Then Duyk looked right at John Taylor. He said, “That sounds kind of suspicious, doesn’t it?” He said he’d been with Chris several times since the murder and Chris had always seemed upset but had never wanted to talk about what had happened.
As the interview ended, Taylor said, “Keep thinking, Daniel. Keep remembering. This isn’t the last time I’ll be talking to you. I’m leaving now, but I’ll be back.” Duyk didn’t seem happy to hear that.
* * *
Next, Taylor visited a friend of both Pritchard and Upchurch’s named Matt Schwetz. He’d seen Schwetz’s name in several of Lewis Young’s reports.
It was raining, but Schwetz would not let Taylor enter his apartment. He stood in the kitchen doorway, keeping Taylor out in the rain.
“Listen,” Taylor said, “I’m not here to bust you for dope. I just want to ask a few questions. But I don’t want to stand here and get wet.”
Schwetz shook his head.
“One step,” Taylor said. “I just want to take one step inside your fucking doorway, so I can get out of the rain while we talk.”
Schwetz acted as if he’d heard this kind of story before and didn’t like it. He was going to put up a goal-line stand. Finally, he relented enough so Taylor could at least shield his notebook from the rain.
Pritchard, yeah, he knew Pritchard. What an asshole. They used to drink together, but he hadn’t seen him since fall. Heard he’d dropped out of school for psychological reasons. Wouldn’t be surprising. That kid was really fucked up. He’d told a lot of different stories about the murder. One time he said his father surprised a burglar and was killed. Another time, he said the killer had raped his mother first.
Frankly, Schwetz himself wasn’t tracking very well. This guy’s got a fried mind, Taylor thought. He was jabbering on now about what a swell guy Pritchard was. Always took care of his friends. Always bought the expensive beer, not the cheap stuff. Guy had a real positive attitude, you know? Always talked about his relatives like he loved them. Once, he’d said his family owned 35 percent of RJR Nabisco. His sister had been around when he’d said that. She’d said no, it was only 32 percent.
Dungeons & Dragons? No, not Schwetz. Steam tunnels? No, didn’t know anything about them. Yeah, he knew Vince, he knew Daniel, he knew Moog. He’d even seen Moog recently, but only in passing, didn’t know where it might have been. You know, you see a lot of guys, don’t always pay attention to who was where.
“Listen,” Taylor said. “I’ve been told you supplied Upchurch and Pritchard with acid.”
Oh, no. Absolutely not. Acid? Was that the same as LSD? He’d heard of it, but didn’t know anything about it. No, no; not acid. Chris, as a matter of fact—now this was something he remembered—had never even used acid. Or LSD. Whatever you called it. Whatever it was.
“Stick around town,” Taylor said. “I’ll be back. And next time I’ll bring an umbrella.”
* * *
Taylor returned to Raleigh on March 29 to talk to Vince Hamrick again. “He gave me one of those ‘Y’all leave me alone,’ type looks,” Taylor said, “which always makes me feel a little more like asking questions.”
The night of the murder, Vince said, he’d been studying for a physics test. His best guess was that Chris had come in about midnight. As best guesses went, thought Taylor, that one wasn’t very good. He didn’t remember seeing Daniel Duyk or James Upchurch at all on Sunday night. Cards? No, he didn’t remember playing cards. No, he didn’t remember answering the phone when Angela called. He hadn’t woken up until Chris was packing to go home. Car keys? No, he didn’t remember anything about Chris not being able to find his car keys. But one thing he did know: Chris loved that car, man, and would never let anyone else drive it.
They used to play D&D, he said, but it all kind of petered out after the murder. He hadn’t played with Moog or Daniel Duyk since the murder, that was for sure.
“Good luck on the test, Vince,” Taylor said. “But don’t graduate too soon. I’ll be wanting to talk to you again.”
