Chris’s polygraph examination consisted of two questions considered “relevant” by the operator:
First, “Did you set up the murder of your stepfather?”
Second, “Do you know the name of the person who stabbed Lieth?”
To each, Chris answered, “No.”
The operator’s report said, “Based upon my analysis of the nature and degree of the tracings on the three polygraph charts, it is my opinion that the psychophysiological responses of Mr. Pritchard, when answering the above relevant questions, are not indicative of deception.”
In other words, he passed. The operator gave Chris and Bonnie the good news immediately. Neither of them seemed to show much emotion. It came, of course, as no surprise to Bonnie. She’d never had a moment’s doubt. But Bill Osteen, for one, was greatly relieved.
For the first time since her release from the hospital, Bonnie felt that matters were sufficiently under control so she could take a few days to be by herself, to get somewhere new, to feel something different. And so, at four-thirty on the morning of April 26, 1989, she climbed on a tour bus in Winston-Salem for a four-day trip to Disney World.
16
On Monday, May 1, the decision was made to confront Chris and his mother with the evidence the SBI and Washington police had already gathered.
“It wasn’t going to be pretty,” Taylor said later, “but we’d decided to have it out with Bonnie and Chris.”
Young called Bonnie to say he would be coming to Winston-Salem the next day, bringing with him all the items of evidence she’d been wanting to see since early August. He told her he’d be wanting to speak to Chris and Angela, too. Eight o’clock tomorrow night, he told her, at the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department in Winston-Salem. They were going to lay all their cards on the table.
Without hesitation, Bonnie told him, “We’ll be there.”
At ten forty-five the next morning, Lewis Young stepped out of SBI headquarters in Greenville and walked toward his car, where a young assistant district attorney named Keith Mason was waiting. On the off chance that, after seeing the case they were building against him, Chris might want to make a statement, the district attorney had wanted someone from his office standing by.
Young was only a few steps from the car when his beeper rang. The message was that an attorney from Greensboro named William Osteen had called his Little Washington office, trying to reach him.
“I’ll be right back,” Young said to Keith Mason. Knowing he’d be on the road most of the day, Young decided to return the call before setting out on the trip. Having spent most of his career in eastern North Carolina, Young was not familiar with the name William Osteen. He called the Greensboro number.
* * *
The timing of the call was pure coincidence. Bill Osteen had had no idea that, even as he was trying to contact Lewis Young, the SBI agent was preparing to drive to Winston-Salem to try to obtain a confession from his client.
It had just seemed to Osteen—who knew nothing of any comparisons of printing samples—that since Chris had passed a private polygraph exam, the SBI test no longer loomed as a threat. In fact, if Chris passed it—and given the results from Charlotte, Osteen was confident that he would—investigators might finally cross him off their list of suspects.
And so he introduced himself to Young as an attorney who’d been retained “to represent Chris Pritchard concerning the polygraph.”
“It’s my understanding,” Lewis Young said, “that Chris Pritchard doesn’t want to take an SBI polygraph.”
“That’s not necessarily so,” Osteen said.
“Well, good,” Young replied. “I’ll ask him about it when I see him tonight.”
There was a brief silence.
“Tonight?” Osteen asked, sounding surprised.
“Yes,” Young said, but already with the sinking feeling that he’d said more than he should have. “I’m on my way to Winston-Salem right now. I’m interviewing Chris and his mother and his sister tonight.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Osteen said, “but I can’t be there tonight.”
* * *
All the way to Winston-Salem, Lewis Young stewed. Young, you ran your big mouth off, he told himself, repeating the thought aloud to Keith Mason. “I blew it,” he said. “I’ve screwed this one right into the ground.” Osteen hadn’t come right out and said he was going to instruct Chris to cancel his interview, but Young was sure he would. “That lawyer,” he said, “is going to call that boy and tell him there’s no way he’s going to talk to us tonight.”
Keith Mason had to agree. Lewis Young might not have been familiar with the name, but Mason was. In fact, he’d been in law school at Chapel Hill with Osteen’s son. He told Young that Bill Osteen was a former United States Attorney and one of the most respected and renowned lawyers in the state.
At five-ten P.M., as soon as he’d checked into his motel, Lewis Young called Bonnie.
She quickly gave him the answer he’d anticipated.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but Chris won’t be there tonight. His attorney, Mr. Osteen, does not want him interviewed unless Mr. Osteen can be present himself.”
“And how long,” Young asked, “has Mr. Osteen been involved in this case?”
“I retained him to represent Chris in January,” Bonnie said. “He was recommended by the attorney I retained then, Wade Smith.”
Wade Smith! Young was staggered. “As soon as I heard that name,” he said later, “it rang all sorts of bells and dollar signs.” Young might not have been familiar with Bill Osteen, but every law enforcement officer in the state knew of Wade Smith. He was, quite simply, the biggest name there was in criminal law in North Carolina.
What in the hell, Young asked himself, are these victims doing with lawyers like Osteen and Wade Smith?
“You mean to tell me,” Young demanded of Bonnie, his temper rising fast, “that you’ve had Wade Smith and this fellow Osteen representing you and your family since January!”
