Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  Bonnie was pleased that he had made friends so quickly, but concerned that the anxiety and depression that had forced him to drop out of school were growing worse. Her concern caused her to ask the doctor in Winston-Salem whom she was seeing about her chest if he could recommend a psychotherapist for Chris. He gave her a couple of names, but when she called, she was told it would be weeks, if not months, before either of them would have an opening for a new patient. Bonnie did not feel that Chris could go that long without treatment.

  Still weak and distracted herself, she took an untypically casual approach: she opened the yellow pages and looked under the heading “Psychotherapy” and called the number of the therapist whose office was closest to her house. He said he had immediate openings and could see Chris that very week.

  And so Chris began what Bonnie presumed was a course of therapy. The first consequence was that he was given an anti-anxiety drug called Buspar, which was roughly the equivalent of Valium. When Bonnie herself called the therapist a few weeks later to check on Chris’s condition, she was told he seemed to be progressing well, though she herself had noted little, if any, improvement. She and the therapist agreed that the murder of Lieth and the near-fatal attack upon herself must have been a terrible shock to what was apparently already a fragile nervous system.

  10

  It was true, as Bonnie suspected, that confusion, lack of leadership, and in some quarters, an absence of individual initiative within the Little Washington police department had slowed the investigation’s progress.

  Lewis Young had been promoted. While still technically the resident agent for Beaufort and Hyde counties, he had also begun to work within an SBI department that handled particularly sensitive investigations, such as those involving judges or law enforcement personnel, all across the state.

  His new duties required him to spend more time in Raleigh than in Little Washington. The Von Stein murder, hideous as it was, no longer commanded his full attention. In his absence, little was accomplished.

  By late fall, the rumors in Little Washington had convicted Bonnie and her children of virtually every crime of violence committed in the South since the assassination of Martin Luther King. Yet two or three days a week, Bonnie would call to ask about progress, saying she wanted to do more to help, asking if she couldn’t look at the files. She would say that perhaps she’d come across some fact or impression that, while appearing irrelevant to detectives, might trigger a helpful memory in her. This, in Young’s experience, was not the behavior of someone trying to conceal involvement in a murder.

  Yet, there were factors he could not simply dismiss, no matter how badly hurt Bonnie had seemed to be, and no matter how many times she called to inquire about progress.

  These were becoming, to Lewis Young, a familiar litany: the large inheritance; the appearance of a staged, rather than a real, break-in; the rice in Lieth’s stomach; the blood-spattered pages.

  In his mind, he believed her to be innocent, but the nagging doubts wouldn’t disappear.

  And in the case of her children—especially Chris—Young realized he was dealing not simply with doubt but with outright suspicion.

  “From the get-go,” he said later, he’d been bothered by both Angela and Chris. Not just by their attitudes, but by facts.

  It didn’t seem plausible that Angela could have slept through so brutal and noisy an assault. The fan in her room was not that loud. She hadn’t been drugged. And her bed was less than twenty feet from where Bonnie and Lieth had been attacked. Bonnie’s own recollection was that Lieth had uttered a series of sharp, loud screams as he fought for his life. Young had spent time in the house. The walls were wallboard, not plaster. Even with doors closed, sound carried. It defied logic that Angela had slept through it all.

  Besides, the first officer to enter her room had reported that when he’d opened her door, she’d sat up immediately, as if already awake. She’d had a phone in her room and, if awake, could easily have called for help. And there was the unanimous opinion of those who’d seen her in the ensuing hours—including Young himself—that she’d seemed neither shocked, grief stricken, nor even particularly surprised by what had happened.

  And then there was the question of the unmelted ice. No one had bothered to photograph it, or even to include mention of it in any official report, but it had become one of the most widely told stories in town: there had been unmelted ice in the glass observed by the side of Angela’s bed when the first officers had entered her room. If she had poured herself a glass of ice water or iced tea before going to bed at midnight, the ice should have melted long before five A.M.

  Also, she had not been harmed. As an isolated element in an equation, survival did not imply guilt. But might it be significant that of the three people present in the house, Angela alone had been spared? It was possible, of course, that the killer hadn’t known she was there. But it also seemed possible that he had known, had chosen not to hurt her, and had been so confident that she’d never say anything that he’d had no qualms about leaving her undisturbed.

  Finally, of course, there was the money. Both Angela and Chris had known at least something about the money. Notwithstanding whatever complex trust arrangements Lieth had made, they might have expected that if both Lieth and Bonnie were dead, up to $2 million would be theirs.

  Lewis Young had seen many people murdered for less likely reasons than that.

  His suspicions of Chris arose from so many reports of quarrels with Lieth, so many reports of heavy drug use, reports of frequent bragging about his parents’ wealth, the genuine and serious fears expressed by George Bates, Jr., and his wife, Peggy, and—more than anything—from the map.

  All through the fall, even when occupied with other duties, one thought was paramount in Lewis Young’s mind: the killer could not have been a Washington resident or he would not have needed a map. But whoever had drawn the map was familiar with the town, with the Smallwood neighborhood, with the Von Stein house.