* * *
Taylor went back to see Karen Barbour and Kirsten Hewitt. Yes, they remembered that Sunday night. They’d been with Chris and Moog and Daniel and Vince at Wildflour Pizza. On the way back to the dorm, they’d bought beer. Karen had bought it because she was the only one of legal age. Yes, they’d thought it unusual that Chris parked the car in the fringe lot, so far from the dorm.
The boys had disappeared for a while, they assumed to play Dungeons & Dragons. The card game hadn’t started until late, maybe ten. Daniel got mad because Vince was giving Kirsten advice on how to play. Then Vince got mad at Daniel. By eleven P.M., he’d stormed out of the room, but they kept on seeing him because they’d left the beer up in Chris and Vince’s room because Vince had a refrigerator, and every time one of them went up to get a beer they saw Vince studying. They hadn’t seen Upchurch at all.
They clearly recalled that from one or one-thirty on, Kirsten had asked the boys to leave. At three-thirty, she’d said, in her most exasperated tone yet, “Can’t we please stop the game?” Chris asked what time it was. When they told him three-thirty, he left at once. This had always struck them as strange.
John Taylor—being twenty-six and good-looking and comfortable in blue jeans—had established good rapport with these two girls. They felt comfortable talking to him, not intimidated. He wasn’t like a cop you had to be afraid of. So they volunteered some additional information.
Kirsten said that Chris had told her once that he’d entered a plan on his computer disc that outlined how he could “come into a lot of money.” When she’d asked to see it, he said it was secret. She said he seemed to resent Lieth and Lieth’s money, which, he said, Lieth used only to take care of Bonnie, not his sister or him. If they were so rich, Chris complained, how come he and Angela couldn’t have more clothes or better cars?
Karen said she’d seen Chris sell marijuana and take acid. But both girls made it clear they liked him. He was good company, fun to be around, even if he was a little obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons.
* * *
Leaving campus, Taylor stopped at the security office to show a picture of James Upchurch that he’d obtained from the probation officer. He said Washington police and the SBI were eager to speak to the young man and asked for help in finding him. He said it shouldn’t be hard. “Really,” Taylor said. “A guy with pink hair. Let’s find him.”
* * *
On March 30, an FBI lab technician phoned Taylor to say that on the basis of the samples submitted, they could deem it “probable” that Chris Pritchard had written the word LAWSON on the map found at the fire site.
15
The next day Bonnie arrived in Little Washington for the annual dinner of the Humane Society, the one social event that could have brought her back to the town she’d learned to fear and loathe.
That afternoon, she went to police headquarters to ask yet again what had become the one question of significance in her life: Was there any news about the investigation?
She was hoping to see John Taylor, who seemed to her to be the only person connected to the case who displayed even a modicum of courtesy.
Taylor was there, but Lewis Young was also present and greeted her coolly. She complained about the rude and insulting manner in which Newell and Sturgell had questioned her. Then she announced her intention of hiring a private investigator and told the two officers that she expected them to cooperate with whomever she brought into the case.
Young flatly told her that it was not SBI policy to cooperate with private investigators.
Bonnie told him she no longer gave a hoot about SBI policy. In eight months, SBI policy had accomplished exactly nothing, except to let a murderer’s trail grow cold. She was fed up with SBI policy. And fed up with the incompetence—or worse—of the Little Washington police department. She was taking matters into her own hands, and i
f they did not cooperate voluntarily, she would take all measures available to her under the law to force them to.
Lewis Young told her she still didn’t seem to understand the situation. They were investigating, and they were making progress. Maybe her problem was that it was progress in a direction that made her uncomfortable.
Young might have looked like a banker, and might be an alumnus of Chapel Hill, but he’d grown up in a strict police family. His father had been a North Carolina highway patrolman for thirty-eight years, and Young had lived all over the state as a boy, moving each time his father was transferred. Police work, he would say, “was in my blood.”
