Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  Yet, after another long and anguished conversation, they decided they couldn’t walk away.

  No matter how much they disliked Chris, no matter how much disgust they felt for his crime, no matter how dismayed they were by his current self-destructive behavior, no matter how much fear they had about what each new day might bring, neither lawyer felt comfortable with the prospect of abandoning a young man who was in such obvious, and perhaps terminal, distress.

  Nor could they just walk away from Bonnie. It was bad enough that they had kept the truth from her and were still doing so. It would be worse now to leave her all alone.

  “The bottom line,” Osteen said later, “was that, ethically, I didn’t think I could justify leaving a client worse off than he’d be if I continued to represent him. I knew I was no miracle worker and I knew I was making decisions that could prove to be terribly wrong, and that if they were wrong, they could have truly awful consequences. But at least I, and Jim Vosburgh, knew Bonnie and Chris.

  “Maybe we didn’t really know them, but at least we’d had experience dealing with them, and we were familiar—all too familiar—with the case. And this was one that could blow up in our faces at any moment, in any one of a dozen ways.

  “So how could we turn everything over to somebody brand new, who didn’t know anything? This wasn’t a situation where a new lawyer would have the luxury of a few weeks or months to get up to speed. Chris was a time bomb, and he had already started to go off.

  “If I’d walked away, and then things had blown up completely, I would have wondered for the rest of my life if staying in might have made a difference. In the end, I think Jim and I both decided that we owed Bonnie—and even Chris—the benefit of our knowledge, at least, if not our wisdom. But there wasn’t one day that passed, then or later, when both of us didn’t wish we’d taken the other path.”

  * * *

  Chris told Billy Royal he’d started confessing because he’d needed to see what would happen if people he cared about knew the truth. Would he be shunned, or would he be accepted despite his crime? As Dr. Royal saw it, these first confessions had been a rehearsal for the moment when he would finally be permitted to tell Bonnie.

  More strongly than ever, Dr. Royal felt that that moment could no longer be delayed. The situation had reached such a point of crisis, he told Osteen, that, even contrary to the lawyer’s instructions, he might feel bound by his own code of ethics and professional responsibility to ease the psychological pressures that threatened to destroy his patient by orchestrating a scenario in which Chris would admit to Bonnie what he had done.

  It is Dr. Royal’s recollection that Osteen called back at three-fifteen that afternoon, Wednesday, September 6, to say he agreed that the moment for full disclosure had arrived, legal consequences notwithstanding. He added, however, that he felt it was his responsibility to break the news to Bonnie first, and that he would do so the next morning in his office.

  Dr. Royal then arranged to see Bonnie and Chris separately the next afternoon and evening, saying he also wanted to meet with them together at eight P.M. In that joint session, he felt, with the truth finally on the table, he could assess their reactions and perhaps try to help them with the task of going forward under what would be a new and—for Bonnie, at least—appalling set of circumstances.

  He would see Bonnie first, so he could gauge her reaction to Osteen’s disclosures. He also wanted to tell her how Chris had been stricken, almost fatally, with guilt over what he’d done, and to suggest to her that full and unquestioning forgiveness—if she was capable of it—would be the greatest gift she could ever give her son.

  He would next see Chris, in order to report on Bonnie’s reaction, and to help prepare the young man for what undoubtedly would be the most acutely upsetting encounter of his life.

  * * *

  September 7 was, for all concerned, if not the worst, perhaps the most confusing, day of the year. Bonnie would later describe it as “the day the bottom dropped out of my heart.”

  It was Dr. Royal’s recollection that Osteen had said the day before that he would tell Bonnie “all that Chris had told him.”

  Osteen, however, recalled only that he’d said “the time had come to be sure that Bonnie knew, if she didn’t already, that things were not as she’d hoped.” Osteen said he had no memory of ever stating to Dr. Royal that he would be absolutely explicit.

