Cruel Doubt (47 page)

He recalled Upchurch as “incredibly unathletic.” Once, Vince had taken him to lift weights, and Upchurch had been unable to lift them.

Henderson, a bigger man, was also “very devious.” In D&D games, “he was the magic user. He would find magic items and lie to everyone that they weren't worth anything. Then he would go back and keep them for himself.”

In Vince's opinion, Upchurch was too small and weak to have carried off the attack by himself. Based on Bonnie's description of her attacker, as well as Henderson's personality and size, Vince was convinced that Henderson had participated in the attack. So convinced that even in casual conversation he referred to how “they” did it, and what “they” were thinking. Vince's opinion was that Upchurch had done the stabbing, but that Henderson had wielded the club—whether it had been a bat or a bamboo rod.

If all he'd been was a last-minute driver, he wouldn't have been involved at all, Vince said. “Why would they ask him? He didn't really even hang out with our group.”

Hamrick also recalled clearly the particular Dungeons & Dragons scenario that, at Moog's direction, the players had been enacting in the days leading up to the murder.

Moog had entitled it “The Rescue of Lady Carlyle,” and he had invented it himself. They'd been playing it almost every night for at least two weeks before July 25, 1988. In essence, the characters had to rescue Lady Carlyle, an attractive young woman, from the castle where an evil baron was holding her captive. The baron did not have a last name.

Once rescued, Lady Carlyle would reward them handsomely with a part of the fortune her father possessed, and she would also bestow sexual favors upon them.

It was strange, Vince said, that at a time when the real murder plot had already begun to develop—in fact, just before the murder of Lieth (whom Chris, when he was younger, had called “Lieth Von Frankenstein”)—Moog, as Dungeon Master, had advanced the scenario to the point where they were able to carry out the rescue by breaking into the castle in the middle of the night while Lady Carlyle lay asleep in her chamber.

* * *

What Neal Henderson told me was also unsettling. Henderson was imprisoned in Harnett County, not far from Fayetteville and Fort Bragg.

On two separate occasions in the spring of 1990, I talked with Neal Henderson for two hours, uninterrupted by prison personnel. He could have been telling me the truth, or he could have been lying with every word. He was perfectly willing to look me in the eye, but I had no idea what I was seeing when he did. It might still have been one big Dungeons & Dragons game, and I was simply a new element in the scenario.

But I can report this: he has a bulky upper body—quite distinctive, really—and a thick, short neck that makes it appear as if his head sits almost directly on his shoulders. Everything about him—his physical movements, his speech, his whole personality—seemed cautious and slow, restrained and controlled.

We talked about the improbability of his having moved the car to a different location. “It was taking him too long,” Henderson said. “I just got scared, so I went looking for him.”

While parked on the Airport Road, he said, he'd heard “the sound of someone running.” When I asked how Upchurch could have spotted him that far down the Airport Road, he said, “I must have had the brake pedal depressed without knowing it, because when he got in the car, the first thing he said was, ‘You know, your brake lights are on.'” Then Henderson added a line of dialogue not heard at the trial. “He said, ‘Someone made a very loud noise. I had to hit the guy to make him be quiet. I'm surprised the whole neighborhood didn't wake up.' ”

Despite the faith placed in it by Norton, Mason, Crone, Taylor, and Young—all of whom struck me as capable, honest men acting in good faith, but all of whom, it must be said, had every reason to
want
to believe Henderson (and none of whom ever subjected him to a polygraph test)—I had problems with Henderson's account of his own limited role.

There was, first, the power of Bonnie's impression, the validity of which Jean Spaulding had recently reiterated to me. “It was an internal, instinctive, overwhelming reaction,” she said. “Not the sort Bonnie was accustomed to having, because she is very logical, and—not in a negative way—just so detached emotionally. Her insides, her viscera, had to be remembering something, and when she just
felt
his presence, she knew this was the man. She had a very strong total-body reaction. This was not something that seemed to start on a cognitive level, but was more or less an ‘emotional memory.' And I take that very seriously, given my knowledge of Bonnie, because she is very logical and does not get overwhelmed by emotions at all.”

Beyond that, there was the unlikelihood—emphasized by both Page Hudson and Tom Brereton—of one person, armed only with bat and knife, entering a house he'd never been in before, in which he knew at least three adults slept upstairs, intending to murder them all.

Dr. Hudson had said, “Given the wounds Mrs. Von Stein had and Mr. Von Stein had, it's easier for me to picture two people as attackers. I just have difficulty imagining how one attacker could have taken care of both of them.”

Brereton, with his twenty years of FBI experience—some of which had been earned on Indian reservations, investigating more homicides by stabbing than he could count—felt even more strongly. “You would never assign one person to go in and kill three,” he said. “How could you expect to kill the second, much less the first, without waking the third?”

