The estimates of acquittal ranged from 10 to 25 percent. For avoiding the death penalty if convicted, between 30 and 50 percent. Chris had rolled enough ten-sided dice during Dungeons & Dragons games to find those estimates discomforting.
Just as Chris was starting to ask about the probable length of his sentence, Bonnie was permitted back into the conference room. She heard Osteen say that pleading guilty to accessory to second-degree murder would probably carry a sentence of fifty years to life. A guilty plea to the count of conspiracy to commit murder would add another ten. The most severe sentence that could be imposed for all crimes considered together would be one of life plus twenty years.
What does that mean in “real time”? Chris asked. Estimates varied here because the parole process was notoriously difficult to predict, but Bill Osteen finally said that Chris could expect that even the most favorable plea-bargain agreement would mean he’d be spending at least twenty years in prison.
Bonnie was mystified. What were they talking about? Why were these questions being asked? “Real time? . . . Life plus twenty?”
Osteen turned to her and said that while it was still not possible for them to share with her the details that had led them to this point, it would be necessary, within a matter of a very few days, for Chris to decide whether to accept the type of arrangement he’d just described, or to continue forward to trial, aware that the death penalty was a real possibility.
“It was a very precarious time,” Vosburgh said later, “because we had tremendous anxiety about Bonnie. That was nothing new, of course—we’d been doing emotional calisthenics over Bonnie every day since August—but now she had tremendous anxiety, too, and she couldn’t hide it any longer. It was a real dramatic time. Everybody was uncomfortable with the fact that she was the only person in the room who didn’t know what the fuck was going on. We all knew we were in the Twilight Zone.”
“Chris?” Bonnie was having a hard time getting the words out. “Why is this something you would even consider?”
“I don’t know,” he said, not looking at her. “There are a lot of things to consider.”
“I think, Chris,” said Bill Osteen, interceding—for he still did not want Bonnie to start asking direct questions of her son—“that you should go home and think about it very hard. There’s no guarantee that I can work out an arrangement no matter what you decide, but I can’t even begin to try without being told that that is what you want to do.”
“I’m gonna go with your advice,” Chris said. Then he did look at Bonnie, adding, “I can’t put my mom through a trial.”
Immediately, Bonnie objected, saying her only concern was what was best for Chris. “Mr. Osteen,” she said, “this may be the most important decision Chris will ever be forced to make. As his mother, I’d like to help him with it, but I can’t if I don’t know all the factors involved.”
But Osteen just shook his head and repeated that the situation was still so fragile, and its outcome so uncertain, that there were certain details—such as anything that had to do with the weekend of July 25, 1988—that still could not be shared with her.
Then Osteen said he did not want Chris to reach a final decision that night. Go home, sleep on it, call in the morning. Osteen said he’d be there, waiting. If the decision was to go for the plea bargain, he’d immediately begin negotiating with Mitchell Norton. If it was to go forward to trial, well, then, that’s what they’d have to do.
But no one had the slightest doubt about which option Bill Osteen preferred.
* * *
As Bonnie and Chris walked silently into the cold December night, Osteen said to Jim Vosburgh, “I think we’ve just ruined their Christmas.”
“Forget Christmas,” Vosburgh said. “What about the rest of their lives?”
* * *
On the drive home, Bonnie asked only, “Chris, is anybody pressuring you? Threatening you?”
He said no. He did not elaborate.
“I can’t understand how you could even consider something like this.”
He was silent.
“I can’t help you if I don’t know all the circumstances.”
He remained silent.
“I just want to tell you, Chris”—and here, Bonnie’s voice trembled just a bit—“that, even if I don’t understand it, I will support you in whatever you decide.”
* * *
Bonnie called Wade Smith in the morning, to describe the meeting and its aftermath. “I don’t understand,” she kept saying. “I don’t understand. Why would Chris be willing to go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? Why is a guilty plea something that Mr. Osteen would even want to consider?”
And Wade, still bound by the constraints he’d been under since the summer, could only say—and there was no way to say this very soothingly—“Bonnie, you’ve just got to trust Bill Osteen. You’ve just got to believe that whatever he does will be the right thing to do.”
* * *
Chris had an appointment with Billy Royal that morning. He said, among other things, “I told them to get my sister, too. But to make sure it was painless.”
If everyone was dead, he told Royal, none of them would ever know how very badly he’d really done at school. If they were dead, he said, then nothing he did could ever disappoint them again. And if they were dead, they could never leave him. He’d never again have to fear rejection.
That afternoon, Chris called Osteen and said he had made his decision: he wanted to go for the plea.
That night, he told Bonnie what he’d decided.
Why . . . why . . . why? she kept asking. His only answer was, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
* * *
Later in the week, Osteen called to say he’d arranged to meet with Mitchell Norton the day after Christmas in order to work out the details. He wanted Bonnie, Chris, and Angela to arrive in Washington on the evening of December 26. If all was in order, Chris could sign the agreement, and then, Osteen promised, Bonnie could ask all the questions she liked.
