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 P.M. 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.”
&nbs
p; 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 P.M. 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 P.M. that I get up with him. It just didn’t seem right. I didn’t like it.”
Besides, Young could not erase from his mind the content of the blood-spattered pages he’d read that afternoon.
Chris told Young he was sorry he’d been so hard to contact, but he didn’t know anything helpful, anyway. He’d been enrolled at NC State’s summer session and hadn’t been home much since early June. Hadn’t been home much all year, in fact. He’d just finished his freshman year at State. Had a few problems with his grades. You know how that goes. That’s why he was in the summer session.
The last time he had seen any member of his family was Saturday night, one of the few occasions when he had been home for dinner. He’d actually cooked the meal himself. With his sister’s help, he’d prepared hamburger patties for a barbecue. It had been a nice meal, everyone happy and relaxed. After dinner, he’d driven back to school because he had a term paper to work on.
Sunday night, he’d been up late—real late, until about three-thirty A.M.—playing cards and drinking beer with a couple of girls and another friend of his. When Angela had called, he’d been so out of it that it had taken him five minutes to understand what she was talking about. And then he hadn’t been able to find his car keys and had wound up calling campus security to get a ride home.
He wasn’t aware of any family problems, didn’t know of any enemies whom either his stepfather or mother had. He did know that his stepfather had recently come into a large inheritance and spent a lot of time working on stock investments, but Chris himself “did not know about that stuff” and had no idea how much money was involved.
Young was struck by how fidgety and skittish Chris was. Hyper, jittery, all revved up. He couldn’t sit still. His head twitched, his hands jumped, his legs quivered. He couldn’t seem to focus on the questions.
And neither he nor his sister had seemed to express the slightest bit of sadness at their stepfather’s death, or concern about their mother’s condition.
* * *
At six-thirty the next morning, Lewis Young received a phone call from a woman who identified herself as the wife of Bonnie Von Stein’s brother. She said she and her husband were staying at the Holiday Inn, along with other members of Bonnie’s family who had rushed to Little Washington as soon as they’d heard the news. She told Young that she and her husband wanted to speak to him as soon as possible. And she said it would have to be kept confidential: she and her husband did not want other family members—and especially not Bonnie herself—to know that they’d contacted the police.
Young told them he’d be waiting at headquarters. They were there within fifteen minutes.
Bonnie’s brother, George, stood just less than six feet tall. He was a thin man, with a mustache and a small beard that covered only his chin, not his jaw. He struck Young immediately as being honest and unassuming. He worked as a chemist for a paint manufacturer in High Point, a city in the middle of the state, not far from Greensboro and Winston-Salem. Young sized him up as a man who would do what he believed to be the right thing, even if it made him uncomfortable.
His wife, Peggy, who had been raised in Washington, D.C., was slim and attractive, with long red fingernails and short brown hair. She, like her husband, spoke plainly and with feeling. They both said, right away, that the decision to seek out Lewis Young had not been an easy one; that, in fact, they’d stayed up most of the night, talking about what they should do.
The problem, they said, was Chris Pritchard, and to a lesser extent, perhaps Angela. From the moment they’d first seen Chris the day before, they had sensed that something was not right.
“It’s hard to put into words,” George Bates said, “but I don’t understand the way he’s acting. Yesterday, he didn’t act like his mother had just been stabbed in bed and almost died. And like his stepfather had been murdered.”
“I never saw a tear in his eye,” Peggy Bates said.
“He didn’t seem upset,” George said. “He didn’t seem distraught. He was just his normal, run-here, run-there, can’t-sit-still, nervous personality.”
Young had thought Chris’s nervousness might have been just a reaction to the shocking news he’d been given early that morning. But Chris’s uncle said, “He’s been that way as long as I can remember.”
The big point they wanted to make—and this was a very hard thing for them to say—was that, based on what they’d seen of Chris since their arrival in Washington, they feared he might have some involvement in the crime.
Angela’s behavior had bothered them, too.
“I never saw a one of them shed a tear,” George Bates said. “It was like nothing had happened. It was like if I just went to their house and they’ve got some friends over and it’s, ‘Hey, how you doin’?’—same kind of nonchalant way. Like, hey, they’re makin’ plans to go get pizza and whatnot, up to the mall.”
George Bates looked Lewis Young squarely in the eye. “I could almost rationalize losing a stepfather and not being in tears, but their mother is in intensive care. She was almost murdered! This wasn’t a car accident. Som
eone intentionally tried to murder their mother. And they show no concern whatsoever. Why aren’t those kids in tears? Why aren’t they sitting up at that hospital right now, protecting their mother? If I were them, I’d be there day and night.”
Then Peggy Bates said, “The first people you need to give your attention to are Chris and Angela.”
And George Bates said, “Look, I’m not convinced about anything. I’m just bothered. I’m bothered enough to be sitting here talking to you about my own family. I don’t like doing it, but I want you to at least be sure you keep someone there at the hospital, looking out for Bonnie. Because, heaven forbid, if the kids did have something to do with it, they might try something else.”
* * *
A policeman had been assigned to guard the door of Bonnie’s room the day before. Young called to be sure someone was still on duty. Then, at ten A.M., he went to the hospital himself to have his first talk with Bonnie, and to see for himself how badly hurt she really was. Her brother might have feared for her life, and she might have been—as she appeared—an innocent victim, but she was also, Young said later, “already something of a suspect.”
Lieth had been dead for only a day, but Little Washington was filled with rumors about her possible involvement in the murder.
Had Bonnie been well known in the community, had she had a broad range of friends, acquaintances, or civic activities, the suspicion might have been slower to spread. But who had really known this Bonnie Von Stein? For years, she’d been a stranger beside them. Of such a person, it was easy to believe the worst.
This, as much as anything, might have been what led to the first wave of suspicion, although the existence of a $2 million inheritance—and it was not long before news of this swept the town—was no doubt a contributing factor.
Cruel Doubt Page 5