Chris had said he'd drawn a second map—one presumably destroyed in the fire—that showed the location of the upstairs bedrooms. Thus, Upchurch would have known where Angela slept. But Chris had never said he'd told Upchurch Angela did not have a phone in her room. In fact, she did, and—if awake and frightened—could easily have used it to call for help.

Even with the downstairs telephone cord disconnected—and if one wanted to assure that no one upstairs could use a phone to call for help, why not simply take the downstairs receiver off the hook, rather than unplug the cord?—there was no reason to believe that an unaware Angela would not be awakened by the noise of a beating and stabbing in the bedroom right next to hers, and would not, when awakened, reach for her phone and immediately call the police, before either hiding in her closet or under her bed, or fleeing downstairs and running out the front door for her life, screaming as loud as she could.

Unless, of course, she was already awake, or had gone to sleep knowing that she would not be harmed.

Or knowing nothing in advance, she might have been awakened by the sounds of Lieth's screaming, and the thumping and the pounding, to discover not only a stranger—Neal Henderson—in her house, trying, with some success, to murder her mother and stepfather, but a stranger accompanied by James Upchurch, a young man she knew well, and liked, and who she knew was fond of her.

Chris had said in his formal statement that he did not know if James Upchurch had even met his sister. But Mitchell Norton had told me that Henderson had told him that Angela “had had intercourse with Upchurch on several occasions.”

Now, sitting under a hot June sun at a small concrete table in the yard of the Harnett County Correctional Institution, with guards armed with rifles standing in towers just beyond a nearby high fence topped with razor wire, Henderson elaborated on what he said was his understanding of the relationship.

He told me that Moog had been infatuated with Angela Pritchard, even commenting, “Finally, I've met a girl I'd like to marry.”

Henderson said, “I'd never heard James talk about a girl like that before. He
really
liked her. He said she was very pretty, intelligent, and of course, her parents had millions of dollars. It was so unusual for him to be talking like this that I remember it real well. It really floored me. And this was before any talk of the plot. I said to myself at the time, ‘James Upchurch is saying this to
me
?' It made me feel kind of good that he would confide in me that way. It wasn't something he ordinarily did.”

As I was preparing to leave at the end of this visit, Henderson added that it was, of course, a standard Dungeons & Dragons scenario to kill the reigning royalty, marry the princess, and thus inherit the keys to the kingdom and all its wealth.

And Angela, who never expressed emotion, who slept through it all, who had not used her phone to call for help, and who had read
A Rose in Winter
three times, had cried when Moog had been sentenced to death.

 

43

“At some point,” Jean Spaulding said to me in the spring of 1990, “Bonnie needs to have one of those straightforward, eye-to-eye conversations with Chris. It would be brief, it would be nonemotional, but I think she needs to confront him with ‘You planned to kill me.' Not even ‘Did you plan?' but ‘You planned to kill me and I need an explanation of that.' Then I think she could take that and she could work with that and she would process that and I think she could then lay it to rest.

“I could see it staying sealed over for a fair number of years, but I think, on an emotional level, she needs, at some point, to get that done. It will take some work and preparation, and we're not working on that currently.

“She has still not even come in and said to me anything like ‘Chris tried to murder me.' Or ‘Chris murdered Lieth.' Or ‘Chris is responsible for this.' It has never come out directly.”

“So you think,” I asked, “that she hasn't been able to fully accept that he tried to kill her, or have her killed? Of course, it's a hard thing.”

“A very hard thing,” Jean Spaulding said. “The only thing harder, I think, would be if Angela had some involvement.”

This was a problem. There was no hard evidence, but in
all
quarters, from prosecutors to defense attorneys to family members to Dr. Spaulding herself, there were qualms about Angela's claim of total uninvolvement.

At trial, Frank Johnston had hinted that Angela might have played a role. Asked later if that role had been more active than passive, he said, “I
feel
that it was. I do not believe, and will not believe, that somebody could sleep through this type of thing. I don't think most people could sleep through screams in their own house.” And, he pointed out that, like Chris and Bonnie, “Angela had a lot to gain financially.”

And Angela's deportment—however much it was beyond her control, however much it might have been an involuntary response learned from her mother or bred into her genes—added to this whiff of suspicion.

There were friends of Angela's, and family members, and Angela herself, who told stories of her legendary ability to sleep through earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanoes.

Yet combined with her apparent indifference to what she found once she was awake—an attitude that, when it persisted for a year and a half, could not easily be attributed to temporary emotional shock—her tale of deep sleep was greeted with skepticism even from those who would have been far more comfortable believing her.

