Cruel Doubt

  Still, it wasn’t so bad at the restaurant. At least they were surrounded by other people, and though no one could eat anything, they had the distraction of their food. Only when they got back downtown, to SBI headquarters, and led Henderson into an interrogation room did he look as if he was having second thoughts.

  Then, when Mitchell Norton did finally arrive, he announced that he himself would not speak to Henderson for fear of later being called as a witness, which could have prevented him from serving as prosecutor at a trial. He announced that only his assistant, Keith Mason, would speak to Henderson.

  “Oh, boy,” Crone said later, “I had a hard time coping with that. We wait five hours and then the guy won’t even talk to him!” Norton remained at the opposite end of a hallway, not even introducing himself, while Crone, Taylor, Young, Mason, and Henderson all filed into an office.

  By now it was almost ten P.M. Six hours had passed since Neal Henderson had said he wanted to tell the story of his involvement in the murder of Lieth Von Stein. So far, no one had been willing to let him. Henderson was beginning to look discouraged.

  He looked even more discouraged when Keith Mason, gently and politely, explained that they could not offer any sort of plea bargain, no matter what he might say. They were making no promises. If he wanted to talk, he should talk, but he would have to take it on faith that talking would be in his best interest, because any information given in return for a promise of leniency could be considered less credible by a jury. Of course, a judge might someday take his cooperation into account when imposing a sentence—if matters ever progressed to that point—but there could be no promises made even about that.

  Henderson began shaking his head and looking around the room. It didn’t happen this way on TV. On TV—which Henderson watched quite a bit of—you came forward and said you wanted to confess and they signed a piece of paper promising to let you off easy, and then you told your story and then the cops were your buddies—or at least they treated you with courtesy—and the whole thing ended, if not happily, at least with no alarming consequences.

  It had been one thing talking to John Crone, whom Henderson considered a genuinely nice man, in the comforting din and fluorescent light of Wendy’s on a sunny Friday afternoon in late spring.

  Now late at night, sitting in some sort of interrogation room that came out of a bad dream somewhere, here was some assistant district attorney they’d suddenly sprung on him—a young lawyer with a manner every bit as pleasant as John Crone’s, but a total stranger, nonetheless—telling him that being first to come forward might do him no good at all.

  “You could tell,” Crone said later, “that he was really getting depressed, upset, in a panic. The very thing I’d been trying to avoid. So I said to the others, ‘Why don’t you guys go out for a while and let me talk to the boy.’ I could see he was getting a little spooked, not just by what Keith had told him, but by the fact we had him outnumbered four to one. And after all, I’d been the one he’d spoken to in the first place.”

  When the others left, Crone asked Henderson, in the softest tone possible, if he understood why no deals were possible. Glumly, Henderson said yes. Then Crone reminded him that he’d said earlier that he wanted to talk about this to “get it off his mind,” and not simply in return for some sort of plea bargain.

  “You can still do that, Neal,” Crone said. “You can still talk just to make yourself feel better.”

  Henderson stared at the floor, saying nothing. To Crone, he seemed not simply disappointed or frightened, but despondent.

  “I’ve got a son about your age,” Crone said. “And I’ll tell you the truth. If you were my own son, I’d tell you to do the right thing. And I think you know what the right thing is.”

  Henderson, whose own father had left him at an early age—and, like Chris Pritchard’s, had kept up only sporadic and unsatisfying contact—looked up at John Crone’s concerned and not unkind face.

  Later, he would say, “I’d always pictured policemen as guys ten feet tall with blank faces. Chief Crone wasn’t like that. He was just a nice man who really seemed to care about me.”

  Henderson said, “Well, I guess there’s still some hope.”

  “There’s always hope,” Crone said. “There can’t be any promises, but there’s always hope.”

  Henderson nodded.

  “Are you going to talk to us?” Crone asked quietly.

  Henderson nodded again.

  “Well, do me one favor, Neal. No lies. Give us the truth or nothing at all. Will you promise me that?”

  “Yes,” Henderson said tonelessly, “I’ll tell the truth.”

  Crone paused a moment. There was silence in the room. The two of them could hear muffled voices from the hall.

  “Who do you want to tell your story to?” Crone asked.

  “You,” Henderson said. “You, and I guess John Taylor, too.”

  Crone stepped into the hallway and informed the others of the situation. Then Crone and Taylor stepped back into the interrogation room and Taylor formally read Henderson his rights and had him sign a form acknowledging that he waived them. Crone then asked, for the record, whether Henderson had been promised any kind of reward or deal, or had been threatened in any way, as an inducement to persuade him to talk. He acknowledged that he hadn’t. Crone then asked him to start telling his story. When a question seemed called for, Crone asked it. Taylor took notes.

  “The first time through,” Crone said, “it was just the bare bones. The whole thing couldn’t have taken him five minutes.” (John Taylor’s notes indicate that this first interview took twenty minutes, but after the day Crone had been through, it was not surprising that his sense of time might have been slightly askew.)

