Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  “I think Bonnie really was trying to do well,” he said. “I think she was trying to stand by her children. And I think Bonnie is—my guess is that she is a good person. But I’ll tell you something I’ve never mentioned before.

  “I think,” he said, well after his involvement in the case had ended, “if you go back, you will find a couple of letters that were found in Lieth’s office drawer. And I think those letters could be interpreted as giving rise to the possibility of a relationship with a lady in California. And I always wondered, during all that time, could this possibly be a plot which was beyond all of us here, that these people know about?

  “I’ve discarded that. I really have. But I looked at those letters and said, ‘Am I missing something? Is this more than it appears to be?’ And that’s a tough thing to say because, good gracious, if Bonnie has had the strength and fortitude to do the things she’s done, if she’s been able to withstand the heartache, then it’s terrible to think, ‘Well, at one time I had to consider you a suspect, too.’ ”

  * * *

  That left, of the items on Mitchell Norton’s dirty-laundry list, only the four blood-specked pages from A Rose in Winter. In the chaos of the crime scene, no one recalled when or where the book itself was found. John Taylor remembered that at one point he was holding it in his hand, but does not know how he came to have it.

  As to the pages, however, Lewis Young’s recollection—supported by Taylor’s crime-scene photographs—was quite specific. They were stacked neatly on top of the typewriter stand. And they had been spattered with blood. A T-shirt of Bonnie’s, hanging on a chair just beyond them, was also blood flecked. To Young, this indicated that the pages were on the typewriter before the blood had been shed.

  Also, it seemed unlikely to him—given the disregard they’d shown for other potential evidence—that an EMT or Washington patrolman would have carefully gathered the pages from the floor and stacked them neatly, in proper numerical order.

  Yet Bonnie had testified at trial, “When I went to bed, there weren’t any books that were torn apart or disassembled or had pages out of them.”

  Asked if she’d read this particular book, these pages of which bore such an insidiously close resemblance to what had occurred in the room where they’d been found, she had replied, “I don’t remember the story. I read it several years ago.”

  And that was where the matter rested. No one seemed able to take it any further. At least not until Angela said in an interview, on June 14 of this year, 1991, that she knew the book well.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’ve probably read it three times.” An intriguing comment, given the nature of the book and the fact that Angela did not have a widespread reputation as a voracious reader, and that in March 1989, she’d told SBI investigators Newell and Sturgell she did not remember the book.

  But in June 1991, she acknowledged that she knew what action occurred in those particular pages. She said the way she figured it, the book could have been open by the bed because she thought her mother was reading it at the time.

  * * *

  By June 1991, Chris’s ex-roommate Vince Hamrick was also able to remember some intriguing details and to offer some provocative opinions.

  First, in addition to his baseball bat, James Upchurch had kept a Japanese martial-arts weapon in his dorm room. This, made of two pieces of bamboo strapped together and bound at the handle, was a powerful weapon, not some sort of flimsy reed. The kind of weapon that—while it might not fracture a skull as easily as a baseball bat would—could certainly inflict damage to a forehead, especially if swung by someone standing over a woman who was lying on a floor. The thing he most remembered about the weapon, Hamrick said, was that it made a whistling sound when it was swung hard.

  Second, for two weeks after the murder of Lieth, while Chris was away from the campus, James Upchurch had moved into the room and had slept in Chris’s bed, becoming Vince’s temporary roommate. At the time, Vince had seen nothing strange about it since they all were hanging around together so much anyway, and Moog had never discussed the crime, but in retrospect Vince found it odd indeed.

  He recalled Upchurch as “incredibly unathletic.” Once, Vince had taken him to lift weights, and Upchurch had been unable to lift them.

  Henderson, a bigger man, was also “very devious.” In D&D games, “he was the magic user. He would find magic items and lie to everyone that they weren’t worth anything. Then he would go back and keep them for himself.”

  In Vince’s opinion, Upchurch was too small and weak to have carried off the attack by himself. Based on Bonnie’s description of her attacker, as well as Henderson’s personality and size, Vince was convinced that Henderson had participated in the attack. So convinced that even in casual conversation he referred to how “they” did it, and what “they” were thinking. Vince’s opinion was that Upchurch had done the stabbing, but that Henderson had wielded the club—whether it had been a bat or a bamboo rod.

  If all he’d been was a last-minute driver, he wouldn’t have been involved at all, Vince said. “Why would they ask him? He didn’t really even hang out with our group.”

  Hamrick also recalled clearly the particular Dungeons & Dragons scenario that, at Moog’s direction, the players had been enacting in the days leading up to the murder.

  Moog had entitled it “The Rescue of Lady Carlyle,” and he had invented it himself. They’d been playing it almost every night for at least two weeks before July 25, 1988. In essence, the characters had to rescue Lady Carlyle, an attractive young woman, from the castle where an evil baron was holding her captive. The baron did not have a last name.

  Once rescued, Lady Carlyle would reward them handsomely with a part of the fortune her father possessed, and she would also bestow sexual favors upon them.

