“And there did come a time when Chris sat down and talked to you about it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And did he tell you everything that he testified to here in court?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Since that time,” Osteen said, “you obviously have had time to think about your relationship with Chris. And you know he’s going to prison. Just tell the court what you expect your relationship to be with your brother from this day forward.”
“I expect us to stay as close as we ever were. Keep in contact with letters, or however. And I expect to be there to pick him up when he gets out.”
“Angela, as a result of what has happened, do you have any fear of Chris to this day?”
“No fear at all.”
* * *
Next, with both Bill Osteen and Jim Vosburgh present, Bonnie spoke to Judge Watts on Chris’s behalf:
“Dr. Royal basically has the overall picture pretty well covered. We struggled very hard—or I struggled very hard—to maintain the home that we were living in when my husband and I separated, so the children wouldn’t have to be uprooted. And we suffered in lots of ways. By not having balanced meals, I guess, on occasion.”
This was not easy for her. This was like asking for pity. But in the realm of the law, it was the last chance she’d ever have to help Chris.
“I just tried to maintain Chris’s and Angela’s environment as well as I could under the circumstances and continue with my job so we could move forward at some point in our lives. My sisters kept the children on many occasions. My mother and father kept Chris and Angela a lot. At the time, I was traveling for my company, and on many occasions I would be out of town for as much as a week at a time.”
Once more, she tried to counter the impression of perpetual discord that Mitchell Norton had attempted to create:
“We had a very close-knit family relationship. Lieth was very proud of Chris. On many occasions he would tell me—and he would tell Chris also—that even though Chris wasn’t doing as well at North Carolina State, gradewise, as he would like to see him do, he was doing much better than Lieth did when he went to State.
“And you know, occasionally Lieth and Chris would have a disagreement. But it was always a very short disagreement. And when it was finished, or they finished the argument or discussion or whatever they were in, everything was back to normal, and there was no problem.”
It seemed that might be how it would always be in Bonnie’s mind, no matter what anyone else might feel or say: there was no problem.
In talking about the period in August when Chris had been hospitalized, she sounded almost upbeat. “He made a lot of friends in the hospital. And I think he acted a little bit happier than he had in previous months, acted like he was a little bit more relieved, or there was some pressure taken off him.”
“Do you know,” Osteen asked her, “whether Chris wanted to talk to you after he entered the hospital about the facts of this case?”
“Oh, yes. Dr. Royal said Chris wanted to talk with me. And you specifically asked me not to talk about July twenty-fifth. And Chris said you asked him not to talk to me about it. So we just avoided discussing anything about July twenty-fifth.”
“Throughout this time, Chris was, in effect, wanting to tell you?”
“Oh, absolutely. And it really bothered him, from what I saw.”
“And did you notice any change in Chris after he was able to tell you what the facts were?”
“Oh, yes. Complete relief. He just had a totally different attitude—like he didn’t have anything to hide anymore.”
“Mrs. Von Stein, you have heard what Chris has had to say about this, and of course you were a victim. You are a mother and a victim. Would you please relate to the court what your feeling is about Chris presently, as he is getting ready to serve his time for what he’s done?”
Bonnie took a deep breath, then another. She had very much wanted not to cry in public at this moment, but she did.
“My feeling with Chris now,” she said, wiping her eyes, “is that he indicates to me in every way and every action and everything he says that he is basically looking forward to serving his time to pay for the things he was involved in, things he really can’t explain to me.
“I feel like Chris, without the effects of the drugs, could never have even considered doing the things and saying the things that he did. It’s totally foreign to everything he was brought up to believe in. It’s totally foreign to his personality.
“Chris has always been the kind of person—he’s kind of like me in the respect that instead of stepping on a cricket in the house, he’ll pick it up and carry it outside and turn it loose. He’s always been like that. That’s one of the reasons I was absolutely sure Chris had no involvement in this, when the investigation started going in that direction.
“Now I am going to stand by him and be there for him. I will love him as I’ve always loved him. I don’t approve of the things that happened, but that can’t be undone. I know in my heart that without the drug situation it never could have happened.
“And if he gets out of prison in my lifetime, I will do everything I can to help him get on his feet and start a new life for himself. He has my support.”
She paused, then said, “I will also make arrangements that if he’s not out during my lifetime, those things will still be possible for him.”
When Bonnie returned to her seat in the front row, Lewis Young walked over to sit beside her.
“I just wanted to apologize,” he said, “if I ever caused you any unwarranted hurt during the investigation. Sometimes, I have to take steps that others just may not understand at the time.”
She thanked him and said she fully understood that he had just been doing his job.
And as Bonnie finished, Judge Watts said, “Incidentally, Mr. Osteen, let me observe that I certainly recognize the difficult situation that this placed you and Mr. Vosburgh in, and placed Mr. Pritchard and Mrs. Von Stein in. And I must say that you handled it in a very responsible manner, in accordance with the code of professional responsibility.”
