“I think it’s also strange for us to talk about how that game could affect and influence a young person, since none of us have ever played it. We don’t know the full ramifications it may have upon someone. Along with the influence of alcohol and drugs. There’s just no other explanation for it.”
* * *
And then Johnston closed with his own appeal based on religion. “I was thinking yesterday, when I was sitting in church, about the mask Mr. Norton—the map Mr. Norton presented to you in his final argument. He put it up to his face to imply a mask, or some type of a cult symbol, and suggested to you that it was for some supernatural or divine reason that the map was not burnt up in the fire. And that the only way this investigation continued was because they were able to find the map and link Pritchard to it, because of the word Lawson.
“And as I thought of that during the minister’s sermon yesterday on mercy, I could only think that I hope that God’s mercy will be with you in your decision.”
* * *
As the jury left the courtroom to deliberate whether James Upchurch should live or die, Judge Watts began the sentencing hearings for the two accused who had pleaded guilty.
Henderson’s was first. As with Upchurch, witnesses testified in his behalf. The first was the same high school teacher from Caswell County who’d testified for Upchurch. He said Henderson’s IQ scores were “the highest of any student we’ve ever had in the twenty years that I’ve been there.”
He said, “Even in fifth and sixth grade, he so far outstripped his teachers that he basically would be sent to the library every day—the public library down the street, where he would simply read a great deal and play.”
On his Scholastic Aptitude Test, taken while a senior in high school, Henderson scored 1500, the highest score ever recorded in Caswell County. “He did not always work as hard as he could have,” the teacher said, “but he was certainly the most gifted student I’ve ever dealt with.”
Socially, however, the teacher said, Henderson was looked upon as “an oddity. Socially and emotionally he was always out of place. He often was laughed at.” Even outside of school hours, he lived an isolated life. To get to his house, where he lived with his mother and grandmother and sister—the father having left long before and moved out of state—“you had to drive down a tiny little dirt road, through trees, off the highway a good bit.”
The teacher also said that Henderson was “intimidated” by physical violence. “I’ve never known him to get into any kind of physical confrontation, even in play.”
Then John Taylor testified that from the moment Henderson had first come forward, he’d cooperated fully with investigators and had been helpful. “He wasn’t sure of a lot of things,” Taylor said, “but he did the best he could. He cleared things up for us on the course of events.”
Judge Watts asked Taylor why he thought Henderson had decided to talk.
“He never came right out and stated he had done this for such and such a reason,” Taylor said, “but I got the impression it was a conscience-clearing effort on his part. Because there was no other reason for him to be doing it.”
Bonnie, however, could think of an obvious one: to get the best deal for himself, at the expense of the others who’d played the game. You would not have had to score 1500 on your SATs in order to figure out that.
Lewis Young then testified that Henderson had been “totally cooperative” throughout the investigation. “Anything we’ve asked him to do, he has done.”
To Young, Judge Watts said, “I’ve known you, what, fifteen, twenty years now? I don’t mind saying that I have the highest regard for your instincts as an officer and as an investigator. But it struck me in reviewing your notes of your conversations with Mr. Henderson that, in many instances, he was at least vague. Did you get that sense—that there were just some areas he was extremely vague on?”
“Yes, sir,” Lewis Young said. “I found him to be very vague in areas concerning certain details that night. One was what happened to the bat. Another was the car. I immediately recognized I was talking to someone of superior intelligence, but I felt like maybe the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday, did not seem to register with him.”
“It was not your impression,” the judge asked, “that he was at all deceiving, or being intentionally vague?”
“No, sir. I think he was trying to be helpful. I didn’t think he was trying to throw us a curve, if you will.”
And that seemed to satisfy Judge Watts, who again noted the “tremendous respect” he had for Lewis Young’s integrity and ability.
Then the judge revoked Henderson’s bond and ordered him taken into custody, pending a decision on sentencing, which would not be made until after the jury had returned with its verdict on Upchurch’s punishment.
“If ever he was going to try to flee,” the judge said, “this would be the time to do it, because it’s all been prologue until now. We are near the final curtain of this drama, tragic tale that it is.”
* * *
The next day, Tuesday, January 30, as the jury continued its deliberation of Upchurch’s fate, Chris’s sentencing hearing began. Billy Royal was the first witness called, and it was Bill Osteen, speaking for the first time in the Elizabeth City courtroom, who put the questions to him.
One thing he wanted to get into the record was at least a bare outline of the miasma of doubt and confusion through which lawyer and psychiatrist had groped between mid-August and the end of December.
“Dr. Royal,” he asked, “as part of the work you were doing with Chris, did you note a concern on his part as to how his mother was going to accept this situation, or what her reaction would be?”
“That was probably the foremost concern.”
