But then Osteen said—with no vagueness whatsoever—that the real reason he’d asked her to come by was because he had to tell her something extremely important, and he wanted to be sure she fully understood how vital it was in terms of Chris’s interests.
Osteen said that beginning immediately, and continuing until he personally told her otherwise, it was imperative that under no circumstances was she ever to ask Chris any questions about anything surrounding the events of July 25, 1988.
Before she even had a chance to wonder why this new prohibition was being put into effect, Osteen added that it would not be possible for him to explain. He would not be able to tell her any more than he’d already told her, but it was essential that she follow his instructions to the letter.
She and Chris could talk about anything else, but they were absolutely not to discuss any aspect of the circumstances surrounding the weekend of Lieth’s murder.
When she thought about this later, Bonnie said, she’d just assumed that Osteen—recognizing how unscrupulous a prosecutor could be—simply wanted to be sure no ambiguous remark she or Chris might make to one another could ever be twisted into something that sounded sinister.
“He made it very clear that this was important to Chris’s defense,” she said, “but he in no way indicated that Chris was responsible. And my thoughts, believe me, were elsewhere than on the implications. I was still in a state of shock. My main concern was just to get to Chapel Hill and be with my son.”
And so, with that meeting, there commenced a weeks-long sequence of miscommunication and semantic confusion, of vague hints and expressions of partial truths, conveyed in a language thickly encoded so as to maintain at least the appearance of ambiguity. When combined with a loving mother’s powerful and continuing desire not to hear the worst of all possible truths about her son, this led to a series of misunderstandings and flawed perceptions which would have been almost comical had the matter not been fraught with such intractable legal and ethical problems, and had it not threatened such potentially tragic consequences.
* * *
Bonnie drove on from Greensboro to Chapel Hill, an hour away. Memorial Hospital was a large, modern, confusing complex, yet the psychiatric wing was reassuring. In many ways, especially given that most of the patients seemed to be about Chris’s own age, the setting struck Bonnie as a slightly more orderly version of his dormitory at NC State.
They sat and talked in a small lounge. It was late afternoon by the time Bonnie arrived, and she wound up staying for dinner. She sat with Chris and a few other patients and did not find the conversation to be any less rational or controlled than at any other dinner she’d ever had.
What was not so reassuring was Chris himself. He seemed exceedingly nervous. He could not keep his arms or legs from quivering. He chain-smoked cigarettes, lighting one from the butt of another with trembling hands.
He was, she said, “withdrawn, distraught, and apologetic. Apologetic for having to be in the hospital, for causing me so much concern.”
The last thing Bonnie wanted was to put more pressure on him by asking too many questions—or any at all. It was obvious that, for whatever reason, he already was under more pressure than he could handle.
“I just wanted to reassure him,” she said later. “I wanted him to see that I was there and that I loved him and that I wanted him to get better and to feel better about himself.”
It turned out that although Dr. Royal had arranged Chris’s admission to Memorial, he himself was not on staff there and was not present in the hospital that night. On her first visit, in fact, Bonnie was unable to find any doctor to whom she could talk about Chris’s condition, or about what treatment he would receive.
* * *
That night, however, Dr. Royal called Osteen with a recommendation that complicated matters even further. “We’ve got to get Chris and his mother together,” he said. “Until he sits down and tells her what he did, he can’t possibly start to get better.”
Dr. Royal explained that, in his view, the cause of Chris’s suicidal impulse was guilt about his role in the original crime, and about his having lied to his mother ever since.
What it came down to was this: having broken through such a momentous barrier the day before, by admitting the truth in Osteen’s office, Chris was now perched on a suicidal precipice from which he could not even begin to retreat until he made a full confession to his mother and sister.
“I can’t let that happen,” Osteen said. “I can’t let him. I simply cannot let that happen.”
“The problem is,” Dr. Royal said, “from a psychiatric standpoint, I think we might be talking about a matter of life and death.”
“Well,” Osteen said, “this may sound melodramatic, but from a legal standpoint, I know we’re talking about a matter of life and death.”
* * *
But Billy Royal called again the next day. He said Chris would be “acutely suicidal until he gets this resolved with his mother,” then added that the best place for such a confession to take place would be in the supervised setting of the hospital.
Osteen, however, reiterated that he could not allow such a conversation. He also reminded Dr. Royal that he, Osteen, had retained the psychiatrist, and that whatever the doctor’s personal feelings might be, he did not have the freedom to do or say anything, or to cause or to allow to happen anything contrary to Osteen’s explicit instructions.
“Well, all right,” Dr. Royal replied, “but I want to be on record as having given you my professional opinion that this boy is a time bomb waiting to go off.”
* * *
Chris remained in the hospital for eight days, receiving no treatment, and Billy Royal saw no improvement in his condition. Yet hospital officials determined he was ready for release on August 23.
