Chris said he’d better get someone else to drive the car. Moog said, no problem. Neal Henderson could drive the car. Then Chris said chopping off the heads with a machete might be noisy. Angela would probably wake up. If she did, Chris said, it would be all right to kill her, too.
The machete store was also closed on Sundays. They had to go to K Mart instead. The best Chris could do there was to buy Moog a hunting knife. Moog said it sure wasn’t any machete, but he’d do the best he could.
Then they went to Henderson’s apartment. Moog explained the circumstances and Henderson said he’d be happy to drive. Chris drew a map. He also said they’d better hurry because he really did have a term paper due the next day, and unless his parents were murdered, he wouldn’t have a good excuse for not turning it in on time.
At about eleven that night, Chris returned to his dorm from Wildflour Pizza with Vince and Karen and Kirsten, and gave Moog the keys to his car. Then he went upstairs to play cards so he would have an alibi. Moog told him to stay up until at least three or four a.m. He said the car should be back in the parking lot before dawn. The last thing he could remember telling Moog was which side of the bed Lieth slept on, and that he’d better go after Lieth first.
The next thing he knew, Angela was on the phone, telling him he’d better get home fast.
He’d seen Henderson not at all, and Moog only once since the murder. He’d seen Moog in late summer at NC State. Moog had started to tell him about it, saying, “You never told me the back door was Plexiglas,” and “I never saw so much blood in all my life.” Chris had screamed at him to shut up. That was the night he’d had his bad acid trip, and Moog had stayed with him, so he wouldn’t blurt out anything to the police.
Chris stopped talking. He looked at his mother and his sister. Neither Bonnie nor Angela said a word. Osteen broke the silence, asking Bonnie and Angela, “Does either of you have any questions?”
Bonnie said only that now that he’d finally told the truth, she hoped Chris could start to feel better about himself. Angela said nothing at all.
Again, it was Osteen who broke the silence.
“Chris,” he said, “I hope you understand just how special a person your mother is. Here, after all the things you’ve just told her, her first concern is still for you.”
30
Bonnie’s recollection of what happened during the rest of that day and night would prove very different from notes she took at the time, almost as if, for twelve hours, she’d been plunged into a state of near-amnesia.
She said the meeting in Vosburgh’s office hadn’t lasted more than thirty or forty-five minutes, that it had to be brief because the prosecutors were waiting for Chris. She recalled leaving the office accompanied only by Angela and returning, dazed and numb, to the Holiday Inn. Angela had asked no questions, but said, “Chris is my brother and I love him, and I know if he hadn’t been doing drugs, he never could have done any of this.”
Bonnie remembered no other conversation with Angela about what the two of them had just heard. Angela had not stayed long at the motel. Probably, she’d spent the day with friends. Bonnie recalled spending the afternoon alone in the motel room, wondering how she’d ever be able to break this news to her mother, and to the other members of her family.
“I don’t remember if Angela and I ate dinner together, or if she ate with some friends,” Bonnie said later. She did recall sitting in the motel room with Angela later that night, watching television. If, in all the hours since Chris had made his confession in Vosburgh’s office, either Bonnie or Angela had said a single word in reference to it, neither was able to recall it.
Some things, Bonnie said later, were just too painful to talk about. Besides, what good would talking do? It wouldn’t change anything. It would not bring back Lieth. To share their pain, even with each other, would have been a sign of weakness. And now, more than ever, Bonnie was determined to be strong.
She did remember Chris arriving at the motel room at ten-thirty P.M., accompanied by Bill Osteen, who said only that it had been a long, grueling day and that he, at least, was ready for bed.
Chris took one step inside and with tears in his eyes said, “I don’t see how the two of you can stand to be in the same room with me.”
Bonnie’s recollection was that she and Angela both told him they realized he was not capable of harming anyone, and that they knew what he’d done must have been caused by drug and mental problems. He cried and said he did not understand how he could have done it, no matter what the circumstances. Then he said to Bonnie, “I love you and Angela and I loved Lieth.”
Then he said he was hungry. “He went out to eat,” Bonnie said later. “I don’t think Angela went with him. When he got back, there was very little talk. We were all so drained, we were beyond talk.” They just turned off the lights and went to sleep.
“A sleep,” Bonnie said later, “not only of total emotional exhaustion, but of the worst sort of depression I’d ever known.”
* * *
Bonnie’s notes, however, told quite a different story. She and Chris and Angela had actually left Vosburgh’s office together and had eaten lunch at the Little Washington outlet of the Golden Corral restaurant chain: an odd choice, since it was in a Raleigh Golden Corral that Chris had first broached the idea of the murder.
Even when her notes were read back to her, Bonnie had no recollection of such a lunch, or even of being in Chris’s presence. Nor was Angela able to recall anything she said or did for the rest of the day. Chris had only a vague memory of possibly eating lunch somewhere, but did not remember where or with whom or anything that might have been said.