“That’s right,” she said. “One attorney for those of us who were present in the house at the time, and another for Christopher, who was not.”
“You never told me a damned thing about having any attorneys involved!”
“I didn’t think it was any of your business,” she said mildly, adding that she’d long ago lost confidence in the ability of the Washington police and the SBI to find her husband’s murderer. She said, in fact, that she’d come to fear they might be not only incompetent but dishonest, and that in order to cover up their own mistakes, they might make a serious accusation against an innocent person.
By now, Lewis Young was fuming in a way he seldom did. His charm and courtliness were nowhere in evidence. Bonnie had never told him about Osteen or Wade Smith. Instead, she’d played so dumb and helpless—jerking him around all year long—as she secretly retained two of the highest-caliber lawyers in the state.
Since January Osteen had been in the case. Ever since Chris had backed out of the polygraph. Goddamn it. Goddamn it! She’d promised him that Chris would take that polygraph. Then, at the last minute, she’d changed her mind.
Now, she’d promised him that Chris would appear for an interview. But the very day it was to take place a lawyer whom she’d hired in January had intervened to prevent him from talking.
“I guess blood is thicker than water,” Young said.
“What do you mean by that remark?”
“I mean, you’ve known all along that Chris was involved and you’re doing everything you can to cover for him.”
“I assure you,” Bonnie said, “that nothing could be further from the truth. Angela and I will see you, as planned, at eight P.M.”
Lewis Young slammed down the phone. So much for poor little Bonnie. Tonight, that little lady would see a different and much less pleasant side of L
ewis Young’s personality.
* * *
That night, as Bonnie entered the meeting room, she observed that Lewis Young had not come alone. He was accompanied not only by John Taylor, but by her nemeses of March—the Thin Man and the Doughboy.
Young, still incensed, jumped to his feet before she could even take a seat and picked up a large stack of papers.
“You know,” he said, in a much harsher voice than she’d ever heard him use before, “I came to Winston-Salem with every intention of going through this stuff with you, but now I’m not going to do it. As a matter of fact, I’m not ever going to discuss the case with you again.”
He threw the papers on a table. Then Newell began to talk. Or maybe Sturgell. Then Lewis Young again. They were coming at Bonnie from all sides. Chris was involved. They had evidence. He hadn’t committed the murder himself—he wasn’t even in the house at the time—but he was involved. He’d lied to them. They could prove it. No, they wouldn’t discuss how they could prove it. They would have been happy to tell her if she hadn’t gone out and hired attorneys. The presence of attorneys changed everything. It put her and the investigators on opposite sides of the fence. Since when did victims need attorneys?
Chris’s involvement might have been innocent, they said. He might not even have realized he’d provided information that led to her husband’s murder. But he realized it now and was lying. They were willing to make a deal with somebody, to plea-bargain, but it would only be with whoever came forward first. And the talk would have to be in the absence of attorneys. If Chris wouldn’t talk to them without a lawyer present, they had no further interest in talking to Chris. They’d just go ahead and build their case against him.
Then they told her Chris was in danger. They called him a “weak link” who could lead them directly to the killer and said the killer had strong reason to want Chris quickly and permanently silenced. They said Bonnie and Angela were in danger, too.
“We’re stepping up the pressure now,” one of them said. “We’re starting to push a lot harder. We’re closing in. Somebody could come after you at any time. If you don’t have any protection, you’d better get some.”
This sounded to Bonnie very much like a threat—as if they were trying to scare her into capitulating. They did not succeed—bullying was not a tactic that would ever succeed with Bonnie—but they did make her both angrier and more frightened than she’d been since the previous July.
“I know for a fact,” she told them, “that Chris didn’t do it. He had nothing at all to do with it. I have my own proof of this.”
They sneered at her. One of them said, oh, yeah, she must have arranged a private polygraph. For her poor little darling who was afraid to take a real polygraph test.
“You get what you pay for,” one of them said. “If you buy the polygraph, you can be sure you’ll get the result you want. But it isn’t worth a damned thing.”
Then they got even more personal. “You say you want the truth!” Lewis Young shouted, in a most uncharacteristic manner. “You say you want to find the guilty person! But that’s only true as long as he’s not your son!”
“That’s not true,” Bonnie said, her own voice betraying more emotion than usual. “I want the guilty person in jail no matter who it is.”
But she couldn’t help adding, somewhat desperately, “It’s not Chris. I tell you again: Chris is not involved.”
And they told her again: the first person to come forward would be the only person with whom they’d deal. This might be Chris’s last chance.
She told them again to call Mr. Osteen if they really felt they needed to talk to Chris.
They told her again that they would not deal with any lawyers. Then Lewis Young told her the meeting was over. He said he’d be in town overnight and left a number where she could reach him if Chris was willing to talk—without an attorney.
“It looks to me,” she said, her voice quavering, “that since you’re not able to find out who really did it, you’re going to try to make someone a scapegoat.”
