Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  Wade told Bonnie to stay right where she was, on the floor. Then he brought Mitchell Norton into his office and duplicated his little demonstration.

  Then Bonnie was permitted to get up and to put on her glasses. Wade took off his overcoat with the air of a skilled surgeon who’d just completed a particularly complex and dangerous operation. He opened his draperies. Once again his office was flooded with light.

  He asked Bonnie to step outside while he spoke for just a few more minutes with Mitchell Norton. He wanted to stress to the prosecutor—though he did not say this to Bonnie at the time—the importance of wording the question in such a limited and precise way as to allow her to feel that she was being truthful in giving him the answer he needed. Don’t push it too far, he cautioned. Honesty is first on the list of Bonnie’s virtues. The truth has hurt her dearly in this matter, but it’s all she has left to cling to. If you’re very careful, he said, and do it just right, you can have her say it’s possible. But she’s so ready not to, he added, that it wouldn’t take but one extra question to have the whole house of cards come tumbling down.

  * * *

  In the waiting room, Bonnie resumed her writing.

  “11:55—Still sitting in lobby. Beginning to look like the whole purpose of this meeting is to establish/coerce my testimony to make certain that I do not say figure could not possibly have fit size and stature of Upchurch. . . .

  “12:05—Still sitting in lobby. My feelings are that there is probably a conspiracy going on here to bend my testimony to fit the prosecution’s case. (In speaking to Mr. Smith, I mentioned that I felt the physical evidence the prosecution has should directly place Upchurch in my home on the nite of the 25th. Mr. Smith said he feels there is no physical evidence to that effect. That’s what I am afraid of.)

  “12:10—Still in lobby. I trust Mr. Smith’s judgment, but feel the evidence alone should prove/disprove the outcome of this trial. Let me get this in the record: NO ONE WANTS THE GUILTY PARTY/PARTIES PUNISHED MORE THAN ME! I CONTINUE TO LOVE LIETH. THE PASSING MONTHS AND YEARS HAVE NOT DIMINISHED THE LOSS I FEEL IN ANY RESPECT.”

  * * *

  From twelve-twenty until almost three P.M., in a windowless conference room, Bonnie met with Norton and Young and Taylor to discuss her testimony. From the start, the atmosphere was strained.

  “They went over the questions they might be covering when I testified,” Bonnie said later. “They wanted to see what kind of answers I would give. We ended up arguing. I would give a full response, but Mr. Norton would want a long, complicated, suggestive question to produce a yes or no answer.

  “I said, ‘Mr. Norton, if you were to ask me a short, simple question, I could give you a short, simple answer.’ But he put his questions in such a form as to tell you what to say. All you had to do was concur, but often what he said was not right. He had hypotheticals that were so long that by the time he got to the end, you forgot what the beginning was. His goal was to create a sense of constant conflict between Lieth and Chris. To make it seem that there was no goodwill. He wanted to create in the jury’s mind what he considered a real motive: conflict and greed, not just drugs. And that just wasn’t right.”

  Norton’s recollection was that Bonnie grew hostile every time he suggested the existence of any conflict between Chris and Lieth. “She just denied it,” he said. “She just kept saying, ‘It wasn’t that bad.’ I sensed a real problem with her, because she’d been on the other side all the way along and just couldn’t accept now that we’d been right.”

  At times, both Young and Taylor would step outside the conference room, leaving Bonnie alone with Mitchell Norton. As soon as they did, it seemed to her that the district attorney, who had never been exactly cordial, grew more antagonistic.

  “When I did not answer the questions the way he wanted,” Bonnie wrote later in her notes, “he began to say things like, ‘You appear to be defending your son. This can only make things harder for Chris at the sentencing. The jury will look at you and think, now, who benefited the most from Lieth’s death?’ ”

  Bonnie found it harder than usual to maintain her self-control. Who benefited the most? How about, who has suffered the most? This was beginning to remind her of that bad night back in May in Winston-Salem, with Lewis Young shouting at her. But why was Mitchell Norton treating her this way now, when they were no longer on opposite sides?