The night before, Billy Royal called Osteen yet again. He said Chris was still bursting with the need to tell his mother the truth, and that until he did, he would remain not only suicidal but also a danger to others—in particular to Bonnie. If he couldn’t relieve his internal pressure by telling his mother he’d tried to have her killed a year ago, there was a risk he would instead kill her now.
Osteen, not normally a man given to spasms of self-doubt, called Vosburgh again. Although the problem of what to do about Bonnie—which was another way of describing this clash between Chris’s psychological and legal best interests—had tormented both lawyers since the night of his admission to Memorial, it took on even more urgency now that he was about to be released.
They talked on, late into the night, changing their own minds, then changing each other’s, then finding themselves back where they started.
“We’ve just got to make sure she doesn’t learn too much,” Osteen said.
“Yeah, but she’s gonna be living with this guy again,” Vosburgh said. “We already know he’s suicidal. We know they didn’t do a damned thing to help him in the hospital, so he’s just as bad off as when he went in. Even if he doesn’t kill her, what do you think it will do to her if he goes home and kills himself?”
“And what do you think it will do to us,” Osteen responded, “when we have to tell her the reason he killed himself is because we wouldn’t let him talk to her?”
“But goddamnit, Bill, we’ve got a duty to him, as our client, not to disclose anything that could impair his defense.”
Finally, Osteen said, “Vos, if they covered this one in law school, I must have been absent that day.”
“Bill, if they’d covered this one, I would have transferred to divinity school the next morning.”
25
* * *
Chris was released as scheduled on August 23 and did no immediate harm to anyone. Two days later, in fact, he helped Bonnie bring Angela to the small college in southwestern Virginia where she’d enrolled for the fall semester.
To Billy Royal, who saw
him almost daily through late August, Chris seemed dejected, said he’d been drinking incessantly since his discharge from the hospital, and displayed “notable mood swings.” He said that if he did not have legal problems he could envision a future for himself in which he’d “write a successful novel, have a big house, a fast car.” He also said, “You have no idea how hard it is for me to live with my mother and have to keep lying to her.”
On August 29, Dr. Royal asked Bonnie to meet with him, thinking that getting to know the mother might give him better insight into the son.
* * *
Billy Royal had white hair, a scraggly beard, a shambling walk, and when speaking—as Bonnie had already noticed—a tendency to mutter and on occasion, to drift from what seemed the point. Once one got past this appearance of distraction, however, one found that he possessed a reassuring calmness, and that, even after thirty years in practice, he had a quick and strong sympathy for those who came, or were sent, to seek his help.
“I believe in a goodness in all people,” he once said. What he prized most highly in an individual was “a sense of humor in this crazy world. Nobody understands it.” He added that most people who were described as being evil “are usually just district attorneys.”
Dr. Royal had grown up in the tiny Sampson County village of Salemburg, in the south-central part of the state. Salemburg was so small that the streets didn’t even have names. Its center had been dominated by a mighty oak tree, in the shade of which old men sat and played checkers. On May Day, girls and young women did actually dance around a maypole, and the biggest event of the year was the Mother’s Day parade. If Norman Rockwell had stumbled upon the town, he would have thought they were putting him on.
Billy Royal’s family were merchants. They owned almost every business in the town: the general store, the hardware store, the dry goods store, and the grocery store.
He could empathize with some of the stresses Chris had faced in going from Little Washington to NC State, because when he’d left Salemburg at the age of sixteen, bound for Wake Forest University, he’d lasted only a year before dropping out to join the Navy. He wound up as a hospital corpsman, stationed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where, on the seventeenth floor, he would occasionally see President Harry Truman dropping in to visit a recuperating senator.
After the Navy, he returned to Wake Forest and earned his degree. Then, unsure of what to do with his life, he went back to Salemburg and ran the general store for four years, selling “everything from bras to pork and beans.”
Young men in Salemburg who eyed more distant horizons were generally given three aspirations from which to choose: medicine, the law, or the ministry. Billy Royal knew he didn’t want to be a lawyer or a minister, so he drifted into medicine by default.
He did his internship in San Francisco, his psychiatric residency in Chapel Hill, and then, in 1963, with a partner, opened the first private psychiatric practice in the city of Durham.
A first marriage had ended after almost twenty years, and he’d recently married again, to a much younger woman who was also a doctor. From the first marriage, he had four grown children, with whom he stayed in close and affectionate contact, and from the second, a baby daughter.
He was a great fan of the ballet and of the works of William Faulkner, saying that, in Faulkner, he liked “that Southern craziness and weird behavior.”
He was also licensed to fly a single-engine airplane and had spent thousands of hours in the air over his native state, but when traveling to New York City for a psychiatric convention, he would be more likely to take the bus than to fly commercially, even if it meant changing in Pittsburgh, “because people on buses seem to have better stories to tell.”
On the evening of August 29, Bonnie found him “a strange bird” and said, “I did not relate well to him at all. He irritated me. He gave me the feeling he was putting me under a microscope, asking all sorts of personal questions that I considered irrelevant to what was happening with Chris.
