June–December 1989
21
Under the best of circumstances, the billboard-cluttered drive from Winston-Salem to Little Washington is a four-and-a-half-hour exercise in tedium, relieved, on the interstate west of Raleigh, only by occasional jolts of fright caused by unpredictable, high-speed movements of tractor trailers, and aggravated, from Raleigh east, by the frequent stopping and starting required for passage through such unmemorable towns as Wilson, Farmville, and Greenville.
For Bonnie Von Stein, who left her small house before dawn on Saturday, June 17, bound for the jail in the basement of the Beaufort County Courthouse, where her son was being held on a charge of first-degree murder, the best of circumstances was a condition she doubted she’d ever encounter again.
The day before, determined to maintain her composure, she’d watched the four law-enforcement agents lead Chris away in handcuffs. They’d told her—she was sure they’d told her—that they were taking him to the magistrate’s office in Winston-Salem.
She’d taken a five-minute shower, thrown on whatever clean clothes were closest at hand, and had rushed downtown.
At the magistrate’s office, she was told Chris was not there and had not been there. She was advised to check at the sheriff’s office. There, she was told, no, they’d not seen Chris, either. In a hallway, rattled and anxious, she was approached by a well-dressed, good-looking man in his late fifties.
“Excuse me,” he said, “are you Mrs. Von Stein?”
“Yes, I am,” she said, “and I’m trying to find my son, who’s just been arrested.” She thought this might possibly be the sheriff himself.
“Well, I’m Bill Osteen,” he said, “and I’m looking for him, too.”
And Bonnie realized that, for all the time they’d spent talking on the phone, she’d never before met Bill Osteen in person.
He said he’d just arrived from Greensboro. He quickly located an SBI officer, who told him Chris had already come and gone.
For Bonnie, this news seemed almost as much of a blow as the arrest itself. It wasn’t fair, she insisted to Osteen. They had promised her they wouldn’t take him anywhere before she got to the magistrate’s office. She was sure that was what John Taylor or Lewis Young or both of them had said. This was just another example, she complained, of how they were persecuting her and her family, of how the victims were being treated like criminals.
Osteen was not a man to get sidetracked. He told Bonnie firmly that the details of the arrest were not significant. What did matter was that Chris had now been charged with a crime for which he could face the death penalty. He explained the need for hiring local counsel quickly and asked Bonnie if she had any preference among the attorneys practicing in or near Little Washington. Bonnie said her first choice would be a man named Jim Vosburgh.
The name was vaguely familiar to Osteen. There had been a young lawyer by that name who’d involved himself in a colorful fracas on behalf of the Republican Party during the presidential election of 1960. If this was the same man, at least they’d have someone who didn’t back away from a scrap.
Osteen called him. He was the same Vosburgh. He said he’d be pleased to serve as local counsel for Chris Pritchard. Bonnie could meet him at his office the next morning. First, he’d attend the press conference that Chief Crone had scheduled in order to announce the arrests.
* * *
Later, Bonnie would remember little of what she’d done or whom she’d talked to for the rest of that day and night.
She had called one friend in Little Washington, a kindergarten teacher named Linda Sloane, who also was active in the Humane Society. She hadn’t wanted Linda to learn of the arrest from television or the newspaper. She’d also wanted to assure Linda that Chris had said, “Mom, I didn’t do it,” and that she was certain he was telling the truth.
She’d also called her father to break the news. He accepted it stoically; not, of course, as if he’d been expecting it in any way, but just as one more of the terrible surprises life could throw at you, and with which you just had to cope. He told her he’d come with her to Little Washington, but Bonnie said no, that first trip to the jail was one she felt she needed to make alone.
That evening, she and Angela had sat together, each attempting to console the other by repeating what an outrage it was, and each assuring the other that it would all be fine in the end because, even if the police can arrest someone without any evidence, they can’t keep him in jail forever, and they can’t put him on trial, and they certainly couldn’t convict him of any crime.
By four A.M., with an optimism she later came to recognize as near-hysterical, Bonnie was packing clothes for herself and for Chris, hoping that somehow, magically—even though he’d been charged with first-degree murder—she’d be able to explain things once and for all to John Crone and Lewis Young, or to some judge who would now have authority in the matter, and they’d apologize for their cruelty and obtuseness and let her have her son back. If that was to happen, she wanted to be sure he’d have clean clothes to wear home.
* * *
Bonnie reached Jim Vosburgh’s office at ten-thirty Saturday morning. The Washington Daily News had already come out, its page-one headline announcing, “Von Stein Stepson Held for Murder.” Beneath the headline was a picture of Chris getting out of Lewis Young’s car the night before, wearing a baseball cap, an NC State “Wolfpack” T-shirt, shorts, sneakers, and handcuffs.
He looked sixteen years old instead of twenty, and except for the handcuffs, as if he were arriving at summer camp.
Next to his picture was one of Upchurch, wearing a Cornell University sweatshirt. There was, however, nothing else Ivy League about Moog. Staring straight into the camera with an expressionless face, the scraggly hair down almost to his shoulders, he looked more like a member of the Manson cult than he did a North Carolina college student in the post-Reagan era.
