“Why did he feel compelled to lie in every instance about forming this conspiracy with Upchurch? I contend that it was because he never formed a conspiracy with Upchurch—he formed a conspiracy with Neal Henderson.”
Just look, Sermons told the jury, at the story Henderson told about Kenyatta demanding that he leave their apartment. “How did he know she would kick him out?” Sermons asked. “Was that a regular type thing? I mean, that’s just too pat. I would argue that what actually happened was—you remember Chris Pritchard’s description of LSD. You see colors. It makes you feel invincible. It gives you incredible energy.
“I contend to you that Mr. Henderson was telling the truth when he said, ‘I took LSD,’ and that he was telling Kenyatta the truth when he said, ‘I took LSD.’ And that after taking LSD, he went and did this murder.”
Then, Sermons, too, hit hard at the implausibility of Henderson’s story about moving the car. He had been parked in what was, from his point of view, a perfectly good location: at the end of a dead-end dirt road that anyone fleeing the Von Stein house could reach by passing through a vacant lot and a wooded area, running only a small risk of being seen.
“But Neal Henderson says he got scared. Didn’t know what was going on. Couldn’t stand to wait.” So he drove back out to the well-lit and well-traveled Market Street Extension, drove past Lawson Road, turned around, came back up the Market Street Extension, and then pulled down a long, narrow pathway called Airport Road that was shielded from view by both woods and high corn. And pulled in there, Sermons emphasized, “in hopes that the defendant would see him!”
That Upchurch, “in the dark of night, never having been there,” would somehow stumble across Henderson parked a hundred yards or more down the Airport Road?
That instead of fleeing out the backyard and across the vacant lot and through the woods to where Henderson was supposed to be, Moog had ambled out the front, loped down the middle of Lawson Road, hit the well-lit Market Street Extension, decided to toss his bat in the woods right there, and then run along the highway in search of his getaway car, having somehow intuited that his Dungeons & Dragons buddy would have chosen, all by himself, to switch locations?
“I think you should question that finding,” Sermons said. “You should look at that very carefully.”
He then asked the jury of three men and nine women to consider one final point: “woman’s intuition, the feeling of déjà vu.”
He said, “You all know what that is, the feeling that you’ve seen something before or been in a situation before. Mrs. Von Stein testified that the silhouette was bulky, broad-shouldered, and no-necked. Look at Neal Henderson. You saw him on the stand. He’s bulky, broad-shouldered, and no-necked.
“I contend that the evidence shows that Mrs. Von Stein’s woman’s intuition was correct that day in court when she became so frightened of Neal Henderson that she had to leave the courtroom and go to her attorney’s office. She also told you that on a separate occasion, seeing the defendant Upchurch, she had no such fright. That should weigh heavy in your mind.”
He closed by discussing reasonable doubt, defining it as “a sane, a sensible doubt, an honest substantial misgiving,” and citing a North Carolina Supreme Court ruling that said a reasonable doubt could exist if jurors “after considering, comparing, and weighing all the evidence . . . are left in such a condition that they can’t say they have an abiding faith in the defendant’s guilt.”
Had the State, he asked, presented evidence that caused the jurors to have an “abiding faith” in the guilt of James Upchurch? “Abiding,” he said, “means not only that you will feel the State has proven its case when you are back in the jury room, but that you will abide by that, that it will carry with you, that you will feel good about it . . . into this week, next week, next month, next year.
“If not,” he concluded, “then you should return a verdict of not guilty.”
* * *
After the jurors had left for their lunch, Judge Watts spoke from the bench. “All right,” he said. “I am going to say it on the record. Mr. Johnston, I was most impressed by your remarks to the jury. Mr. Sermons, I was most impressed by your remarks to the jury. I think both you gentlemen did a fine job in this case, and I think you ought to be commended for it publicly.”
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Mitchell Norton was aware that, quite apart from the quality, or lack thereof, of his evidence, his presentation of it had been less than dynamic. He knew Judge Watts thought he’d moved far too slowly. More importantly, he’d been told by such people as Keith Mason and Lewis Young that the jurors seemed less than enraptured by his style. And so, somewhat unconventionally, he began his closing argument with an apology:
“I didn’t come here the last couple of weeks to irritate you. I didn’t come here to irritate the judge. We didn’t come here to drag this case out. We came here to present the evidence. So if I have said anything, if I have done anything which would irritate you—you don’t like the slow manner in which I speak, you don’t like my bushy mustache—hold that against me personally, not against Lieth Von Stein. He can’t speak for himself. I must speak for him. That’s why I am here.”
Then Norton tackled the question of reasonable doubt: “Lawyers, when they talk about it, sometimes want to make it such a heavy burden that you feel like you want to put it in a wheelbarrow and push it around.” But really, he said, it was just a matter of common sense—“good old, plain old, everyday common sense.”
Then he said, “Let me give you an example. This is a hunting area up here, Pasquotank County—deer hunters, duck hunters. Suppose I were to go out in the field during the deer season, and I were to spy this buck deer standing out in the field. And I were to take my rifle and I would take aim and I would fire and the deer would fall over. And I would look at Mr. Sermons and Mr. Johnston and say, ‘Oh, look, what a fine buck there I have killed.’ And they would shake their heads and say, ‘Oh, no, you didn’t kill that deer. That deer died of a heart attack.’ Well, I suppose that’s possible. But is it reasonable? Does it make good common sense?”
