“What’s wrong?” he asked her.
She pointed to a photograph of Lieth on the mantelpiece, barely visible in the dim light.
“I was just thinking that my dad’s gone,” she said, “and that he’s never coming back.”
Steve held her until her crying stopped.
The next day, Angela went to the cemetery where Lieth’s ashes were buried. Laura went with her. There, Laura said later, Angela cried “for close to half an hour.” She said, “Lieth was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
On other occasions, Angela would speak of retribution. “If I could catch the person who did this,” she’d say. “I’d do the same thing to him.” Bonnie would gently suggest that capital punishment could never be justified, and that Lieth’s killer should be imprisoned for life, but not executed. Chris, on these occasions, would have little or nothing to say. Often, he’d just leave the house.
To Bonnie, it was obvious that the ceaseless talk about the murder and the investigation upset and depressed Chris, but to her it was all there was left of life. It sometimes seemed that the sole reason she continued to exist was so she could find out who’d tried to put an end to her existence.
As Christmas approached, her spirits sank. She didn’t know how she could face the false gaiety of the holiday. What would make it even worse was that everyone—her mother, her father, her sisters, her brother, Chris, and Angela—would tiptoe around her, knowing the pain she was in, and making it worse by trying so hard not to. She’d have to be cordial and congenial for hours on end, at a time when even brushing her teeth in the morning required a formidable act of will.
Also, the little house that had belonged to Lieth’s parents, the house that she had hoped would offer solace, had turned out to be drab and cheerless. She felt she was living inside her own tomb. It had been years since the interior had been painted. The walls were a lifeless green that sucked up whatever meager winter light managed to filter through the small-paned windows. She could not make herself put up Christmas decorations. She could not bear the thought of a tree with lights and ornaments.
Nor could she any longer bear the thought that the police were getting nowhere.
* * *
On December 7, she reached a point of such desperation that she made the drive to Little Washington to again confront Lewis Young in person.
She insisted that he give her an accounting of everything the SBI and Washington police had done, and an explanation of everything they intended to do from that point forward. She said she was fed up with the continuing gossip, rumor, and innuendo concerning her own possible involvement in the crime, or the possible involvement of either of her children. The time had long since passed for that to have stopped. Not that it should ever have started in the first place.
She told him bluntly that she wanted him and the other investigators to “stop looking at us.” She told him she intended to hire private detectives to find Lieth’s killer. She would demand that he make available to her and her detectives the entire investigative file.
Bonnie was beginning to wonder if someone in law enforcement did know who had killed Lieth, but for some nefarious reason—political pressure, financial payoff, how could she tell?—had decided to cover it up.
Young said he could understand and sympathize with her frustration. But he said a lot of work had been going on behind the scenes. And he said, yes, he’d be happy to share with her all the information they’d developed. But there was one thing she’d have to do first. She—and Chris and Angela—would have to take a polygraph examination administered by the SBI.
He explained that she was under no legal obligation to do so, nor were her children. But he added that until all three of them passed such a test, they could not be eliminated as suspects. And that until the people closest to Lieth had been excluded, investigators could not extend their search beyond this “innermost circle.”
The way he presented this request—so tentatively and apologetically, almost as if he were embarrassed to ask—caused Bonnie to feel that he had expected her to refuse. But of course, she wouldn’t refuse. If this was what was required to get the investigation moving forward, of course she and her children would cooperate. Any one of them would submit to any kind of examination the SBI wanted to give them at any time. Good Lord, hadn’t that been clear from the start? If this was what Lewis Young wanted, why hadn’t he asked her weeks ago?
He said SBI polygraphs were given in Greenville. She and her children would have to come all the way from Winston-Salem to take the test.
Bonnie assured him that this would pose no problem. She said she was “certain” both Chris and Angela would take the test. The only difficulty was with logistics. Because of Chris’s job at Triad Tires, the three of them could only come together on a Tuesday, his day off. With the SBI’s polygraph operator already heavily scheduled, and with the upcoming holidays adding further delay, it was determined that the test could not be given until Tuesday, January 17, 1989.
Both Bonnie and Lewis Young said they’d prefer to get it done sooner, but that was the date they agreed on. Again, Bonnie said she wished he hadn’t let so many weeks go by before he’d asked. Again, Lewis Young was polite and considerate and respectful. And managed to avoid saying much of anything at all.
He knew the polygraph was not infallible. Indeed, results from such tests were still not admissible as evidence in North Carolina, or in most other state and federal jurisdictions across the country. But Young, like many law enforcement officers, had come to value the polygraph as an investigative tool.
If nothing else, it tended to frighten those who had anything to hide. More than once, Lewis Young had seen suspects refuse even to take the test, and run instead toward the protective arms of a criminal attorney.
* * *
Christmas was as bad as Bonnie had feared. As always, there was the big Christmas Eve gathering of the Bates family at her parents’ house in Welcome, with all her little nieces and nephews running around, oblivious of the aching in her heart. She and Chris and Angela had little to say to one another. This was the first Christmas without Lieth, but as they all knew, it was only the first of many.