  Indeed, he still felt that Bonnie’s knowledge of the details would have to be sufficiently inferential so as to permit her to testify at trial in a way that would be both truthful and not ruinous to Chris’s chances for acquittal. So, he would hint, he would imply, he would suggest, and Bonnie—he hoped—would draw the proper conclusion without certain blunt words being spoken.

  However he phrased them—and neither Osteen nor Bonnie took notes on this meeting—the words he did utter had great impact.

  “There were no specifics,” Bonnie said later, “but he did say he had the distinct feeling that Chris was involved. He said, ‘I can’t tell you certain things that I know.’ And he reiterated how important it was to Chris’s defense for him not to share with me privileged information. He was very apologetic about it, but he said, ‘I don’t want you to be placed in the middle here, so it’s best that you not discuss anything that had to do with that weekend.’

  “He said it put him in an awkward situation, and he realized it put me in an awkward situation, but he knew I was on my way to see Dr. Royal, and he made it very plain that Dr. Royal, too, was not to discuss with me anything about July twenty-fifth, and I was not to ask him anything.”

  However confusing the day was, and would become, there was one point of clarity: as Bonnie put it later, “This was a bad day. I felt Mr. Osteen’s assessment of the situation had changed. Until then, I had believed that he felt Chris was not involved in any way. Now I had the distinct feeling that he had changed his opinion, for reasons I could not be privy to. As much as what was actually said, I could detect a feeling, a difference in attitude, and this scared me.”

  Yet it still did not occur to Bonnie—or she could not yet accept—that any “involvement” Chris might have had could have been anything but inadvertent. She saw Osteen’s new “feeling” as reflecting nothing more than an awareness that the strategic problems posed by Chris’s defense might be greater than he had at first expected.

  So Bonnie left Osteen’s office and drove to Chapel Hill for her four P.M. appointment with Billy Royal more fearful than she had been about the upcoming trial, but with her faith in Chris’s innocence undiminished.

  As soon as she walked into Dr. Royal’s office, however, Bonnie sensed that something was not right. “The moment I sat down,” she said, “it was obvious that he wanted to tell me what was going on with Chris, what had been causing Chris to be so upset. It seemed plain that he planned to forge ahead with what I assumed was exactly what Mr. Osteen had again just given me instructions not to discuss.

  “I interrupted him right away. But when I told him that he couldn’t talk about the weekend of the murder with me, he seemed dismayed. He said he would have a difficult time treating Chris unless Chris and I could talk about the things Chris had been holding inside. ‘The situation’ was the way he described it.

  “So I said, ‘Mr. Osteen just spent the afternoon telling me there are certain things we can’t talk about.’ I think he may have gone into a private office and called Mr. Osteen right then. Just how it was expressed I don’t remember, but I got the impression that he still wanted to tell me exactly what it was that Mr. Osteen did not want him to tell me. Apparently, he thought he had explained to Mr. Osteen that this was what he was going to do. And Mr. Osteen thought he had explained to Dr. Royal that this would not be possible.

  “It reached the point where I thought it better to stop the meeting. I told him I’d come back to meet with him and Chris together as we had planned, bu
t I left his office in the middle of the appointment and went over to the Chapel Hill shopping center and got something to eat. I was terribly upset and confused. I didn’t know what was going on, or what was about to happen next. The one thing I did know was what Mr. Osteen had emphasized so strongly: that it could be dangerous for Chris if certain topics were discussed. And nothing, or no one, could have caused me to do anything that would have endangered Chris.”

  Billy Royal’s recollection and interpretation of the afternoon was rather different. His notes reflect that Bonnie had begun the meeting by saying that she’d had a great deal of experience with computers and thus had learned to put different types of data in different compartments and not get things mixed up. Dr. Royal recalls thinking, as he heard this, she’s been told, and this is how she’s dealing with it. She’s putting it aside for now, so she can keep functioning and trying to help Chris.

  He did not recall Bonnie terminating the session prematurely, nor his making any call to Osteen, nor any sense of being dismayed by anything Bonnie told him.