All the way from Winston-Salem, panic had mingled with indignation in Bonnie’s heart. There was, of course, her fear of the unknown: of the abyss that had suddenly opened beneath her and into which her son had plunged. But there was also resentment at the way Chris had been whisked away from Winston-Salem, and anger that John Crone had been so gloating and boastful and vain as to actually hold a press conference to trumpet news of the arrests, and extreme irritation that someone had tipped off a Washington Daily News photographer in time for him to get a picture of Chris arriving handcuffed at the jail. This was just the kind of harassment to which each of them had been subjected from the start.
And that, she said to Jim Vosburgh, almost before she sat down, was something she wanted stopped immediately. She’d be calling Wade Smith later in the day, and he, too, would advise her on what to say and do under these new circumstances, but Vosburgh, unlike Wade or Bill Osteen, was right here in Little Washington, around the clock, and he knew personally each of her adversaries in law enforcement. She wanted him to make it unmistakably clear that she would not tolerate one more iota of this sort of emotional and psychological abuse.
Vosburgh looked sympathetically across his desk at her and thought, Oh, my Lord, this woman has some hard times ahead.
* * *
Jim Vosburgh ran his one-man law practice out of a long, narrow, storefront office located next to the Mecca Poolroom on Market Street in Little Washington, just around the corner from the courthouse.
He drove to work in a 1986 Ford Ranger pickup truck equipped with CB radio and rifle rack, and conducted the sort of practice in which clients sometimes paid fees not by check but with moonshine liquor, country hams, or dogwood trees ready for planting.
Vosburgh was fifty-six years old, opinionated, voluble, and not infrequently profane. Were you to spend a couple of hours within earshot of him at the bar of the Brentwood Lounge on a Friday or Saturday night—and getting within earshot of Jim Vosburgh was not, generally speaking, hard to do—you’d come away knowi
ng exactly what he thought about almost everyone and everything in Beaufort County. Neither was he a man who had to struggle for words when asked to talk about himself.
He’d grown up in Durham, just a block away from the Duke University campus, where his father had been a professor of chemistry. An adopted child with a very smart older sister, he’d wanted to do something she couldn’t do, so for college, he went to The Citadel, the South’s premier military academy, and a school that still does not admit women.
After graduation, he’d become an Army paratrooper, meeting his wife at a debutante party while he served as an officer at Fort Bragg. After the Army, he’d gone to law school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He had come to Beaufort County, rather than a more invigorating venue, because it was the home of a legendary eastern-shore trial lawyer named John Wilkinson, who had agreed to hire Vosburgh as an associate.
With the passing of the years since he’d last parachuted from a military airplane, Vosburgh’s waistline had expanded, his face had reddened, and as a Republican in a Democratic town, his view of local judges, law enforcement personnel, opposing attorneys, and the political establishment had grown, if not exactly jaundiced, at least slightly discolored.
The fact was—even though he sang solo in the choir of the First United Methodist Church—in some quarters of Little Washington, Jim Vosburgh was viewed with about as much affection as an alligator in a bathtub. He was proud to have earned such animosity, especially from such people as Mitchell Norton, the district attorney: he considered it a mark of his good character and moral worth.
He was also pleased with the location of his office. When working late on a warm spring evening, he could pop into the Mecca for a couple of cold Budweisers and still manage to hear his office phone ring through the wall. Indeed, during his early years in Little Washington, there were months when, if Vosburgh did not actually spend more time in the Mecca than in his office, he certainly won more money shooting pool there than he earned from the practice of law.
Two doors up on the other side of the office was Jimmy’s Newsstand and Luncheonette, where a man could not only get a quick sandwich and cup of coffee, but could find out what was really going on in the town, and not necessarily by buying the paper.
In the pool hall, the courthouse, and in Jimmy’s—the three points that pretty much triangulated Jim Vosburgh’s working day—both patrons and staff spent a great deal of time discussing what was not in the paper.
Vosburgh, when he was not himself speaking, listened attentively. Thus it was that more than a full day before the warrant was issued, he knew Chris Pritchard would be arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the death of his stepfather.
Vosburgh had been a casual acquaintance of Lieth’s. Once, Lieth had come to the office to ask how an individual could incorporate as a business. On a few other occasions, the two had found themselves occupying nearby stools or tables at the Brentwood, the bar and restaurant toward which Washington’s professional classes gravitated on their nights out.
His impression had been that Lieth was “quiet and reserved,” though Vosburgh’s own ebullience would make almost any companion seem so by comparison. Still, Lieth had not been easily approachable. “If you wanted to be his friend,” Vosburgh said, “you had to work at it.” He, personally, never had; nor, it seemed, had anyone else in Little Washington. Friendship was not something that Lieth had encouraged.
His only other contact with the family arose from a minor automobile accident in which Angela had been involved. She’d been charged with a traffic violation, and Vosburgh had obtained a not-guilty verdict and had later initiated a civil action to recover damages from the driver of the other car.
The younger of his two sons had been in Chris’s high school class. The two boys had not been friends, and Jim Vosburgh remembered Chris only as “a very energetic, immature kid, always quick with some smart, facetious remark, but not necessarily insulting.”