Bonnie’s notes indicated that she returned Chris to Jim Vosburgh’s office at one-fifteen P.M., so he could be at the county sheriff’s office by one-thirty in order to make his formal statement.
After that, Bonnie did go back to the motel, apparently alone. There, she tried to write about what Chris had just confessed to. “It is so much worse than I had ever feared,” she began. But then she stopped.
She called Wade Smith in early afternoon, but was unable to reach him. He returned her call at four P.M., according to her notes, but she felt unable to speak freely to him then because Linda Sloane, her friend from the Humane Society, had arrived in the room.
Bonnie could not remember any of this, but Linda recalled the afternoon and evening clearly. A few days earlier, she and Bonnie had made plans to exchange Christmas gifts in the Holiday Inn, then to have dinner together in the Holiday Inn dining room.
And that’s what they did. When Linda arrived at the motel in late afternoon, neither Bonnie nor Angela, who also was there, gave any sign that they’d had an unusually stressful day.
Everything seemed perfectly normal. Indeed, when Linda asked Bonnie how she felt, Bonnie said, “I feel good. I feel positive. Things are going to work out.”
They sat in the room and exchanged gifts. Then the three of them went to the dining room and ate. All Bonnie said was that Chris was answering some questions for the police, and she was concerned that if they kept him too long, he might not get a good dinner.
Days later Linda Sloane read in the newspaper that Chris had confessed and was going to plead guilty, and she then realized that Bonnie had known the truth throughout the afternoon and evening they’d spent together.
Even after the story had been printed in the paper, Bonnie never said a word about it. Just as Bonnie never told Linda—perhaps her best friend in Little Washington—that Chris had been hospitalized back in August.
Some things were just not meant to be discussed. Some things were private. Some burdens were not meant to be shared. And maybe, as Linda Sloane suggested later, “to not talk about it can help it to not be real.”
* * *
The other discrepancy between Bonnie’s memory and her notes involved what happened after Chris had come b
ack to the room. All the restaurants in Little Washington were already closed, and so, according to the notes, she gave Chris and Angela her car keys so the two of them could drive to The Waffle House in Greenville: the place where Bonnie had eaten her last breakfast with Lieth.
Chris and Angela did not return until after midnight. Later, neither could recall anything they had talked about to one another.
The formal interview with Chris had lasted from 1:25 to 10:10 P.M. Present were Lewis Young, John Taylor, Mitchell Norton, Keith Mason, and Bill Osteen. Young later typed a thirty-four-page report of what was said, based on notes he took as Chris spoke. Osteen also took handwritten notes.
Several things Chris said would later give rise to troubling questions. Among them:
—He met Moog for the first time during summer session.
—He did not know whether Moog had ever met Angela.
—When he’d come to Washington on the Friday night before the murder, he’d gone out with his friends Jonathan Wagoner, Steven Outlaw, and Tiffany Heady.
—While home, he’d stolen a key. Young’s notes said the key was for “the new back door . . . the outer back door.” Osteen’s notes confirm this, quoting Chris as saying, “I had gotten a key for the new back door.” In the spring, Bonnie and Lieth had enclosed what had been a screen porch behind the kitchen. A new door, with a new lock, had been installed. The original back door, which led from the porch to the kitchen, had become an interior doorway, no longer directly accessible from outside the house.
—Moog was to leave Chris’s car keys on a chair in his room upon returning to campus. If they weren’t there whenever Chris was first informed of the murder, he would know his car had not yet been returned to the parking lot and he would make up his story about not being able to find his keys.
—Angela was to be a victim. He had no idea why she was not harmed.
—He had never read, or even heard of, the book A Rose in Winter.
—Except for the one occasion in August, he’d seen Moog only to say hi to after the murder, had never discussed it with him, and had never again played Dungeons & Dragons with either Moog or Neal Henderson.
At the time, none of these statements provoked much response. In retrospect, however, they could be seen as having disturbing implications.
* * *
Bonnie, Chris, and Angela drove back to Winston-Salem the next day. They still did not discuss what Chris had done.
“I’m just not the kind of person who’s going to get into a long discussion about an unpleasant subject knowing that we’ve got a four-hour drive to Winston-Salem ahead of us,” Bonnie said later.
Angela said, “I never asked any questions because I didn’t want to upset him. That’s just the way I was brought up.”
And as soon as they reached Winston-Salem, the three of them went their separate ways.
* * *
That evening, Eric Caldwell came by the house. He’d already seen Chris, already knew Chris had confessed to Bonnie. Now he wanted to see how she was coping. For months he’d known the moment would someday come when Bonnie would have to learn the truth. Now he wanted to tell her he was sorry for having participated in what everyone had felt was a necessary deception.
“How’re you doing?” he asked.
“Very surprised,” Bonnie said.
“You had no idea? You really never had any idea?”
“No,” she said, “it never once occurred to me that this would be the course events would follow.”
Eric told her how hard it had been for him to keep silent. She told him he had done the right thing. He had been loyal to Chris, and she admired him for that. There was nothing for which he should feel sorry; nothing for which she needed to forgive him. Chris was fortunate to have had him for a friend.