“Now, at that time, I told you that Chris could not discuss what actually had happened with his mother, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Were you having some problem dealing with the mother and the son on the basis of that catch-22 situation?”
“Absolutely.”
“Describe what kind of dilemma that created for you.”
“My initial response,” Dr. Royal said, speaking so softly that the judge had to ask him to raise his voice, “was that the suicide and depression could not be resolved without resolution of the issue between him and his mother. A resolution that allowed him to tell her what he had done, which was something he wanted to do. And I thought that should occur during his hospitalization, so that the issue could be dealt with in a therapeutic setting.”
“And you even explained to his lawyers that you thought that ought to be done at that time?”
“That’s correct.”
For Osteen, but even more for Billy Royal, this was the strangest sensation: to have all those desperate, searching, frantic phone calls reduced to this formalistic question-and-answer exchange.
“And what response did you get from his lawyers?”
“His lawyers did not feel that should be done if there was any way to cut around it.”
“Did his lawyer explain to you why?”
“Yes,” Royal replied.
“Why was that?”
“Because if he had told his mother and it came to trial, she would have to relate that. And as I understood the contract you had with his mother, she had told you to do what you could to protect Chris. And in that sense, as I saw it, you were in a difficult situation about how to do that. But that seemed to be the direction that you had received from her. And in my discussions with her from time to time about her relationship with you, that seemed to be what she was stating.”
This exchange would not produce testimony that could lessen Chris’s sentence. It almost seemed as if lawyer and doctor were engaging in mutual catharsis. To establish that, however uncertain each may have been about the likely outcome of the chosen course, he was doing what h
e thought Bonnie wanted done.
Dr. Royal then delivered his professional opinion of Chris in the simplest terms possible: “Chronic anxiety has been a problem since his youth. Just never being able to relax. Always, in a sense, as Satchel Paige aptly put it, looking behind to see if something were gaining on him.”
The abandonment by his father, Dr. Royal said, “affected Chris very much in terms of anxieties. In my view, it’s been an insult to his psyche that he has never compensated for, because you can’t go back and compensate for something like that at that age. So, he has therefore been insecure, anxious, depressed throughout his life, and his psyche has always been engaged in an attempt to deal with that, to deny that, to cover that over.”
Chris had also found it impossible to communicate with his mother about his inner turmoil and dread. In the fall, Billy Royal had noted that Bonnie’s understanding of Chris was “superficial.” He’d written that she was “not reading Chris, what’s going on internally.”
This condition extended back many years. Chris and his mother had never talked deeply and openly about feelings; they’d never dealt with what was going on inside his mind, with how he really felt about himself. Bonnie had never opened that avenue. How could she, when it did not exist within herself?
The result was that Chris had been locked inside himself, just as Bonnie was cut off from aspects of herself. By example, she had taught her children that emotional turmoil was a weakness best overcome by refusing to recognize its existence. Feelings were messy and threatening: do not express them. Do not acknowledge them. Do not discuss them with others, do not admit their existence to yourself.
Even in this psychological environment, Dr. Royal said, Chris had been able to cope until he’d gone away to school. Then, for the first time, he’d had to face the consequences not only of his lifelong difficulties, but of the more acute phase—the thirteen-month period that covered the deaths of Lieth’s parents and uncle.
In this period, Dr. Royal explained, both Lieth and Bonnie had had less contact with Chris, had given less support, had almost—although Billy Royal did not actually use the word—abandoned Chris emotionally. As Bonnie had grown increasingly concerned about the stresses that were plaguing her husband, she had inevitably become less aware of whatever anxieties and pressures had been building in the lives of her children.
The NC State environment had not been a healthy one for Chris—nor was it for most other students, in Billy Royal’s opinion. “Chris did not do well academically,” he said. “He got involved gradually in drugs, alcohol, and Dungeons and Dragons.”
Osteen asked more about the game.
“It has, I guess, received notoriety in the last few years,” Dr. Royal said. “There has been a great deal in the press about different aspects of it. It most often attracts young people who are bored or need something to do. It’s a game that involves skill, daring, a lot of intellectual adventure. But there have been a number of tragedies. Meaning, not infrequently, that some people get hurt or killed through playing the game.”
Dr. Royal stressed the impact that the game had had on Chris. “In his case, this and a combination of drugs and alcohol became a kind of modus operandi for him and the group he was involved with. To some degree, this group became a family. This game, with the alcohol and drugs, created for Chris a situation where there was a separation from life, from his ordinary functioning, from what’s going on in reality. He moved into this fantasy world. And in my view, the plans that were carried out regarding his stepfather and mother were a direct result.
“Chris was trying to find a solution where he was not going to be abandoned; where he was going to live a life in which he didn’t have to depend on other people; in which he was not going to be hurt.”
