Cruel Doubt

  Suddenly, he found himself presented with a chance to talk about his favorite subject, and he was quick to seize it. He said Dungeons & Dragons was a “role-playing game, where a person or group of people get together, create their own little world, so to speak, and have what is known as characters. Now, these characters would be people that you want to be, or people that you would like to be. You could be thirteen years old and be a fire fighter, or you could be a soldier or you could be a knight.”

  The game, he said, was “set on the swords and sorcery theme. It would be equivalent to medieval times, but it is actually set on an entirely different planet.” He was off now, doing his Dungeons & Dragons riff right there in court. He talked of “bards, magic users, thieves, fighters.” He said, “Those are the general classes. There are subclasses. Subclass of fighters would be—”

  But there Judge Watts brought his flight of fantasy to a halt, sustaining an objection on grounds of relevance.

  Regarding the murder, Chris said the plot was conceived “about five days prior to July the twenty-fifth,” when he’d asked Upchurch his “patricide” question at the Golden Corral. He said he’d told Upchurch that his parents had “about five million dollars between them.”

  Even before that, he said, “we were discussing what we were going to do if we got rich, or after we graduated from high school—I mean, from college. Daniel wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a writer, and James wanted his own restaurant. I said, ‘Well, if something should happen to my parents, then I could set James up in his restaurant. We can all three live in a big house in north Raleigh, a real classy section of Raleigh, and have a real nice stereo; and you know, everybody would have nice cars, something like that.’ ”

  Yes, he said, during this discussion they’d all been drinking beer and smoking marijuana, and no, he was not serious about it at the time. It was, he said, “just daydreaming.”

  But then, he admitted, it got serious. He told the same story he’d told in Vosburgh’s office: the further plans, the trip to steal the key, the Sominex powder, Upchurch waiting for him in the shack.

  “Had you and James talked about what would happen to your sister, Angela?” Norton asked.

  “We had discussed it. James said something to the effect of, ‘Well what about your sister?’ And I said, ‘Well, if she is there, then I guess her, too. But if she’s not, that’s fine, too.’ ”

  “What was your reaction to that talk about going to get a machete?” Norton asked.

  “I said, ‘Aren’t the Army surplus stores closed?’ First of all, you know, I wanted it to be painless. But the Army surplus stores were closed.”

  Then he described buying the hunting knife instead, telling Upchurch he’d have to find a driver with a license, meeting Neal Henderson, and drawing the map.

  “What was the purpose of killing your parents?” Norton asked. “What were you going to get out of it?”

  “A large inheritance.”

  “And had you talked with James about that?”

  “Yes, sir, I told him I would give him a car and fifty thousand dollars.” He added that Henderson was to get $50,000 and a Ferrari. Not a bad deal for Henderson, some thought: getting a payoff equal to that of the killer for doing no more than driving the car. But Norton didn’t want the focus to be on Henderson.

  “The initial plan,” he asked, “whose thought was that?”

  “I brought up the idea of killing my parents.”

  “After that, what part did James Upchurch play?”

  “He was an equal in the planning in that he came up with some ideas. I came up with some ideas. You know, it was an equal thing. I mean, neither one of us sat there and talked the other one’s ears off.”

  He said he’d drawn the dogs on the map “so that when James went to the house, he wouldn’t accidentally get a dog to barking, because it might have woken up my parents or the neighbors.” They had determined that the killing should take place at around two A.M., “because my parents usually went to sleep around eleven or twelve, and at two o’clock they would be pretty deeply in sleep.” He said he’d pointed out the best spot for Upchurch to be dropped off, so he could make his way to the back of Chris’s house, moving mostly through trees instead of around other houses.

  On Sunday night, he’d gone to Wildflour, he said, and had drunk “a lot of beer” and eaten pizza. At eleven P.M., he’d been in his room with his roommate, Vince Hamrick. Upchurch stopped by.

  “He said that he was going to go do some homework. I said, ‘Well, good luck.’ And that was it.”

  Through all of this, Chris seemed composed, even detached. Later, he said, “I took so much of that medication to calm me down that I almost went to sleep twice on the witness stand.”

