Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  In short, the match between Bill Osteen and Chris Pritchard did not seem to be made in heaven. So strong, in fact, was Osteen’s initial distaste that if the referral had come from anyone but Wade Smith, Osteen would have declined to represent Chris. But at least the association promised to be brief.

  He explained that, unlike Wade, he never made an exception to his rule that no client of his would submit to a state-administered polygraph before passing a private examination.

  “Frankly,” Osteen said later, “I was a little upset with Wade for allowing Bonnie and Angela to take the polygraph because I didn’t think any of them should take it unless we knew what it was going to show. In order to do it properly, I thought we ought to arrange our own examination first.”

  When he expressed this opinion, Osteen found Chris in full agreement. And that seemed to be the only thing lawyer and client had in common.

  * * *

  On January 16, the day before the polygraph, Bonnie (but not Angela, who said she had other plans for the day and didn’t need to talk to any lawyers, anyway) met with Wade to go over the procedure that the operator would likely follow.

  Wade said he saw no need to accompany her to Greenville; she’d be just fine on her own. Besides, his presence at her side would send the wrong signal: that she was worried enough about something to have retained the top criminal lawyer in the state. For the present—and quite likely in the future, Wade said—it was best that his involvement not become public knowledge.

  * * *

  Bonnie’s recollection of what happened in Greenville the next day was very different from Lewis Young’s. She insisted that she had let him know well in advance that only she and Angela would be taking the test; that Chris had been advised not to by his psychologist because it might prove too stressful and set back his recovery.

  Young, however, said Chris’s failure to appear came as a “complete surprise.” After all, the whole point of delaying it until a Tuesday in mid-January had been to accommodate Chris’s work schedule.

  As recently as the previous Friday, January 13, Young had spoken to Bonnie by telephone, and according to notes he made available later, she had not mentioned that Chris would not be taking the test.

  Furthermore, his notes from January 17, the day of the test, stated only that “Christopher Pritchard canceled, due to being emotionally upset and due to strong feelings of guilt about not being present when his parents were attacked and Lieth was killed.”

  It was Lewis Young’s recollection that these notes reflected what Bonnie had told him that morning, and that she’d never mentioned anything, even then, about a psychologist’s advising that Chris not take the test.

  To further bolster his contention that Bonnie had not informed him in advance, Young offered the notation made by Bill Thompson, the polygraph operator, who had written on Chris Pritchard’s file, “This test canceled 8:30 A.M. January 17, 1989.”

  That, according to Young, substantiated his claim that Bonnie had not called in advance to tell him that Chris would not be present. If she had, a notation would have been made at the time of the call.

  In any event, from that day forward, Lewis Young’s attitude toward Bonnie changed. Having virtually dismissed her as a suspect, he had begun to feel deep sympathy for her. Now, however, irritation was added to the mix. In his view, she hadn’t played straight.

  Unlike most of the population of Little Washington, and even other investigators, he still did not believe she had any direct connection to the crime, but as of January 17, 1989, he began to suspect that she might be covering up for her son, trying to shield him from investigators, fearful of what they might learn.

  “I don’t envy you,” he told her that day, in reference to Chris. “You’re between a rock and a hard place.”

  She bristled at this remark. She’d been in a hard place since July, she said, since the night her husband had been murdered, and neither Lewis Young nor the Washington police had done one single thing to help her out of it. So she was in no mood to listen to ugly remarks about her son. Chris’s doctor had said the polygraph might prove too stressful. That was the reason—the only reason—why he hadn’t come to take the test. He’d been as eager to take it as she was, but they could not ignore a medical recommendation.

  Bonnie found taking the test “demeaning.” She said later, “It must have upset me a great deal because when it was over, I felt dirty. I didn’t feel like a clean person. If I’d had the slightest idea of what it would be like, I’d have never, never agreed to take that test. I’d never do it again under any circumstances and I’d never let any member of my family do it either.”

  Yet the results, in her case, could not have been better. Of the ten questions she’d been asked, only three were used in the scoring. They were:

  —“Did you plan the death of Lieth Von Stein?”

  —“Did you help to plan his death?”

  —“Do you know who stabbed him?”

  To each, she answered no. In the scoring system used by the North Carolina SBI, the highest score possible was plus twelve and that’s the score Bonnie got. As Young put it, “She knocked the doors off.” John Taylor said, “She blew it out. It looked like she’d never told a lie in her life.”

  For Angela, the results were somewhat more equivocal. Angela was asked:

  —“Did you help someone stab Lieth Von Stein?”

  —“Were you involved in stabbing Lieth?”

  —“Do you know who stabbed Lieth?”

  Angela received a score of plus five. Only weeks earlier, any score between minus six and plus six was considered “inconclusive” by the North Carolina SBI. Then the parameters had been revised, so that any score above plus three was considered passing.

  Thus, Angela, too, “passed” her polygraph test, though the difference in score between her and her mother was never far from investigators’ minds.

