Cruel Doubt (48 page)

Despite the shy smiles, Angela would not admit to any particular affection for him, much less intimacy (she later told her mother she'd been a virgin the whole time she knew him), but said she did recall John Taylor telling her in Elizabeth City during the trial that Moog had told Henderson he'd wanted to marry her.

And though Angela said she did not recall it, Donna Brady had said, “I think I remember someone saying Moog told Chris he was going to marry his sister, or something like that. I can't remember if it was Chris, or maybe Angela's mom, that was kidding around about it one day. It may have been Chris.”

“I was in shock when he was arrested,” Angela said. “He doesn't strike me as a violent-type person. Never has, never will. And I know him. I mean, I've seen him high, I've seen him on acid, and I've seen him drunk. And he was never a violent-type person. I don't know Neal Henderson, but I definitely can't see Moog doing it. I just can't really—I don't believe Moog actually did it. I don't, to this day. I just can't. I can't.” Saying this, she became more animated than at any other time during the talk.

So strong was this belief, that, yes, it was true, as I'd heard elsewhere, Angela—the girl who never shows emotion—had cried in the Elizabeth City courtroom when Upchurch had been sentenced to death.

But then she said, “I didn't know him well. I had seen him a couple of times in Chris's room.” Not only had she not slept with him, or thought of him as a prospective husband, she said, “Mmm mm,” shaking her head to mean no, when asked if she'd even kissed him.

She said, in fact, she had no recollection of ever even seeing him alone. “I don't remember having any private conversations with Moog. I really don't. It was just a bunch of people going out together.”

As for Chris, she told me, in an absolutely flat, affectless tone, that she was angry at him not so much for what he'd tried to do to her—have her murdered in her bed so he could have more money for drugs—but mostly “because he hid it so long and put Mom through so much hell. He knew he was guilty, but he still made Mom pay all that money for his defense. It was pointless. He could have made a deal in the beginning instead of dragging it on and on.”

Like her mother, Angela had never spoken to Chris about the murder in detail. “I'm afraid that if I did, I'd get really mad at him and end up hating him. And I don't want to hate him. So, I've never sat down and discussed it and I probably never will. I wanted to talk to him when he first confessed. I wanted answers, but I was afraid of what he might say. Sometimes, it's like I want to know, but I don't really want to
know
. So I just accepted what happened. It was over, in the past, and there was nothing I could do to change it. There was no point in going back to relive the whole thing again.

“Look, he can discuss it with his psychologist. It's easier for me not to have to sit down and talk about it. Why or how it happened, I really don't want to hear. There's nothing he could say or do to change it, so what's the point?”

She said, “Probably the reason I didn't react more in Vosburgh's office was that the night before, Chris took me aside and said, ‘I'm gonna tell you something tomorrow that's gonna shock you, but please don't hate me.' And I said, ‘Nothing you could say would make me hate you. You're my brother.' But I knew then for sure that he was guilty and that he would tell us the next day.

“Until that night, I would have laid my hand on a Bible and said he had nothing to do with it.” In Vosburgh's office, as Chris was talking, I just kept thinking, ‘I don't believe this.' I was just like, ‘No way.' I was mad. I was shocked. Because for a year I had said, ‘No, Chris had nothing to do with it. That wasn't my brother. That wasn't the brother I'd known all my life.' When I'd look over at my mom, I was wondering what she was thinking and what was going through her mind. But we never really talked about it. Not then, or ever. There really wasn't anything we could say.

“And I've never talked about it to Chris, either. That first night, driving to Greenville, I remember
not
talking about it. I didn't want to. I just remember talking about my friend Steve Tripp. Chris was hungry, but all I wanted to do in Greenville was see Steve. Chris did ask what Mom had said, and I said, ‘Nothing,' because she hadn't really said anything to me.”

The one time she had wanted to know more was during the period surrounding Chris's arrest and hospitalization. “I was sort of left out in the dark. I would have liked to have had more answers then, but the way the lawyers and everyone treated me, I was just the third member of the family, and I didn't want to disturb Mom or Chris.

“I've learned to control my feelings the same way my mom has. If I'm upset, I'll go to the barn and cry on my pony. I did let it get to me, but no one ever saw it.”

If people were disturbed by her apparent lack of reaction, that was their problem, not hers, she said with no apparent resentment.

“My first thought when Edwards opened my door and woke me up was,” she said, “ ‘What the hell is Danny the Dickhead doing in my house?'” She said she wasn't frightened, she was angry.

There could well have been unmelted ice in her glass. There probably was. First of all, the house was cold. Lieth liked the house very cold. And second, she had her fan on. If John Taylor later thought he needed to turn up the air-conditioning, that was probably because the doors had been opened a lot, with people running in and out and up and down.

“After that, people say I didn't react, but I walked to that door and looked in and saw Lieth on the bed, and that's why—I went into shock then and there. I knew he was dead. It's just like you really go ice-cold. It feels like your heart just stops. And you're like, ‘Oh, my God.' It's not, ‘Well, is he okay?' It's, ‘Oh, my God, he's dead.' So I was very calm. I was in shock. I wasn't in hysterics. I was calm.”

