This was all routine, Bonnie said. Almost every night, Lieth would go to sleep before her, then would stir when she came into the room. Often, he would want some iced tea to drink; often, he’d even wake up enough to turn on Johnny Carson and watch television for a while as she read. But on this night, he’d simply gone back to sleep.
Angela, she said, “was lying in bed, listening to the radio, reading.” Bonnie also said that even though the house was air-conditioned, Angela had a fan on, as had been her habit, “year-round, since she was a small child.” She liked the comforting hum, Bonnie said, and the feeling of air blowing on her face.
“After I sat in bed and tried to read for a few minutes,” Bonnie testified, “I kept hearing Angela’s radio through her bedroom door. So I got up and closed my bedroom door.”
“Could you hear anything after that?” Norton asked.
“No. Nothing.”
Bonnie said that, as “a guess,” she’d gone to sleep “around midnight.” Then: “I was awakened to hearing Lieth scream. There was a lot of confusion. Someone was standing at the foot of the bed.”
Suddenly, Mitchell Norton was right there, at what he considered the most crucial moment of Bonnie’s testimony, and perhaps the whole trial: her description of the intruder.
He established that she wore “thick” eyeglasses, that she was “very nearsighted,” that she’d taken her glasses off before going to sleep, that all the lights in the bedroom were off.
But that wasn’t enough. He still didn’t trust her. So he told her to take her glasses off, right there in the courtroom. Then he asked, standing about twenty feet from her, “Can you see me? Do you recognize me from where you are now?”
“I can tell you have brown hair, have on a gray suit, red tie, and a white shirt.”
“Other than that, can you see anything else?”
“I can tell you have eyes and a mouth, but I can’t tell what they look like.”
“How about my mustache? Can you see my mustache?”
“No.”
“Can’t see that?”
“No.”
“All right. Now you may put your glasses back on.” That should be good enough, he thought. No matter how definite she might try to be about the shape of an upper body glimpsed amid that murderous confusion in the dark, he’d already demonstrated that without her glasses the poor woman simply could not see.
“What was it that first awakened you?” he asked.
Until that moment, Bonnie had been in such total control of her emotions that a number of observers wondered if she was feeling anything at all. Now, however, she began to chew on her lip. “The sound of Lieth’s scream,” she said.
“Can you describe Lieth’s scream for us, please?”
“It was short. It sounded piercing right in my ears. Just a series of short screams, very loud to me.” She chewed harder on her lip.
But Mitchell Norton wanted more than that. “You say it was very loud. As best you can, can you duplicate for us here in the courtroom the scream that awakened you?”
She tried, but sitting there on the witness stand, in full view of judge, jury, and press, the soft-spoken Bonnie Von Stein was not able to scream loudly. It wasn’t good enough for Mitchell Norton.
“No,” he said. “I mean with the volume that Lieth used, that you heard that night.”
“I don’t know if I can or not.”
“Can you try? Is there some reason that you feel you can’t do it, Ms. Von Stein?”
Now, Bonnie had to fight harder to maintain composure. “Yes,” she said. “That’s one thing that I’ve not been able to face.”
“Can you explain that?” Norton demanded. “That you can’t—I mean, can you explain?”
Finally, Judge Watts stepped in, putting a halt to that line of questioning, allowing Bonnie to say simply that she didn’t know how many screams she’d heard, but “when I heard the screams and I was awake enough to know that something was wrong, Lieth was in a sitting position. I believe I reached my hand toward him.”
“What happened when you reached over towards Lieth?”
“I was struck with some kind of instrument. I believe, on the hand.” This blow, she said, had caused a fractured thumb. Then she said, “The person standing at the—near the end of the bed struck Lieth, hitting my hand in the process. Then I was struck in the head. Then Lieth was struck again. I don’t know where. And then I was struck again. And I don’t remember after that for a while.”
“Was Lieth still screaming?”
“Yes.”
“During the time that this individual was striking him?”
“Yes.”
Bonnie testified that she’d been struck twice on the right side and once on the left side of her forehead. She said the bedroom was dark, but a light—“it wasn’t a bright light”—shone in from the hallway.
Now Norton returned to what was, for him, the crux of the matter.
“Could you tell what type of clothing the individual was wearing?”
“No. Everything looked dark, black, everything looked black to me. It was just dark.”
“Could you discern anything at all about the facial features?”
“Nothing. He had his hand raised up over his head, had something in his hand, and was striking us with it. He looked bulky, big through this area”—here, Bonnie gestured to her shoulders and chest. “It looked like he didn’t have a neck. It looked like the head just sat right up on top of his shoulders.”
At the defense table, James Upchurch sat slender and long-necked. The short-necked and bulky Neal Henderson would not be seen by the jury until he was called to testify.