  It was, however, as Wade had foreseen, Chris’s failure to take the test at all that made by far the strongest impression.

  “From that day forward,” Lewis Young said, “my suspicions really started kicking in.”

  * * *

  Within days of the test, Bonnie’s right eye began to swell and she developed blisters on her nose. The ailment was diagnosed as shingles, an extremely painful and debilitating viral condition brought on by an uncommon level of stress. In Bonnie’s case, the attack was so severe that except for visits to an eye doctor, she was unable to leave her house for the rest of the month.

  12

  On February 1, a new chief of police took office in Little Washington. His name was John Crone, and even before his appointment became official he was told that solving the Von Stein case would be his top priority.

  He’d been quite candid with the town manager. “Look,” he said, “I’m not a crack detective. I never was a homicide investigator.”

  “You are now, Chief,” the town manager said.

  Crone was forty-two, and for the previous eight years he’d been a police captain in the resort town of Ocean City, Maryland—one of those places with a winter population of five thousand that swells to three hundred thousand in July. Among his responsibilities had been recruitment and training of the temporary police needed to cope with those crowds. It was not a task he’d found rewarding. In addition, Ocean City had a tradition of always going outside the department to find a chief, so his chances for promotion seemed slim.

  Crone’s wife was from North Carolina. During a visit to her parents’ house, he’d seen a newspaper advertisement stating that the town of Washington, North Carolina, was looking for a chief. On their way back to Ocean City, they’d driven through Little Washington, liked the town well enough, and Crone had applied for the job.

  His background alone would have qualified him. The son of a physicist, he had grown up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C, and had
worked for seven years as a policeman in the District of Columbia. He’d been promoted to sergeant after four years and earned a bachelor’s degree from American University. In 1977, divorced and remarried, he’d moved to a suburb of Denver, but had returned to Maryland after only a year, taking a lieutenant’s position in Ocean City.

  In addition to his experience, John Crone seemed a congenial fellow. Weighing possibly a pound or two more than he’d like to, Crone had thinning blond hair, a quick smile, and enough self-confidence so he didn’t have to swagger into town looking as if he wanted to turn a fire hose on the first person he spotted jaywalking. He gulped a lot of coffee and kept a bottle of Maalox on his desk—and no one who’s been married three times and divorced twice can be said to have lived a stress-free life—but Crone’s professional manner tended to be more affable than intimidating.

  As soon as he assumed command, Crone began to examine the Von Stein file. One thing he noticed quickly was that for a case of such magnitude in the community, the file was notably sparse. In fact—although it had been one of only two murders in the town in the past two years—there did not seem to be anyone from his department working on it.

  “The whole thing was at a standstill,” Crone said later. “I come into town, I’ve got no idea who’s even working for me, and here’s a six-month-old murder case they want solved tomorrow.”

  On a nine-man force his options were limited, but one of John Crone’s first decisions was to assign a new detective to the case. Hoping that youthful energy and a fresh perspective would make up for lack of experience, he chose John Taylor, the dark-haired, toothpick-chewing twenty-six-year-old investigator who had photographed the crime scene. Taylor was not a man who would need Lewis Young to hold his hand.

  The choice turned out to be inspired. Taylor was a slim and graceful man whose speech was a lot slower than his thinking. He had an appealing, self-deprecating wit; in dealing with the public, he was affable, low-key, and direct: the sort of officer who, like Chief Crone, would not tend to frighten suspects into silence. He went out of his way to be generous and considerate even when he had no reason to. People tended to like John Taylor as soon as they met him, and in most cases the feeling endured.

  Also, he was thorough and smart. He’d already learned a lot in the months that had passed since he’d taken the Von Stein crime-scene photographs, and he showed an aptitude for learning more, fast.

  Taylor had an uncle who’d been chief of the Little Washington department back in the mid-seventies, so he knew the job offered the opportunity for advancement. Especially now that the new chief had put him in charge of the biggest case the town had seen in years.

  From the start, as he said later, he saw his new assignment as “the chance of a lifetime, if I didn’t fuck it up.”

  * * *

  Chief Crone’s study of the case file turned up an additional insight.

  “Dungeons and Dragons,” he said later. “One of the first things that struck me was all these college kids playing this weird game I didn’t know anything about.”

  He also noticed how many suspects there still were, even six months after the crime. “Everybody was a suspect,” he said. “We just didn’t have any facts.”

  The three potentially useful objects he did have seemed to be: the knife that had apparently been the murder weapon; the green knapsack, of which all members of the Von Stein household disclaimed knowledge; and the map, which had been found with the knife at the scene of the fire.

  To Crone, the bloody—and blood-spattered—climax to A Rose in Winter, undigested rice, and an uncle’s suspicions were intriguing elements, but they did not constitute physical evidence.

  Of the items that might, the map was the one most on Crone’s mind. Like Lewis Young, he recognized that whoever had drawn it must have had intimate knowledge of the Smallwood neighborhood, having been able to identify which homes near the Von Stein’s had dogs, and having even correctly sketched the way in which the drainage ditch behind the Von Stein home curved.