  His sense was that Bonnie was not comfortable talking about what she’d just learned about Chris before she’d had a chance to talk to Chris directly, and that she didn’t want, or need, any sort of planning session to prepare for the joint meeting that night.

  She had received the information, she was processing it, and by eight P.M. she’d be prepared to deal with Chris, knowing now the worst about him. Under the circumstances, her calmness and her obviously undiminished concern for Chris’s well-being struck Dr. Royal as quite remarkable.

  What he didn’t realize was that Bonnie didn’t know the worst, or anything approaching it.

  * * *

  When Chris arrived at seven P.M., his first question was, “How can I look at my mom?” It would be impossible, he said, for him even to look her in the eye, knowing that she now knew he had plotted the murder of her husband, had tried to have her killed, too, and had been lying about it to her ever since.

  But then, it seemed, he wanted to talk about everything but telling Bonnie. He said he liked to sit in the woods and play with cats. He said he wanted to have a wife and child. He asked, “What’s the point of being alive if I have to be in jail until I’m seventy?” He said Osteen had “jumped my shit” for his having told others about his involvement. He was extremely emotional and tearful, switching subjects even more rapidly, and with less apparent logical connection, than usual.

  At one point, he plunged into tearful hysteria, and Dr. Royal said he was prescribing a drug called Serentil, which should help to reduce his anxiety and minimize his symptoms of depression.

  “I’m a planner,” Chris was saying, talking faster than Dr. Royal had ever heard him talk before. “I plan ahead. I really could be somebody if only I didn’t have all these problems.” He said he was “very intense” about music, driving, eating, and learning things, that he’d read twenty-nine books while in jail and that he was currently reading a book about the brain.

  “He was a weird guy,” Billy Royal said later. “He had a lot of feeling about some things; about others, he was totally devoid.”

  * * *

  Bonnie returned at eight P.M. Chris seemed terrified. Now, for the first time, his mother would be confronting him, fully aware of the murderous desires he had harbored in his heart, and of the responsibility he bore for the ghastly deeds that had flowed from them.

  And knowing, too, that so callously and for so long he had lied to her and had permitted her to trust and to love him when he so clearly had not been deserving of either.

  As she entered the office, Chris curled into a fetal position in his chair, hiding his face in his hands, too frightened to look at her. His shoulders heaved with convulsive sobs.

  “He was,” Dr. Royal said, “regressive and infantile. My impression was that she knew, and she was facing him now for the first time since she knew. This was the point Chris had been trying to get to, but at the same time had been dreading all along. He avoided any visual contact with her. He was like an infant who expected the all-powerful mother to do away with him. He had no defense.”

  Billy Royal felt that this was perhaps as pivotal a moment as would ever occur in the psychological lives of either Bonnie or Chris, and that his proper role was to remain in the background and let the scene play itself out.

  Bonnie took two steps into the office, looked at her son, then stood still, shocked into silence. She’d not been prepared for this. The sight of Chris in such a condition scared her, as much as her presence in the room frightened him.

  “I knew he was in pain,” she said later, “a lot of pain. But I didn’t know what was going on. I’d never seen him like that before or since.”

  Then, as Billy Royal watched silently, she slowly approached him.

  As she drew near, he forced himself to look up at her, and with tears flowing freely down his cheeks, he said, “Mother, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” And then again he sank his face back into the sanctuary of his arms.

  At that point, Bonnie said later, “I put my arms around this whole little ball he was curled up in, and I said, ‘Chris, I don’t know what you’re going through, but I’m here and I love you and I want you to know that.’ ”

  To Billy Royal, this was a magnificent act of forgiveness on Bonnie’s part—one that might well, he thought, save the life of her son.

  To Chris, it was the absolution for which he’d been yearning, but which his legal jeopardy had prevented him from seeking openly. Now, having been granted his own mother’s pardon, there was nothing he’d be unable to face.