“For example, he dwelled on Steve Pritchard and our divorce. I thought he was looking at me as another potential patient for himself. He even asked me if I thought I needed a psychiatrist, which was a question I considered quite offensive. I can’t say I liked him, and that made me wonder if he was really going to be able to help Chris.”
* * *
The next day, for the first time in weeks, Bonnie saw Jean Spaulding again.
The session began with Bonnie saying she and Chris had been able to go to the beach together and that they “had a very quiet time for a week.” Only after that did she mention, with no notable inflection in her voice, that he’d been kept in jail for six weeks and that, since his release, he’d spent eight days in a psychiatric facility, due to “depression.”
“Then,” Dr. Spaulding said, “she said a boy had confessed. At this point, she didn’t use the name. Said a boy had confessed that Chris had said, ‘I hate my mom and dad. Let’s kill them and we’ll be rich.’ She did not believe that. That fell into the category of almost extraneous information. There was no way that she could believe that Chris was capable of doing that, or saying that.”
* * *
Eric Caldwell, the shy and bespectacled computer whiz who had become Chris’s closest friend, spent the Sunday night of Labor Day weekend at Chris’s house. “We stayed up talking until five o’clock in the morning,” Eric said later. “The crime was definitely on his mind. He made a lot of suggestions and I made a lot of inferences, but nothing was said directly. But he told me without telling me. By the time I fell asleep on Labor Day morning, I knew he had done it.”
On Monday night, Chris was explicit. He called Eric at home and told him all he had already admitted in Bill Osteen’s office, and all he had told Billy Royal.
He said that, as he spoke, he was sitting on his bed, holding his loaded gun in his hand.
“I’m lying to my mother,” he said. “I can’t tell her the truth. What reason do I have to go on living? Even if I don’t kill myself, I’ll get the death penalty. Why wait for them to do it to me if I can do it to myself right now and spare my mother all the extra agony? Not to mention the expense.”
Eric had talked people out of suicide before. He’d also contemplated the act himself, on one occasion, and had rejected it, later writing a poem about the experience of coming so close.
He stayed on the phone with Chris for more than two hours. “You’ve read my poem,” he said. “And when you read it, you agreed that nothing was more stupid than suicide. So how can you be thinking of it now?”
“You don’t understand,” Chris said. “It’s my goddamned lawyer. He won’t let me tell my mother the truth. And I can’t go on dealing with her if I can’t tell her. The fucking lawyer isn’t giving me any choice.”
* * *
On Tuesday, Chris had a regular seven P.M. appointment with Dr. Royal. He told his psychiatrist that over the weekend he’d confessed his guilt to his best friend. Then he said he’d also called an ex-girlfriend and had told her.
Dr. Royal asked if finally telling the truth to close friends had made him feel any better.
“No,” Chris said. “But it didn’t before, either.” Then he explained that during his eight-day stay at Memorial he had confessed his guilt to three other patients.
Well, Billy Royal said to himself, it’s like I kept telling them. The lid was bound to blow off.
After Chris left, Dr. Royal called Bill Osteen. This, he said, was where the strategy of keeping Bonnie in the dark had gotten them: Chris had confessed to at least five people already, three of whom were mental patients.
For Osteen, this might have been the worst night of them all. In August, he’d obtained an admission of guilt from his client that would severely limit his options at trial. Then, in order to preserve some hope of mounting a successful defense, he’d stuck fast to his insistence that Chris not be permitted
to tell Bonnie the truth, even when told that his position might be endangering the lives of both mother and son.
It had not been an easy time for Bill Osteen. At no point had he been sure his course was correct. So far, both suicide and homicide had been averted, but now the crazy little coot had started confessing to boyfriends, girlfriends, and total strangers from a mental institution!
Any one of those people could pick up the phone at any moment and call the SBI or the Washington police or the Beaufort County district attorney’s office and—just out of a sense of civic duty—report what Chris had told them.
Then where would they all be? Chris would be on death row, Bonnie would probably be in a mental hospital herself—if not a funeral parlor—and Osteen would spend the rest of his life blaming himself for letting the case, the client, the whole mess, spin so far out of control.
He spent a near-sleepless night and arose thinking perhaps he should withdraw from the case before any more damage was done. Let someone else step in and face the hard decisions that still lay ahead. He had given this his best effort, but maybe, for this client, for these circumstances, he was not, in fact, the right man.
He placed a call to Jim Vosburgh. “You sitting down, Vos?” he asked.
These were words that, coming from Osteen, Vosburgh had already learned to dread.
Osteen broke the news about Chris’s five confessions. “And these are only the five we know about so far,” he said. “There could be more. By the time trial comes, he could be confessing to the jurors while we’re up there arguing that the State has failed to prove its case.”
“You know, Bill,” Vosburgh said, “there are only two things wrong with that boy. He’s got a loose screw and a fat lip and both keep running all the time.”
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