Cruel Doubt

  It wasn’t right.

  She didn’t need logic, only gut instinct, to tell her that, as she put it later, “something bad was in the wind.”

  Chris! Oh, dear Lord, the stress had finally gotten to him and her son had killed himself.

  Bonnie parked as quickly as she could, and she and her mother got out of the car in a hurry.

  The front door opened and her brother came out to meet them in the driveway.

  “What’s going on?” Bonnie’s mother asked.

  “Come on inside and I’ll tell you.”

  “No, tell me outside, right now.”

  Bonnie didn’t wait. She knew the answer as soon as she saw her brother come out the door. For whenever anyone came to his house for any reason, it was always George Bates, Sr., Bonnie’s father, who greeted them first. But he wasn’t there.

  Bonnie ran past her mother and brother and into the house, crying, “Where’s my daddy? Where’s my daddy!”

  He wasn’t there. He’d been back in the woods behind the house that afternoon, cutting down a dead tree, an activity he’d engaged in for more than half a century.

  But on this day, December 1, 1989, exactly one month before he was to go to Elizabeth City to attend his grandson’s murder trial, he’d failed to clear a path for himself and had cut the tree the wrong way and it had fallen on him and killed him.

  He’d died right there in the woods—only a quarter mile from where, on Pearl Harbor Day, he’d carved the lines from the Joyce Kilmer poem—with his only living brother cradling his head in his arms.

  Later, Bonnie’s mother would say, “It was all because of how much he was dreading that trial.”

  And she would tell her only son, Bonnie’s brother, that it wasn’t just the trial, but “Chris, and what he had done, that caused his death.”

  28

  What worried people was that Bonnie didn’t cry. She didn’t cry when she was first told, she didn’t cry later that night, she didn’t once cry during the two days of the wake, as her father lay in his open casket, and, it seemed, the whole population of Welcome, and half of Lexington as well, came to pay final respects, and she didn’t cry at the funeral, which was held Sunday afternoon in the simple brick church that George Bates had built with his own hands.

  “What purpose does crying serve?” she asked later. “It doesn’t make anything any different.”

  Instead of crying or praying or grieving in what many would consider the traditional way, Bonnie became even more businesslike than usual. She spent a lot of time on the phone. It was she who called the newspaper to give information about funeral arrangements and all the factual details of her father’s life necessary for the obituary. And it was she who called Bill Osteen and Jim Vosburgh, explaining that due to a family emergency she would have to ask that the upcoming motion hearing be rescheduled for later in the week.

  * * *

  The last of the hearings on pretrial motions was held at the Pitt County Courthouse in Greenville on December 14.

  As he awaited the start of the proceedings, Bill Osteen heard Mitchell Norton say something to him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your client’s a wimp,” Norton said.

  To Norton’s surprise, Osteen did not seem offended by this remark. Instead, he nodded in agreement.

  “I think you’ve put your finger on the heart of the matter,” he replied. “Chris is a wimp.”

  While a plea bargain had remained his fondest dream—and while he’d been growing increasingly anxious as trial approached because he still could not view either winning or losing as a satisfactory outcome—Bill Osteen had not yet calculated the best way to raise the question with a district attorney who he thought would reject it out of hand.

  He instinctively saw Norton’s remark as an opening. He nodded again. “Yes, Mitchell, I think you and I are in complete agreement about Chris. And because he’s such a wimp, any part he may have played in this whole thing could only have been inadvertent. He’s not like the people who carried it out. They weren’t wimps. They were evil.”

  The district attorney did not interrupt.

  “You know,” Osteen continued, “maybe when this hearing is over, you and I ought to sit down by ourselves for a few minutes and see if we might not have something to talk about.”

  Mitchell Norton could hardly believe what he was hearing. Yes, it was oblique, it was tentative, it gave away nothing, it did not in any way compromise Osteen’s position, but there was no doubt about it: Chris Pritchard’s lawyer was talking about a plea.

  To Norton, this seemed almost too good to be true. For, unbeknownst to Osteen, Mitchell Norton was almost equally eager to negotiate a plea bargain.

  Like Osteen, Mitchell Norton had certain problems. Foremost among Norton’s was Neal Henderson. The district attorney had by now spent many hours in his star witness’s company. He believed Henderson’s story. But he had also come to feel that the young man from Caswell County, with his 160 IQ and 1500 score on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, and his passion for Dungeons & Dragons and for arcane, bizarre comic books, and such rock groups as Blue Oyster Cult (“That damned old narcotic music,” Norton called it)—and with his cold, flinty eyes, his expressionless face, and his detached, inflectionless voice—would make an awful witness.

  “He’s a plastic man,” Norton had complained to his assistant, Keith Mason, and to Lewis Young and John Taylor, who were also helping with pretrial preparation. “He walks like a robot and talks like a robot and nobody’s going to believe a damned word he says.”

  And Henderson was his whole case. He possessed not a whit of physical evidence. To prove the guilt of James Upchurch, he had only Neal Henderson’s word. To prove Chris Pritchard’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, he had only Henderson and the map.