More than one of Chris's closest friends, not wishing to speak for attribution, wondered aloud whether—as one phrased it—“she might not have known more than she's let on.” These were people who had been in the house on Lawson Road. They knew how sound carried, and how tightly the upstairs rooms were clustered.

Within Bonnie's family, doubts were expressed with varying degrees of bluntness.

Her sister Kitty would say nothing.

Her sister Sylvia vaguely remembers someone—she's not sure who—asking, “Do you reckon those kids had anything to do with it?”

Her aunt Bib—her father's sister—says, “That question was floating around.”

Her sister Ramona said flatly, “If Chris knew, Angela knew.”

And her brother, George, who had felt so conflicted about ever speaking to Lewis Young that almost three years passed before he would even acknowledge that he'd done it, said, “Exactly what I am thinking is that she may have known something and didn't say.”

His wife, Peggy, added, “I wasn't sure about Angela then, and I'm still not.”

But as recently as June of this year, 1991, the question bothered them and kept them talking.

“There ain't no way in the world someone could sleep through that,” George said.

“I could almost accept Angela sleeping through the murder, but I was having a real hard time with the police and ambulance coming down the street, and
up to your front door
,” Peggy said.

“And them waking her up,” George said. And it wasn't as if the noise had been confined to the master bedroom, though the noise of a grown man screaming as loudly as he could, repeatedly, while fighting vainly for his life, should have woken even the soundest of sleepers. But Bonnie—he'd learned later—had said she'd heard thumping noises from the hallway, even after her door was closed. That would put loud noise even closer to Angela's room.

“We went through the ‘in shock' theory,” Peggy recalled. “That would have been great if the kids had stayed home the night after the murder, away from people. But you're not in shock if you're okay to go out and party.”

“It was like,” George recalled, “ ‘I don't understand. Why aren't these kids in tears? Why aren't they sitting up at that hospital protecting their mother?' I would be there day and night!”

And it wasn't just that first day and night. It was the next three years.

Even Bonnie's mother said to me one hot summer evening, with a terrible sadness in her voice, “Angela—you never know
what
she's thinking or feeling. My son asked me, ‘Does Angela have any feelings at all?' ”

And as recently as Father's Day, 1991, Steve Pritchard, who quite unexpectedly had received a phone call from Angela that day, voiced concern to me, but would not be specific as to why. He said only, “What's done is done. Nothing can change it. There's no hard evidence. I personally have chosen not to pursue it any further.”

It was, ironically, the person Bonnie feared most in the world who provided, at least indirectly, what some considered the strongest support for belief in Angela's uninvolvement and unawareness.

As Lewis Young put it, “With all that Neal Henderson told us, I don't see any way he wouldn't have given us Angela if he'd known she had anything at all to do with this. After giving up Chris and giving up Moog, Neal would have no reason to protect her. Now, maybe they never told
him
—look, the further this goes, the stranger it gets—but I have a hard time buying that Chris and Angela and Moog were all in this together and for some reason Neal never found out about her.”

* * *

Jean Spaulding, however, from her perspective, responded to further questions.

“A policeman walks into her room and he says, ‘Excuse me, miss,' and she's not, like, shrieking! She was seventeen at the time? I don't know of too many seventeen-year-old girls who are just going to sit up and adopt a conversational tone if a policeman appears in their room in the middle of the night. Not at the front door, but in their room! That doesn't seem to ring true. Maybe she was in shock from the moment she saw the policeman, but I would expect something different.

“And her door is close to their door? And she didn't, like, immediately run into her mother's room? That's amazing. Either she very much needs some help, or she knew what was going on, I would venture to say.

“Where did she fall apart? Where did she break down? Where did she cry? What did she say?”

Dr. Spaulding also found it peculiar that Angela would have dressed in the presence of a young police officer she knew and did not like.

“She got out of bed and put her blue jeans on while he was standing there? That's a little striking, too. She's seventeen years of age and she's dressed in panties and a shirt? And she gets out of bed and pulls her blue jeans on in front of him? I don't know of many seventeen-year-olds who, in any sort of normal state, would do that. And maybe that's the issue: maybe she wasn't in a normal state of mind.”

When informed that the only time Angela was known to have cried in public was at the sentencing of James Upchurch, Dr. Spaulding seemed almost amazed.

“That's striking to me,” she said, “because if we're going to postulate that we don't see emotion from her because she's a Bates—if we're going to give her that degree of credit—then why is she weeping for this person that she supposedly barely knew?

“This man is being sentenced because he killed her stepfather. That's one aspect. But I think even more important is that this is the man who supposedly almost murdered her mother. Her mother has scars on her face to this day because of that assault. So how can you weep, if you're a Bates, at the sentencing of the murderer? That doesn't fit.”