In early January, trying to focus on business again, forcing herself, on a daily basis, to do what needed to be done, Bonnie met with an estate lawyer in Winston-Salem.
It was a routine meeting (the lawyer had been a family friend for many years), and toward the end he asked, just in passing, if there had been any new developments in the investigation. Bonnie said no, but added that once she and the children took their polygraph, she was hopeful that things would move forward.
The estate lawyer did not like the sound of that and told her so. After she left, he made inquiries and was told that the best person to advise Bonnie on whether to take such a test was a man named Wade Smith, a former state legislator who was now chairman of the Raleigh firm of Tharrington, Smith and Hargrove.
Smith promptly told Bonnie’s estate lawyer that no one, under any circumstances, no matter how pure of heart or soul they might be, should ever consent to a polygraph examination administered by the North Carolina SBI, or any other law enforcement agency, without prior consultation with an experienced criminal lawyer who would formulate an opinion as to the advisability of such an action only after having made an extensive inquiry into the facts.
In other words, send the woman to Raleigh to see him. Or send her somewhere else to see a different criminal lawyer. But for God’s sake, don’t let her or her children walk blithely into that SBI polygraph room in Greenville unprepared. Too many stories, Smith said, similar to those involving Christians and lions, came to mind.
And so it was that at one P.M. on January 6, 1989, Bonnie Von Stein found herself standing at the iron gates that marked the entrance to the marble-walled offices of Tharrington, Smith and Hargrove in downtown Raleigh.
Stepping into a lobby replete with atrium, hanging gardens, skylights, and waterfalls, she was, at first, a bit overawed. This looked less like the headquarters of a law firm than it did the lobby of a plush Hawaiian resort hotel.
But she began to feel better the moment she first met Wade Smith. At fifty-one, with short, white, curly hair and a quick, warm smile, he still carried himself with the nimbleness of the Carolina halfback he’d once been.
Eminence rested lightly on his shoulders. He got as much pleasure from flying a kite or painting a watercolor as from making a winning argument to a jury. Both his daughters were grown and gone from home, and his wife was constantly occupied with a variety of worthy causes, but if you could catch Wade in his kitchen with his shoes off and jeans on, he’d still be quick to recite a Bob and Ray skit from memory or to improvise one of his own, or to take out his banjo or guitar and start to sing.
He could easily be drawn into the most serious sort of conversation about metaphysics or epistemology, but he also still played and sang with an acoustic group that performed in the Raleigh–Durham-Chapel Hill area, and he remained one of those rare people in whose company it was impossible to feel anything less than total delight at the happy accident of being alive.
It had been some months since Bonnie had felt anything of the sort.
Still, even as she settled herself into a comfortable armchair in his private office—a far homier and less ostentatious place than the lobby—and Wade came out from behind his desk to sit right with her, face-to-face, she felt a burden lifting from her heart.
As he looked her in the eye with what appeared to be genuine compassion, she sensed that for the first time since the murder of her husband she was in the presence of not only a professional in whose judgment she could place absolute trust, but of a man who—unlike anyone she knew except her father—seemed to care as much about her well-being as he did his own.
And so, looking and sounding, as Wade would say later, “like the saddest, most forlorn person on earth,” Bonnie began to tell him the story of her life.
Part Two
Presumed Guilty
January–June 1989
11
As he listened to Bonnie, Wade Smith thought: clearly, she was a suspect. He knew nothing of blood-spattered pages or rice in the stomach or reports of family discord. All he knew was that she had gained $2 million from her husband’s death, and that she, badly injured or not, had survived. That fact alone would require any competent investigator to put her story to the sternest test.
Invariably, Wade’s recommendation to a person in Bonnie’s situation would be at least to postpone an SBI polygraph until he could arrange for one to be privately administered. If that result was unfavorable, no one would ever know. She could then simply decline to take the SBI test. If, on the other hand, she passed the private exam, she could take the official polygraph test with little to fear.
There was, however, something so guileless and unstudied about Bonnie Von Stein that Wade felt inclined to waive his normal procedure. She seemed utterly without artifice and to his practiced ear and eye—and Wade Smith had been lied to by the best—thoroughly trustworthy.
He said that while this was not counsel he would normally offer—in fact, he couldn’t recall ever having given it before—in this instance, based on his assessment of her, and based on the strength of her desire to do so, he would advise her to take the test.
Without giving it as much thought as he later admitted he might have, he said he saw no problem with Angela’s taking the test, too. After all, she’d been in the house at the time of the attack, and it seemed obvious that she had not participated in it.
In Wade’s mind, however, Chris fell into a different category. Because he had not been present when the murder occurred, and therefore could not be considered an intended victim, Wade thought it possible that investigators might look at him through a different lens.