When asked why she didn't go straight to the hospital, even riding in the ambulance with her badly injured mother, who appeared, at the time, to be near death, she replied, “I remember feeling like I needed to be at the house. I didn't think I should walk out of the house with ten million people there. You know, my parents were always like, ‘We don't want anybody in the house when we're not here.' ”

It might have been answers like that that caused people to question her role. But Angela had no apologies to make for her behavior.

“I just don't like to show emotion,” she said. “The way I look at it is, my emotions are nobody else's business, unless it is a close friend. I want people to think I can take care of myself. It's like, ‘Don't worry about me, I'm fine.' That's the reason I don't want to talk to a shrink. Because I don't like to talk to someone I don't know. I don't like to show emotions in front of people I don't know.”

Returning one more time to her conduct on the morning of the murder and in the following days, she said, “I was seventeen years old. I don't know how to handle it. I figured my best bet, in order not to totally lose it, was to go out with people I knew. To surround myself with my friends. Because I mean, really, except for my mom, I'm not that close to my family. My friends were more like a family. That's who I wanted to be around, rather than hearing Ramona and Kitty bitch about Peggy being there, because she's not really part of the family. I didn't need to hear that. I didn't want to be around it. And I wasn't worried about what everyone else was thinking at the time, or whether they wanted to see me or not.”

Leaving her that day, and seeing her on a couple of other occasions during the summer, I found myself liking Angela. She did not strike me as cold. But I wasn't so sure she was fine. Gliding along on the surface of life, she seemed passive, unstimulated, and more than a little bit lost.

* * *

But she had read
A Rose in Winter
three times.

And there had been blood on four neatly stacked pages by the side of the bed. Pages that contained references to blood-darkened daggers, villainous lords of the manor, a victorious hero named Christopher, and a heroine who softly sobbed out her relief.

Tom Brereton had been struck by her apparent anger over the fact that Lieth's inheritance had made no significant difference in her life. From someone normally as blasé as Angela, this would have been a surprising show of feeling in front of a stranger.

Chris had said, “I don't know if James had ever met Angela.”

But Angela herself said she'd met him in Chris's room, months before Chris admitted to knowing him.

And, whenever they'd met, Moog had become his best friend, mentor, LSD source, coconspirator, and Dungeon Master. And he'd known about the money and, according to Henderson, had said he was so attracted to Angela he might even want to marry her.

Even Bill Osteen felt there was “something” between Moog and Angela.

And she'd cried when Moog was sentenced to death.

 

44

The truth, Bonnie had said, was what she wanted. However it turned out. And Wade had said there was no way I could hurt her: that she was a person with nothing left to lose.

But there are problems.

Chris said he came home on the Friday night before the murder to go out with friends. But the friends did not go out with him. Then he said he couldn't remember why he'd gone home. Finally, he said he'd gone home to steal the key to the back door so either he and Moog, or Moog alone, could enter the house silently. This, he had specified very clearly in his December 27 statement to investigators, was the key to the
new
back door, the
outer
back door.

The problem is, that is not the key he took. The key marked “back door” that hung on a rack in the kitchen was the key to what had been the back door before the porch had been enclosed. That was now an inner door, which Bonnie did not even lock at night.

To the new back door, there were only two keys. Bonnie kept one on her key ring at all times, and that key ring was found inside the house after the murder. There was no indication that any key had been removed from it, and no one had ever said he'd done so.

The other key to the outer back door was with a woman who lived elsewhere, a woman who came to take care of the pets when Bonnie and Lieth were away. That key had remained in her possession, undisturbed. Neither Chris nor Angela had a key to the outer back door. Not even Lieth had a key to that door.

So the key that Chris had stolen—whatever he thought it might have done—would not have opened the new back door, which Bonnie distinctly remembers locking that night. And one might surmise that Chris, having lived in the house for seven years, would have realized to his dismay that Friday night that the key he had come for was not a key he could obtain.

Angela's friend and next-door neighbor, Stephanie Mercer, remembers Angela sleeping over at her house that Friday night. She also remembers Chris coming to the back door of her house Saturday morning to speak to Angela privately.

Later in the morning, despite the fact it was raining, Angela and Donna Brady drove two hours to the beach. Angela purchased a peach-colored shirt at a Benetton store, paying with a credit card and obtaining a receipt. In the miasma of forgetfulness and blurred memory that surrounded so many events on this weekend, both Angela and Donna—and Bonnie herself—have a remarkably clear recollection of that.

Chris, by then, was back in Raleigh, picking up Moog and depositing him in a little shack behind the airport, about a mile from his house. There, from three until at least eight
P
.
M
., Moog waited, presumably alone, although Bill Osteen has his doubts about that.

Meanwhile, Chris was preparing the hamburgers that were supposed to put everyone to sleep. Preparing them all by himself—unless one goes back to his statement of August 1, 1988, when he told Lewis Young he and Angela had made the hamburgers together; or to either of the two statements Bonnie made saying the same thing. Only after it was disclosed that the hamburgers were part of an aborted murder plot did recollections that Chris and Chris alone had prepared them lock into place.