  It was strange, Vince said, that at a time when the real murder plot had already begun to develop—in fact, just before the murder of Lieth (whom Chris, when he was younger, had called “Lieth Von Frankenstein”)—Moog, as Dungeon Master, had advanced the scenario to the point where they were able to carry out the rescue by breaking into the castle in the middle of the night while Lady Carlyle lay asleep in her chamber.

  * * *

  What Neal Henderson told me was also unsettling. Henderson was imprisoned in Harnett County, not far from Fayetteville and Fort Bragg.

  On two separate occasions in the spring of 1990, I talked with Neal Henderson for two hours, uninterrupted by prison personnel. He could have been telling me the truth, or he could have been lying with every word. He was perfectly willing to look me in the eye, but I had no idea what I was seeing when he did. It might still have been one big Dungeons & Dragons game, and I was simply a new element in the scenario.

  But I can report this: he has a bulky upper body—quite distinctive, really—and a thick, short neck that makes it appear as if his head sits almost directly on his shoulders. Everything about him—his physical movements, his speech, his whole personality—seemed cautious and slow, restrained and controlled.

  We talked about the improbability of his having moved the car to a different location. “It was taking him too long,” Henderson said. “I just got scared, so I went looking for him.”

  While parked on the Airport Road, he said, he’d heard “the sound of someone running.” When I asked how Upchurch could have spotted him that far down the Airport Road, he said, “I must have had the brake pedal depressed without knowing it, because when he got in the car, the first thing he said was, ‘You know, your brake lights are on.’” Then Henderson added a line of dialogue not heard at the trial. “He said, ‘Someone made a very loud noise. I had to hit the guy to make him be quiet. I’m surprised the whole neighborhood didn’t wake up.’ ”

  Despite the faith placed in it by Norton, Mason, Crone, Taylor, and Young—all of whom struck me as capable, honest men acting in good faith, but all of whom, it must
be said, had every reason to want to believe Henderson (and none of whom ever subjected him to a polygraph test)—I had problems with Henderson’s account of his own limited role.

  There was, first, the power of Bonnie’s impression, the validity of which Jean Spaulding had recently reiterated to me. “It was an internal, instinctive, overwhelming reaction,” she said. “Not the sort Bonnie was accustomed to having, because she is very logical, and—not in a negative way—just so detached emotionally. Her insides, her viscera, had to be remembering something, and when she just felt his presence, she knew this was the man. She had a very strong total-body reaction. This was not something that seemed to start on a cognitive level, but was more or less an ‘emotional memory.’ And I take that very seriously, given my knowledge of Bonnie, because she is very logical and does not get overwhelmed by emotions at all.”

  Beyond that, there was the unlikelihood—emphasized by both Page Hudson and Tom Brereton—of one person, armed only with bat and knife, entering a house he’d never been in before, in which he knew at least three adults slept upstairs, intending to murder them all.

  Dr. Hudson had said, “Given the wounds Mrs. Von Stein had and Mr. Von Stein had, it’s easier for me to picture two people as attackers. I just have difficulty imagining how one attacker could have taken care of both of them.”

  Brereton, with his twenty years of FBI experience—some of which had been earned on Indian reservations, investigating more homicides by stabbing than he could count—felt even more strongly. “You would never assign one person to go in and kill three,” he said. “How could you expect to kill the second, much less the first, without waking the third?”

  Chris had said he’d drawn a second map—one presumably destroyed in the fire—that showed the location of the upstairs bedrooms. Thus, Upchurch would have known where Angela slept. But Chris had never said he’d told Upchurch Angela did not have a phone in her room. In fact, she did, and—if awake and frightened—could easily have used it to call for help.

  Even with the downstairs telephone cord disconnected—and if one wanted to assure that no one upstairs could use a phone to call for help, why not simply take the downstairs receiver off the hook, rather than unplug the cord?—there was no reason to believe that an unaware Angela would not be awakened by the noise of a beating and stabbing in the bedroom right next to hers, and would not, when awakened, reach for her phone and immediately call the police, before either hiding in her closet or under her bed, or fleeing downstairs and running out the front door for her life, screaming as loud as she could.

  Unless, of course, she was already awake, or had gone to sleep knowing that she would not be harmed.

  Or knowing nothing in advance, she might have been awakened by the sounds of Lieth’s screaming, and the thumping and the pounding, to discover not only a stranger—Neal Henderson—in her house, trying, with some success, to murder her mother and stepfather, but a stranger accompanied by James Upchurch, a young man she knew well, and liked, and who she knew was fond of her.

  Chris had said in his formal statement that he did not know if James Upchurch had even met his sister. But Mitchell Norton had told me that Henderson had told him that Angela “had had intercourse with Upchurch on several occasions.”

  Now, sitting under a hot June sun at a small concrete table in the yard of the Harnett County Correctional Institution, with guards armed with rifles standing in towers just beyond a nearby high fence topped with razor wire, Henderson elaborated on what he said was his understanding of the relationship.

  He told me that Moog had been infatuated with Angela Pritchard, even commenting, “Finally, I’ve met a girl I’d like to marry.”