Her biggest worry at the moment, she told Eric, was how she would tell her family what had happened.
“They told me about my daddy,” she said. “Now I get to tell them about the next death in the family. Because that’s what this is. Another death in the family.”
Her only consolation, she told Eric, was that, even though it had taken him a long time to work up the courage, to face up to what was right, to what must be done, Chris had, in the end, acted honorably.
“Chris pleaded guilty,” Bonnie said, “because he could no longer live with his remorse.
“He didn’t plead guilty just to avoid the death penalty. He needed to do it because he couldn’t live with it any other way. He wanted us to know. To go through a trial and be acquitted, and then never be able to tell us, that was not something he felt like he could live with. So, at least he acted with honor at the end.”
Such were the scraps and tatters to which she clung.
But Eric would say later that he’d reluctantly formed a different opinion of Chris’s motive for pleading guilty. “He told me Osteen had said he only had a thirty percent chance of getting off. He said, ‘If they told me forty or fifty percent, I would have gone for it.’ He said he looked at it like in Dungeons and Dragons, where you roll two ten-sided dice. Bonnie kept insisting that he’d pleaded guilty because of sorrow and remorse, but Chris said it was simply a matter of percentages.
“My biggest fear,” Eric said, “was that Chris wasn’t really sorry for what he’d done.”
Bonnie did tell her mother and her brother and her sisters. Later, she would say, “They were all as shocked as I was.”
Then, alone, on New Year’s Day, she made the six-hour drive to Elizabeth City, despite the fact that Chris would not be standing trial.
Part Four
“The Three Ds”
January 1990
31
For so long, January 2 had been imprinted on Bonnie’s mind as the date when the long-obstructed march toward justice would begin. No more of the storm-trooper tactics of the SBI and Washington police. No more intimidation, no more lies, no more being treated like a criminal instead of a victim.
In the courtroom, in Elizabeth City, in front of the stem but fair-minded Judge Thomas Watts, with Bill Osteen and Jim Vosburgh defending him, Chris would finally be given a chance to demonstrate his innocence. And Bonnie would learn for the first time, from hearing all the evidence, what had really happened to her and to Lieth.
Now it was not to be. Now, Chris would not be on trial. Now, he would be making only the briefest of appearances to testify against James Upchurch on behalf of the prosecution.
And the prosecution—against which Bonnie had fought for so long and so hard and with such futility—was now representing her interests. After so many months of contempt for their tactics and their incompetence, and their stubborn and willful insistence on believing what she knew could not be true, Bonnie was suddenly on their team. This was not at all what she had been expecting. But not for a moment did it occur to her to alter her plan to attend every session of the trial. Even if Chris’s fate was no longer hanging in the balance, this remained the trial of the man accused of murdering her husband, and of having tried to murder her.
And even though Bonnie was as convinced as ever that it had been Henderson, not Upchurch, whom she’d seen in her bedroom that night, she was now faced with Chris’s admission that he had plotted with Upchurch, not Henderson, what he’d hoped would be her death.
Some were surprised that Bonnie was still so committed to attending the whole trial. Yes, of course, she would have to testify; yes, she would want to be there when Chris testified; but why put herself through the agony of being present every day? Why not just wait for a phone call in late January or early February, informing her of the jury’s verdict?
Since she now knew for certain that her son would be going to prison for many years, why not take advantage of this last opportunity to spend time with him?
One answer was, she did not want to. And the trial provided the pe
rfect escape. Now that she finally knew the truth, now that her denial mechanism—at least in regard to fact, if not emotion—was inoperable, the only way she could avoid confronting the reality of what he’d done was to avoid Chris himself. Only by spending alt week, every week, in Elizabeth City, until the very day Chris was sentenced, could Bonnie spare herself the trauma of such an encounter.
Consciously, of course, she saw her choice not as avoidance but as a last chance to bear witness to the love she’d had for her husband. “There would be other opportunities to be with Angela and Chris,” she said. “But this was the, last thing I could ever do for Lieth. Elizabeth City was where I felt I needed to be. I had accepted long ago that he was dead and that there was nothing I could do to change that, but I could be there and assist in any way I could to be sure the people who were responsible for his death were punished.
“And whatever the outcome, I needed to feel that when it was over, I would know as much as possible about what had happened on that weekend.”
Regarding Chris, she said that during those few hectic and traumatic days between his confession and the start of the trial, “I never had a major talk with him.” She seemed surprised, in fact, that anyone might think she’d find it necessary to have a frank discussion—possibly even an emotional discussion—about the fact that he had tried to have her murdered.
“The most significant talk we had was me asking him if he wanted me to sell his car. I did ask him once what his concerns were about being in prison, and he said he was worried about sex abuse, but I made a conscious effort not to rehash any of what he’d already told me about the crime because he was facing having to testify, and that would be hard enough for him, without me giving him some sort of grilling in advance. Besides, he’d already told me the basics in Mr. Vosburgh’s office.”