Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  “I had nothing to do with it. And I’m glad that she’s the one person that believes me. That honestly believes me. That has no doubt. And she may, but she hides it very well if she does.”

  As the talk ended, focusing on the subject of Chris, Angela’s voice became shaky and tears came again.

  “The reason I haven’t talked to him about it is because I don’t want to. I don’t want to because after I do, I’ll hate him. There’s no doubt in my mind. He killed my dad. He almost killed my mom. He’s my brother and I want to love him because he’s my brother, but I just can’t. So I just don’t want to talk to him about it.”

  Actually sniffling now, Angela said, “I love him because he admitted it, but I hate him because he did it.”

  And then she said that in the year and a half since he’d been in prison, and even though he was now only two hours away, she’d never once been to visit him alone.

  “I just never have,” she said, “because I’m afraid it’s going to come to talking about it, and I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  * * *

  The road back to Asheville from the house where Angela was living—in a small town where northeast Tennessee meets southwest Virginia—starts out like any other highway. It’s four lanes at the outskirts of Johnson City, Tennessee. Then, looking ahead, you get your first glimpse of the always hazy, misty Blue Ridge Mountains rising to the south and west.

  The road narrows to two lanes and then begins a thirty-mile climb up a mountain. There’s no passing here. The road winds through small crevices. Sometimes, there’s the illusion that the road will slam you right into the side of the mountain, but then it will gently groan around a curve and shoot you off toward another pass.

  Eventually, it takes you up and over the ridge and deposits you back in North Carolina. It’s a beautiful road, a great road for thinking.

  And one of the thoughts that comes to mind is how ironic it is that these two sad, forlorn children, once so close to each other, and so cut off from all else that they’d hug silently for hours on end, are now separated not only by such a mountain, but by the indelible horror of July 25, 1988.

  * * *

  Unless, at some dark, subterranean level, that horror has drawn them closer together.

  Chris wrote to me on June 21, 1991, in response to further questions about Angela: “The questions you have are legitimate and they deserve legitimate answers. But your point about my sister’s involvement is wrong. It is valid, but wrong. I wasn’t at the house during the murder, but I do know my sister. While in high school, little short of throwing water on her or bodily removing her from bed would wake her up. It is thus possible for me to believe that she slept through it all. She had no prior knowledge of what happened.”

  Later in the letter, he wrote, “I got so sick of lying during the period following my dad’s murder, I vowed to never lie again. I would not actively or consciously lie, even if my life depended on it. I can say that with assurance.”

  But just before closing, he added, “In all honesty, if my sister had been involved and I knew about it, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  46

  Three months earlier Chris had written in response to my asking if he spent much time thinking about why it was that he was in prison.

  He replied:

  Do I think about what happened to put me here? Yes and no. Let me explain. At first, all I did was think about everything that happened during the previous two years. Most of the things that came to mind severely depressed and disgusted me. My first two or three weeks in prison left me unable to hold down any food. During this time, suicide was still an option. I was receiving Serentil during this period and I had been collecting it in my cell, under the nose of the nurse who “supervised” me while I took it. Before my imprisonment, I had researched this medication to see what an overdose would do. The book I used said it would put me into a coma just before I died. As you know, I did not go through with it.

  The guilt I had been hiding for the previous year and a half had been exposed in full. My family and friends knew everything and they loved and supported me anyway. In my first two months, I got over 150 letters and cards from them. I averaged seven letters a day from them after the first three weeks. This overwhelmed me emotionally. It was inconceivable to me, at the time, that anyone could love me. My self-esteem had never been high and was at its lowest point. The guilt I felt was unbearable.

  My thoughts ran along these lines: I killed my father and ruined my family and friends’ lives. My life had been handed to me on a gold plate and I rejected it. To add insult, I spat upon what was handed me. Every time my mom came to visit, all I could see was her lying in intensive care. The only good thing I could see was that I was no longer out there to further injure, emotionally, those that I loved. It seemed I only brought misery to those who tried to love me.

  No matter how much my family showed me their love . . . for a long time I simply could not forgive myself. I felt I deserved to die. My mom kept coming to see me and I eventually snapped out of my depression. I saw that my family and friends had forgiven me. My next step was to forgive myself.

  I have to do that all the time. Whenever I think back at the damage I did, I get depressed. After I let those thoughts torture me awhile, I get to thinking about how everyone who matters treats me. God has forgiven me and so have my family and friends. Therefore, I must forgive myself.

  I still struggle with my past, though not as often. My insane past made me sane. Everything is much different for me now. I don’t worry about things anymore—I think about them. No longer am I a confused, insecure, emotional child. I can feel free to let my emotions show, although that opportunity doesn’t arise very often here.

  I deserve to be punished and will accept the punishment I have, but damn it, no one will benefit from my imprisonment! I can do very little from here to teach other people how to avoid this place. I’m not whining about my time, nor do I stay depressed about it. I miss a lot of things about society, most of all being with my family and friends.