  Henderson said, “I’d never heard James talk about a girl like that before. He really liked her. He said she was very pretty, intelligent, and of course, her parents had millions of dollars. It was so unusual for him to be talking like this that I remember it real well. It really floored me. And this was before any talk of the plot. I said to myself at the time, ‘James Upchurch is saying this to me?’ It made me feel kind of good that he would confide in me that way. It wasn’t something he ordinarily did.”

  As I was preparing to leave at the end of this visit, Henderson added that it was, of course, a standard Dungeons & Dragons scenario to kill the reigning royalty, marry the princess, and thus inherit the keys to the kingdom and all its wealth.

  And Angela, who never expressed emotion, who slept through it all, who had not used her phone to call for help, and who had read A Rose in Winter three times, had cried when Moog had been sentenced to death.

  43

  “At some point,” Jean Spaulding said to me in the spring of 1990, “Bonnie needs to have one of those straightforward, eye-to-eye conversations with Chris. It would be brief, it would be nonemotional, but I think she needs to confront him with ‘You planned to kill me.’ Not even ‘Did you plan?’ but ‘You planned to kill me and I need an explanation of that.’ Then I think she could take that and she could work with that and she would process that and I think she could then lay it to rest.

  “I could see it staying sealed over for a fair number of years, but I think, on an emotional level, she needs, at some point, to get that done. It will take some work and preparation, and we’re not working on that currently.

  “She has still not even come in and said to me anything like ‘Chris tried to murder me.’ Or ‘Chris murdered Lieth.’ Or ‘Chris is responsible for this.’ It has never come out directly.”

  “So you think,” I asked, “that she hasn’t been able to fully accept that he tried to kill her, or have her killed? Of course, it’s a hard thing.”

  “A very hard thing,” Jean Spaulding said. “The only thing harder, I think, would be if Angela had some involvement.”

  This was a problem. There was no hard evidence, but in all quarters, from prosecutors to defense attorneys to family members to Dr. Spaulding herself, there were qualms about Angela’s claim of total uninvolvement.

  At trial, Frank Johnston had hinted that Angela might have played a role. Asked later if that role had been more active than passive, he said, “I feel that it was. I do not believe, and will not believe, that somebody could sleep through this type of thing. I don’t think most people could sleep through screams in their own house.” And, he pointed out that, like Chris and Bonnie, “Angela had a lot to gain financially.”

  And Angela’s deportment—however much it was beyond her control, however much it might have been an involuntary response learned from her mother or bred into her genes—added to this whiff of suspicion.

  There were friends of Angela’s, and family members, and Angela herself, who told stories of her legendary ability to sleep through earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanoes.

  Yet combined with her apparent indifference to what she found once she was awake—an attitude that, when it persisted for a year and a half, could not easily be attributed to temporary emotional shock—her tale of deep sleep was greeted with skepticism even from those who would have been far more comfortable believing her.

  More than one of Chris’s closest friends, not wishing to speak for attribution, wondered aloud whether—as one phrased it—“she might not have known more than she’s let on.” These were people who had been in the house on Lawson Road. They knew how sound carried, and how tightly the upstairs rooms were clustered.

  Within Bonnie’s family, doubts were expressed with varying degrees of bluntness.

  Her sister Kitty would say nothing.

  Her sister Sylvia vaguely remembers someone—she’s not sure who—asking, “Do you reckon those kids had anything to do with it?”

  Her aunt Bib—her father’s sister—says, “That question was floating around.”

  Her sister Ramona said flatly, “If Chris knew, Angela knew.”

  And her brother, George, who had felt so conflicted
about ever speaking to Lewis Young that almost three years passed before he would even acknowledge that he’d done it, said, “Exactly what I am thinking is that she may have known something and didn’t say.”

  His wife, Peggy, added, “I wasn’t sure about Angela then, and I’m still not.”

  But as recently as June of this year, 1991, the question bothered them and kept them talking.

  “There ain’t no way in the world someone could sleep through that,” George said.

  “I could almost accept Angela sleeping through the murder, but I was having a real hard time with the police and ambulance coming down the street, and up to your front door,” Peggy said.

  “And them waking her up,” George said. And it wasn’t as if the noise had been confined to the master bedroom, though the noise of a grown man screaming as loudly as he could, repeatedly, while fighting vainly for his life, should have woken even the soundest of sleepers. But Bonnie—he’d learned later—had said she’d heard thumping noises from the hallway, even after her door was closed. That would put loud noise even closer to Angela’s room.

  “We went through the ‘in shock’ theory,” Peggy recalled. “That would have been great if the kids had stayed home the night after the murder, away from people. But you’re not in shock if you’re okay to go out and party.”

  “It was like,” George recalled, “ ‘I don’t understand. Why aren’t these kids in tears? Why aren’t they sitting up at that hospital protecting their mother?’ I would be there day and night!”

  And it wasn’t just that first day and night. It was the next three years.

  Even Bonnie’s mother said to me one hot summer evening, with a terrible sadness in her voice, “Angela—you never know what she’s thinking or feeling. My son asked me, ‘Does Angela have any feelings at all?’ ”