Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

But there are problems.

  Chris said he came home on the Friday night before the murder to go out with friends. But the friends did not go out with him. Then he said he couldn’t remember why he’d gone home. Finally, he said he’d gone home to steal the key to the back door so either he and Moog, or Moog alone, could enter the house silently. This, he had specified very clearly in his December 27 statement to investigators, was the key to the new back door, the outer back door.

  The problem is, that is not the key he took. The key marked “back door” that hung on a rack in the kitchen was the key to what had been the back door before the porch had been enclosed. That was now an inner door, which Bonnie did not even lock at night.

  To the new back door, there were only two keys. Bonnie kept one on her key ring at all times, and that key ring was found inside the house after the murder. There was no indication that any key had been removed from it, and no one had ever said he’d done so.

  The other key to the outer back door was with a woman who lived elsewhere, a woman who came to take care of the pets when Bonnie and Lieth were away. That key had remained in her possession, undisturbed. Neither Chris nor Angela had a key to the outer back door. Not even Lieth had a key to that door.

  So the key that Chris had stolen—whatever he thought it might have done—would not have opened the new back door, which Bonnie distinctly remembers locking that night. And one might surmise that Chris, having lived in the house for seven years, would have realized to his dismay that Friday night that the key he had come for was not a key he could obtain.

  Angela’s friend and next-door neighbor, Stephanie Mercer, remembers Angela sleeping over at her house that Friday night. She also remembers Chris coming to the back door of her house Saturday morning to speak to Angela privately.

  Later in the morning, despite the fact it was raining, Angela and Donna Brady drove two hours to the beach. Angela purchased a peach-colored shirt at a Benetton store, paying with a credit card and obtaining a receipt. In the miasma of forgetfulness and blurred memory that surrounded so many events on this weekend, both Angela and Donna—and Bonnie herself—have a remarkably clear recollection of that.

  Chris, by then, was back in Raleigh, picking up Moog and depositing him in a little shack behind the airport, about a mile from his house. There, from three until at least eight P.M., Moog waited, presumably alone, although Bill Osteen has his doubts about that.

  Meanwhile, Chris was preparing the hamburgers that were supposed to put everyone to sleep. Preparing them all by himself—unless one goes back to his statement of August 1, 1988, when he told Lewis Young he and Angela had made the hamburgers together; or to either of the two statements Bonnie made saying the same thing. Only after it was disclosed that the hamburgers were part of an aborted murder plot did recollections that Chris and Chris alone had prepared them lock into place.

  In any event, nothing happened Saturday night. Chris picked up Moog and went back to Raleigh at some point. Angela, back from the beach, was in and out of the house, but not sure where or when or with whom.

  On Sunday night, Angela breaks a date with a boyfriend. (“I was supposed to go out with David. I cannot remember his last name to save my life.” When the last name was given to her, she said, “Yeah, that’s the one. I was supposed to go out with him and I didn’t want to. So I told him Lieth wouldn’t let me go out.”) Instead, she goes out with Donna Brady. She isn’t sure where. One time, she seems to remember it was the mall. Another time, she thinks it was down by the river. It might have been both. Wherever it was, it was boring, there was nothing to do, so she comes home early, well before her curfew, an almost unprecedented occurrence.

  And for some reason, Donna Brady, who had been planning to spend the night at Angela’s house, goes home instead. Donna says she doesn’t remember why she didn’t sleep over. Angela says only, “For some reason, she did not.”

  Lieth is already asleep. Angela goes upstairs to read and to listen to music. Bonnie watches the Ted Bundy miniseries with her rooster, then goes to bed.

  And Neal Henderson and Moog cruise past the house, checking it out.

  Moog has his knife and his bat and his flashlight—and maybe a hollow bamboo rod that “whooshes”—but no key to the new back door.

  The key to the old back door also opens the front door, but nothing suggests that Moog would know this. Nowhere, in any of Chris’s statements, has he said he told Moog he was not able to steal a key to the new back door, but not to worry because the key he did take would open the front door. In fact, Chris has made it a point to say something very different: that the key he took was the key to the new, outer back door. But that key can’t open that door.

  The new back door is directly under the master bedroom where, by four A.M., Lieth had already been sleeping almost seven hours. There is glass on the new back door, but it might be Plexiglas, hard to shatter. There is also a large, double-paned glass window farther from the door. To shatter this with a baseball bat would make a noise. There are many men, and women, too, who, upon hearing a large pane of glass shattered just beneath their bedroom window at four A.M., might wake up.

  In any event, John Taylor, Lewis Young, and even Tom Brereton are in agreement on one point: the scene resembled a staged break-in, done after the fact, not a real one.

  So one is left to consider this question: If Moog had no key, and if he did not break in, how did he enter the house?

  And then one might ask: Just how did the Dungeon Master, who may have wanted to marry the sleeping princess, gain entrance to the castle of the evil overlord?

  Was there even the slightest possibility that someone already inside had gone downstairs before his arrival, unlocked the door, and then carried a glass of ice water back upstairs?

  As Jean Spaulding once said, “There is a lot yet in this story that’s untold.”