“But, Dr. Royal,” Osteen said, asking this question almost as if he himself were seeking the information, because he himself was still trying to answer the question of how all this could have happened, “there are a lot of young people unfortunate enough to grow up in the poor circumstances that Chris did, and a lot of young people who get caught up in drugs, and apparently at least some people that get caught up in playing Dungeons and Dragons. Is there anything else that might relate to why that combination affected this young man as it did? Why him, in other words?”
To Bonnie, listening attentively, this was the most important question asked all year. Even more than whether or not Neal Henderson had been her attacker, this was the question to which she most wanted an answer. But this was also the one question she’d not been able to bring herself to ask, either of Chris or of anyone else: Why him? Why my son?
“You get to the bottom line,” Dr. Royal said, “and I think it’s because there have been tremendous stresses, primarily internal, which have never been talked about, never been dealt with. Chris, throughout his life, has developed a lifestyle of denial, of compartmentalizing things and not dealing with them.”
There were consequences, in other words, to a lifestyle of denial.
Consequences, Bonnie realized, such as the possibility that one day your poor, lost, befuddled, forlorn son will discover that he wants you dead.
40
Just as she had been for his testimony, Angela was present in court for Chris’s sentencing hearing. Throughout all proceedings, she’d made a strong impression on those who observed her by seeming thoroughly uninterested.
Bill Osteen had noticed this same disturbing lack of reaction on December 27, when Chris had first confessed that he’d planned to have her killed in her sleep.
“You could just as easily have been reading her the Wall Street Journal,” Osteen would say of that day. “No reaction. None. It was as if nothing in the world had been said to her that was of any consequence whatsoever. She could easily have said, ‘I think I’ll just go to Hardee’s and get a hamburger while y’all talk about this.’ ”
During her brief appearances in Elizabeth City, it had been the same. At night, she would spend time not with her mother or brother, but at the Holiday Inn, socializing with John Taylor and others.
In court, she showed no signs of caring about what was said. Wayland Sermons would say later that he’d thought—perhaps erroneously—that Bonnie had seemed “cold” throughout the trial. Regarding Angela, he said, “My impression of that kind of coldness was probably tripled. Angela would look around, play with her fingernails, adjust her clothing. She acted very bored, uninterested in what was going on.”
Shortly after four P.M., however, one event prompted a dramatic change in her demeanor. Chris’s sentencing hearing was interrupted by word that the jury had decided the fate of James Upchurch.
The verdict: “We the jury unanimously recommend that the defendant, James Bartlett Upchurch III, be sentenced to death.”
And Angela, to the amazement of all who saw her, began to cry.
* * *
Though she shed no tears, the sentence came as a shock to Bonnie, to the extent that she was still capable of feeling shock. It had seemed to her that, just as in closing arguments during the trial, Upchurch’s two lawyers had argued more forcefully and more persuasively than Mitchell Norton. She realized, however, that her view of Norton’s performance might be colored by her view of Norton, and that the members of the jury, having been spared the sort of personal contact with him to which Bonnie had been subjected, might have been less unimpressed.
But beyond that, she didn’t see how a jury could say that a nineteen-year-old boy deserved to die when there still wasn’t one single piece of physical evidence that proved he had even committed a crime.
After the verdict was delivered, Judge Watts offered Upchurch the chance to speak. When he stood, Bonnie was again struck by how skinny he seemed, how prominent his long, thin neck was. Considering that he hadn’t found it desirable to utter a single word throughout the entire trial, he made quite a little speech on this occasion.
“First off,” he said, “I want to thank my attorneys. They have done a remarkable job. And that’s got my utmost respect. And I want to thank you, Your Honor. You obviously have gone a long way to keep this trial from becoming any more of a circus than it already is. And, you know, I respect the trouble the jury has gone through to deliver their verdict.”
He was sounding more like someone who’d just been given an Academy Award than a death sentence.
But then he said he was “appalled and shocked” by the verdict. “I find it utterly amazing that the testimony of two confessed murderers would be enough to convict anybody to death. I am forced to believe that I am merely being convicted by the assumption of guilt by association. I am an innocent man.”
Or a guilty man who had incorrectly calculated the odds. A man who had thought, as had Bonnie, that in the absence of any physical evidence, no one—least of all, a white college student—would be convicted of first-degree murder. Especially by a jury which, under the law, was not allowed to learn of his prior criminal record.
The Dungeon Master had spent so long devising his own scenarios, then watching others act them out, that he might not have realized that this had been a game whose outcome he could not control.
* * *
The next morning, when Angela was called to testify for the first and only time, her display of emotion over Upchurch’s sentence was well behind her. She managed to seem both nervous and indifferent. She gave the impression of being there because she had to be, even if she provided all the right answers to Osteen’s questions.
“Angela, for a long time after this tragic event, you and your mother believed that Chris had nothing to do with it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Cruel Doubt Page 45