  But to Bonnie herself, her consoling words and actions were no more than a mother’s instinctive reaction to seeing her child in pain. When he told her he was sorry, she had no idea what, specifically, he was sorry for.

  “There could have been lots of reasons why Chris was in that state,” she said later. “And lots for him to be sorry about. His suicidal tendencies, the fact that he’d had to be hospitalized, which he knew was upsetting to me, and maybe even, as Mr. Osteen had suggested that afternoon, the possibility that once, long ago, through some terrible mistake or misunderstanding, he had done something accidental that might have contributed to a situation where the awful events of July twenty-fifth had taken place. And so, I comforted him as best I could, but it was without any idea of why he needed comforting so badly.”

  Gradually, as Bonnie continued to reassure Chris of her love for him, and of her enduring support, he grew calmer. And then, just as she felt he might be about to say more than she was permitted to hear, under the strictures imposed by Bill Osteen, she told him she’d met with Osteen earlier that afternoon, and he had again stressed how vital it was that she and Chris not discuss any specifics of the weekend of the murder. She quickly added that anything Chris might have said to Dr. Royal in that regard must be held in confidence between the two of them. Under no circumstances should either of them tell her anything that Mr. Osteen did not want her to know.

  To Billy Royal, this was a stunning display of the compartmentalization to which Bonnie had referred that afternoon. Here she was, only hours after having been informed of how her only son had tried to have her murdered, yet she not only was able to forgive him, but retained enough presence of mind to remind him, even at such an emotionally overheated moment, that his lawyer had instructed her that they should not discuss the details.

  That Bonnie was brave and strong enough to postpone such a discussion until such time as it would no longer pose a danger to Chris at trial so impressed Dr. Royal that he even commented on it to his wife that night.

  “Just remarkable,” he said, “the way she was able to forgive him, having just been told what she’d been told.” In Billy Royal’s mind, “there was no doubt about it. Whatever words Osteen had used, it was clear to me that the information had been conveyed.”

  Bonnie, however, said
later that she had in fact been told nothing substantive. She knew only that the attorney in whose judgment she had unquestioning faith was now troubled in a way he’d not been before. But nothing anyone had said had shaken her faith in Chris’s innocence. Only facts could do that, and she still hadn’t been presented with any facts.

  “It got pretty scary,” Dr. Royal said later. “The craziness of all of us in this exercise. Nobody could talk to anybody. Nobody could talk about the real issue. It was like a chess game where you weren’t allowed to see your opponent’s moves. Or the shell game, where the shells are always moving, and you can never guess which one the pea is under.

  “I would say, ‘This is crazy!’ but at the same time there was a prohibition against doing anything differently. Maybe what was hard for all of us to grasp was that you have to noncommunicate at times, or risk destroying the system, even though everybody knows what’s being noncommunicated.”

  * * *

  Eric Caldwell and John Hubard came by the house on Saturday night, September 9. For five days, Eric had been living in silent terror, aware that he knew a secret that could end the life of his best friend, but one that he also felt driven to share with Bonnie, who had become like a second mother to him.

  He’d not had a decent night’s sleep since Chris had made his confession. He was burdened by guilt and also by fear. He asked himself continually, “What the hell do I do if they find me?” Every day, he expected a call from the SBI or the Washington police, or the Beaufort County district attorney’s office. After all, wasn’t it logical that, in preparing for trial, they would seek to question Chris’s friends? From both Chris and Vince Hamrick, Eric knew how much of an effort they’d made on the NC State campus prior to the arrests, and he feared it would be only a matter of time before the same detectives, or new ones, came to Winston-Salem to interrogate Chris’s friends there.

  But should he even wait for the police to come to him? Didn’t he have some obligation, as a citizen, to contact them? Bill Osteen and Billy Royal could quite justifiably say that their privileged professional relationships with Chris prevented them from sharing the truth with anyone else, but for Eric it was only friendship, and a sense of loyalty, that caused him to stay silent. And the silence caused him severe discomfort.