Cruel Doubt (5 page)

Andrew drove Chris and Angela and Donna Brady to Burger King. Nobody ate. They just ordered sodas and coffee. Chris seemed not just nervous now, but angry. He overheard some people in a nearby booth talking about the killing.

“They better stop talking about us!” he said. His voice was loud and shrill, his hands drumming on the table nonstop.

He said he needed to get away, out of town. He hooked up with Jonathan Wagoner again and asked Jonathan to drive him to Greenville, twenty-five miles away. Jonathan went to East Carolina University in Greenville and had an apartment there. Chris said he needed to sleep. He didn't want to talk about what had happened, or hear anyone else talk about it.

They drove to Greenville. When they reached the apartment, Chris turned on the television, found MTV, and then, without another word, lay down on the couch and went to sleep. Shock. This must be shock, Jonathan thought.

Chris slept for two hours, but not peacefully. Jerking and twitching a lot. When he awoke, his face was slick with sweat.

* * *

Angela seemed as calm as her brother was hysterical. She seemed beyond calm: casual, even indifferent.

“She's just like her mom,” her best friend, Donna Brady, said. “Neither one of them are emotional. They keep everything inside.”

To Donna, there was nothing suspicious or even out of character about Angela's apparent lack of reaction. Others, less well acquainted with Angela, formed a different opinion.

She and her friends sat in a neighbor's yard for hours, directly across from her house. Trees provided shade from the hazy July sun. Seated on the grass, legs crossed, they were joking, laughing, smoking cigarettes. Somebody said they should get some beer. Someone else asked about a party that night.

“It looked like a sit-in,” one neighbor said. “Or like they were watching a big circus, or a parade. There was no sadness, no sense of danger, no feeling of horror that a ghastly murder had been committed. I finally walked out and said, ‘Angela, why aren't you at the hospital with your mother?' And she said, ‘Oh, she's fine. Chris has already been to see her.' ”

* * *

The detectives were gone now. Only a single patrolman stood guard at the front door. In early afternoon, he was approached by a group of five or six neighbors, who said it would be a terrible thing for Bonnie to have to come home to a house that looked like a crime scene. The patrolman agreed and willingly stepped aside as they marched in with their scrub brushes and buckets and liquid detergent and ammonia, and scrubbed all the bloodstains and the fingerprint powder off the walls. There was blood even on the master bedroom ceiling, and they made sure they got that, too. The mattress was saturated with blood, so two of them carried it down the stairs and out the front door. They heaved it into the back of a pickup truck and drove it to the town dump.

By the time the neighbors were finished, you could not have told that Lieth Von Stein had so much as stubbed his toe inside that house.

* * *

That afternoon, at police headquarters, Lewis Young read the book pages he'd found, which were the last four pages of a romance novel called
A Rose in Winter
by Kathleen Woodiwiss.

Young was startled by what he read. He didn't know what had transpired over the first 560 pages of the book, but on page 561 alone—the blood-flecked page that had been on top of the stack—Young encountered a young hero named Christopher, who, waving a sword, challenged “the lord of the manor” and said, “You have for too long ravaged this land and escaped your fate. . . . Your time has come. . . . Death, Milord . . . Death!”

Young read descriptions of “a long, blood-darkened blade,” a “saber slashing, thrusting, cutting,” and a dagger “held ready to test the flesh.”

The whole page, and those that followed, described a scene of bloody mayhem. Sabers, swords, and daggers seemed to be everywhere. One character “raised his cane and lowered it over the man's head, crumpling him.” The villainous lord of the manor “never felt the thrust that pierced his ribs and heart.” The victorious hero, Christopher, gathered the heroine in his arms “as she came to him and softly sobbed out her relief.”

* * *

Angela went to the home of Donna Brady, whose parents had said that she and Chris could stay with them as long as they needed to. She and Donna and Andrew Arnold and Stephanie Mercer, who lived next door to Angela on Lawson Road, drove around town a little bit. They went to the mall. They went down to the river. Angela did not return to the hospital to see her mother, who had been moved from the emergency room to intensive care. Eventually, they went back to Donna's house.

