Cruel Doubt

  Taylor leaned on Daniel Duyk a little harder. Duyk said, yeah, he’d heard something: he’d heard that Upchurch was supposed to start a job working for a housepainter. There’d been a flier posted on a campus bulletin board. Taylor checked the board, but the flier was gone. He looked up housepainters in the yellow pages. There were, he said, “about nine thousand” of them. Raleigh was not at all like Little Washington.

  Christy Newsome, the probation officer, said she’d heard Upchurch was living in a shelter for the homeless. They checked shelters near the campus. No Upchurch, and nobody recognized his picture.

  The rumors and reported sightings continued. There was a witch living in a house on Boylan Street who knew Upchurch, but when Taylor went there, she said she didn’t know him, and she didn’t appear to be a witch, though Taylor had to admit he might not know a real witch when he saw one.

  A Raleigh policeman told him a black guy had been in a fight with Upchurch right out on Hillsborough Street only two days before. Then Taylor was called by a police informant who said he’d actually seen Upchurch that very day, but when he’d approached, Moog had run away.

  They were getting closer. Taylor could feel it. On May 19, they staked out a house where Upchurch was supposed to turn up at a party. A big party, but no Upchurch. They went back to Matt Schwetz’s house, where they found a note taped to the door. It said: “Matt—Just stopped by for a second. Headed for the cellar for a while.” It was signed, “The Killer.”

  18

  On May 22, James Upchurch was arrested near the NC State campus. When first approached, he had run. When eventually caught, he’d given a fake name. Clearly, this was a young man apprehensive about something.

  Young and Taylor spoke to him at nine P.M. in an interrogation room on the fifth floor of the Raleigh police department, where he’d been charged with violation of the terms of his probation.

  His hair was dyed pink, or maybe orange, and it was the longest, scraggliest hair Young and Taylor had seen in quite some time, but aside from his appearance, Upchurch—after all that hunting—was a disappointment.

  They’d expected him to be hostile and resistant; else why would he have tried so hard to avoid them? Instead, they found a cordial, forthcoming, intelligent young man who talked freely and gave the impression of being sincerely interested in helping them.

  Yes, he’d heard that Chris Pritchard’s stepfather had been murdered. Terrible thing. Pritchard had never really seemed to recover. After the murder, he’d been “paranoid and upset” and had carried a long-bladed knife with him around the campus. Since he’d dropped out of school, Upchurch hadn’t seen him.

  He explained that he’d first met Chris in late May or early June, after posting a notice on a campus bulletin board, advertising for Dungeons & Dragons players. Chris had been one of eight or nine people who’d responded and was one of a half dozen or so who’d formed a group to play the game regularly. As he became better acquainted with Chris, he started hanging out in Chris’s room, which was two floors below his own, in Lee Dorm. The first time he’d gone there, the room was full of marijuana smoke. Everyone there was smoking pot.

  Soon, Chris had grown “bored” with marijuana and moved on to cocaine, but this proved too expensive, even though, as he’d stated often, his family had “more than a million.”

  From cocaine, Chris had switched to LSD, mostly because it was cheaper. After taking his first acid trip in Upchurch’s presence, Chris had become infatuated with the drug and had begged Upchurch to get him more. The morning after the night he’d taken his first hit, he took his second. As summer progressed, Chris began to do acid “constantly.” He spent so much on drugs that he wasn’t always able to pay in advance and wound up owing money to people Upchurch described as “shady, ex-con types.”

  The fact was, Upchurch said sadly, Chris had a problem with drugs. Upchurch had found it worrisome. Eventually, he said, he’d felt obliged to warn Chris about the dangers of addiction.