* * *
And then it was Christmas again, with Bonnie feeling obliged to put on a happy face.
But for whom? Lieth was gone, her father was gone, and within a few weeks—she now knew—her son would be taken from her, too. But she still felt she couldn’t ask why, not only because of Osteen’s order, but because she was worried about Chris.
“If we were to get into a discussion, and I were to ask him some pointed questions,” she said later, “suppose they caused him to end his life? Then I’d be responsible for that.”
So she smiled her way through the day. “I don’t like being around people who fall to pieces,” she said. “And I certainly wasn’t going to fall to pieces myself.”
As a Christmas present, she gave Chris a VGA graphics card for his computer, so he’d be able to play his fantasy games in color instead of black and white.
By early evening of December 26, Osteen had reached an agreement with Norton, though it would be the following morning before it would be typed and ready for signature.
The agreement stipulated that Chris would make a complete statement to the SBI as to the extent and nature of his involvement, would answer truthfully and fully all questions put to him, and would later testify truthfully at trial.
In return, the charge of first-degree murder would be withdrawn, and he would be permitted to plead guilty to the crime of aiding and abetting murder in the second degree, and to aiding and abetting an assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and inflicting serious injury—the latter charge being the attempted murder of Bonnie.
In addition, Mitchell Norton agreed that he would make no specific recommendation at Chris’s eventual sentencing hearing before Judge Watts. It was understood by both sides that the maximum possible sentence would be life imprisonment plus twenty years, which in “real time” probably me
ant at least twenty years before parole.
That was the good news Osteen was able to share with Bonnie, Chris, and Angela when they arrived in Little Washington that night. As soon as Chris signed the agreement the next morning, he said, they could all meet in Jim Vosburgh’s conference room and Chris could tell his mother and sister the truth.
29
Jim Vosburgh’s private office was like the man himself: large, comfortable, slightly untidy, and filled with material from which entertaining stories can flow. It looked, in fact, less like a lawyer’s office than a shop filled with a life’s worth of souvenirs.
The walls were covered with virtually every diploma or letter of recognition he’d ever received, including his diploma from the old Durham High School, and his “Bachelor of Harmony” degree from the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, of which he’d been a member for fifteen years.
Over the door hung two gun racks, one holding an 1864 Remington single-shot rifle with shell ejector, and the other an old BB gun, with which he would occasionally shoot a bird.
Five shelves ran the length of the back wall, crammed full of everything from photographs of his parents and autographed baseballs from Little League teams he had coached (plus one from former Brooklyn Dodger pitcher Roger Craig) to his father’s old slide rule, a pair of chopsticks brought back from Thailand by a friend, and a plaque with a hand grenade embedded in it that said, “Best Damn Lawyer in Town.” That last item being a gift from a grateful client.
Also on the walls were paintings by another grateful client—an arsonist—who’d done them in prison after a conviction that even Vosburgh’s best efforts could not prevent. Scattered among these were art projects his children had made in kindergarten years before.
The office was, in short, warm and homey, distinctly not a place where he wanted the business of this particular morning to be conducted.
Instead, when Bonnie and Chris and Angela arrived at nine-thirty A.M., he showed them to his spartan conference room, where only shelves lined with law books supplemented the utilitarian furniture.
At that early hour, the poolroom next door was quiet. So were Bonnie and her children. Chris and Mitchell Norton had signed the plea bargain. The deal was done. Now, nothing remained but for Chris to tell his story: first here, then in Norton’s office, and then at trial. After that, for many years, he would be forced to deal with the consequences of his acts.
Bill Osteen was more grim and drawn than either Bonnie, Chris, or Jim Vosburgh had ever seen him. They took seats at Vosburgh’s conference table, Chris at one end, Bonnie at the other. Angela was on one side, Vosburgh and Osteen across from her.
“Chris,” Osteen said, “the time has finally come for you to tell your mother and sister what you did.”
But now, after all these months—all that yearning to be freed from his prison of deceit and silence—Chris panicked. He froze up. He shook his head. He said softly, “I can’t.”
Bill Osteen didn’t raise his voice. He did not need to raise his voice to make a point. For months, he’d been tormented by the need to keep the truth from Bonnie, and by the pressure of making life-and-death decisions, about the correctness of which it seemed necessary to sound much more certain than he was. Now, almost as if seeking redemption for the weeks of anguish his edicts had caused, he would not permit another moment’s delay.
“Chris,” he said evenly, “I’m not going to let you leave this room until you tell your mother what really happened.”
Chris looked first at Osteen, then at Jim Vosburgh. Then he looked down at the table in front of him. He began to take deep, jerky breaths. Suddenly, he was gasping for air. Vosburgh was afraid he’d hyperventilate and pass out.
“Goddamnit, Chris!” Vosburgh said. “You tell your mother the truth!”
And with that, Chris Pritchard began talking and crying all at once, precipitating what Vosburgh would later describe as “the most gut-wrenching, emotional day I’ve ever had in the practice of law.”