  But even if he persuaded a jury that Pritchard had indeed drawn the map (and no expert witness could say so with certainty), Chris could say he’d done so only as a joke, or as part of a Dungeons & Dragons game. Then his mother—who would win the jury’s sympathy instantly—would back him up. Bonnie would say there was no way in the world her son could have had anything to do with this tragedy.

  And then she’d say the silhouette of the killer she’d seen in her room matched the physique of Neal Henderson and could not possibly have been that of Upchurch.

  Unaware, of course, that Osteen would not permit Chris to testify, and also unaware of the various friends to whom Chris had already confessed, Norton had been suffering through his own sleepless nights. The whole case—and with it his career—could so easily go up in smoke, just as the map had not.

  Eventually, he’d begun to wonder if he should consider broaching to Osteen the possibility of negotiating a plea bargain with Chris. That way, the district attorney felt, he’d have a much better chance of winning at least one conviction at a trial.

  Unfortunately, nothing Norton had gleaned from Osteen’s actions or demeanor suggested that the Greensboro lawyer had anything on his mind except fighting like hell, fully confident of the outcome.

  It might only make matters worse if Norton raised the question. First, it would be viewed as a sign of weakness. If he were confident of winning, why would he even entertain the notion of making a deal? Second, Osteen might be insulted. His client was claiming innocence, and Osteen was about to step forward and argue that position. He might not take at all kindly to the suggestion that his whole posture had been no more than an elaborate charade; that what he had really been looking for all along was some way to get out from under the worst of the consequences his client might face.

  But now . . . but now . . . Osteen himself had raised the question.

  * * *

  They met in a small, plain room immediately after the hearing: just Osteen, Norton, and Norton’s able and affable young assistant, Keith Mason.

 
Osteen began by saying. “I haven’t raised this before because my client and I are more than ready to go to trial, but I do think that the Code of Ethics requires me to explore any possibility of a settlement of these charges. And so, if either of you have any suggestions, let me know. If not, we’ll just proceed.”

  Keith Mason responded first. “What can you help us with?”

  “It’s not a question of help,” Osteen said. “Our position is that we’ve got a very good chance of winning at trial because there are some real loopholes in your case that all of us are aware of already. But if you all think there might be any basis for discussions, let me know. If not, so be it.

  “And I want you to understand,” he continued, “I haven’t talked to my client about this. I haven’t been authorized in any way to engage in a formal discussion. I am simply inquiring as to what your attitude would be if such a thing ever did become conceivable from our point of view.”

  Chewing on his mustache, Norton said, well, this wasn’t the sort of discussion that he was prepared to really enter into either, but of course, just as Osteen had an obligation to explore all the options available to his client, Norton, too, as a public official, had a duty to his constituents to consider any and all alternatives that might be suggested in good faith.

  Then Osteen said, well, maybe they should just leave it right there for a while, not push it any further. Maybe it wasn’t an appropriate thing to be discussing, even on an informal basis.

  But he added that Mrs. Von Stein had lost her husband at the same time that she’d also almost lost her own life, and then just recently, and so tragically, she’d lost her father, and now she would be testifying that the silhouette she had seen in her bedroom matched that of the State’s star witness, Mr. Henderson, and could not have been that of the defendant, Mr. Upchurch.

  A jury, Osteen added—a jury that would inevitably have enormous sympathy for Mrs. Von Stein—might well conclude that it was Mr. Henderson rather than Mr. Upchurch who should be sitting at the defendant’s table and that, in any event, Mrs. Von Stein had suffered enough. They would not, under any circumstances, want to add to her woes by convicting her son of such a heinous crime.

  And then he added that the Christmas season was almost upon them, and that if there was any way, any way at all, that Mitchell Norton could help Osteen bring an end to the agony that that poor woman had been going through, then, “I’ve just got to know if that’s available. What I’m trying to do here is to save people’s lives and save people’s sanity.”

  Norton allowed as how that was something that, as good Christian gentlemen, and in the spirit of the season, they all probably ought to spend a bit of time mulling over. “There can’t be any harm in talking further,” he said, “just so long as nobody thinks anybody is committing to anything.”

  “Just theoretically,” Osteen asked, “what would your position be in regard to sentencing?”

  Again, Mitchell Norton was stunned. This was in no way theoretical. This was real.

  “Well, I don’t know.” he said, speaking even more slowly than usual. “I must say, that’s something I’ve never really thought about.”

  “Here’s my position,” Osteen said. “I would want you to agree not to argue for any particular sentence. To let me argue for as light a sentence as possible, but to leave it strictly in the hands of Judge Watts.”

  “I suppose,” Norton said, “a lot of what I could agree to would have to do with what it was that Pritchard would say.”

  “What he would say,” Osteen replied, “is that the plan was pretty much what Neal Henderson has said it was.”

  And with that, Bill Osteen went back to Greensboro, leaving Mitchell Norton almost too flabbergasted to drive himself home.

  * * *

  “I didn’t like the thought of dealing with anyone,” Norton said later, “but the danger of blowing it all was just too great. The stakes were so high. And I was a public official. I had responsibilities to people in a five-county area. I’ll tell you, I stayed up all that night. I looked at those crime-scene photos again. I saw the brutality with which Lieth had been killed. And I asked myself, who was worse morally, the guy who drew the map or the guy who swung the bat?