  But then again, drugs were a campus-wide problem at NC State. Upchurch explained that he’d come from a small town in Caswell County and hadn’t been prepared for the Sodom-and-Gomorrah-like atmosphere he’d found at State. An insecure kid such as Pritchard, he explained, “someone who always worried, ‘Do they like me? Am I gonna be accepted?’” could easily get into trouble at a place like State. Fortunately for himself, Upchurch explained, he was unconcerned about social acceptance. He marched to the beat of his own drummer. He was his own man, his own boss; the kind of person, he said—hoping this wouldn’t sound immodest—that Chris Pritchard had always wanted to be.

  He said that Chris, while likable and outgoing, also was strange and eccentric. He did everything to excess and in a show-offy manner. Like, whenever he got any acid, he’d run around the dorm and tell everyone he had it and ask if anyone wanted any. And he would always blow the limit on his credit cards.

  Upchurch said he had a vivid recollection of his July 4 trip to South Carolina with Chris. He said Chris’s relatives down there were “real rednecks” and “very rough-type people” and that members of the crowd they hung out with were “always talking about knowing people that would kill other people.”

  Chris’s aunt Ramona had proudly showed Upchurch her .357 magnum the night they arrived. Upchurch found the “rednecks” poor company, so he spent most of his time in a motel with a girl he met. Chris spent most of his time with a girl who had brothers who were “criminals.” Chris was trying to get into a drug-dealing business with them. Chris was “the type of person who wanted to get into the drug business and wanted to make money dealing drugs.” Chris told Upchurch more than once that he’d met people that weekend in South Carolina who could “supply him with anything and in any amount that he wanted.”

  He said Chris seemed fond of his natural father, Steve Pritchard, and quite obviously loved his mother, who would call school several times a week to check on him. Whenever she called, he’d “hit her up” for more money. He added that Chris and his stepfather “did not seem to get along too well with each other” and seldom spoke.

  Still, he had a hard time believing that Chris could possibly have hired anyone to kill his parents. Some of those characters Chris had met in South Carolina, though, were probably capable of murder. He said he was sorry to hear that Chris seemed to be a suspect, but he could understand how it could happen, because Chris was such a weird, flaky kid, and you never knew what he’d do next. Plus, there was always all that talk about how much money his parents had, and how much easier Chris’s life would be if he had it himself.

  For example, one night he was with Chris and a group of other friends at the Golden Corral restaurant just off campus. The bill had come to over $100 and Chris had insisted on treating everyone. Someone—Upchurch could not remember who—mentioned that if Chris kept spending money at that rate, he’d have to “off” his parents in order to get their money. Chris replied, “Yeah, I have thought about that a few times.”

  But that wasn’t unusual, Upchurch went on. Every two or three days someone would suggest to Chris that he “off his parents and inherit the money,” but it had always seemed to be said as a joke.

  Regarding the weekend of the murder itself, Upchurch’s recollection grew hazy. He said he might have been studying for an English exam but wasn’t sure. He thought Chris had called him the night before and asked him to come to his room and play a card game called Spades. He thought Kirsten had also called to invite him, but he hadn’t gone because he didn’t like to play Spades.

  But really, he couldn’t be sure. The fact was, when it came to that weekend, his memory failed him. He just couldn’t remember what he’d done, where he’d been, who he’d been with. All those summer weekends, he said somewhat apologetically, tended to blur.

  And, he added—projecting a sense of shame and remorse when he admitted to this—even he, James Upchurch, had been doing a fa
ir amount of drugs that summer. Even he had slipped into bad habits. He was not, therefore, able to remember every last little detail with perfect clarity. But, he repeated brightly, quite possibly he’d spent the weekend studying.

  After the murder, he was so concerned about Chris that he contacted several friends on campus and enlisted their support in a campaign to keep Chris away from acid, fearing that after the trauma he’d just undergone, he would be susceptible to a bad trip.

  There had been one night, though, when Chris had taken acid and, indeed, had had a very bad trip, screaming that he thought he was dying and begging for help, and Upchurch had to stay with him almost all night, talking him through it. After that, Chris seemed to stop taking drugs, though he continued drinking heavily, and of course he was acting “paranoid” and carrying that long-bladed knife everywhere he went, saying he was afraid someone might try to kill him, the way they’d killed his stepfather.

