Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  And as recently as Father’s Day, 1991, Steve Pritchard, who quite unexpectedly had received a phone call from Angela that day, voiced concern to me, but would not be specific as to why. He said only, “What’s done is done. Nothing can change it. There’s no hard evidence. I personally have chosen not to pursue it any further.”

  It was, ironically, the person Bonnie feared most in the world who provided, at least indirectly, what some considered the strongest support for belief in Angela’s uninvolvement and unawareness.

  As Lewis Young put it, “With all that Neal Henderson told us, I don’t see any way he wouldn’t have given us Angela if he’d known she had anything at all to do with this. After giving up Chris and giving up Moog, Neal would have no reason to protect her. Now, maybe they never told him—look, the further this goes, the stranger it gets—but I have a hard time buying that Chris and Angela and Moog were all in this together and for some reason Neal never found out about her.”

  * * *

  Jean Spaulding, however, from her perspective, responded to further questions.

  “A policeman walks into her room and he says, ‘Excuse me, miss,’ and she’s not, like, shrieking! She was seventeen at the time? I don’t know of too many seventeen-year-old girls who are just going to sit up and adopt a conversational tone if a policeman appears in their room in the middle of the night. Not at the front door, but in their room! That doesn’t seem to ring true. Maybe she was in shock from the moment she saw the policeman, but I would expect something different.

  “And her door is close to their door? And she didn’t, like, immediately run into her mother’s room? That’s amazing. Either she very much needs some help, or she knew what was going on, I would venture to say.

  “Where did she fall apart? Where did she break down? Where did she cry? What did she say?”

  Dr. Spaulding also found it peculiar that Angela would have dressed in the presence of a young police officer she knew and did not like.

  “She got out of bed and put her blue jeans on while he was standing there? That’s a little striking, too. She’s seventeen years of age and she’s dressed in panties and a shirt? And she gets out of bed and pulls her blue jeans on in front of him? I don’t know of many seventeen-year-olds who, in any sort of normal state, would do that. And maybe that’s the issue: maybe she wasn’t in a normal state of mind.”

  When informed that the only time Angela was known to have cried in public was at the sentencing of James Upchurch, Dr. Spaulding seemed almost amazed.

  “That’s striking to me,” she said, “because if we’re going to postulate that we don’t see emotion from her because she’s a Bates—if we’re going to give her that degree of credit—then why is she weeping for this person that she supposedly barely knew?

  “This man is being sentenced because he killed her stepfather. That’s one aspect. But I think even more important is that this is the man who supposedly almost murdered her mother. Her mother has scars on her face to this day because of that assault. So how can you weep, if you’re a Bates, at the sentencing of the murderer? That doesn’t fit.”

  * * *

  Not only had Chris said, in his December 27, 1989, statement to authorities, that he did not know whether Angela had ever met James Upchurch, he also made it a point, on six separate occasions, to emphasize either that she was not considered in his planning, or that he didn’t care if she lived or died.

  In Lewis Young’s report, these comments read as follows: “There was not any discussion about Angela. . . . Pritchard stated he never thought about Angela at all during these discussions [with Upchurch]. . . . He had not thought about Angela.” Then, as the plot moved closer to execution, “Upchurch said he would be making some noises and he would have to get Angela as well. Chris stated he told Upchurch it was okay to go ahead and kill Angela as well. . . . Pritchard stated it was determined by him and Upchurch that Angela would be killed so Pritchard would get all the money. . . . He pointed out on the map of the house where Angela’s bedroom was located.”

  But Jean Spaulding, for one, found it hard to accept that Chris could have been so callous in regard to his sister.

  At my request, she had met with Bonnie in July 1990 to review numerous photographs of Bonnie, Chris, and Angela taken over the children’s entire life span. Dr. Spaulding had said she’d found this technique an invaluable aid in developing insight into the nature of family relationships.

  In August, she wrote me a letter that said in part:

  One of the most striking issues that I would like to raise with you for your consideration is the large number of photographs of Chris and Angela engaged in an embrace or some other manifestation of physical closeness. I have over the many years of practice reviewed many family albums and many, many pictures of brothers and sisters. I was struck by the apparent warmth and closeness demonstrated in these pictures over such a prolonged period of time of Chris’s and Angela’s lives. There are pictures of them hugging from earliest childhood all the way up to the latency years. Additionally, most of the photographs during the adolescent years that are of a casual basis demonstrate an apparent warmth and camaraderie between Chris and Angela. One would wonder at Chris’s ability to participate in a plot that would harm the one person with whom, by documentation in these pictures, he appeared to have a warm and normal bond.

  Even Bill Osteen, who’d long since overcome his doubts about Bonnie, continued to harbor uneasiness about Angela. When asked if he found her lack of affect, as opposed to Bonnie’s, to be suspicious, he answered, “Very much so. I still—I always wondered if there wasn’t something somewhere that we were missing. I always have felt that there was something between Upchurch and Angela that I don’t know about. I would love to have a video of Upchurch out at that little shack on the day he waited there. I always had some question about whether Angela knew he was there.”