* * *
But then Mitchell Norton stood to say that of the three people involved in the killing “Chris Pritchard, from a moral standpoint, is more guilty than the other two.” He again called the killing “savage and brutal” and despite his earlier agreement not to ask for any particular sentence, noted that the maximum was life plus twenty years and said, “I would ask the court to look at that whole, entire maximum.”
This brought Jim Vosburgh to his feet almost immediately. Goddamnit, he thought, if Chris was the most morally guilty of the three, then Norton should have had the balls to try him—Bill Osteen or no Osteen.
Vosburgh said, with some indignation, “Any one of these three people could have ducked out of this at any time. Nobody forced Mr. Henderson to drive. Nobody forced Mr. Henderson to go to a place and pick Upchurch up. Nobody forced him to do anything. He could have bailed out at any time.
“And nobody forced Mr. Upchurch to do the things that were done. Just like nobody forced Mr. Pritchard to draw a map. The district attorney thinks he’s more guilty—we don’t have comparative negligence in this state. We don’t have comparative guilt. They are either innocent or guilty. That argument about greater guilt is a specious one. It just doesn’t hold water when you take into consideration the roles of all three people.”
Rather than saying that Chris had “induced” the other two to commit the crime, Vosburgh suggested that the real inducement had been Dungeons & Dragons.
Or, he said, “Dungeons and Dragons and drugs. The three Ds. Those were the inducements. The idea may have originated as a joke, but the more they played and the more drugs that were induced into their systems, the plan became reality as opposed to fantasy.”
* * *
Then, for the first
and only time, Bill Osteen spoke on behalf of this client whom he’d so disliked from the start, who’d caused him such stress and anxiety for so many months, who’d presented him with the least rewarding, most distasteful case of his career.
Personally, Osteen was inclined to agree with Norton. He did not express this opinion in court but would say later, “By far the worst of the lot is the son who participates in something like this. The people who came in and helped, even doing the act, are no more at fault than the son. From the prosecutor’s standpoint I would have had a hard time seeing Upchurch where he was and Chris where he was.”
This, however, was not the time to share that view. Until sentencing, he was obligated to act as Chris’s advocate.
At first, as he spoke, it almost seemed a form of therapy. As if, after going for so long saying so little to so few, he now felt a compulsion to put in the record some observance of the difficulties that had beset him. As if, by reciting them to a judge in a public forum, he might be able to put to rest his own inner doubts about the way he had handled the case.
“This was,” he said, “a most difficult situation. Leaving out what happened on July twenty-fifth, but just dealing with the mother, who was concerned and offering her help, and a son who was concerned and wanting that help, and lawyers who were trying to help but were caught in the middle, with the psychiatrist saying we needed to come to a resolution of this between the people immediately.
“If there is a responsibility that Chris Pritchard did not carry out in regard to telling his family earlier, then I assure Your Honor, it was at the direction of his lawyers, who were caught in the position of saying, ‘We can’t do it because she may be required to testify. They just have to accept our word for it that there’s more involved here than anybody thinks there is, and at the proper time we can make it all known.’
“And if Your Honor please, when it came time to make a decision on what to do, there is nobody in this courtroom who knows, or will ever know, whether proper decisions were made or not. We live with our decisions. They become history. They are subject to second-guessing. They are subject to many things.
“But in keeping with the responsibility that Mr. Vosburgh and I and my son had, we evaluated this case from the standpoint of its being a one-witness case. And we evaluated it from the standpoint that we thought there were serious discrepancies, or areas that could not be confirmed by the prosecution, as a one-witness case. That witness being Mr. Henderson.
“And we had an obligation to tell Mr. Pritchard how we evaluated his case if he went to trial. And we did that. And after hearing us tell him that this was not by any means, in our opinion—and I am not asking anyone else’s opinion at this time, I am just trying to set the tone of what Mr. Pritchard heard from us—rightly or wrongly, his attorneys thought there was at least anywhere from a small chance to a good chance that if these matters were put before a jury, Mr. Pritchard had a good chance—as would Mr. Upchurch, based on the evidence at that time.
“We told him our opinion. We also told Chris that we did not know what could be worked out in the way of an agreement to plead guilty, but that we would explore it if he wanted us to. And we said we doubted that Chris Pritchard could walk out of our office that day, or after a trial in which he might be found not guilty, and ever feel good about himself again. And his lawyers would not have felt good about it.
“And Chris sat there and said to us, ‘I participated, and I understand I am responsible for it, and I don’t want to walk out.’ And so we did work something out with the State.”
Osteen paused. He had needed to get that off his chest. He had needed to leave in some appropriate forum some objective record of the agonies he’d been through along the road to where he now stood. To those who knew him well, this public display of personal feeling about a professional matter was entirely uncharacteristic. But this case had affected him as had no other during his thirty-year career. And since this would be the only time he’d talk about it publicly, he wanted to say a few more things—perhaps hoping that by trying to explain to Judge Watts how this had happened, he might succeed, at least in part, in explaining it to himself.