  Young had looked often at the report of the late-August interview with Chris Pritchard: while playing Dungeons & Dragons, they’d gone down to the steam tunnels to make a map.

  He thought he’d like to learn more about the life Chris had been living in college.

  And so, in November, while in Raleigh, Young dropped by the NC State campus to interview Vince Hamrick, who had been Chris’s roommate at the time of the murder. It seemed to typify the lack of focus and energy that had plagued the investigation from the start that more than three months had passed since the murder and no one had yet talked to Pritchard’s roommate, the one person who’d been with him when he’d received the phone call from his sister.

  As a graduate of what had traditionally been considered the real University of North Carolina—the Chapel Hill campus, twenty-five miles away—Lewis Young could not help feeling a trace of that slight condescension that so many Chapel Hill people felt toward NC State.

  The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—universally referred to within the state simply as “Carolina”—was recognized as one of the two or three finest state universities in America. Its campus was ivy covered, richly green, bursting with blossoms in spring, and gently shaded by tall, stately trees that added to the sense of tradition. When one went to Chapel Hill, one went to Carolina. If you went to NC State, you were simply going to college to get a degree that would help you get a better job.

  The attitude was somewhat unfair, given State’s excellence in the area of engineering—its student paper was called The Technician and it even had its own nuclear reactor on the campus—but it had started as primarily an agricultural school and there were bumper stickers visible in both Raleigh and Chapel Hill that said, “Honk If You Go to Carolina—Moo If You Go to State.”

  Carolina was Chapel Hill, the university being the heart and soul of the small, charming town that had grown up around it. State, on
the other hand, even with more than twenty-five thousand students, was just one of six colleges and universities in Raleigh, a rapidly growing city with bigger things on its mind.

  In addition to being the state capital, Raleigh was at the eastern point of The Research Triangle—a cluster of high-tech facilities that constituted an East Coast version of California’s Silicon Valley. Significant new findings in science and medicine were a regular occurrence at laboratories belonging to such multinational corporations as IBM, Glaxo, Burroughs Wellcome, Becton Dickinson, and Northern Telecom.

  With Chapel Hill at one of the Triangle’s western points and Duke University in Durham at the other, it has been said that within twenty-five miles of Raleigh there were probably more library books than anywhere else in the world, as well as more Ph.D.’s per square mile.

  Having government and education as its main industries, Raleigh possessed charm and graciousness to a degree almost unique to cities its size (population about 225,000), but it was, undeniably, a city. And the NC State campus was only five minutes from the center of downtown.

  The first thing noticed by anyone setting foot on campus was the brick. The whole 650 acres seemed to have been constructed of red brick. Dormitories were red brick, classroom buildings were red brick, even the sidewalks were red brick. Officials at State would claim that this was only appropriate for an institution that had sprung from the soil, in an area where the soil was red clay, but the effect was to make State seem strictly functional—a big-city school for small-town farm kids—and a far cry from the pastoral elegance to be found at Chapel Hill.

  The university at Chapel Hill accepted only one-third of those who applied; NC State accepted two-thirds. Once enrolled, 75 percent of the freshmen at Chapel Hill eventually graduated, as opposed to little more than 50 percent at NC State. And the attrition rate for freshmen at State was twice that found at Chapel Hill.

  There was also, of course, the notoriety attached to the sports programs at State. As opposed to UNC at Chapel Hill, which, especially in basketball, had managed for years to produce nationally competitive teams without compromising academic integrity, athletics at NC State had become a scandal.

  Especially after the arrival of Jim Valvano as head basketball coach in the early 1980s, the sports program at State—while enjoying success in the arena—had been embroiled in almost constant controversy. There were allegations of financial impropriety, grade manipulation, and abandonment of any academic standards whatsoever when it came to admitting athletes heavily recruited by the coaching staffs.

  In turn, the athletes had been involved in more than their share of on-campus crime: charged with everything from theft of stereo equipment from dorm rooms to rape, sodomy, and other forms of sexual assault.

  And it was by no means just the athletes who got into trouble with the law. One statewide survey had shown the per capita crime rate on the campus of North Carolina State University to be the highest of any community in the state.

  Drugs, Young knew, were rampant on campus. Anarchy reigned. Kids from small towns all over the state—such as Little Washington—went to State and just got swallowed up by the enormous impersonality of the place, especially during their freshman year. What seemed, at the very least, to have been the emotional, intellectual, and behavioral collapse of Chris Pritchard was a story all too common at NC State.

  * * *

  Chris’s summer-session roommate, Vince Hamrick, was a husky young man with dark, curly hair. To Young, he seemed sullen and evasive. He said yes, Chris had dropped out of school; no, he wasn’t sure why; something to do with psychological problems. Sure, a group of them had played Dungeons & Dragons a lot during the summer. Daniel Duyk, some guy named Moog. He wasn’t sure, he’d heard that Moog had dropped out of school, too. And Daniel, yeah, Daniel had broken up with his girlfriend and had dropped out, too.