  Chris had told everyone he was dropping out of school because he was under psychological stress and because he “had to go home and take care of his mother.” This, however, was “bullshit.” The real reason was that Chris was already flunking again and wanted to drop out before he got kicked out.

  In September, Upchurch had begun living with Daniel Duyk. They would often discuss the murder and try to figure out what had happened. They were both pretty sure that Chris himself hadn’t done the killing because he’d seemed to like his parents—at least his mother—and also because he didn’t have the guts. And they had a hard time figuring the motivation because they thought Chris’s parents would have been smart enough to put their money in a trust fund or something of that nature, so neither Chris nor his sister would get it all at once if the parents should die.

  What they finally came up with was that Steve Pritchard—whom neither of them had ever met—had probably carried out the whole thing, probably still jealous at Bonnie for remarrying and even more jealous at her having all that money, and figuring eventually, as natural father to the children, he’d be able to take control of the trust.

  The other thought Upchurch had—and this he seemed to confide almost reluctantly—was maybe Angela and Daniel Duyk had been involved. He had the impression that Duyk was attracted to Angela, but recalled that he’d once described her as “evil.” When Upchurch had asked why he’d said that, Duyk replied it was because when he’d spoken to her about the murder, she hadn’t shown any emotion.

  As for his own difficulties with the law, Upchurch said he’d been a little wild when he was younger, but he’d really matured a lot since. His probation difficulties had begun when he’d overslept one morning and missed a meeting with his probation officer. Fearful that the probation would be revoked, he’d foolishly gone into hiding. Then, when he heard the law from Little Washington was looking for him, wanting to talk about a murder, he’d gotten scared. Not scared because of any involvement, but worried that Washington officials would turn him in to the probation department if they found him.

  He apologized for having been so hard to locate. It was just that he’d dropped out of school for a while and was kind of moving around from place to place. But if there was anything else he could ever do to help them, he’d be glad to. He was working now for Triple A Student Painters in Raleigh, a company that hired college students to paint houses in the summer, and was living at the Sylvan Park apartments, 3903 Marcom Street, sharing quarters with his cousin, Kenyatta, from Caswell County, and Kenyatta’s boyfriend, who was an old friend of his from high school named Neal Henderson, and another guy.

  “It was a major-league letdown,” Taylor said. “It was so hard to tell where he was coming from. You couldn’t look at him and tell what he was thinking. He was just this cool, detached, real skinny dude with this real funny look on his face.”

  The interview, in fact, caused Lewis Young to “seriously question whether we were on the right track. We came away a lot less suspicious of him. I guess mostly because of his demeanor. He was so friendly and open, not arrogant. A hundred eighty degrees from Pritchard in terms of the personality we saw. Drugs, yes. He obviously had a problem with drugs and he would have talked to us about drugs for a week. But he did not come across as the kind of person we would normally consider a suspect in a murder case.”

  Still, Young remained convinced that the answer would eventually be found in Raleigh. He decided to “keep things stirred up at NC State. Make repeated contacts. Keep coming and coming. Make somebody feel, ‘They’re in our ballpark now. It’s time to get on the other team.’ We knew all we needed was one. Just from the map, we were convinced there was more than one person involved. And if we could get the first one, we knew he could give us the others.”

  * * *

  On June 1, bringing John Taylor with him, Chief Crone traveled to Raleigh to speak to Upchurch for himself. Moog had been released after his probation violation, but was living under a house-arrest system that required him to wear an electronic bracelet around his ankle, so his whereabouts could be monitored at all times.

  He was still living in the Sylvan Park apartments—camping out, actually, on the living room floor of the apartment rented by his high school classmate Neal Henderson.

  There were games—board games, fantasy games—spread all over the floor. Axis & Allies, Dungeons & Dragons, World War I, The Civil War, The War of 1812, War of the Worlds. You name it, past or future, if it involved battling and bloodshed and fantasy, it was there.