  Then Norton said, “There are a lot of people in Washington who still think you and Angela are involved.”

  “I couldn’t care less what they think.”

  “But a case could be made,” Norton persisted. “There are circumstances.”

  “Mr. Norton,” she said, “your problem from the very beginning has been that all you’ve had have been circumstances. You’ve just never had any facts.”

  “You sound like a mother instead of a victim.”

  “Unfortunately, I am both.”

  Bonnie deeply resented Norton’s attitude. She had no present, could envision very little future for herself, and now this man was trying to take away her past.

  32

  On Monday morning, January 8, Mitchell Norton, from whom words came as slowly as unrefined molasses poured from a jug, stood before the jury and delivered his opening remarks.

  He said there would be inconsistencies in what the jury would hear. “Inconsistencies insofar as time, place, insofar as when occurrences occurred, and maybe sometimes what actually occurred.” But he said not to worry. “That is the normal, the natural state of affairs, not only in trials of criminal cases, but also in our everyday lives. People do not see things the same way, do not hear things the same way, do not remember exactly in the same way.” He added that in this case, inconsistencies might have arisen because the first arrest was not made until almost a year after the murder had been committed. He urged the jurors not to focus on the inconsistencies, but to look at the broad picture instead.

  “There’s going to be evidence of drug usage—acid, marijuana, cocaine. There’s going to be elements of repression in this case, people that wanted desperately to forget what had happened.” But, he said, the evidence would show “a cold, calculated, brutal killing.” He said, “It’s going to be unusual in some respects, bizarre in some respects, but when you boil it right down to what it’s all about, it’s a much more basic motive, a much more basic cause: one of greed. Fast, easy money is what this case is all about.”

  Norton then launched into his vision of life in the Von Stein–Pritchard household at the time of the murder. “Lieth Von Stein was under a lot of stress. Because of the stress, because of the deaths [of his parents], sometimes Lieth was on edge. The son, Chris, had gone to North Carolina State University. Lieth Von Stein was paying the bills. The grades weren’t good. Chris was spending money. Problems erupted. At times, the relationship was on edge.”

  There it was: the unhappy home life that would allow a conclusion of premeditation; that would render ineffective any argument that this whole tragedy was the almost accidental result of some kids playing a fantasy game that spun out of control.

  Norton then described the murder: Lieth “screaming at the top of his voice,” Bonnie’s description of the intruder as “a shadowy figure, a person who appeared very methodical, strange, broad-shouldered.”

  The prosecutor described how Bonnie, “wanting desperately to believe that it was not true [that Chris had planned the murder], supported the son, believed him to be innocent, until two weeks ago.” But, he said, “Chris Pritchard himself will talk to you about his use of drugs, the use of alcohol, the fact that he was a student living in a ‘me’ world, a world surrounded by pizza and beer and alcohol and drugs and a game called Dungeons and Dragons.

  “Now,” Norton said, “the game has an influence in the case, but it is not a case of a Dungeons and Dragons game gone crazy. It’s not a case of Dungeons and Dragons out of control. But Dungeons and
Dragons influenced the way that he and Neal Henderson and James Upchurch thought and lived. The game was more of a routine for them than going to class. It’s what brought them together: this game that’s based on a medieval setting, with clubs and daggers and knives and sticks, in a time before guns were invented. And their minds were accustomed to thinking and living in this world of ‘me.’ ‘What am I going to do?’ Fast, easy money.”

  He said Chris, hoping to “accelerate his inheritance,” had “provided the car . . . provided the key so that James Upchurch could come into the house and kill his mother and stepfather.”