  “When he was through, I told him that Lewis Young had been working on this case for almost a year and would undoubtedly need to ask a lot of questions. I asked him if he’d agree to talk to Lewis. He said yes, so I called Lewis in.

  “At this point, it was after ten P.M. and all of a sudden it hit me: ‘Where the hell is my wife?’ I quick called the highway patrol and had them check the Wendy’s at the Apex exit, where she had said she’d be waiting, and they went and looked and called back saying there wasn’t any Wendy’s at the Apex exit of I-40.

  “Well, goddamn, I had no idea where she was. I called my in-laws down in Mooresville and asked, ‘Have you heard from Cindy? I don’t know where she is. Has she called you? Is she there?’ First, my father-in-law thought I was joking. Then he goes into a panic. And by then I’m worried as hell, too. The biggest confession of my whole damned career and I can’t find my wife.

  “Well, it’s eleven o’clock before the highway police call back and say, yeah, there is a Wendy’s, but it’s a mile down the road, not right at the exit. So I say, ‘For Christ’s sake, go check it, please.’ And they called back and said, yeah, she’s there, she’s been there for hours, and she’s pretty upset.

  “So I had to have Mitchell Norton, the DA, drive me out there. What the hell, it was the least he could do, he wasn’t going to talk to Henderson anyway. We get there and Cindy’s on the phone to her parents, crying.

  “And Christ, her whole family had been so worried all night, when we finally get to Mooresville about two o’clock in the morning, she starts crying again and my father-in-law sees this and he’s so pissed he doesn’t want to talk to me.

  “Here, I’ve just gotten a confession in the biggest case of my life, and it’s looking like I’m going to have to sleep in my car.”

  Young and John Taylor questioned Henderson from ten-twenty until eleven-thirty P.M. Then they broke for half an hour. But Lewis Young was far from finished.

  As Crone had said, for almost a year this case had been the primary focus of Young’s professional life. Now, here, for the first time, was someone willing and apparently able to tell what had
happened.

  Young was starved, famished for detail. There was no point—no matter how small, no matter how seemingly insignificant—that he was not obsessed with the desire to know more about.

  They started up again at midnight. Henderson was tired now, drained both emotionally and physically. But Young was energized, growing stronger as the night wore on, high on the adrenaline rush that comes to good cops when they’re finally—for real—breaking open their biggest case.

  For most of the hours after midnight, it was just Young and Henderson, one on one. Crone had gone to Mooresville and Taylor was down the hall, conferring with Mitchell Norton and Keith Mason about the next steps to take in light of what Henderson had said.

  It was three twenty-five A.M. when Young finally let Henderson go. John Taylor drove him, dazed and weary, to his apartment. They had decided not to arrest Henderson while Upchurch was still at large. “That’s all we need,” Taylor had said earlier to the district attorney. “Upchurch reads in the paper that we’ve got Henderson in custody and we’ll have to go to Libya to find that boy again.”

  Henderson had not been a target of the investigation. Upchurch had no reason to fear he would talk.

  Exhausted, Henderson had little to say as Taylor drove. But as they pulled up in front of the apartment—with Taylor reminding him not to go anywhere, that they would be back in a few hours to bring him to Little Washington so he could show them just what had happened where—Henderson looked across the front seat and said, as if this could somehow make everything all right:

  “You have to understand. I really didn’t expect it to happen. When I drove down there, I really didn’t expect to see blood.”

  20

  The following Tuesday, June 13, still unaware of even the existence of Neal Henderson, Bonnie drove from Winston-Salem to Washington to work with two friends, making little porcelain dolls that she gave every year to her nieces and nephews at Christmas down in Welcome.

  This was so comforting to her: porcelain dolls; decent, quiet, God-fearing people; all the old values with which she’d been brought up. They were like her cats and her rooster. Like poor dumb animals everywhere. They loved and trusted and needed you and would never lie to you or make emotional demands that you could not meet.

  If the dark fantasy world of Dungeons & Dragons, or the world of mind-bending drugs or the world of inchoate hatreds or the world of real-life, murderous assaults in the night had an opposite, this was it.

  Among the peaceful, Bonnie Von Stein was at peace. If the meek would inherit the earth, she’d own it all—at least judging from surface appearances. The internal toughness, the resilience, the sheer tensile strength of body and mind that had enabled her to survive and move forward—and that would enable her to survive what was to come—were not apparent to the casual observer.

  Bonnie was tolerant, not judgmental. What she liked, she did not necessarily expect others to appreciate. What she disapproved of, she recognized others might find of value. She had never sought conflict; indeed, in all her relationships, she had worked to avoid it—even if emotional aridity was the price she sometimes paid.

  What she would soon discover was that for such a limitation—if, indeed, that’s what it was—few had ever paid a higher price.

  * * *

  On June 14, as Bonnie sat ten miles away, making her porcelain dolls, John Crone, having deduced where to look after listening to Henderson’s statement, and disguised as a highway worker so as not to attract undue attention, swung a sickle through high grass and found a baseball bat sunk into the muck of a wooded area fifty yards from the Von Stein house, where Lawson Road met the Market Street Extension.