In any event, nothing happened Saturday night. Chris picked up Moog and went back to Raleigh at some point. Angela, back from the beach, was in and out of the house, but not sure where or when or with whom.

On Sunday night, Angela breaks a date with a boyfriend. (“I was supposed to go out with David. I cannot remember his last name to save my life.” When the last name was given to her, she said, “Yeah, that's the one. I was supposed to go out with him and I didn't want to. So I told him Lieth wouldn't let me go out.”) Instead, she goes out with Donna Brady. She isn't sure where. One time, she seems to remember it was the mall. Another time, she thinks it was down by the river. It might have been both. Wherever it was, it was boring, there was nothing to do, so she comes home early, well before her curfew, an almost unprecedented occurrence.

And for some reason, Donna Brady, who had been planning to spend the night at Angela's house, goes home instead. Donna says she doesn't remember why she didn't sleep over. Angela says only, “For some reason, she did not.”

Lieth is already asleep. Angela goes upstairs to read and to listen to music. Bonnie watches the Ted Bundy miniseries with her rooster, then goes to bed.

And Neal Henderson and Moog cruise past the house, checking it out.

Moog has his knife and his bat and his flashlight—and maybe a hollow bamboo rod that “whooshes”—but no key to the new back door.

The key to the old back door also opens the front door, but nothing suggests that Moog would know this. Nowhere, in any of Chris's statements, has he said he told Moog he was not able to steal a key to the new back door, but not to worry because the key he
did
take would open the front door. In fact, Chris has made it a point to say something very different: that the key he took
was
the key to the new, outer back door. But that key can't open that door.

The new back door is directly under the master bedroom where, by four
A
.
M
., Lieth had already been sleeping almost seven hours. There is glass on the new back door, but it might be Plexiglas, hard to shatter. There is also a large, double-paned glass window farther from the door. To shatter this with a baseball bat would make a noise. There are many men, and women, too, who, upon hearing a large pane of glass shattered just beneath their bedroom window at four
A
.
M
., might wake up.

In any event, John Taylor, Lewis Young, and even Tom Brereton are in agreement on one point: the scene resembled a staged break-in, done after the fact, not a real one.

So one is left to consider this question: If Moog had no key, and if he did not break in, how did he enter the house?

And then one might ask: Just how did the Dungeon Master, who may have wanted to marry the sleeping princess, gain entrance to the castle of the evil overlord?

Was there even the slightest possibility that someone already inside had gone downstairs before his arrival, unlocked the door, and then carried a glass of ice water back upstairs?

As Jean Spaulding once said, “There is a lot yet in this story that's untold.”

* * *

“If there's a metaphor for Bonnie,” Dr. Spaulding said on another occasion, “I see her as a tree where the roots are planted very deep in the soil of her family. And it is as though she can weather many storms. She has a quiet strength, a quiet serenity, but I would hate to see her take many more blows.

“One of the dominant features of Bonnie is her true love for her children. Yes, her true love for her husband was there, but without him at this point, and then going back to before he came into her life, these children are so important to her.

“That she's not demonstrative doesn't mean she doesn't love them. You cannot connect those two. Her role model for how to deal in these close relationships is her father, who doesn't cry, who doesn't have mood swings. He's busy out there in the woods by himself, carving all the trees. That seemed to be his outlet for his emotions. And so, dealing as a mother, she would tend to emulate the way her father dealt with her. She's really kind of tucked her father in there psychologically. It would be his manner of parenting that she would reflect in her style.

“But now there have been so many losses. I cannot imagine, in one lifetime, having to experience the losses that she has. She's lost her husband because he's dead. Then to lose her father right at that time, especially because he was such a source of strength. And though Chris is not dead, it's still a loss. Their relationship will never be the same. And yet she doesn't get knocked over, she just keeps right on.

“Bonnie is very involved with Chris, but with respect to Angela there's another sort of involvement. Chris has to live out x number of years in prison, but Angela is still out in the real world. So, on a different level, Angela is Bonnie's raison d'être. I would hate for anything to happen to Angela in any shape or form. There are all these things that would make one wonder, but I would certainly hope that nothing happens that would lead one to conclude that Angela is guilty of anything.

“Bonnie's primary mechanism is denial, and she's going to hold tenaciously to it, especially if something's going around on the fringes of her brain to bring up doubt. Is someone guilty or are they innocent? If you have doubt, then internally you're going to be in conflict. You counter your conflicts by holding on to your defense mechanisms. And with Bonnie, if we strip her of her defenses, I don't know what's there. And I don't think I want to know. That's all she has.

“She's already lost a lot of herself. And if somehow Angela were taken away from her, not by misfortune, death, or accident or something—but by some complicity in this whole thing—that, I think, might be more than Bonnie could endure. That might be the last little domino. Should that topple, then we'd have a very different sort of situation, I fear.”