  “What it looked like,” John Crone said, “was like they took thirty games out of their closet and threw them all over the floor. The apartment was an absolute pigsty.” Upchurch and his friend Henderson, a shy, awkward kid who looked and walked a little bit like a turtle, were there when the two officers arrived.

  Upchurch seemed surprised—even a bit shaken—to see investigators from Little Washington again. He apparently thought he’d disposed of that little piece of unpleasantness.

  “My gut feeling,” Crone said later, “was that this guy couldn’t be the murderer, but seeing this involvement in all these games—the same kind of obsession Pritchard had—I felt maybe he could tell us who did it. So I decided to take him outside and shake him up a little bit. Not physically, you understand—never physically. Just see how much it would take to make the boy retch. Because maybe if he starting retching, he would talk.”

  Crone and Taylor, much less amiable than Young and Taylor had been a week earlier, told Upchurch to step outside. They led him to Chief Crone’s car and climbed inside. Taylor sat, unsmiling, behind the wheel, with Upchurch next to him. Crone sat in the backseat.

  When they told him they were closing in on Pritchard, Upchurch said, as he had in May, that he didn’t think any of the talk about offing Chris’s parents had been serious. But, if they thought it was, the person they should talk to was Daniel Duyk, the only truly “unbalanced” member of their game-playing group.

  “That’s enough,” Crone said suddenly. “Stop right there.” Upchurch had been pointing them in any and every direction that led away from himself: from thugs in South Carolina to Daniel Duyk, to Chris and Angela, and to their natural father, Steve Pritchard.

  Crone wanted to shake the kid up. “Show him the pictures,” the chief barked. Upchurch had a smirk on his face.

  Taylor leaned across the front seat and stuck a picture of the bloody, beaten body of Lieth Von Stein squarely into Upchurch’s range of vision.

  “Jesus, this is serious shit,” Upchurch said, still smirking but trying to turn his head away.

  “Look at the goddamned picture,” John Crone said. “This man was brutally beaten and stabbed to death.”

  Upchurch kept glancing at the picture out of the corner of his eye, but leaned farther from it, toward the car door.

  “If you’re gonna get sick,” John Taylor said, “open that door and puke on the sidewalk. Don’t vomit in the chief’s car. I got to rid
e in that seat going home.”

  Upchurch paled and began to perspire, but the smirk never entirely left his face. Nor did he have anything new to say. It wasn’t his thing, man. He didn’t know anything about it.

  When they walked back inside with him, Crone turned to Henderson, who seemed just a blob in the background, and said, “By the way, what we’re trying to do here, in case no one has told you, is find out who committed a murder. It was Chris Prtichard’s stepfather who was murdered, and we already know that Pritchard helped to arrange it. What we want now is anybody who knows anything about Dungeons and Dragons. We think the murder might have been just a scenario that got out of hand. Somebody on drugs might have taken it too far without really meaning to. We have no reason to think it was premeditated.

  “But the fact is, a man got killed, and we’re close to finding out who killed him. If anybody knows anything, pass the word around that we’re ready to listen to the first person who talks. But the first person is the only person we’ll listen to. Our ship is about to pull out, and we’ve got room for one person, and one person only, on board.”

  * * *

  The same day, Lewis Young was trying a different approach. He was speaking, off the record, to Wade Smith.

  Young knew that by having accused her of deliberately covering up for her son, he had forever alienated Bonnie Von Stein. But he still believed that her cooperation could be tremendously helpful.

  He remained convinced that Chris was the link to the killer, just as he’d said on May 2. But he also knew Chris had not committed the murder himself. That might be a bargaining chip. Maybe his involvement had been innocent. Maybe he’d made a map as part of a D&D game and then someone else, acting without Chris’s approval or even awareness, had independently decided to drive to Washington and turn fantasy into blood-drenched reality.