Mitchell Norton didn’t want to talk about shoulders and necks. He wanted to talk about what Bonnie had not seen. “Could you discern anything at all,” he asked, “about the nose, the mouth, anything at all?”
“No.”
“All right, now after you were struck on the hand, struck in the head, you said you didn’t remember anything. What was the next thing that you can remember? Lieth is screaming. Your thumb is broken. You are hit in the head.”
“I remember being conscious, and I was lying on the floor. There was someone standing at my feet that I assumed was the same person I had seen earlier. Again, with his hands raised and something in his hands. And I was struck again.”
“Where were you struck at that time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know where you were struck?”
“No.”
“Where were you?”
“I believe I was lying right next to the bed, on the side that I slept on, with my head near the wall.”
“Do you know how you got on the floor, Ms. Von Stein?”
“No.”
“Do you recall being struck in the chest?”
“I don’t remember that now, no, sir.”
“Did you receive some injury to your chest?”
“I was stabbed in the chest. There was internal bleeding and my lung collapsed.”
“And were you hospitalized?”
“For seven days, I believe.”
“And what about the injury to your head?”
“I had long, open wounds on my head. One on the right side, from my eyebrow up to my hairline.”
He made her get down from the witness stand and walk close to the jury and pull her bangs aside and show them—even after all the plastic surgery—the extent of the scarring that remained. And he made her put her fingers on her chest in the exact spot where she’d been stabbed.
She then testified that she’d had “some seizure-type activity,” presumably as a result of her head injury. “I would be in the shower,” she said, “or driving down the highway, and all of a sudden it was like I was standin
g on the outside watching somebody else doing something totally different. And it was explained to me as a daydream-type seizure.” No, she said, she’d never had anything like that before being attacked.
“Now,” Norton asked her, “how many times did you see—actually see, or look at, the individual there in the room that night?”
“Two times that I recall. When I first awoke and saw the person standing near the end of the bed, and then again when I regained consciousness on the floor, he was standing at my feet.”
“And what was the next thing that happened as you were lying on the floor?”
“I heard a whoosh noise and I lost consciousness.”
“How many times did you hear the whoosh noise?”
“Directly preceding every time I remember someone being struck.”
“How many times do you remember either yourself or Lieth being struck?”
“Four or five times.”
“Do you know how long you were unconscious?”
“No.”
“What was the next thing you remember?”
“I remember hearing the bedroom door close very softly. And I heard the same type of whoosh sound and some thumps outside of the bedroom behind the closed door. And the thought that came to me was, ‘Angela is being attacked now.’ ”
“What was Lieth doing? Were you aware of where Lieth was at the time?”
“No.”
“Do you recall hearing anything from him, any sounds at all coming from Lieth?”
“At that time, no.”
“At some time later did you?”
“Yes.”
“And when was that, please?”
“I lost consciousness after hearing the whoosh and the thumps outside the bedroom door, as best I recall. And the next thing I remember is becoming awake, being disoriented. I was lying on the floor. I didn’t know why I was on the floor. I thought I had had a bad dream and fallen out of the bed. I reached up to get back up on the bed, and I felt Lieth’s hand. It was very sticky. It was a very sticky feeling, and his fingers just hung down.”
“Could you hear any sound from Lieth at that time?”
“I believe I heard him breathing.”
“Were you conscious of the fact at that time that you yourself had been struck?”
“At that time, no.”
“What about the chest wound?”
“At the time when I moved my hand, when I reached to try to get up on the bed,” she said, “I couldn’t move. And there was this gushy, yucky, warm feeling that came up on my neck. And I put my hand up on my head. And I felt, like, a big hole in my head. And I realized that something was—was terribly wrong, and I needed to get to the telephone. I remember trying to move towards the telephone, and I couldn’t get up. The only thing I could do to make myself move was to push with my heels. So I got turned around in the direction where the telephone was. It was sitting on top of the metal filing cabinet next to the desk.”
Norton asked her how she managed to get to the phone.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I remember moving and trying to reach the phone. And then I remember being right next to the filing cabinet. I couldn’t reach the phone. I couldn’t sit up far enough to get to the phone. And I reached between the desk and the filing cabinet and caught hold of the cord and pulled the phone, and it fell on top of me.
“I remember becoming conscious again. I had the telephone sitting on top of me. I tried to call, get the operator. I tried to call 911. I couldn’t remember where any of the buttons on the telephone were. I kept getting a busy signal, and all kinds of weird noises.
“Finally, I just hung the phone up and thought, ‘I have to find the zero.’ So I started pushing the buttons one at a time. I would push a button and then hang the phone up until I got to the zero and got the operator.
“Could you describe your emotional state at that time?”