  “I honestly believed that with the map to corroborate Henderson’s testimony, we could probably have gotten a conviction against Pritchard. But about Upchurch I wasn’t nearly so sure. And he was the man all the evidence, and all my intuition, pointed to as dangerous. He was the type who could do it again, especially after getting away with it once.”

  Evidence to support Norton’s assessment had been provided on November 20 in the form of a letter Upchurch had sent to a friend, a letter that had found its way into the hands of Lewis Young.

  Upchurch had mistakenly addressed the letter to a sporting goods store on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, apparently confusing the store’s address with that of his friend. Not long before, the store had been burglarized, but the stolen goods had been recovered. When a sheriff’s deputy had arrived at the store on November 20 to return the stolen property, the manager had showed him an envelope containing numerous newspaper clippings concerning the murder of Lieth Von Stein, and a letter obviously intended for someone else, but with the address of the sporting goods store on the envelope.

  The deputy had turned the materials over to the SBI. One clipping concerned the value of Lieth’s estate. Upchurch noted the estimate of $2 million, but wrote, “He was probably worth ten times this.”

  He also asked the friend to mail him doses of LSD in jail. He recommended that the friend put the drug tabs under the postage stamps of letters sent through his public defender’s office, rather than directly to him, explaining that guards sometimes threw away the envelopes before bringing his mail to his cell.

  In the letter, apparently referring to a prior conversation, Upchurch urged his friend not to let any of the specifics he’d mentioned about a bat or knife used in the murder be made public. He said his strategy was to “appear ignorant” to the district attorney. The only story he wanted spread, he said, was that Henderson was lying and he could prove it.

  More chillingly, Upchurch had also written that he was enjoying being the center of attention: “It’s the ultimate game of me against THEM and winner take all. Win millions of dollars or lose your life. . . . None of this is real, it’s just a part of THE GAME OF LIFE and somebody upped the stakes. . . . It looks like I’m going to be a very rich guy a year from now.”

  Having read that, Mitchell Norton felt even more obligated to do whatever was required to win a conviction against Upchurch—even if it meant making a deal with Chris Pritchard.

  * * *

  Returning from Greenville to Greensboro, Bill Osteen called Bonnie to tell her he wanted to meet with her and Chris at five-thirty P.M. on Sunday, December 17.

  She thought it unusual for Osteen to schedule a meeting for a Sunday evening, and even more unusual for Jim Vosburgh to drive all the way out from Little Washington to attend.

  It had been a cold afternoon and was already dark before the meeting began. Because it was a Sunday, downtown Greensboro was deserted, even in the midst of the Christmas season. The heat in Osteen’s office building was shut off on Sundays, and he had to use a space heater to warm his conference room. He placed another heater in the reception area outside the room because he knew that for much of the time they were meeting with Chris, Bonnie would have to wait there alone. Inside, they’d be discussing matters about which she still could not be told.

  Bonnie and Chris took seats at the same conference table at which, in August, Chris had confessed to a crime Bonnie still did not believe he could commit. Vosburgh was there, as well as Bill Osteen, Jr.

  Bill Senior began by saying, “In preparing for a trial of this nature, we have to explore all the options available in the best interests of the client.” He went on to say that the t
ime for trial was drawing very near and that Chris would have to make some big decisions. He said that only a few days earlier he’d become aware that the possibility existed for working out an arrangement with Mitchell Norton whereby Chris could change his plea to guilty and promise to testify truthfully, in return for a lesser sentence than he might receive if he was found guilty at trial.

  Bonnie wasn’t quite sure she had understood Osteen correctly. Had he said Chris could plead guilty?

  Then they asked her to go out to the reception area because they had matters to discuss with Chris privately.

  Once she was outside, Osteen laid it on the line: time was short. Norton would agree to a plea. But Chris would have to decide fast. If they were going to make a deal, they would have to make it soon because, for all they knew, Norton might also be negotiating with Upchurch’s attorneys. If the district attorney made a deal with Upchurch, where would that leave Chris? The answer was clear: on death row.

  “It is our duty,” Osteen said, “to lay out your options, but they’re not attractive. In the best possible case, you could go free. In the worst, you’d be put to death.” Then he explained the problems that made the best possible case also the least likely: first, he could not permit Chris to testify in his own defense; second, a deal might be made with Upchurch; third, at any moment, any one of the numerous people to whom Chris had already confessed could be discovered by the Washington police or SBI.

  “Chris,” Osteen said, “you’re a very young person and this is a decision that will affect, or might even take away, the rest of your life. Obviously, it’s one that we all want you to consider very carefully. But it’s just as obvious that you don’t have a lot of time.”

  All three lawyers then gave Chris their best estimates of the percentages of, first, his being found not guilty, and second, of his receiving the death penalty if convicted.

  For once, he wasn’t snotty, he wasn’t arrogant, he wasn’t even immature. “I think,” Jim Vosburgh said later, “that this was the only time I ever saw him when he wasn’t playing a role. I think he finally put the whole thing on the scales intellectually and saw how heavily they were weighted.”