It had also drawn a bit of his blood. One night, in 1977, while still a bachelor, Young had been standing at his kitchen sink preparing a peanut butter cracker. A shot was fired through the window behind him. The bullet had creased his scalp and skimmed the top of his skull. A quarter inch lower and he would have been dead. His assailant, it turned out, was a former Washington police officer Young had once arrested for theft.
For a while after that, Young ate no peanut butter, but his commitment to his work was intensified by the attempt on his life. And once you’ve been shot in the head at close range, you are not intimidated by a five two, 110-pound woman, no matter how indignant and determined she may be.
Already, Young told her, “a case could be made,” against someone. Already, he said, “there’s enough circumstantial evidence to bring someone to trial.” No, he said, he was not going to identify the suspect, but rather pointedly he reminded her that Chris had still not taken his polygraph. He said he wanted that done within two weeks. Arrangements could even be made to have the test given in Winston-Salem, so Chris would have no excuse about the inconvenience of traveling to Greenville. He just didn’t buy this new story Bonnie was telling him: that some anonymous therapist had said that the test would prove too stressful for the poor boy.
Lewis Young’s voice, and his manner, had an edge that Bonnie had not heard or seen before. It both angered and frightened her. What Young seemed to be implying was that in order to get this case taken off the books, in order to wrap it up and move on, they might file baseless and unprovable charges against someone who was, in a very real sense, a victim, too—her own son.
She left the police station and went to her room at the Holiday Inn. She put in a call to Wade Smith, who was not immediately available. Then she sat down and made a few notes to which she could refer when she did speak to Wade. She wrote:
“Current major concern—LEWIS YOUNG—Does not appear genuinely interested in finding guilty party. He feels case can be made—Many cases have been solved on circumstantial evidence. BULL SHIT!!! I will settle for NO LESS THAN a conviction on cold hard evidence. Facts must speak, not circumstances.”
But when she did meet with Wade, on her way back to Winston-Salem, he counseled patience once again. Because he felt she was already bearing a sufficient burden, he did not share with her, on this occasion, the faint sense of unease he’d begun to develop about the direction the investigation might take once the pace did begin to quicken.
Recent conversations with Bill Osteen had left Wade concerned about Bonnie’s son, whom he himself had never met. Couching the opinion very carefully in several layers of lawyerlike euphemism, so as not to risk compromising any degree of attorney-client confidentiality, Osteen had conveyed to Wade the distinct impression that the son of Bonnie Von Stein struck him as an insolent and untrustworthy little thug.
This judgment was so much at odds with the portrait Bonnie had painted of Chris that it caused Wade to have his first twinge of misgiving: If the boy Bonnie described and the boy Osteen had seen were so different, might there someday prove to be a corresponding discrepancy between what Bonnie was so convinced of and what investigators would find?
* * *
As April began, the search for Moog intensified. “A really weird fucker,” Taylor said. “He didn’t seem to live anywhere.”
They talked to his father, who, indeed, worked for the department of social services in Raleigh. No, he hadn’t heard from James for quite some time. They talked to his mother, who, indeed, lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia. No, she hadn’t heard from James for quite some time.
It seemed that Taylor was driving back and forth to Raleigh every day. In the company of Upchurch’s probation officer, Christy Newsome, who, in one of life’s pleasant small surprises, turned out to be not only competent but extremely good-looking, he staked out virtually every bar in which an NC State student had ever ordered a drink.
Sadlack’s, The Watering Hole, the Brewery, the Fallout Shelter, Bourbon Street, I Play Games. Taylor thought The Watering Hole was “the worst damn looking place I’d ever seen. I didn’t even want to go in there. Nothing but blacks and motorcycle guys. But Christy had guts. She’d walk right up to the bar and start showing that picture around and didn’t even look over her shoulder.”
You wouldn’t think, Taylor said, that in 1989, as opposed to 1969, some guy with pink hair and a knapsack—and yes, they had learned that Upchurch carried a knapsack with him wherever he went—would be that hard to spot in Raleigh, North Carolina. But even with the help of the Raleigh police, as well as the NC State security officers, Moog could not be found.