  Yeah, during one D&D game they’d taken swords—these wooden, Japanese martial-arts weapons—and had gone down into the steam tunnels and acted out their roles. They’d spray-painted their names down there, too.

  Chris probably went down in the tunnels five or six times. Vince himself had stopped when he’d gotten too busy with schoolwork. Schoolwork was not something with which Chris had ever seemed busy. Drugs, yes; studies, no. Chris had smoked a lot of pot, then tried to quit, then started again, and had dropped acid a few times, too. Chris lived a day at a time, a spur-of-the-moment type guy, didn’t look into the future. He was easily influenced. His bad grades hadn’t seemed to bother him. He’d said his father was rich; said he’d once peeked into some sort of stock portfolio he wasn’t supposed to know about and had seen that they owned stuff worth millions.

  By July, Vince said, Chris had been smoking “a whole lot” of pot. Then he’d disappeared over the July 4 weekend. His mother had called, looking for him, but Vince had had no idea where he’d gone.

  The morning of the murder, Chris had been so out of it that Vince had had to answer the phone. He’d handed the receiver to Chris and had gone back to sleep almost immediately. He vaguely remembered Chris saying his parents had been attacked by a burglar, and some kind of fuss about car keys, but it was the middle of the night, Vince was tired, he’d been up late, he didn’t really focus, just went back to sleep.

  Later, of course, he’d heard all about it. And when Chris came back to school, it had been strange: all he would say was that his stepfather had died, that the police didn’t know who did it, and that he didn’t want to talk about it. Period.

  After his talk with Vince Hamrick, Young was even more persuaded that, despite Bonnie’s urgings that he direct his energies elsewhere, he wanted to take a closer look at the surviving members of the family.

  Before traveling to Winston-Salem and slapping handcuffs on trust officers of the North Carolina National Bank, or before arresting everyone at National Spinning who’d ever had an item questioned on an expense account, he thought he might lean just a little bit harder on Bonnie and Angela and Chris.

  Especially, he thought, on Angela and Chris.

  * * *

  Throughout November and into December, Bonnie made herself leave the house after dark every day. She had nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be with, but she would get in her car, drive to a mall, get out, walk around, gaze blankly at the Christmas decorations, then return to her dark house alone.

  It was, at first, excruciatingly difficult, but she made herself do it, the same way she’d made herself walk up the stairs and go straight into the bedroom of the house on Lawson Road. Of course, she took her gun with her in the car. Kept it right on the front seat next to her as she drove. Just as she kept it tucked inside the waistband of her sweatpants as she sat in her living room, watching television or reading a book. And just as she kept it at her bedside every night.

  For a long time, after dark, she was too scared to go out to the backyard shed in which she kept her thirteen cats and pet rooster. The night she finally did—it was in late November or early December—she felt as if she’d taken a big step on the road back to normalcy.

  But how much farther could she go when she did not know who had tried to kill her, or why? She spent a lot of time considering the possibilities. The problem was, when one looked at it logically, the person with the most obvious motive for wanting Lieth dead was herself.

  She tried to put herself in Lewis Young’s position. If she were him, she would unquestionably consider the surviving widow who had inherited $2 million a prime suspect—injuries or no injuries.

  It made less sense to her—in fact, no sense—that anyone could think Chris or Angela had been involved. But here it was, four months later, with the police still dithering and rumors continuing to fly. Every time she called either the Washington police or Lewis Young, they gave the same evasive answers to her questions and did not seem the least bit interested in any theories she’d developed on her own.

&nb
sp; One thing she stressed repeatedly was that she didn’t see how a lone intruder, armed only with a knife and club, could enter a locked and darkened house in the middle of the night, either not knowing how many people he’d find there, or knowing he’d find at least three.

  Every time she raised this point, they came back with the same response: Are you sure you saw only one intruder? And she always gave the same answer: I only saw one, but for all I know there could have been five. And maybe, if you hadn’t let so much potential evidence be destroyed, you’d have a better idea of how many there were and who they were and why they came and where they are now and whether or not they’re going to try again to kill me or to kill my son or daughter.

  Since there was nothing else about which she cared, she found that she spoke of nothing else. Angela would come home from her Greensboro business college—by now, Bonnie realized it had been a mistake for her to go; she was in no shape to be in school; she had scarcely attended a class all fall—and she and Chris and anyone else who happened to be in the house would sit in the cramped living room, alarm systems on, guns close at hand, interior lights burning through the night, and obsessively go over every detail of what they knew and speculate endlessly about what they didn’t.

  One weekend Angela’s friends Steve Tripp and Laura Reynaud drove out from Greenville. On Friday night, they ate at the same Red Lobster restaurant where, years before, Bonnie and her children had been introduced to Lieth’s parents. After dinner, they stopped by Action Video to rent a movie. When it was over, they turned out most of the lights, though Bonnie had made it a practice never to let the house be totally dark. Laura quickly fell asleep. Steve, lying next to Angela on a fold-out couch in the living room, began to hear the sound of soft crying.