  And like Young, he was struck by the way someone had drawn those strange pictures of dogs—“hounds of the Baskervilles” was how he thought of them—instead of simply having written the word dog.

  Another element to which he paid close attention was the word LAWSON. He knew, as did Young, that an SBI or FBI lab technician could probably not make a positive handwriting match on the basis of a single printed word, but he still felt it would be useful to obtain handwriting or printing samples from family members and friends.

  “What I wanted to do,” he said later, “was at least narrow the list of suspects. I wanted to know who might have drawn the map and who might have needed it. For example, Steve Pritchard, the natural father, was in many ways a pretty good suspect, except that he’d already been to the house—he’d actually stayed there two or three times before the murder—so, as Lewis pointed out, he wouldn’t have needed a map.

  “The same with all of Bonnie’s relatives. And with all the kids’ high school friends. None of them would have needed a map to find the house.”

  So Crone agreed with Lewis Young that while someone who knew the neighborhood had drawn the map, it had probably been used by someone who would otherwise not have been able to find his way around.

  “We felt pretty sure,” Crone said, “that this had been planned. It wasn’t just a random, spontaneous event. But the plan didn’t work the way it should have. They must not have expected anyone to see that fire, or to find that pile of rubble. Maybe they were careless about burning the map because they never thought we’d find the fire. Take that a step further and maybe whoever drew the map didn’t bother to disguise his printing because he never figured we would see it.

  “I also thought it was interesting that the road where that fire was burning was a back road that led to Raleigh. It was obvious that the map was the biggest thing we had, but somebody had to get off his ass and do something with it.”

  Chief Crone decided the first thing John Taylor should do was take a considerably closer look at Chris Pritchard and his friends from NC State.

  * * *

  In early February, Bill Osteen, troubled by his new client’s attitude and demeanor, arranged for a private polygraph test, to be given in Charlotte by a former FBI examiner in whose work Osteen had developed considerable confidence during his years as a federal prosecutor.

  Osteen explained that the results would be kept confidential. The police would never be permitted to see them. There was no risk. No matter what the test indicated, it could not do Chris any harm.

  Before it, however, Chris consumed such a large dose of Buspar, his anti-anxiety medication, that the results were rendered meaningless. Not negative in any fashion, Bonnie was assured by Bill Osteen. Just meaningless. The polygraph operator would have to repeat the test at a time when Chris was not taking any drugs.

  The day after his futile polygraph exam, Chris drove to Appalachian State University in Boone, two hours west of Winston-Salem, to visit his friend Eric Caldwell. That night, he met a slender and attractive girl with whom he became instantly infatuated.

  He called her the next day and the next day and the day after that. He went back to see her again. On Valentine’s Day, he arrived laden with roses and gave her a necklace and bracelet on which he’d spent more than $500, once again overdrawing his Visa card.

  Chris was this way about everything, but girls especially. He had no control, no restraint. He would call constantly, show up unexpectedly, buy gift after gift. His pursuit had a nervous, even desperate edge: as if he were so starved for love, for affection, for companionship, that a girl who displayed even lukewarm politeness in response to his ardor became for him the sun, moon, and stars all roiled together; the sole reason for his continued existence.

  Sooner or later—usually sooner—even girls who had initially been attracted to Chris despite his scrawniness,
his jitteriness, his erratic behavior, found the manic quality of his attentions too much to contend with, and they retreated; running faster the harder he pursued.

  There was so much he wanted so badly, yet his actions all but assured that his deepest desires would stay unfulfilled. He repelled the very things—and people—he yearned for most.

  This was one reason he’d become so obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons: in that game, as a scenario developed, the character you created for yourself could acquire all sorts of powers and charms that you might lack in real life. In the dark realm of the fantasy world, you could—for hours on end—be brilliant and strong and sexually attractive and courageous and rich.

  And if you took the right sorts of drugs while playing the game, the illusion became even more convincing.

  * * *

  Slowly, through February, Bonnie recovered. There was no permanent damage to her eye. She continued to receive plastic surgery on both her forehead and chest. She ate lunch with one of her sisters and some old friends from work. She started a class in Lotus 1-2-3 at the Forsyth Technical Institute in Winston-Salem. She had the walls of the house painted in a brighter color and new carpet laid on the floor. She was trying to create a life for herself that would contain at least a few normal elements.

  But the alarm system was always on, the guns were always loaded, and the little blue motion-detector lights glowed in the short, narrow hallways all night long.

  She took her cats to the vet, she had lunch with an account executive at NCNB (one she did not suspect of having plotted her husband’s murder), and she met again with her estate lawyer. On Sundays, she’d make the half-hour drive down to Welcome and teach Sunday school at the Center United Methodist Church, the one her father had built, brick by brick. Often, she’d stay for dinner with her parents. Then she’d drive back to Winston-Salem, her handgun never farther from her than the glove compartment of her car.