Physical evidence, Bonnie thought. You could tell whether you shot the deer or whether the deer died of a heart attack by just walking up and looking to see whether there was a bullet hole in the deer. Just as, in this case, the mysteries might have been solved by physical evidence, if only the Washington police had not so badly bungled their handling of the crime scene.
But now Norton was trying to deal with that: “I told you when we started that there were no fingerprints that will link anybody to it. I told you there were going to be inconsistencies. I told you right from the start. I also told you that in some respects, the evidence in this case was unusual, strange. Mr. Johnston tells you that we don’t rely on common sense. That this is a case of the supernatural. He talks about Ted Bundy murders, about roosters, about Alfred Hitchcock.
“But no. The motive in this case is not strange. It’s not supernatural. It’s not Dungeons and Dragons gone crazy, although Dungeons and Dragons played a part in this case. It’s what brought them together. It’s what got them thinking about medieval times, with daggers and knives and swords, in the days before guns were invented. That’s what got it started.
“But the motive, the reason for this, is age-old. Nothing different about this case. Fast money. Chris Pritchard didn’t want to work for it, didn’t want to go to school and study. Fast money, fast cars, easy living. When? After you’ve put in the work and the effort and the time? No—now. Now. The motive in this case is greed. The motive is fast, easy money.”
Then Norton spoke about the inconsistencies: “These cases do not come tied in nice little neat packages. They come turned and twisted sometimes by time and faulty memories. People see and hear things differently. They remember things differently. Perhaps some of you, when you were children, remember a little game. It was called Gossip. We might could try it right he
re just with you right now. You know how it works. You take a series of facts and phrases and you lean over and whisper in your neighbor’s ear, and the neighbor whispers to the neighbor and tells her what he heard, and so on, and on and on down the line.
“You will be surprised, when you get back up here to Mr. Foreman, how it’s changed. It don’t say that you are lying about it, that you’re trying to cover up and not tell the truth, but it is the normal, natural, human, everyday experience of life.
“The only way, ladies and gentlemen, the only way that you can get everybody to say exactly the same thing every time is to walk in and give them a script. But we didn’t do that in this case. There hasn’t been any scripts.”
But then he began to speak from what might have been his own script. He had his own version of “Life With Lieth and Bonnie,” and the fact that Bonnie had been fighting him about it every step of the way was not going to prevent him from presenting it now, at the close of his case.
“Bonnie Von Stein,” he said, “is in a unique position. She is a wife—a widow now—a mother. She is also a victim in this case. She was married to Lieth Von Stein for approximately nine years prior to his death. Chris Pritchard was ten years old when Lieth married her, took in her family, provided for her.
“But you heard Bonnie say there were problems. There were problems about school. There were problems about the trip to South Carolina when the missing person report was filed. And who was he in South Carolina with? James ‘Moog’ Upchurch. And when he got back, Lieth and Bonnie changed the way in which Chris was allowed to handle money. He would have to account for the money.
“And she relates to you that one time they almost came to blows, and that after that Lieth began letting her discipline the children. Chris had the car stereo stolen. He didn’t want to let Lieth know about it. He was going to let Bonnie take care of it, because they didn’t want to upset him.
“His parents, his entire family, wiped out from February of 1987. The father died, his mother died, the uncle died, and they were going back and forth to Winston-Salem, getting the estate settled. He had inherited a million dollars. Now, you say, well, give me some of that stress. I would like to try that sometime.
“But think about it. Stress is a change in your life. Bonnie said he was under a great deal of stress. Chris flunking out of school, no grades at all. Caught in a world of pizza and beer and drugs and Dungeons and Dragons, with no responsibility whatsoever. A world centered around ‘me’ and self-gratification. Instant gratification. House in north Raleigh, all the drugs I want, play Dungeons and Dragons anytime I want.
“Remember what Chris said? ‘They had talked to me twice about my grades. I knew that when the third time rolled around, that I won’t be going to school, won’t get the money. I was going to have to go to work.’ But it wasn’t weighing heavy on his mind because he had already resolved how to handle it. He was going to kill him. Kill him and get the money. Yes, it’s cold. Yes, it’s heartless. Yes, it’s cruel.”
Then, abruptly, Norton shifted his focus to Bonnie. He talked about her wounds, about how serious they had been, about how she still bore the scars. “This is important,” he said, “because the defense lawyers insinuate to you that that woman right there”—and here he pointed directly at Bonnie—“had something to do with the murder of her husband, or with concealing it.”
This, Norton suggested, was the most outrageous suggestion he’d ever heard.
He didn’t tell the jurors that Bonnie still “just didn’t feel right” to him. That there remained a little part of him that kept on doubting her story. That was an opinion he would not express until well after the trial.
For now, to deal with the problem of Bonnie’s testimony that the intruder had been broad-shouldered and no-necked, Norton suggested she wanted to believe Henderson had been her attacker because of the deep resentment she bore toward him for his having gotten Chris in so much trouble.