  There is a flip side to this prison coin, however. Had I not come here, I probably wouldn’t have discovered my family and friends. Their love was ever before me—as was God’s—but I had to come here to find it. In a sense I am more free now than I was when I was out in the world. I have plenty of time to search my soul. I’m finding out who I really am, deep beyond the surface. I like what I find. Prison has, in fact, set me free.

  From certain quarters, however, forgiveness has been slow to come. There is, of course, Angela. But there are also Bonnie’s two sisters, Kitty and Sylvia, who do not wish to see Chris.

  Sylvia says she admires Bonnie for being able to visit him, but she herself cannot. She simply cannot forgive him for what he’s done. This has even caused her to stop teaching Sunday school at the Methodist church in Welcome.

  “I cannot stand in front of a group of people and teach forgiveness if I myself cannot forgive.”

  This is not something about which she’s been able to talk to Bonnie, she said, because “Bonnie is a very private person.”

  And then there is Bonnie’s brother, George, who, this past June, reflected on all that has happened since the murder.

  “I’ve been in touch with Bonnie a lot more,” he said. “For the simple fact that I know I almost lost her. And that if I had lost her”—here, already, he paused, his eyes filling with tears—“I never would be able to just pick up the phone and call her again.”

  He can still vividly recall going from his early-morning meeting with Lewis Young, where he first pointed the finger of suspicion at Chris, to the hospital where he looked down upon Bonnie in her bed.

  “Boy,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “It was like, ‘Sis, I hope . . . I hope . . . I hope what we’re thinking or feeling is not true. And I hope you won’t think bad of us. I don’t want to be the
heavy. I don’t want to be the one who says, “Look, your son did it,” or, “I squealed on your son,” or, “I even had something to do with putting the police on your son.” I don’t want to be the bad one here.’

  “But I did it because I did not want anything to happen to my sister. My first concern was for her. I was thinking, ‘I hope this is not true. But I’ve got to say how I feel, what I see, for your safety. I hope it’s not true.’ But at this point you can’t leave any stone unturned, any suspicions. You cannot take any chances.

  “I didn’t care what anybody else thought. When it came to her safety, I could not take that chance. I would rather be an outcast and have her hate me for the rest of my life, not speak to me, knowing that she’s going to live. And they’re not going to get to her again.

  “And to this day,” he said, tears overflowing his eyes, “I’m not sure it won’t happen again.”

  After a pause, he was asked why.

  “Because,” he said, “I’ve seen the bullshit letters from Chris. And I worry that the strict father-figure is no longer there. ‘There’s no one to tell me no. I can get around Mom.’ It’s almost like, ‘So, I’ll cool my heels and I’ll be out in a while and I’ll go back and I’ll get everything. No matter what.’ ”

  He said he had not yet shared this misgiving with Bonnie because he did not want to upset her further. Besides, it was a hard thing to talk about.

  But he said he’d neither written to Chris nor visited him. “My mother does,” he said. “Mom is just like Bonnie. She believes that he realizes he’s done wrong and has mended his ways. That he’s going to follow the right path. I’m sorry. I will not. I just cannot. I’m from the old school. I just don’t believe that. I have not written him. I have not seen him since the trial. It’s something I cannot condone. To try to kill your own mother—that’s probably the worst possible thing someone can do.”

  His comment reminded me of a rhetorical question Jean Spaulding had once asked: “If he had gotten away with it, would he have any sense of remorse?”

  And even Bonnie’s mother—little four-foot-nine-inch, sixty-eight-year-old Polly Bates—said forgiveness had come hard for her.

  “I probably spent more time with Chris in those first couple of years after Steve left than she did,” Bonnie’s mother told me one evening in Welcome.

  “What I remember most is how he would just lie right there on the floor, screaming and crying. There was just no way to make him stop. I’d tell him over and over again that his mommy was coming home, but there was nothing you could do to calm him down. Angela, she’d never say a word. Just sit there silent as a ghost. And when Chris wasn’t crying, and Bonnie was late getting home, the two of them would just sit there on the hearth for hours, all huddled up together, neither one of them saying a word, just hugging each other. And I’d always tell them, ‘Don’t worry, your mom will be here soon.’

  “Everywhere we’d take those kids, Angela would sit as still and quiet as a statue, but Chris, he’d walk up to complete strangers—just somebody filling our tank at a gas station—and he’d say, ‘My daddy left me.’ If I heard it once, I heard the poor boy say it a hundred times, every time he met somebody new—‘My daddy left me’—those would be the first words out of his mouth.

  “I think George and I were the only stability that poor boy had growing up. He loved his granddaddy so much. They’d plant watermelon seeds, and he’d be so proud when his watermelon came up better than his granddaddy’s. Then, of course, they’d go fishing in the creek. George had a very special love for that boy, which is what made it all the harder for him to contend with what happened.

  “This was why we were so happy when Lieth came into Bonnie’s life. She’d tried so hard, and it seemed she’d had such little happiness. But Lieth was wonderful to her. And to me, too. When I was sick in the hospital, he’d call me two times a week, asking if there was anything I needed. He would tell me he loved me, and I really believe that he meant it.