  And, Norton said, it had been Upchurch and Upchurch alone. All poor Neal Henderson had done was drive a car, not really knowing what would happen. Norton said Henderson was “so intelligent that when he was in kindergarten, they put him in second grade. When he got to the fifth grade, they put him in the eighth. The other boys were bigger than he was. They made fun of him because he was smarter than they were. He craved acceptance. Looked for friends, turned to music and fantasy and Dungeons and Dragons.”

  And so, craving friends, Henderson had agreed to drive the car and “to wait while James Upchurch went into the house and killed Lieth Von Stein.”

  * * *

  When Jim Vosburgh had explained that he would not be able to represent Upchurch as a public defender, the next name up had been that of Wayland Sermons, a tall, dark-haired, handsome, well-dressed, soft-spoken thirty-four-year-old graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the law school at Wake Forest.

  Vosburgh liked to say that he’d known Sermons “since he was a snotty-nosed little kid.” A quarter century before, in fact, the day Vosburgh and his wife moved to their home on Honey Pod Road in Little Washington, it was nine-year-old Wayland Sermons who’d come up to their back dock in his small boat and had, in the most neighborly way, taken the new residents on a tour of “his” river. Vosburgh felt he’d entered the pages of Huckleberry Finn.

  Now Sermons, whose father had served in the state legislature for fifteen years, had the responsibility for a man’s life in his hands for the first time in his career. Serving with him as cocounsel was Frank Johnston, an accomplished Washington trial lawyer ten years older than himself.

  Though the jury in Elizabeth City would never know it, Little Washington was such a small town that almost everyone involved in this case seemed to have some odd connection to someone else. For Vosburgh, it had been watching Wayland Sermons grow up. For Frank Johnston, it had been having a daughter who’d been in Chris Pritchard’s class at Washington High School. They’d never dated, but Chris had been in his home.

  Johnston was five eight, on the stocky side, with black hair that was showing its first flecks of gray. He wore wireframed glasses, had a soft Southern accent, and was blessed with a resonant voice, which provided a contrast to Sermons’s smoother, lighter tone. His courtroom style was a distinctive combination of the laid-back (a trait he shared with Sermons) and the no-nonsense. Neither overly folksy nor excessively dramatic, he was noted for his skill at jury argument, and it was he, not Sermons, who made the opening statement on Upchurch’s behalf.

  Not surprisingly, Johnston suggested that the jury disregard Norton’s suggestion and instead look very closely at each and every inconsistency. “Look at it,” he said, “examine it, turn it over, twist it around, pull it apart.” He said—and with this Bonnie had to agree—that the State “does not have any evidence, any real evidence. They just have a lot of circumstances.”

  He asked the jurors the same questions about Neal Henderson that Bonnie had been asking herself. “Why is it that it took him eleven months to have this great conscience breakdown and to decide to spill the beans? We submit to you there’s a reason for that. We submit to you that he had ample opportunity to develop, to analyze, and to determine what testimony he had to give, and what story he had to give, to put himself in the best position possible.”

  Johnston said he was confident that by the end of the trial the jurors would find that reasonable doubt existed as to Upchurch’s guilt.

  33

  Bonnie was called to the stand that afternoon. She wore a plain, black linen dress with a big white collar. Though she realized it only much later, she’d bought this dress to wear to the funeral of Lieth’s father. She’d only worn it four other times: to the funerals of Lieth’s mother, Lieth’s uncle, Lieth himself, and less than six weeks earlier, her own father.

  “It was not a conscious decision,” she said later, “but it must have suggested something about the way I viewed the task of testifying.”

  Wearing that dress and her thick, rimless glasses, walking slowly and speaking softly, she looked every bit the part of a victim still in the early stages of a recovery that might never be complete. A local paper described her the next day as “a small, dark-haired woman, whose thin, haunted face is framed by strands of gray.”