“There are a few things, Your Honor, that I want to call to your attention that I thought were bizarre in this case, and that have never, perhaps, occurred before.
“Chris Pritchard had a record in his community of being an honorable person as he grew up. And it’s just almost inconceivable that things could have gone as wrong as they did. But it’s not a unique situation when coupled, as Dr. Royal said yesterday, with whatever there was in his genetic or environmental makeup, and with his early years and the difficulties that he encountered then.
“It seems to me that it is reasonable to say that when he got to a school—and it could have been State or any other school. I certainly don’t say it’s because he went to State. I say that wherever he went at that time, whatever group he became part of at that time, was likely to have a great influence on him.
“And it did. There was just an ineffable pattern of things going from good to not so good, bad to worse.” But greatly to my surprise, I find that this is not an unusual situation. This week I was reading a book called Understanding the New Age. I don’t know where it came from. My wife got it somewhere. And I picked it up and started reading it.
“There is, in this country, if Your Honor please, a ‘new age,’ which has moved away from some of the things that many people were taught in their youth and clung to, still cling to, as being the things that perhaps make people act in a better manner.
“This new age—and I guess one of the people that comes to mind is a lady named Shirley MacLaine, an actress who has been involved deeply in this new-age theory—this seems to be a theory that says, ‘I am a being, and I am capable of transferring my own powers to a greater power, and therefore I am God.’ That’s the thinking.
“And there was a writer in the L.A. Times, Russell Chandler, who set out to look into and explore this new age. I would like to refer to him for just a moment if I may. Because he said something that hits this case. At least, it did for me. He said, ‘We are all aware that a warning label must be attached to psychedelic drugs, for in the “new age” this is the entry level for altered states. For tens of thousands of people, psychedelic drugs bring back not a past Xanadu, but lead to a mental hospital for a fried brain. By the late 1980s there was growing experimentation and research with high-tech “Designer Drugs” including Ecstasy’—which has been mentioned in this court.
“ ‘Warnings about opening up the mind to hallucination and sinister entities are regularly sounded by critics of the “new age.” The alarms include the dangers of fantasy, role playing, and imagination games like Dungeons and Dragons, which swept the youth culture several years ago. Dungeons and Dragons is a doorway to the occult.’
“It goes on,” Osteen said, “to discuss Dungeons and Dragons, saying it’s laced with references to magic, occult wisdom, violence, and power. And what this man, Russell Chandler, is saying in his summary is that the hallucinogenic drugs, the Dungeons and Dragons game, the other mind-altering games, are an attempt to harness a segment of society that’s never had much religion—to create an alternate religious worldview.”
This was Bill Osteen, the old Republican representative and federal prosecutor speaking now, but speaking to a judge who, except for political affiliation, clearly shared almost all the same values.
“In my view,” Osteen said, “it’s the kind of pathology where the more fascinated a person gets with it, the more likely it is that he can become mentally unbalanced by the process itself.”
He again quoted from the book. “ ‘Auto-hypnosis is a powerful tool, not totally understood. It is manipulation.’ If Your Honor pleases, I submit that is essentially what we see in Chris Pritchard’s case. I am sure there are people who can play Dungeons and Dragons and never have any lasting res
ults. There are people who, unfortunately, can use drugs and not have any lasting results. And there are people who can grow up in deprived homes and do wonderfully well. But once in a while, those categories come together and create what has been created here.
“And I submit that Chris Pritchard, at the time this dastardly act happened, was changed to such an extent—not only his personality, but his pathology, as Dr. Royal has said—that he had moved himself into a position of imagined power and control over his own destiny, which he now understands is not his to determine.
“And through it all, there is a mother who sat on this stand, and who has sat for months and gone through pure hell not knowing what was out there, but knowing something was.
“Who has gone from the belief that ‘My son was not involved’ to the understanding that ‘Some way, something is not as I understand it’ to the full understanding.
“And a mother who sits there and says, ‘I am going to help him. I am going to give him my love and I am going to work with him.’
“I hope Your Honor will take those things into consideration.”
* * *
Then Judge Watts gave Chris a chance to speak.
Chris stood. In jacket and tie that would soon be exchanged for prison jumpsuit, he looked anguished, frightened, and still only about sixteen years old. Whatever combination of arrogance and surliness he had used to mask his guilts and fears over the preceding year and a half, they were now gone. More than ever—and not just to Bonnie—he seemed a victim himself.
“I just want to say, first of all, that I believe Mr. Norton was extremely fair in allowing me to take this plea bargain agreement. I know that I am guilty and I do deserve to spend time in prison. And I think it was fair of him to allow me to have that opportunity.
“I want to speak with my family.” Chris looked unsteady on his feet. Also, he was starting to cry. “As Dr. Royal has mentioned, I seem to deny my feelings. I don’t know why, but I do. And they build up like pressure in a cook pot.”
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