  “But Bonnie? Believe me, he was the light of her life. So, I tell Chris I love him, but it’s hard. Because I have too much to forget. I can’t blame anyone for turning away.”

  And then Bonnie’s mother, like her brother and like Angela, began to cry.

  “We went to see Lieth before he was cremated,” she said. “And every night, when I go to sleep, that’s the image I still see: poor Lieth, his head split open in three places.

  “So I write to Chris, and I tell him I love him. But every time I say those words, I see Lieth lying there with his head split.”

  She was crying harder now, but had one more thing she wanted to say.

  “All I know is I feel so bad for Bonnie I could die.”

  * * *

  And Wade Smith, who’d brought me into all this, had one last summation he wanted to give concerning Bonnie.

  “If you could attach colors to grief,” he said, “Bonnie’s grief would be a different color, a far more intense color, a deeper pain. She began with the grief of a loved one killed violently, and it went downhill from there. And it continued to go downhill to the end, when she suffered a kind of ultimate numbness over the realization that her own flesh and blood had killed her husband.

  “At that point, there was no place to which she could retreat. All her options were gone. She could either die or she could somehow manage to live through it. And she chose to just keep on going.

  “And in that process I came to admire her and respect her and like her. And to believe that she was a human being of enormous worth, of tremendous personal strength.

  “She didn’t whine. She didn’t come in and sit and weep for hours. She simply quietly took it with what I perceive to be a real dignity. So I see her as a very sympathetic figure. A woman who has suffered just about as much as a human being can tolerate.

  “Are you going to hold it against a person who reaches inside for strength, and who bears this burden with great dignity and with real courage? No one I know of ever had a harder, heavier cross to bear than Bonnie did. This cross Bonnie was bearing, it had twists to it that were just unbelievable. The twists jerked her all over the place, jerked her emotions from side to side. Yanked in one direction loving her husband; yanked in another direction loving her son; yanked in another direction with Bonnie herself at first a suspect and having to be polygraphed; yanked in another direction when her father died; yanked in another direction when she had to pay for the defense of her son. It put her in a place where she had to choose to believe her son when he said he didn’t do it. She had to gradually learn the truth. It might have been easier for her had she learned it all at once. But we let her learn it over a period of time.

  “It’s possible in her heart she knew. But I never held it against her for refusing as long as she could to believe that her son would do this to her husband, and to her. I thought that was natural and logical. And that even if she held out longer in that belief than we would think, upon reflection, was wise, we can forgive her for that.

  “We should forgive her for that. This boy was her son and she had a right to wait as long as she could before she yielded to the evidence and started to believe that maybe he did it.

  “When I think of Bonnie,” Wade said, “I always picture the gods as having, for their entertainment, conceived this remarkable scenario in which they could test her. Test the limits of her endurance. Of anyone’s endurance.

  “The gods get bored because they have everything they want and can do anything they want. And when they get bored, they are the most dangerous to us. Because then they make up games and they play games with us.

  “They got bored and used Bonnie. I can picture them devising this very complicated, convoluted, weird situation which would test her: where they could enjoy watching her skitter across the hot landscape, watch her dance, see how much she can take.

  “And when, at the end, it appeared tha
t she just might be making it, the gods said, ‘This won’t do,’ and they introduced a new wrinkle, which was to take her father in an ironic way. To not let him die of a heart attack or in peace, but to let him be killed by a tree. To add a bizarre twist to hurt her even more.

  “I will always think of Bonnie as a little droplet of water skittering across a hot skillet that had been devised by the gods. And the gods were dancing.”

  47

  Until June of 1991, when she had her phone number changed, Bonnie kept Chris’s voice on the answering machine. So that almost three years after he’d tried to have her killed, and almost eighteen months after he’d started serving his prison term, you could still hear his voice by calling Bonnie.

  “I’m not there yet,” she told me in June, “but I can see that the road to recovery is open. I know I’ve still got a lot of anger. Anger towards Chris. And I know that someday I will have to deal with it. But I’m not ready to do it yet. I know it’s there but I’m not ready to deal with it. It’s a lot easier to lay down new linoleum, or stay up until three in the morning, putting a fresh coat of paint in the kitchen. But I do know, now, that that day must come.

  “It’s something I’m working on. Just like with Angela. I’d like to have her start to see Dr. Spaulding. I think Dr. Spaulding would be able to draw Angela out in a way that no one else ever has. I think that might do Angela a lot of good. She doesn’t need this weighing her down for years to come.”

  Bonnie was well aware of how many people, in and out of her family, still had qualms about Angela’s role. But Bonnie herself had no doubts. As Angela sensed, Bonnie believed in her and trusted her and wanted only to find a way to help her heal.

  * * *

  In one late-night conversation with me, Bonnie asked suddenly, her voice faltering, “Why did Lieth get stabbed in the back? He’d been sitting straight up, facing his attacker head-on, fighting for his life. Why did he get stabbed in the back?”