  As she gave a brief chronological history of her married life with Lieth—little more than names, places, and dates—Judge Watts had to remind her several times to speak loudly enough so the jurors could hear her. Between the faintness of her voice, and the slow and convoluted manner in which Mitchell Norton was asking his questions—“After Lieth’s father died, Ms. Von Stein, was there anything going on in Lieth’s life at that time?”—these early moments were awkward.

  It was established that by July of 1987, Lieth had inherited more than $1 million from his parents.

  Bonnie—determined not to participate in the painting of what she considered a distorted portrait of her family—said that prior to the death of Lieth’s parents, he and Chris “got along as good as any loving father and son could get along,” and that Lieth and Angela “were good buddies.”

  After the deaths, Norton asked, was there a change?

  “There wasn’t any change in the overall relationship.”

  “But were there problems on a specific basis?” Norton persisted.

  “There were specific instances.”

  Then Norton had her admit that Chris’s academic performance at NC State had been “mediocre” in the first semester and that in the second semester “I believe he did not do as well as he had in the first.”

  “So if he had a mediocre first semester, the second semester was worse?

  “I believe so,” Bonnie said. She knew, of course, that it had been; that it had, in fact, been a disaster. But she was determined to make Mitchell Norton work for every inch of this distasteful ground.

  She was, however, forced to admit that “a fight almost erupted” between Lieth and Chris during an argument about his grades “sometime during the early summer session of 1988.” She said the incident had occurred in the kitchen.

  “We were having dinner,” she said, “Lieth, Chris, Angela, and myself. I don’t remember the specifics of what was being discussed. But Lieth stood up from the dinner table and tried to engage Chris in a fistfight. Chris would not participate in that.” She added that afterward she had told Lieth “that Chris had acted in a more adult manner than he had.”

  But then she added that “Lieth decided at that point that it would be best if I would render discipline to the children instead of him,” and she conceded that “occasionally” Chris and Angela would refer to Lieth as an “asshole.”

  “Was that because he was sometimes?” Norton asked, but an objection to the question was sustained before Bonnie could answer.

  * * *

  As she resumed her testimony the next morning, Bonnie described how, after she’d noticed Chris’s sound system missing from his car, she decided that he ought not to mention it to Lieth, and that she would tell Lieth about it later “because Lieth had been under a lot of strain . . . over the loss of both parents and his favorite uncle.”

  To Mitchell Norton, and to a number of others, this seemed among the least plausible elements of the story Bonnie had told
from the start. It had been more than a year since Lieth’s parents had died. It seemed simply not credible that those deaths could have been the source of the severe and relentless strain that Bonnie said had brought about such changes in Lieth’s personality. If, indeed, there was such strain, its roots must have lain elsewhere. But as to its source, Bonnie provided no clues.

  She said Chris had left the house on Saturday “to go and visit some friends” and had then prepared the hamburgers for their dinner Saturday night. She said Angela, too, had been out during the day Saturday, with Donna Brady.

  As she spoke, it almost seemed as if—this one last time—she would be able to convince herself that nothing more sinister had been evolving.

  On Sunday, Bonnie said, she and Lieth had gone to Greenville for breakfast and then “spent all afternoon working on the computer and with the Wall Street Journal,” after which they had “shared some private moments in our bedroom.”

  Then she went through her story of Sunday night: the drive to Greenville for dinner, finding The King and Queen closed, eating instead at Sweet Caroline’s, where Lieth had ordered the chicken special with rice.

  The dinner had lasted from seven-thirty or seven forty-five to “around nine o’clock,” when they’d driven home so Bonnie could watch the Ted Bundy miniseries. Lieth “went straight to bed,” which, she said, was customary.

  Angela had come home at ten-thirty P.M., an hour before her curfew, which was not customary. She’d gone directly to her room and had gotten in bed.

  Bonnie watched the end of the miniseries, then the start of the eleven o’clock news. “Then,” she said, “I went to the kitchen, went upstairs, woke Lieth up, asked him if he would like a glass of iced tea. He said no and went back to sleep. I got into bed, and I sat there and read.”