  * * *

  “If there’s a metaphor for Bonnie,” Dr. Spaulding said on another occasion, “I see her as a tree where the roots are planted very deep in the soil of her family. And it is as though she can weather many storms. She has a quiet strength, a quiet serenity, but I would hate to see her take many more blows.

  “One of the dominant features of Bonnie is her true love for her children. Yes, her true love for her husband was there, but without him at this point, and then going back to before he came into her life, these children are so important to her.

  “That she’s not demonstrative doesn’t mean she doesn’t love them. You cannot connect those two. Her role model for how to deal in these close relationships is her father, who doesn’t cry, who doesn’t have mood swings. He’s busy out there in the woods by himself, carving all the trees. That seemed to be his outlet for his emotions. And so, dealing as a mother, she would tend to emulate the way her father dealt with her. She’s really kind of tucked her father in there psychologically. It would be his manner of parenting that she would reflect in her style.

  “But now there have been so many losses. I cannot imagine, in one lifetime, having to experience the losses that she has. She’s lost her husband because he’s dead. Then to lose her father right at that time, especially because he was such a source of strength. And though Chris is not dead, it’s still a loss. Their relationship will never be the same. And yet she doesn’t get knocked over, she just keeps right on.

  “Bonnie is very involved with Chris, but with respect to Angela there’s another sort of involvement. Chris has to live out x number of years in prison, but Angela is still out in the real world. So, on a different level, Angela is Bonnie’s raison d’être. I would hate for anything to happen to Angela in any shape or form. There are all these things that would make one wonder, but I would certainly hope that nothing happens that would lead one to conclude that Angela is guilty of anything.

  “Bonnie’s primary mechanism is denial, and she’s going to hold tenaciously to it, e
specially if something’s going around on the fringes of her brain to bring up doubt. Is someone guilty or are they innocent? If you have doubt, then internally you’re going to be in conflict. You counter your conflicts by holding on to your defense mechanisms. And with Bonnie, if we strip her of her defenses, I don’t know what’s there. And I don’t think I want to know. That’s all she has.

  “She’s already lost a lot of herself. And if somehow Angela were taken away from her, not by misfortune, death, or accident or something—but by some complicity in this whole thing—that, I think, might be more than Bonnie could endure. That might be the last little domino. Should that topple, then we’d have a very different sort of situation, I fear.”

  45

  On Friday, June 14, 1991, at the Craggy Correctional Institute just north of Asheville, it was suggested to Chris that perhaps his sister had been told that on that Sunday night Moog was coming down just to play a prank. This would be fun, she might have been told. He was going to sneak into the house in the middle of the night and steal a few things, maybe the VCR, the stereo, the TV. Lieth would be really pissed when he woke up, but back at State they could all have a good laugh about it.

  The thing was, Chris hadn’t been able to find a key to the new back door. So what Angela should do, after Bonnie went to bed, was go downstairs and turn that little handle inside the knob, unlocking the door from the inside, so Moog would be able to get in.

  Just an innocent prank, that’s all it would be. And maybe Angela, a good sport, and eager to share in an adventure with Moog, had gone along.

  Only then—to her stark, absolute, and forever-traumatizing horror—she had been awakened by the sounds of Lieth screaming, and by both him and her mother being beaten and stabbed.

  That was the kind of shock, it was suggested to Chris, that could, for very sound psychological and even legal reasons, cause a person in the position Angela would have been in—had she, in all innocence, done such a thing—to withdraw deep inside herself and never come out, saying only that she didn’t know anything about anything, that she’d slept through the whole thing.

  At first, Chris seemed confused. “I have no idea how they got in,” he said. “If Angela knew, it was not from me.” Then he said, “I have to have a cigarette, do you mind?”

  A moment later, he said, “It’s horseshit. I did not tell Angela. If she knew, then it has her so messed up she doesn’t remember.”

  When asked about speaking to Angela on Saturday morning at the rear of Stephanie Mercer’s house, Chris got tears in his eyes. He said, “I don’t remember. . . . I have no idea about that. . . . There’s no way I would have told her. . . . I don’t remember going by Stephanie’s house.”

  Asked more about Moog’s possible relationship with his sister, he responded in a way quite different from earlier statements. He said he remembers Moog having a crush on Angela, and saying once, “Man, your sister is good-looking.”

  As the conversation continued to focus on Angela, Chris seemed increasingly disturbed and upset, almost angry. He kept saying, “I don’t know.” He never jumped up from his chair, but he kept fidgeting in it, his legs bouncing.

  “All these points are valid,” he said, “but they’re not true.” He then added, “I’m not going to believe any of this.”

  Later, somewhat calmer, he said, “You got me rattled. . . . I don’t want to believe it. . . . You wouldn’t bring these things up without knowing something. . . . Maybe she’ll talk to me. . . . I have questions, too, I want to ask her. I want to know for myself. My family is so destroyed now, but I don’t want it any worse.”

  He continued to insist that he had not met Upchurch for the first time until summer session, and that “there’s no way Moog was with us at the Def Leppard concert.”