Angela was very quiet. Donna's father would later describe her as “somber.” To others, she seemed detached and blasé. Donna's father said the police had been trying to find her. Apparently, an SBI detective named Lewis Young had a few questions he wanted to ask.

Young interviewed her at four-forty
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. She was not the least bit impolite, but acted from the start as if she had better things to do. Basically, Angela wouldn't make much of an impression under normal circumstances.

These, however, were not normal circumstances. Her stepfather had just been beaten and stabbed to death and her mother had almost been killed in the same attack, which had taken place some twelve hours earlier, and less than twenty feet from the bed in which Angela had said she'd been asleep.

Something in her nonchalant manner, in her lack of affect, bothered Lewis Young. This whole episode seemed to be something she was watching from a great distance, with very little interest in the outcome.

“She was sometimes in touch, sometimes on Mars,” Young would say later. “Kind of spacey. Like, ‘Lieth's gone, let's get on with it.' Like she'd just as soon be at the mall, having a milk shake. She just didn't seem to connect.”

Angela told Young she knew nothing. She had slept through the whole thing. She'd been horseback riding Sunday afternoon, had come home that night, found nobody there, had gone out again with Donna Brady, and was home again by eleven. Her mother was watching television and working on a design for a Humane Society poster. Lieth was upstairs asleep. This was normal, Angela said. Lieth always went to bed before her mother.

She'd gone to her room, turned on her fan and tape player, and read for a while. Her mother had come in to close her door, saying the music was too loud. Then they'd said good-night and Angela had turned off her light—but not her fan—and gone to sleep. Next thing she knew there was a policeman in her doorway saying, excuse me, someone has broken in and stabbed your parents. It was probably the noise of the fan, she said, that prevented her from hearing the murder. Besides, she added, she was a very sound sleeper.

Angela recited all this in a monotone, as if she found the subject slightly boring. She said they'd been a very happy family with no problems. She knew of no one who might want to hurt either her mother or stepfather, but suggested that the killer could have been someone from National Spinning, maybe someone whom Lieth had fired from his job. That was, she said, “just a possibility.” She didn't have anyone specific in mind.

The knapsack? No, she'd never seen the knapsack before. No one in the family had anything like it. She had no idea what it was doing there.

If she didn't actually look at her watch, Lewis Young had the distinct feeling that she wanted to. Like, how long was this going to take? She didn't seem grief stricken, didn't seem curious, didn't seem angry, didn't seem scared. She just seemed as if she had better things to do.

* * *

The afternoon paper carried the front-page story “Washington Man Killed, Wife Hurt.” Beneath the headline was a picture of the Von Stein house. A police spokesman was quoted as saying the couple had apparently been attacked by burglars, but that details were “sketchy.”

An executive of National Spinning described Lieth as “assertive and well-liked,” and said he would be missed. “He was respected by one and all for his expertise in the computer area,” the executive said.

The story said Mrs. Von Stein was in “guarded” condition in the intensive care unit of Beaufort County Hospital, suffering from a stab wound to the chest and multiple facial cuts and bruises. It said she was sedated and as of press time, had not yet spoken to police.

* * *

Angela called a friend, Steve Tripp, who lived in Greenville. She was upset, she told him, because she was being treated like a suspect.

First, a policeman had thought she had blood on her jeans, when it was only saddle soap and oil.

Then, she said, both in the morning and afternoon, she'd had to go to the police station to answer questions. Each time, it seemed to her that the police to whom she spoke had not believed her when she said she'd slept through the whole thing. They'd also seemed to find it odd that she had escaped the assault uninjured, although lying only twenty feet away.

They didn't know, she told Steve, just how sound a sleeper she really was.

She said, “They don't have any idea who might have done it, so I think they're trying to blame me.”