  And on the night of June 15, in the midst of a tumultuous thunderstorm, James Upchurch, carrying a backpack and wearing a Cornell University sweatshirt, and strolling along a street that bordered the NC State campus, was arrested by college police. His hair was bleached a bright blond. By then—on the basis of Henderson’s statement—he was wanted not merely for a probation violation but for murder in the first degree.

  * * *

  Chris Pritchard spent that night at his friend Eric Caldwell’s house in Winston-Salem. They had, as usual, been out late. The phone rang at eight o’clock the next morning. It was Bonnie. Eric’s mother said both boys were still asleep.

  Bonnie was calling because she herself had just received a call from Stephanie Mercer, their former next-door neighbor in Little Washington and a close friend of Angela’s. Stephanie had said it was on the radio that Chris and someone named James Upchurch had been arrested for the murder of Lieth.

  Bonnie had said, “Stephanie, I don’t believe Chris has been arrested. He spent the night at a friend’s house. But let me call and be sure he’s okay.”

  So she had called.

  Three hours later, she called again. She was a lot more scared than she’d let Stephanie know. This was Bonnie’s way. What she really felt, only she had a right to know.

  This time she spoke to Eric and told him he’d better wake up Chris, no matter how late they’d been out the night before.

  When her son came to the phone, just before noon, she said, “Chris, you need to come home right now because Stephanie called this morning and she heard on the radio that you’ve just been arrested. We’d better get in touch with Mr. Osteen.”

  Disheveled, deprived of sleep, and hung over—the same state he’d been in when he’d arrived in Little Washington on the morning of his stepfather’s murder—Chris made the twenty-minute drive.

  When he arrived, Bonnie fed him a sandwich. The TV was on, minimizing the discomfort that arose from the fact that neither of them was saying anything to the other.

  Shortly after noon, Stephanie called back to say it had just been on the twelve o’clock news that arrests had been made and that Chief Crone would be holding a news conference at eight P.M.

  At this point, Bonnie called Bill Osteen to report what she’d been told. Osteen said no one from law enforcement had contacted him, and he had long ago learned not to panic as the result of hearing something on the radio or reading it in the paper. He didn’t exactly tell Bonnie that there was nothing to worry about, but he himself was unaware of the existence of any evidence that could justify Chris’s arrest, so he spoke calmly to her and assured her that he’d be available if anything unexpected was to happen.

  Angela was working at Action Video. Returning from a lunch break, she found a message asking her to call her mother. Bonnie explained the situation as well as she could, but being Bonnie, tended to sound a lot less worried than she felt. Angela wanted to know if she should leave work early and come home, but Bonnie said she didn’t see any reason to do anything so drastic.

  At three-ten P.M. Bonnie looked out the front window and saw four men in suits and ties getting out of two sedans. She recognized Lewis Young, John Taylor, Sturgell, and Newell. She knew this was not a social call.

  “Chris,” she said, “they’re here. I think you need to go to your room and call Mr. Osteen.”

  When she answered the door, Lewis Young asked, “Can we come in?”

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “We’re here for Chris. Is he at work?”

  “No, he’s right here at home with me. At this very moment, he’s in his bedroom, speaking on the telephone with his attorney. What do you want him for?”

  To Lewis Young, Bonnie sounded “stern and irritated,” but not out of control.

  “Bonnie,” Lewis Young said, “we’re here to arrest him for murder.”

  He did not say it unkindly, but there is no kind way that anyone can ever speak such words to a mother about her son. Especially when the charge is the murder of her husband, and the attempted murder of herself.

  “Where are you going to take him?”

  “First, we’re taking him downtown to book him. Then we’re
going to bring him back to Washington. He’ll be spending the night in the Beaufort County jail.”

  She let the four officers into her living room. “Chris couldn’t have done this,” she said. “I know he couldn’t.”

  “Bonnie,” Lewis Young said, “you’d better tell him we’re here.”

  So she went to his bedroom and told him.

  As she stepped back into her living room, she asked, “What is your evidence? You still haven’t shown me a single shred of evidence.”

  “We’re not going to get into that now,” Lewis Young said. “Chris has an attorney. Mr. Osteen can discuss that with the district attorney.”

  They led Chris from the house without resistance, with Bonnie following close behind. In the driveway, they put handcuffs on his wrists.

  “Can I go back in my room and get my cigarettes?” he said.

  “You’re not going to smoke in my car,” Lewis Young said.

  “You be careful with him,” Bonnie said. “I don’t want to hear about anything happening to him. I’ve heard too many stories about what happens to people in police custody. I’m holding you personally responsible,” she said to Young.

  “Bonnie,” he said, “nothing will happen to him.”

  They put Chris in the backseat of one of the cars and started the engine.

  “I’ll be down there as fast as I can,” she called out.

  And then, one last time, she told Lewis Young how shameful she thought it was that they could drag an innocent person out of his home in broad daylight and charge him with murder, when they still didn’t have any evidence and hadn’t even considered other suspects.

  Part Three

  The Worst Of Truths