  * * *

  I met Angela for the first time in the spring of 1990, in the same small living room where I’d been spending so many hours with her mother. Her hair was brownish blond, with a hint of red. Her skin was clear. She wore no makeup, just a T-shirt and shorts. If not stunningly beautiful, she certainly was pleasant looking.

  But what surprised me—since I’d been led to expect some sort of zombie or department-store mannequin—was how lively and agreeable she turned out to be. She was cordial, talkative, and with one exception, did not seem at all self-conscious. She had at least two things in common with her mother: she did not strain to make an impression, and no question asked seemed to upset her.

  First of all, she wanted to say there had been absolutely no problems at all in the Von Stein house. She had loved Lieth and he had been good to her. He had never given her a hard time about anything, and she’d never had a bad word to say either to him or about him. He and Bonnie had gotten along splendidly, and so had he and Chris. “He cared about us very much,” Angela said. “And Chris and Lieth didn’t hate each other. I know, because I saw it from inside.”

  Only when I asked about Moog did she get what I would call a schoolgirl smile on her face. She looked away briefly, and if she didn’t quite blush, she came close. “I’m drawing a total blank,” she said. “I may have seen him at the beach or in Washington. And maybe in Chris’s dorm.”

  The more we talked, however, the clearer her recollection seemed to grow. Before the day was over, she was able to say, “Moog stands out vividly in my mind. He was drunk the first time I met him. I think this was when Chris was still rooming with Will Lang, which would have had to be his freshman year.”

  The first meeting, in fact, had “probably” been the night of a campus concert given by a group named Def Leppard, which would have put it in the last week of January, almost five months before Chris says he first made Upchurch’s acquaintance. That recollection was bolstered by a comment from her best friend, Donna Brady, that she seemed to remember meeting Upc
hurch “during the year.” Donna, in fact, appeared almost shocked upon hearing that Chris said he hadn’t met Moog until summer session.

  “I remember him skating into Chris’s room on a skateboard,” Angela said. “His hairdo is what sticks out in my mind. Weird, very weird. Just a strange-type person all around. Basically your wired-type, off-the-wall person.” When asked directly, she did say, “I guess you could consider him cute.”

  She said she saw him “many times” during the semester when she would drive up to State to visit Chris. These trips, she said, would occur every “two to three weeks.” In contrast, Bonnie, at trial, had said Angela visited the NC State campus “very infrequently.”

  Despite the shy smiles, Angela would not admit to any particular affection for him, much less intimacy (she later told her mother she’d been a virgin the whole time she knew him), but said she did recall John Taylor telling her in Elizabeth City during the trial that Moog had told Henderson he’d wanted to marry her.

  And though Angela said she did not recall it, Donna Brady had said, “I think I remember someone saying Moog told Chris he was going to marry his sister, or something like that. I can’t remember if it was Chris, or maybe Angela’s mom, that was kidding around about it one day. It may have been Chris.”

  “I was in shock when he was arrested,” Angela said. “He doesn’t strike me as a violent-type person. Never has, never will. And I know him. I mean, I’ve seen him high, I’ve seen him on acid, and I’ve seen him drunk. And he was never a violent-type person. I don’t know Neal Henderson, but I definitely can’t see Moog doing it. I just can’t really—I don’t believe Moog actually did it. I don’t, to this day. I just can’t. I can’t.” Saying this, she became more animated than at any other time during the talk.

  So strong was this belief, that, yes, it was true, as I’d heard elsewhere, Angela—the girl who never shows emotion—had cried in the Elizabeth City courtroom when Upchurch had been sentenced to death.

  But then she said, “I didn’t know him well. I had seen him a couple of times in Chris’s room.” Not only had she not slept with him, or thought of him as a prospective husband, she said, “Mmm mm,” shaking her head to mean no, when asked if she’d even kissed him.

  She said, in fact, she had no recollection of ever even seeing him alone. “I don’t remember having any private conversations with Moog. I really don’t. It was just a bunch of people going out together.”

  As for Chris, she told me, in an absolutely flat, affectless tone, that she was angry at him not so much for what he’d tried to do to her—have her murdered in her bed so he could have more money for drugs—but mostly “because he hid it so long and put Mom through so much hell. He knew he was guilty, but he still made Mom pay all that money for his defense. It was pointless. He could have made a deal in the beginning instead of dragging it on and on.”

  Like her mother, Angela had never spoken to Chris about the murder in detail. “I’m afraid that if I did, I’d get really mad at him and end up hating him. And I don’t want to hate him. So, I’ve never sat down and discussed it and I probably never will. I wanted to talk to him when he first confessed. I wanted answers, but I was afraid of what he might say. Sometimes, it’s like I want to know, but I don’t really want to know. So I just accepted what happened. It was over, in the past, and there was nothing I could do to change it. There was no point in going back to relive the whole thing again.

  “Look, he can discuss it with his psychologist. It’s easier for me not to have to sit down and talk about it. Why or how it happened, I really don’t want to hear. There’s nothing he could say or do to change it, so what’s the point?”

  She said, “Probably the reason I didn’t react more in Vosburgh’s office was that the night before, Chris took me aside and said, ‘I’m gonna tell you something tomorrow that’s gonna shock you, but please don’t hate me.’ And I said, ‘Nothing you could say would make me hate you. You’re my brother.’ But I knew then for sure that he was guilty and that he would tell us the next day.