* * *

By nine-thirty that night, still having been unable to track down Chris Pritchard for an interview, Lewis Young returned to Lawson Road to talk to some of the Von Stein's neighbors about the family. The version of family life he received from them differed rather dramatically from that which Angela had provided him earlier in the day.

Bonnie and Lieth had been extremely reclusive, he was told. While Bonnie herself was intelligent and compassionate, she also was very naive—the sort of person who would say everything was fine, and who might even believe it, when just the opposite was apparent to everyone else.

Lieth had been “very narrow-minded,” a Germanic “when I say no, I mean no” type. Also, “a real Jekyll-Hyde personality,” especially when he was drinking, which was often.

On weekends, he'd start drinking beer in the morning and go all day. He'd go through a case on a weekend, as well as consuming “a full eight-ounce glass of hard liquor, straight from the bottle.” He would go out to a restaurant, have a couple of drinks before dinner, then start cussing out the waiter. At times, it became truly embarrassing. He would have “temper tantrums,” throwing food on the floor, or storming out in anger over some imagined lapse in the quality of the service.

“He was an alcoholic and he knew it,” one neighbor said. “He wasn't ashamed of it. He'd say, ‘It's gonna kill me.' In his mind, he knew he'd die as a young man.” There was a pause. “But not like this.”

Worst had been his attitude toward Bonnie's children. It wasn't so bad when they were younger, though “as far as love and nurturing went, it wasn't there,” and “they never really seemed like a family.”

As they'd grown into teenagers, however, Lieth had lost all patience with Chris and Angela, complaining incessantly that they were an “intrusion” and saying over and over that he “lived for the day” when they would be out of his house once and for all.

“Bonnie would put it out of her mind and dwell on the good things, but the way he treated her children, it hurt her in her heart,” the neighbor said.

Lieth had been especially hostile and sarcastic toward Chris. A few years earlier, Chris, along with a friend, had gotten into some minor scrape with the law—arrested for possession of alcohol and fireworks, something like that, in the nearby small town of Chocowinity. His name had been printed in the paper.

But the way Lieth had reacted, you would have thought Chris had been charged with . . . well . . . murder. He became “more disgusted than you would believe” and from that moment forward had “never given Chris a moment's peace.” He “blew it all out of proportion and he was constantly throwing it in Chris's face.”

In turn, “Chris hated Lieth.” The stepfather had “turned that boy against him and probably didn't see it.” Nor had Bonnie, because she could no more believe that her children were troubled or capable of causing harm, to themselves or to others, than were the helpless pets on which she showered so much affection.

The neighbors advised Young to take a long, hard look at both of Bonnie's children as he investigated the case. Chris was a very strange boy, they said. And as for Angela, “it was like she lived her whole life on some plateau that nobody else could ever get to.”

As he left, having been told that Chris was now at the Brady's house and available for an interview, Young was given one last opinion concerning Angela: “There's no way that girl slept through it.”

* * *

Young had his first talk with Chris Pritchard at ten-thirty
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. at the Brady home.

He was a scrawny kid, Young thought. He looked more as if he were sixteen years old instead of nineteen. He was wearing a baseball cap, a sweatshirt that looked as if he'd been sleeping in it for a week, and a pair of stained and wrinkled shorts. He was unshaven and bleary-eyed and was chain-smoking cigarettes.

“He was more in line with what you'd expect than his sister was,” Young said later. “He came across as more in tune emotionally. You could tell he was upset. In fact, he was shaking. But like his sister, he would flit around a lot in talking.

“Even forgetting what the neighbors had said—neighbors say lots of different things that don't necessarily turn out to be true—what bothered me was that neither one of these kids was doing what they should have been. I mean, Chris had got to town at eight o'clock in the morning and I'd been trying to find him ever since to conduct an urgent interview about a murder committed in his own house, but it's not until ten-thirty
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. that I get up with him. It just didn't seem right. I didn't like it.”