* * *

Not only had Chris said, in his December 27, 1989, statement to authorities, that he did not know whether Angela had ever met James Upchurch, he also made it a point, on six separate occasions, to emphasize either that she was not considered in his planning, or that he didn't care if she lived or died.

In Lewis Young's report, these comments read as follows: “There was not any discussion about Angela. . . . Pritchard stated he never thought about Angela at all during these discussions [with Upchurch]. . . . He had not thought about Angela.” Then, as the plot moved closer to execution, “Upchurch said he would be making some noises and he would have to get Angela as well. Chris stated he told Upchurch it was okay to go ahead and kill Angela as well. . . . Pritchard stated it was determined by him and Upchurch that Angela would be killed so Pritchard would get all the money. . . . He pointed out on the map of the house where Angela's bedroom was located.”

But Jean Spaulding, for one, found it hard to accept that Chris could have been so callous in regard to his sister.

At my request, she had met with Bonnie in July 1990 to review numerous photographs of Bonnie, Chris, and Angela taken over the children's entire life span. Dr. Spaulding had said she'd found this technique an invaluable aid in developing insight into the nature of family relationships.

In August, she wrote me a letter that said in part:

 

One of the most striking issues that I would like to raise with you for your consideration is the large number of photographs of Chris and Angela engaged in an embrace or some other manifestation of physical closeness. I have over the many years of practice reviewed many family albums and many, many pictures of brothers and sisters. I was struck by the apparent warmth and closeness demonstrated in these pictures over such a prolonged period of time of Chris's and Angela's lives. There are pictures of them hugging from earliest childhood all the way up to the latency years. Additionally, most of the photographs during the adolescent years that are of a casual basis demonstrate an apparent warmth and camaraderie between Chris and Angela. One would wonder at Chris's ability to participate in a plot that would harm the one person with whom, by documentation in these pictures, he appeared to have a warm and normal bond.

Even Bill Osteen, who'd long since overcome his doubts about Bonnie, continued to harbor uneasiness about Angela. When asked if he found
her
lack of affect, as opposed to Bonnie's, to be suspicious, he answered, “Very much so. I still—I always wondered if there wasn't something somewhere that we were missing. I always have felt that there was something between Upchurch and Angela that I don't know about. I would love to have a video of Upchurch out at that little shack on the day he waited there. I always had some question about whether Angela knew he was there.”

* * *

I met Angela for the first time in the spring of 1990, in the same small living room where I'd been spending so many hours with her mother. Her hair was brownish blond, with a hint of red. Her skin was clear. She wore no makeup, just a T-shirt and shorts. If not stunningly beautiful, she certainly was pleasant looking.

But what surprised me—since I'd been led to expect some sort of zombie or department-store mannequin—was how lively and agreeable she turned out to be. She was cordial, talkative, and with one exception, did not seem at all self-conscious. She had at least two things in common with her mother: she did not strain to make an impression, and no question asked seemed to upset her.

First of all, she wanted to say there had been absolutely no problems at all in the Von Stein house. She had loved Lieth and he had been good to her. He had never given her a hard time about anything, and she'd never had a bad word to say either to him or about him. He and Bonnie had gotten along splendidly, and so had he and Chris. “He cared about us very much,” Angela said. “And Chris and Lieth didn't hate each other. I know, because I saw it from inside.”

Only when I asked about Moog did she get what I would call a schoolgirl smile on her face. She looked away briefly, and if she didn't quite blush, she came close. “I'm drawing a total blank,” she said. “I may have seen him at the beach or in Washington. And maybe in Chris's dorm.”

The more we talked, however, the clearer her recollection seemed to grow. Before the day was over, she was able to say, “Moog stands out vividly in my mind. He was drunk the first time I met him. I think this was when Chris was still rooming with Will Lang, which would have had to be his freshman year.”

The first meeting, in fact, had “probably” been the night of a campus concert given by a group named Def Leppard, which would have put it in the last week of January, almost five months before Chris says he first made Upchurch's acquaintance. That recollection was bolstered by a comment from her best friend, Donna Brady, that she seemed to remember meeting Upchurch “during the year.” Donna, in fact, appeared almost shocked upon hearing that Chris said he hadn't met Moog until summer session.

“I remember him skating into Chris's room on a skateboard,” Angela said. “His hairdo is what sticks out in my mind. Weird, very weird. Just a strange-type person all around. Basically your wired-type, off-the-wall person.” When asked directly, she did say, “I guess you could consider him cute.”

She said she saw him “many times” during the semester when she would drive up to State to visit Chris. These trips, she said, would occur every “two to three weeks.” In contrast, Bonnie, at trial, had said Angela visited the NC State campus “very infrequently.”