  But if he didn’t push back the date on which he’d first made Moog’s acquaintance, he did admit that the relationship continued far beyond any point to which he’d ever before admitted. He said, contradicting all earlier statements, “We played D and D together until 1989.” But never, he insisted, except on that one bad, acid-filled night in August, had they ever even mentioned the crime.

  * * *

  Also on June 14, two hours away, in the off-campus house she shared with college classmates, Angela responded to further questions. On this hot, sticky night a fan was blowing in her upstairs room. She seemed more alert than in earlier conversations, and her answers were more deliberate. At three separate points, she cried.

  She said she and Stephanie Mercer were good friends and she slept over at Stephanie’s house often, but “I just don’t remember being there that night. I won’t sit here and say I remember sleeping in my bed, but I do not remember sleeping at Stephanie’s house. Not at all.”

  As for Saturday, she said first, “I went out with Donna. I probably went out to the barn.” When told that Donna recalled that they had instead gone to the beach, she remembered and added, “I remember us coming back from the beach to eat dinner. Me and Donna made french fries. Chris made hamburgers.”

  By now, Bonnie was saying that she had made the french fries and couldn’t even remember if Angela was present in the kitchen. But given all that happened in subsequent hours, such confusion may be free of unpleasant implication.

  Though she didn’t recall his being at Stephanie Mercer’s back door, Angela said, “I knew Chris was going to be home that night because I saw him that morning. He asked me to be back for dinner. He said something about him making it.”

  About Sunday night, her statements were much more direct.

  “I didn’t open the door,” she said. “I can tell you that much. I didn’t open that door. It was probably unlocked.”

  She listened carefully to the explanation of how an observer could grow curious about Moog’s means of entrance into the house and did not shy away from the obvious implication.

  “I know,” she said. “But I mean, I didn’t do it. And really, the only thing I can say to any of that is go ask Neal and go ask Moog. And go ask Chris.

  “But I know Chris doesn’t know. And obviously Moog’s not going to say anything. And Neal doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground.”

  But as for her deliberately unlocking the door, however innocently, she was insistent. “No way. No way.”

  Asked if there was anything that could have led people to think she and Moog had had a closer relationship than she said they did, Angela replied, “No. I mean, I’m a very outgoing, friendly person anyway. It’s nothing for me to hug someone. I may or may not have hugged him, I don’t remember.”

  Why, then, had she cried when he was sentenced? Her answer came without hesitation.

  “Because he got the death penalty. He was sentenced to die. And at that point in time, like I told you before, I still had some doubts about whether he actually did it. Because, like I said, I just don’t—I mean, I knew him. I had seen him drunk before, I had seen him high before, but I just don’t remember him—he wasn’t the violent type. I just didn’t believe he was guilty, and I couldn’t believe he’d been given the death penalty.

  “I just can’t picture little scrawny Moog doing that. And from what Mom had said about the figure she saw being big, it just didn’t fit together in my mind and it still doesn’t. And it never will until he says, ‘Okay, I did it,’ or, ‘No, I had nothing to do with it and this is what happened.’ And I don’t see that happening.”

  What then, if any, was his involvement?

  “That he was there. That he, he may have been in the house. I don’t know. But I just don’t think that he actually did it.”

  A few minutes later, the questions shifted to her relationship with Lieth. This was when tears welled in her eyes.

  “My relationship with Lieth was great,” she said. “We had our problems, our minor disputes. Every father-daughter . . . no big deal. We had a great relationship. I loved
him. I would not do anything in the world to hurt him. If I knew it was going to happen before, I would have done everything in my power to stop it, I would have told them. Just because I would never do anything to hurt Lieth or my mom. Lieth was the only dad I ever knew.”

  When asked if it bothered her that so many people were still suspicious of her, Angela’s voice took on its first trace of genuine anger.

  “Yeah, it does,” she said. “The only thing that pisses me off is the people that knew me before. The people who didn’t know me, I could care less.”

  The continuing suspicions of attorneys and investigators did upset her, however.

  “That pisses me off because they’re the ones who talked to Chris and Neal and Moog. They’re the ones who got the story before any of us knew about it. And they can sit there and have the facts laid out in front of them and still suspect an innocent party. That’s what pisses me off. I had faith in, you know, you’re innocent until proven guilty. I never realized there was such a thing as you’re guilty anyway, whether you’re innocent or not. Also, it pisses me off that Moog won’t say anything.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s the one who can say why nothing happened to me. He’s the one who can actually—and Chris, too. Chris can say if I had something to do with it or not. It was his plan. It was his idea. And he knows I had nothing to do with it.”

  Then she said, “I’d like to go under hypnosis. I’d like to do that. I would do that to see if there’s anything there that I know. Because I don’t remember any of it. If there’s anything there, I don’t know it.”

  And then, as the conversation shifted to Bonnie, Angela became very subdued. Her voice was soft and sad. She spoke more slowly.

  “If there’s one person in this world I would do anything for, it’s my mom. I would not let anyone hurt her. She’s my life, and I don’t know what I’d do without her, honestly. If she would have died, I would be in a mental hospital somewhere.