He had a hard time reconciling the boy he recalled with the charges that were about to be lodged against him.
On the morning of the day Chris was arrested, Vosburgh was called by the district attorney’s office and notified that his turn had come in the regular rotation that required all members of the county criminal bar to serve as public defender for someone unable to pay for a private attorney.
Vosburgh was told he was being assigned to represent one James Upchurch of Caswell County, who’d just been charged with the murder of Lieth Von Stein.
A number of thoughts passed quickly through Vosburgh’s mind. Being in business for himself, and being also the sole support of his wife and children, one thought was that if he was going to become immersed in something as complex, arduous, and time-consuming as the defense of a client accused of first-degree murder, it would be a far better thing if the client, or the client’s family, could pay.
Vosburgh knew that before the day was out Chris Pritchard, too, would be charged with murder. He knew also, from courthouse, newsstand, and poolroom gossip, that Chris’s mother, whom he recalled as a bright and pleasant woman, was staunchly maintaining that her son was innocent.
Beyond that, Vosburgh knew that Chris’s mother had inherited, by Beaufort County standards, a whopping sum. And he knew that anyone arrested for the murder of Lieth Von Stein would need a Beaufort County attorney.
He did not know whether he was the first person Bonnie Von Stein would think of in that regard, but he considered it a distinct possibility. He therefore informed the district attorney’s office that, due to prior professional involvement with the Von Stein family, it would be a conflict of interest for him to serve as public defender for someone accused of murdering Lieth Von Stein.
Thus, the cup was passed to the next name on the list, while Vosburgh waited for the phone to ring.
The call came at five P.M. The voice on the other end asked, “Is this the Jim Vosburgh of Madison County fame?”
Indeed he was.
On election day of 1960, while still a law student and an active member of the state’s Young Republicans’ Club, Vosburgh had traveled to the Tennessee border, to extremely rural (and Democratic) Madison County, to monitor voting. He’d been told that two years earlier, in the Madison County community of Upper Spring Creek, which had only three hundred registered voters, more than five hundred votes had been cast, none for a Republican. Vosburgh believed that the interests of Richard Nixon would not be well served by having the same feat repeated.
Details had become a little hazy through frequent retelling, but the main point was that Vosburgh had seen some things he hadn’t cared for, and his method for trying to deal with them had led the county sheriff, a staunch Democrat, to arrest him on a charge of impersonating an FBI agent.
Eventually, the charges were dropped, but publicity surrounding the incident brought Vosburgh’s name to the attention of a number of prominent state Republicans, including a young state legislator from Greensboro named William Osteen.
Now, almost thirty years later, it was Osteen on the phone. He said he’d been representing Chris Pritchard since January, even though no charges had been filed. Vosburgh said he’d be glad to come aboard.
That night, he attended the press conference John Crone held at the Washington police station. He lumbered into the crowded lobby, which was ablaze with television lighting, and saw Crone looking positively military in a freshly pressed uniform and basking in the glow of the attention. Never before in Crone’s career had he had occasion to make so dramatic an announcement.
He stated that Christopher Wayne Pritchard, formerly of Washington and currently a resident of Winston-Salem, and James Bartlett Upchurch III, of Blanch, Caswell County, had been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Lieth Von Stein.
He said authorities had “testimony from a witness who told us exactly what happened,”
and he added that a third suspect, who was not a resident of Washington, would soon be taken into custody.
He would not say if the witness and the third suspect were the same person, but stressed that neither Bonnie Von Stein nor her daughter, Angela, were implicated.
The chief added that the first break in the case had come two months earlier and had centered around Pritchard. He said the major break had come just two days ago, but he would answer no questions regarding details of the investigation, nor would he offer any motive.
He did say, however, that Pritchard, who had spoken with investigators on several occasions, had stopped talking about six weeks earlier, at the same time he’d hired a Greensboro lawyer named William Osteen.
At this, Vosburgh, who’d been taking notes as fast as the reporters, began to ask questions.
He hasn’t tried to flee, has he? Vosburgh asked. He’s been available for eleven months and he hasn’t tried to run away, isn’t that right?
John Crone had been in Washington long enough to know Vosburgh, and he said he wouldn’t answer any of Vosburgh’s questions, no matter how loudly he asked them, because Vosburgh was a lawyer, not a reporter.
So Vosburgh decided that if Crone wouldn’t answer his question, he’d do it himself—forcefully and repeatedly and in the affirmative. Identifying himself as Pritchard’s local counsel, hired only that afternoon, Vosburgh told the assembled press that Pritchard had, in fact, been available to investigators for eleven months, had been living in Winston-Salem with his mother, and had never tried to flee, nor had he ever refused to cooperate with investigators.
Vosburgh then left the press conference, climbed into his pickup truck, and drove the few blocks from the police station to the Beaufort County jail, which was in the basement of the courthouse.
Vosburgh saw Chris Pritchard for the first time at ten P.M. and as had Bill Osteen some months earlier, formed an immediate negative impression.
Cruel Doubt Page 23