This was the story he told:
It began during the first summer session, when he responded to a poster on a wall of his dormitory, saying new players were needed for a Dungeons & Dragons game. That was when he first met Upchurch and Henderson, who already knew each other well.
They played the game obsessively. They also did drugs. A lot of drugs. He’d been drinking heavily through the spring semester and early summer and had begun to smoke marijuana. When he met Upchurch, he also started on LSD. He guessed he’d taken about eighteen hits of LSD in the month or so before the murder.
He told Moog and the other Dungeons & Dragons players that his stepfather had inherited millions of dollars. He said his family had seven cars and three houses and two million dollars in cash. He wasn’t sure he’d said two million. He might have said, at various times, five million, or even ten. It was that kind of summer. That was what was happening with the drugs, with the booze, with the game. Anyone would say or do anything. Nobody paid attention to real life. Nobody stopped to think.
Moog became his mentor, his best friend. Moog was, after all, the Dungeon Master. They drove together to Ramona’s house on July 4 and did some serious partying. Moog got him deeper and deeper into acid, deeper and deeper into the game.
On the night of Wednesday, July 20, things got serious. He and Moog and Daniel and Vince were eating dinner at the Golden Corral on Western Boulevard, not far from campus. Daniel and Vince went to the salad bar. He was alone with Moog.
He asked a question out of the blue? “What do you think of patricide?” By this, he meant the murder of one’s family, although the word actually denoted the killing of one’s biological father, and Steve Pritchard was not whom he had in mind.
Moog answered, “Well, you’d better not believe in God.”
He didn’t know why he’d asked the question. But even through his drug haze, he remembered wondering how many Dungeons & Dragons experience points he might get for killing his stepfather and mother.
Later that night, he went to Moog’s dorm room, and they talked more.
“What about if my parents were dead? Real soon. What if I had somebody go kill them?”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would a fire do it?”
“Sure. A fire would do it.”
The next day, Moog asked, “How would the fire start?”
“Arson.”
“That would be suspicious. But if a fuse blew, that would be different.”
Chris asked how Moog could make a fuse blow. Simple. Pour gasoline on the fuse box and set a match to it. The fuses blow, sparking an electrical fire that burns down the house.
“We could do it,” Chris said, “but suppose they wake up?”
“Sleeping pills. What you got to do is grind up some sleeping pills in their food.”
That night, Chris asked, “How about this weekend?” He said he’d give Moog $50,000 from the inheritance money, plus any new car of his choice. Moog said he wanted a Porsche. Fine, Chris said. A Porsche. Moog told Chris to meet him at one p.m. Saturday behind the Sav-A-Center store, just off campus.
Chris drove home Friday night. He stole a back-door key from the rack in the kitchen so he and Moog could enter the house silently the next night. On Saturday, telling Bonnie he was going out to visit friends, he raced back to Raleigh to pick up Moog. They bought a box of fuses in Raleigh, intending to shatter several and sprinkle them near the fuse box, so it would look as if the fuses had exploded, starting the fire. Then the two of them drove back to Little Washington.
They came in by a back road so the car would not be noticed. At three p.m., he dropped off Moog at a small, abandoned tobacco-drying shack behind the small airstrip about a mile from the house. Moog would wait there alone until Chris picked him up after
dinner. Once they thought everyone was asleep, they would return to the house to set the fire.
Moog gave him a plastic bag filled with blue powder, which Chris said he thought was ground-up Sominex. He mixed it with the meat as he pressed the hamburger into patties. He grilled the hamburgers and they ate. Donna Brady was there and ate with them. They watched television during the meal. Lieth liked to watch television on weekends. As soon as dinner was over, Chris left, saying he had to get back to school to work on that darned term paper. Instead, he drove to the tobacco-drying shack where Moog was waiting. He and Moog tried to break the fuses, but they couldn’t. The two of them were smoking pot. Moog said this wasn’t such a good idea. Chris wasn’t sleepy, even after having eaten a hamburger. Also, Chris should be at school when the murders occurred. That way, no one would ever suspect him. So they drove back to Raleigh instead of burning down the house.
On the way back, Moog said arson wasn’t such a good idea, after all. Too complicated. Too many things could go wrong. Too easy to trace if it worked. Chris suggested staging a break-in, during which Moog could go upstairs and kill Bonnie and Lieth. That way, it would look like just a burglary that had got out of hand.
Moog liked this idea. He said a machete would be the best thing to use. He could just lop off the heads as they slept. One swat was all it would take. Nobody would feel any pain. Chris liked this. He didn’t want them to suffer.
But by the time they reached Raleigh, the Army-Navy store that sold machetes was closed for the night. Instead, they went to Wildflour for a pitcher of beer.
Moog said he’d go back the next night and do the killings. Chris should stay on campus and stay up very late, always in the presence of others, so he’d have an airtight alibi. But Moog would have to drive Chris’s Mustang because he didn’t have a car of his own. Chris said that was no good because Moog’s driver’s license had been suspended. The whole plan could fail if he was stopped for a traffic violation and he did not have a license.
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