* * *
Back in Washington on April 21, Taylor called Bonnie Von Stein. From the start, more than any other investigator, he had treated her with sympathy and respect. It was no act. He liked her. He also felt sorry for her, and he expected that before this was all over she would have to face agonies even worse than she’d already endured.
He said he believed she really did want to help. No matter what anyone else might say or suspect, he thought neither that she’d had anything to do with the murder nor that she was trying to cover for her children. He said he had a couple of questions that might turn out to be important, but added that he couldn’t yet tell her his reasons for asking them.
He asked whether she knew where Chris’s friend James Upchurch, also known as Moog, might be found. This, he reminded her, was the person with whom Chris had disappeared in early July.
Bonnie said she’d ask Chris as soon as she could. “I knew,” she said later, “that I wouldn’t get a straight answer from either John Taylor or Lewis Young if I asked them why they were looking for that young man, so I didn’t even bother to ask. The only way I was surviving was by taking their questions at face value and doing all I could to answer honestly.”
Taylor said his second question concerned a map. He told her—and this was the first time Bonnie had learned this from anyone—that investigators had reason to believe that at some point prior to the murder, Chris had drawn a map of the Smallwood neighborhood, showing the precise location of their house.
She said, in her calm, matter-of-fact tone, “Well, if that were the case, there wouldn’t be anything surprising about it. He could easily have done so in order to provide directions for out-of-town friends, or one of his cousins.”
But later, when she asked Chris, he said, no, gee, he couldn’t remember ever drawing any sort of map of their neighborhood. And when she asked about Upchurch, he said, no, gee, he had no idea what might have happened to James Upchurch. He hadn’t heard anyone speak about Upchurch for months.
Angela, however, volunteered that she had met Upchurch once, when she’d gone to NC State to visit Chris. Bonnie asked her what kind of person he was. She responded, Bonnie recalled later, that he was “a nice, quiet young man who might appear a little bit weird.”
* * *
Taylor’s questions might have sounded idle enough to Bonnie, but to the considerably more sophisticated ear of former federal prosecutor Bill Osteen they seemed ominous.
Osteen was already annoyed, to put it mildly, that Chris had drawn a map of his neighborhood and had printed the name of his street for the SBI. He was equally displeased that neither Chris nor B
onnie had even bothered to tell him that the SBI had wanted to question Chris. Had he known, he would never have let such a meeting occur, at least not unless he’d been present himself.
This sort of loose-cannon stupidity got clients into a lot of needless trouble. Why bother hiring a lawyer, he said to Chris, in a distinctly nonavuncular tone, if you weren’t even going to tell him you were planning to go off and have little private meetings with investigators who might well consider you a prime suspect in a murder case?
Osteen had no idea why the SBI had wanted the printing or the map, and Chris—who struck him as the kind of kid who you’d think was lying if you asked him on December 25 what day it was and he said, “Christmas”—said he couldn’t imagine a map having any possible relevance to anything.
But now that a detective from Little Washington was calling to ask further questions about a map, Osteen could see that Chris was becoming—indeed, had already become—a target, perhaps the target of the probe. Another try for a useful polygraph result suddenly seemed a higher priority.
Osteen scheduled the second test for April 25. Chris stopped taking his Buspar well before it. Bonnie drove him to Charlotte. There was little conversation on the way, but, as she recalls it, he didn’t seem at all tense. Indeed, she thought that his psychological state had begun to improve. He seemed much less depressed than he’d been in winter, much less apt to become tearful or to fly into a rage. He seemed, in fact, to be working and living normally. And Angela seemed better, too.
Despite all the harassment from, and lack of progress by, investigators, and despite the fact that the ache in her heart caused by Lieth’s death had not subsided, and despite the fact that she and Angela and Chris continued to live in constant fear—their little home a virtual arsenal—Bonnie felt that they were not just surviving, but actually beginning to recover, bit by bit.
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