“At the time she saw Henderson she knew he had made a statement and had implicated her son and her son’s friend.” Thus, he suggested, Bonnie needed to believe the worst about him.
Besides, he said again, in the dark, with glasses off, lying on the floor, how much could she really tell? And he referred to Bonnie’s own testimony, to the answer she had so much not wanted to give: “Yes, it could have been him.”
Besides, Norton said, “why frame James Upchurch? Why say something about James Upchurch that isn’t so? Have they presented any evidence, any intimation, any innuendo, as to why they would have selected James Upchurch to frame? Not one mite.
“Chris and Upchurch were friends. They went to the beach together. They went to South Carolina together. They played Dungeons and Dragons together. They went to Wildflour together, to eat pizza.
“Now, Neal Henderson played Dungeons and Dragons with Chris, but there is not one other indication that they had anything at all socially to do with each other.”
As he progressed with his argument, Norton seemed more like a defense attorney than a prosecutor: defending, in this instance, his own case. There were so many problems, so many holes—the inconsistencies, the lack of physical evidence, the improbable story about moving the car, Bonnie’s impression of her assailant, and not least, the puzzle posed by the chicken and rice.
“What about the food? Dr. Hudson said this was unusual, that he normally would have expected the rice to have been gone from the stomach in about two hours. He said finding the rice was consistent with an earlier death than, say, four o’clock. But he couldn’t or didn’t give you an exact time of death. Could not say. And there is not one bit of evidence that Lieth Von Stein died prior to the time Neal Henderson and Bonnie Von Stein say, except for the chicken and rice.
“But what else did Dr. Hudson say about that? That under severe emotional stress, digestion may simply stop for hours. Now, Dr. Hudson had never met Lieth Von Stein. He didn’t know anything about his personality or his emotions. All of you know that different things affect different people. Things that affect me may roll off your back. Something that may be minor to you may be devastating to me.
“The doctor said he had done four thousand autopsies and assisted in four thousand more. But how many did he do with a man that had lost his entire family within a thirteen-month period? How many of those four thousand autopsies had just inherited a million dollars? How many of them had the combination that the child was flunking out of school and he’d had to file a missing person report? How many had put in a stock quotation? How many of them, as Bonnie Von Stein said, were under a lot of stress? How many of them had had rice suppers? And how many had been stabbed eight times and bludgeoned in the head with a bat?
“Page Hudson is a very fine physician. One of the top men in his field. But how many autopsies did he perform on Lieth Von Stein? Only one. Only one. And he didn’t know anything about his personality or his emotions.
“And look at it from another standpoint, because you’ve got to face this, too. If, as they contend, the rice had to be gone in two hours, then Lieth Von Stein was dead at eleven o’clock. And if Lieth Von Stein was dead at eleven o’clock, then Bonnie Von Stein had to know about it. She had to be part of it.
“Neal Henderson and Chris Pritchard have admitted their part in this. But after an investigation of over a year and a half, there is not one bit of evidence, not one piece, not one statement anywhere, that it didn’t happen just like she said it did.
“And if he was dead at eleven o’clock—think about this—if he was dead at eleven o’clock, what in the world was Neal Henderson doing coming down here from Raleigh for five and a half hours with the body lying in the bed and him sitting around and waiting until four-thirty or so to go out and dispose of the clothes?
“Does that make any sense? And after having five and a half hours to think about it, and destroying everything else, leaves the only piece of evidence that
will connect him or anybody else to the crime: and that’s the map. The map that went directly back to Chris Pritchard. The map that he has identified as having written. If he had all that time to think about it and plan it, you know that the map would have been taken care of better than it was.
“And if Bonnie Von Stein was in it, if she planned it, does it make any sense that she would involve her own son, subject him to the death penalty, or life imprisonment plus twenty years? Why not go out and hire a hit man? It would be a whole lot cheaper than legal fees with all this going on in court.
“And what about the vanity of women? They would have you believe that she either did it to herself or allowed someone to put permanent scars in her head, leaving her very near death, seven days in the hospital with a collapsed lung.
“And then they throw out another little innuendo. They say, well, Angela slept through it all, safe and snug in her bed. But there is not one bit of evidence either that Angela knew anything about it other than being awakened from her sleep and being told by the officers to go downstairs. You’ve heard the tape from the mother herself: ‘Don’t let her come in here and see this.’
“They said, oh, well, she was calm, unemotional. That’s one way to describe it. What about shock? What about shock? Wouldn’t that apply just as well?”
The contradictions in the stories told by Chris and by Henderson could easily be explained, Norton said. Chris was confused. “And why is it that Chris is confused? Well, for a year and a half he has denied it to his lawyers, to everybody else, even his own mother right up until December of 1989.
“The only thing these boys differ on, basically, is the time in which the conspiracy came about. Chris, after a year and a half, with the drugs he was taking, the denial to his mother, tries to think back. Try to think about if you had to go to your mother or your father and tell them, ‘Yes, Mama, for money—for thirty pieces of silver—I planned your death.’
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