  “Until that night, I would have laid my hand on a Bible and said he had nothing to do with it.” In Vosburgh’s office, as Chris was talking, I just kept thinking, ‘I don’t believe this.’ I was just like, ‘No way.’ I was mad. I was shocked. Because for a year I had said, ‘No, Chris had nothing to do with it. That wasn’t my brother. That wasn’t the brother I’d known all my life.’ When I’d look over at my mom, I was wondering what she was thinking and what was going through her mind. But we never really talked about it. Not then, or ever. There really wasn’t anything we could say.

  “And I’ve never talked about it to Chris, either. That first night, driving to Greenville, I remember not talking about it. I didn’t want to. I just remember talking about my friend Steve Tripp. Chris was hungry, but all I wanted to do in Greenville was see Steve. Chris did ask what Mom had said, and I said, ‘Nothing,’ because she hadn’t really said anything to me.”

  The one time she had wanted to know more was during the period surrounding Chris’s arrest and hospitalization. “I was sort of left out in the dark. I would have liked to have had more answers then, but the way the lawyers and everyone treated me, I was just the third member of the family, and I didn’t want to disturb Mom or Chris.

  “I’ve learned to control my feelings the same way my mom has. If I’m upset, I’ll go to the barn and cry on my pony. I did let it get to me, but no one ever saw it.”

  If people were disturbed by her apparent lack of reaction, that was their problem, not hers, she said with no apparent resentment.

  “My first thought when Edwards opened my door and woke me up was,” she said, “ ‘What the hell is Danny the Dickhead doing in my house?’” She said she wasn’t frightened, she was angry.

  There could well have been unmelted ice in her glass. There probably was. First of all, the house was cold. Lieth liked the house very cold. And second, she had her fan on. If John Taylor later thought he needed to turn up the air-conditioning, that was probably because the doors had been opened a lot, with people running in and out and up and down.

  “After that, people say I didn’t react, but I walked to that door and looked in and saw Lieth on the bed, and that’s why—I went into shock then and there. I knew he was dead. It’s just like you really go ice-cold. It feels like your heart just stops. And you’re like, ‘Oh, my God.’ It’s not, ‘Well, is he okay?’ It’s, ‘Oh, my God, he’s dead.’ So I was very calm. I was in shock. I wasn’t in hysterics. I was calm.”

  When asked why she didn’t go straight to the hospital, even riding in the ambulance with her badly injured mother, who appeared, at the time, to be near death, she replied, “I remember feeling like I needed to be at the house. I didn’t think I should walk out of the house with ten million people there. You know, my parents were always like, ‘We don’t want anybody in the house when we’re not here.’ ”

  It might have been answers like that that caused people to question her role. But Angela had no apologies to make for her behavior.

  “I just don’t like to show emotion,” she said. “The way I look at it is, my emotions are nobody else’s business, unless it is a close friend. I want people to think I can take care of myself. It’s like, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.’ That’s the reason I don’t want to talk to a shrink. Because I don’t like to talk to someone I don’t know. I don’t like to show emotions in front of people I don’t know.”

  Returning one more time to her conduct on the morning of the murder and in the following days, she said, “I was seventeen years old. I don’t know how to handle it. I figured my best bet, in order not to totally lose it, was to go out with people I knew. To surround myself with my friends. Because I mean, really, except for my mom, I’m not that close to my family. My friends were more like a family. That’s who I wanted to be around, rather than hearing Ramona and Kitty bitch about Pegg
y being there, because she’s not really part of the family. I didn’t need to hear that. I didn’t want to be around it. And I wasn’t worried about what everyone else was thinking at the time, or whether they wanted to see me or not.”

  Leaving her that day, and seeing her on a couple of other occasions during the summer, I found myself liking Angela. She did not strike me as cold. But I wasn’t so sure she was fine. Gliding along on the surface of life, she seemed passive, unstimulated, and more than a little bit lost.

  * * *

  But she had read A Rose in Winter three times.

  And there had been blood on four neatly stacked pages by the side of the bed. Pages that contained references to blood-darkened daggers, villainous lords of the manor, a victorious hero named Christopher, and a heroine who softly sobbed out her relief.

  Tom Brereton had been struck by her apparent anger over the fact that Lieth’s inheritance had made no significant difference in her life. From someone normally as blasé as Angela, this would have been a surprising show of feeling in front of a stranger.

  Chris had said, “I don’t know if James had ever met Angela.”

  But Angela herself said she’d met him in Chris’s room, months before Chris admitted to knowing him.

  And, whenever they’d met, Moog had become his best friend, mentor, LSD source, coconspirator, and Dungeon Master. And he’d known about the money and, according to Henderson, had said he was so attracted to Angela he might even want to marry her.

  Even Bill Osteen felt there was “something” between Moog and Angela.

  And she’d cried when Moog was sentenced to death.

  44

  The truth, Bonnie had said, was what she wanted. However it turned out. And Wade had said there was no way I could hurt her: that she was a person with nothing left to lose.