She took the number, stuffed it into her purse, and left the office. Angela was waiting outside. Now, it seemed, they didn’t even want to talk to Angela. Just Chris. And Chris only without a lawyer.
“Just remember,” Young called after her. “There are unknown people still out there. Unknown people who might try to kill you at any time. So take this as a warning: I’m formally advising you that your life is in jeopardy.”
“I cried all the way back to the car,” Bonnie said later. “I walked a few steps and then I couldn’t see through my tears to walk. Angela thought I was going to pass out. She asked me what was wrong and I told her I’d tell her and Chris all about it when I got home.
“I was so upset myself that I don’t remember how Chris reacted when I told him. I felt so desolate, lost, run over. I felt as if I’d been raped by the very people I’d been depending on.”
One thing she didn’t feel was any doubt about Chris’s innocence. She knew that her own son could never have wanted her beaten and stabbed, could never have wanted Lieth murdered.
At nine-forty P.M. she sat down and made notes of her recollection of the meeting, so that when she spoke to Wade Smith in the morning—which was the first thing she intended to do—she would be as organized as possible. The notes themselves, however, reflected not her analytic skills but the raw emotion of what she’d just been through. She wrote:
“I feel like I have just been raped by the law enforcement that I depend on to solve the murder of Lieth. What are my legal rights in obtaining the information these guys have collected? This dangling carrot (blackmail) has gone on for far too long. . . .
“By now I know that all the delays and blackmail used to this point are exactly that—BLACKMAIL! i.e. ‘After you take polygraph we will sit down & go over info we have. Then, after Chris takes polygraph—same. Then when Chris will not yet take polygraph they are still prepared to go over info. until Bill Osteen calls and says Chris will not be at meeting.
“My thoughts at this moment: these 4 men are probably feeling pretty good right now about how they must have unsettled me. They are probably sure I will call the number to reach Lewis Young. They’re probably ‘laughing it up’ over the victim they have just emotionally raped!
“Sometime during this Stomp on Bonnie routine, I related to them that my options of a private investigation were destroyed along with all other evidence possibly remaining in my house. . . .
“Lewis accused me of not wanting the investigation to include my family. (‘You want to find the persons involved as long as it isn’t a member of your family.’) I told Lewis I wanted the GUILTY person/persons in jail, no matter who! I also told him again Chris was not involved.”
Now, Bonnie was alarmed in a way she had not been before. “They were so adamant,” she said, “so certain, that I thought maybe, somehow, without having any idea he was doing it, Chris had given someone the idea he wanted his family dead. I also worried that maybe, in a completely innocent way, he had drawn a map.
“So I said to him that night, ‘Chris, if there is anything . . . if you ever drew a map—maybe just playing Dungeons and Dragons . . . if anyone ever questioned you about the house . . . if you remember anything, now is the time to let someone know.’
“He went to his bedroom for a while and then came back and said, ‘I have given it some thought, Mom, and I just can’t think of anything.’ ”
17
Crone and Taylor returned to the NC State campus and environs, their mood dark in the wake of the futile May 2 meeting, their questions sharp.
They could now see that any further attempts to deal openly with the family—to enlist Bonnie’s aid in an effort to get Chris to talk—would be fruitless. At Bonnie’s direction, the family had drawn the wagons in a circle. This woman—this victim—whom they had been trying so hard to
help, seemed willing to let the killer of her husband go unpunished in order to save her son.
So they would just have to do it the hard way.
They interviewed Daniel Duyk again. There was nothing easygoing about Crone now. He said, “I know you were lying in at least one of the things you told us. I know Chris Pritchard was involved in at least the planning of the murder. Now what I want to know—and you’d goddamned well better tell me the truth—is who Pritchard would go to for advice. Who would he talk to about something like this? Who was he closest to? Who had the most influence over him?”
Duyk’s immediate answer was James Upchurch.
Where is Upchurch? they demanded.
Duyk started giving them addresses. Places around the campus where Upchurch had been in the past, might be now. They must have succeeded in scaring Duyk because he suddenly seemed to want to help.
“Daniel never really had a bad attitude,” Taylor said later. “But after we told him Chris was involved, he got a lot more cooperative. Like, he suddenly remembered an incident a couple of months before the murder when he was in a room with Chris and Upchurch and Vince Hamrick, and Chris was talking about how rich his parents were, and someone—he said it was either Upchurch or Hamrick—said, ‘We ought to bump off your parents and get that money.’ ”
Crone and Taylor met with security officials and received a guided tour of the network of steam tunnels that ran beneath the campus. They saw a lot of graffiti, including the spray-painted initials CWP, which Christopher Wayne Pritchard himself—back when he was still willing to talk to them—had said he’d put there.
For almost three weeks, Taylor spent most of his days and many nights in Raleigh, searching for Upchurch. Every day, he’d hear a new report of where Moog had just been seen or of where he was expected to turn up. It was the most tantalizing sort of hide-and-seek: as if Upchurch, who, presumably, could have fled the city, even the state, were teasing him. As if, to Moog, the whole search were a game—another Dungeons & Dragons scenario.
Cruel Doubt Page 19