“The only thing I had on my mind,” Bonnie said calmly, “was, ‘I have to get somebody. I have to get help.’ I wasn’t conscious of any other emotion at that time.”
“At any time during the attack,” Norton asked, “did you ever see more than one person?”
“No.” That didn’t mean she thought there wasn’t more than one, but the truthful answer to the question he had asked her was no.
“Are you able to identify that person, Ms. Von Stein?”
She paused. Then, very softly, she gave what she knew to be the only truthful answer to the question he had asked. “No.”
* * *
Norton figured he was through the bad patch now. The rest, from his point of view, was mere detail. But to Bonnie, it involved an anguishing first public description of some of the worst moments of her life.
“I remember somebody knocking on the door,” she said. “I assumed it was the police because the lady on the phone said the police were on their way. I remember saying, ‘Come in.’ But they couldn’t hear me. They kept knocking on the door. Finally, somebody opened the door and turned on the light.
“He turned on the light and said something that sounded to me like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve never seen anything like this.’ And kind of fell back out of the room. Everything—everything was red. The whole room looked red to me.
“I remember asking about Lieth. And someone told me that there was nothing they could do to help Lieth. At one point, I asked about Angela. Then I heard her voice. And that was a beautiful sound.”
Bonnie paused. She could not go on. There just was no more she could bring herself to say. The moment was, she said later, “unbearable.”
But then it got worse. For no apparent reason—Bonnie later surmised, “He was just going out of his way to make me as miserable as possible”—Mitchell Norton handed her one of the worst and goriest of the crime-scene photos John Taylor had taken: one that showed, in full color, Lieth’s bloody, battered body on the bed.
“Who is that individual?” Norton asked.
At this point, Bonnie finally began to cry. “That was my husband, Lieth,” she said.
She held her hand to her eyes and wept softly. It was something she’d promised herself she would not do, but when a person makes as many promises to herself as Bonnie had, it sometimes is not possible to keep them all.
* * *
Even when Bonnie was able to continue, Norton didn’t let up.
“Did you believe your son could have done such a thing?” he asked.
“No.”
“Did you believe your son was innocent?”
“Yes.”
“Had you talked with your son?”
“Yes.”
“Did he indicate to you initially that he had done nothing?”
“Yes.”
“Do you now believe that your son had nothing to do with it?”
“No.”
“Have you talked with your son about what happened that night?”
“Yes.”
“Has he admitted to you that he, in company with others, did in fact plot and carry out not only your death, but the death of Lieth Von Stein?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you who was involved in the planning of this conspiracy?”
“Yes.”
“What did he tell you?”
“James Upchurch and Neal Henderson and himself, Chris Pritchard.”
“Did he tell you what the plan was? What each individual was to do?”
“Yes.”
“What did he tell you?”
“The plan was for Mr. Henderson to drive Christopher’s car to Washington, and Mr. Upchurch was to go in the house and kill us, and Chris was to stay at North Carolina State.”
“When did Chris finally admit to you the things that you’ve just told us about, Ms. Von Stein?
”
“December twenty-seventh, 1989.” There was a pause as it sunk into the jury’s collective mind that this had been less than two weeks ago.
“And from July of ’88 up until December of 1989, had he ever indicated to you, ever admitted to you, that he was involved in this?”
“No.”
“And up until that time in December, did you believe or want to believe that your son could not and would not do such a thing?”
“Yes.”
Then, after having her testify that the total estate that Angela and Chris would have inherited was approximately $2 million, and that neither she nor Lieth had sat down and explained the trust arrangement to either of them in detail, Mitchell Norton was finished with her.
* * *
It was Wayland Sermons, the younger of Upchurch’s defenders, who conducted the cross-examination. He began by asking about their family life.
Bonnie said the million dollars Lieth had inherited had caused no changes in their lifestyle.
“You mentioned a fight at the dinner table.”
“Yes.”
“And that was something prompted not by Chris, but by Lieth’s anger, is that not correct?”
“Yes.”
“Did that cause any animosity or split feelings between you and Lieth?”
“No.”
“For any short period of time?”
“No.”
“But I believe you indicated Lieth would have you discipline the children because they were yours, is that correct?”
“Not because they are mine, but because I was more diplomatic at handling them than he was.”
“Okay. And so that prevented him from becoming involved one-on-one with the children, isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
She said “occasionally” both Chris and Angela would call Lieth “asshole” to his face.
In response to further questions she also said: Chris had lied to her in the past; she didn’t know why the kitchen telephone cord had been disconnected on the night of the murder; and that Chris alone, with no help from Angela, had prepared the hamburgers the night before.
Returning to the night of the murder, Sermons said, “Now, you talked to Angela in her room and she had a fan on and a radio, and then you closed her door and went to your room. Left your door open, is that correct?”
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