Also, Bonnie had told him that Chris had dropped out of NC State because of psychological problems that had cropped up after the murder and that he was currently seeing a therapist in Winston-Salem. She added that the therapist had suggested that a polygraph test might prove too stressful for Chris at this point and could impede his recovery.
Wade recognized immediately that if Bonnie and her daughter took an SBI polygraph, and her son, for whatever sound medical reason, did not, he would immediately become a suspect, even if he wasn’t already. Pressure was going to be put on the boy to take the test. He should have a lawyer of his own.
Not that Wade could foresee any problem, he assured her. It was just that, as a general rule, different interests could lead to different priorities, and he would never want to be in a position where the interests of one of his clients was not fully consistent with the interests of the others, especially when they were members of the same family.
Bonnie was not pleased to hear this. She didn’t think she or her children needed one criminal lawyer, much less two. As was her custom, however, she considered Wade’s point logically and had to concede it had merit.
Besides, there was something in Wade Smith’s manner that inspired belief in what he was saying. His presence was both magnetic and reassuring. He made you believe that what he was telling you must be right—and was certainly in your best interests—even if you wished it weren’t so.
* * *
The lawyer whom Wade recommended for Chris was William Osteen, a fifty-eight-year-old former state legislator from Greensboro, who had served for five years as United States Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina. Osteen, also a graduate of the Law School of UNC in Chapel Hill, was a man as esteemed in Republican political circles as was Wade among Democrats.
As an undergraduate, Osteen had attended Guilford College in Greensboro, as had Lieth Von Stein some years later. He was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1960, the first Republican since 1928 chosen for any public office in Guilford County. He was one of only nine Republicans out of one hundred and twenty members of the House, and, at age thirty, the youngest legislator from either party.
After winning reelection two years later, he did not run again because he’d found politics to be interfering with his first love: the practice of law. In 1968, however, he’d been persuaded to run for Congress. He lost a close, hard fight to Congressman Richard Pryor, but got his picture taken with Richard Nixon in the process. The following year, he was named U.S. Attorney.
In legal circles, Osteen was at least as highly regarded as Wade Smith. Possessing impeccable judgment and an unblemished reputation, Osteen was senior partner of a firm he had founded in Greensboro after leaving his post as chief federal prosecutor in the mid-1970s. (In 1991, he would leave the firm to accept appointment as a federal district judge.)
A hardy and exceptionally handsome man, he was five feet eight inches tall, with solid gray hair. He had a quick sense of humor and unfailingly gracious manners, but when conducting business he functioned in a brisk and direct fashion that left no one guessing about what he thought or where he stood. His voice immediately let one know he was more accustomed to giving orders than receiving them.
Osteen was married, with three sons, the youngest of whom attended The Citadel, the South’s foremost military academy. Osteen’s oldest son, Bill Jr., who had gone to Chapel Hill for both undergraduate work and his law degree, had joined the Osteen firm in 1987 because he was so eager to practice law with his father.
A traditional family man with traditional family values, Osteen possessed a strong competitive instinct both in the courtroom and on the tennis court. But no one who’d dealt with him in any capacity had ever come away saying that Bill Osteen had been anything less than totally fair and honest.
This would be a simple matter, Wade explained. A young man had been through a terrible family tragedy—stepfather murdered, no arrests made, but the boy had been in his do
rm room at NC State and could not have committed the crime. For medical reasons, he would probably not be taking an SBI polygraph test at the same time as his mother and sister. This, no doubt, would cause investigators to start looking at him in a different light. If so, given his age and emotional condition, legal guidance might prove helpful.
Wade was representing the mother, who seemed like a wonderful woman, salt of the earth. He apologized for not sending along a more intricate and challenging case, but said next time he’d try to do better.
* * *
Osteen later said he’d been “amazed” upon first meeting his new client. Eventually, he used stronger language. “He was obviously on drugs,” Osteen said. “He was surly, insolent, spoiled, brattish—anything in the world you want to say, Chris pretty much resembled that.”
Unshaven, with unwashed hair, and wearing a T-shirt that advertised some heavy-metal rock and roll band, Chris had strolled in late for his appointment, with an air of arrogance about him and the smell of alcohol on his breath.
Bill Osteen had grown up on a farm without running water or indoor plumbing, and he well remembered the day in sixth grade when the house first got electricity. His father had been a federal probation officer, his mother a strict Southern Baptist who had made her sons swear never to let a drop of alcohol pass their lips. Bill Osteen had kept the pledge because “that’s the way she wanted it.”
In law school, Osteen’s first ambition had been to join the FBI. Later, as U.S. Attorney, he directed the activities of federal law-enforcement agents. He had an older brother who had graduated from West Point and had retired from the Army as a major general. In the living room of Osteen’s Greensboro home, a large family Bible was always open and on display. His strongest values were family and God, and not necessarily in that order.
“I value some direction in life,” Osteen would say later. “I like to see people who are interested in other people. It didn’t take long to find out that Chris was not on a road to anything worthwhile, and I didn’t like that.”
Cruel Doubt Page 14