  And neither Bonnie nor Angela—who had chosen to leave school to hear her brother’s testimony, though she had not been present for her mother’s—displayed any signs of emotion.

  “Now, Chris,” Norton asked for the second time, “why did you do it?”

  “I honestly don’t know the answer to that question,” Chris said. “There were many reasons that went through my mind, but I honestly do not know why I came up with this idea.”

  “What reasons were going through your mind?”

  “Well, money. I would have inherited a lot of money. I wouldn’t have had to do anything else. I wouldn’t have had to go back to school or anything. I could sit around, buy a house, and do drugs all the time. I could play D and D all I wanted to. And I had a term paper due that Monday that I hadn’t even started on.”

  He said he’d been taking large quantities of drugs in the weeks leading up to the murder. Alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, Ecstasy, and especially, LSD.

  “What effect did LSD have on you?”

  “I saw colors. I felt invincible. My mind raced very rapidly. And I had incredible amounts of energy for about six or seven hours straight. Marijuana, it seemed to make music better, it seemed to make TV more interesting, commercials especially. Ecstasy: I felt very mellow. And I just wanted to sit down and contemplate life. Generally, politics. That was what I was contemplating, world politics.”

  Norton, who was now, in a sense, having the kind of conversation with Chris that Bonnie had not been able to bring herself to have, said, “All right. Now, you also said you had a term paper due. Surely, you don’t mean that you killed your father because of a term paper?”

  “What I mean is, that was a thought that went through my mind as one of the reasons, because I was very upset over the fact that I hadn’t done it. I was very upset over the fact that my parents would be upset about it. I had already had two talks with my father and mother about my grades. I knew a third would mean that I probably wouldn’t go back to school.”

  After receiving the phone call from Angela, Chris was, he said, “in shock.”

  “Why were you in shock? This was something you had planned.”

  “At some level,” he said, “I did not really believe this would happen.”

  “But you had sat down. You had planned. You had provided keys. You had provided an automobile. You had supplied a knife for the killing.”

  “Yes, sir. But it was just like the game. In the game, you sit down and plan out things. You get your ducks in a row. I knew that this would happen. But at a deeper level, I didn’t believe it.”

  That changed when he saw Bonnie in the hospital. “She didn’t look good. She had been injured, beaten, she was on a—she had a tube in her side, in her chest.”

  “Did you hug her, kiss her?”

  “I was just happy she was alive.”

  “But you’d planned to kill her?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now, for the first time, Chris appeared unsettled. He shifted back and forth in his chair, he began to perspire a bit, and he glanced quickly around the c
ourtroom but would not establish eye contact with anyone.

  “Did you go to the funeral?” Norton asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have any feelings about it at that time, about the killing?”

  “Yes, sir, I did. Very strong feelings.” And now Chris put a hand to his face; now tears began to form in his eyes.

  “What kind of feelings?” Norton asked.

  “Incredible remorse,” he said, quite obviously trying to hold back the tears. “I was thoroughly disgusted.”

  “Did you think about the police?”

  “Yes, sir, I thought about the police. I thought about keeping myself away from them. I didn’t want to be arrested, thrown in jail. I didn’t want my mama to know what I had done. So I deceived the police as best I could. I lied to my family and my friends.”

  Bonnie and Angela sat still and expressionless as Chris gave a short, muffled sob. He took a deep breath. He looked around the courtroom again, but not at either his mother or his sister. Then he seemed to regain his composure.

  He testified that when he had returned to NC State in August, he’d had no contact at all with Neal Henderson, and had tried to avoid Upchurch as well, because “I was afraid of him, and I was disgusted with him.”

  There had been, however, one encounter. It was in August. Chris had seen Upchurch at a party and had said he wanted to speak to him. “We went to a room,” Chris said, “I don’t remember where it was. It was in the dorm. And he said, ‘You didn’t tell me that the window on the back was Plexiglas.’ He said he had to cut the screen and break the glass on the side window to get the door. And then, before I could say anything, he said, ‘There was blood everywhere.’ At that point, I told him to shut his mouth. I didn’t want to hear another word. I told him to forget it and to make sure that Neal forgot it, too. And I walked out of the room.”

  “Why was it, Chris, that you didn’t want to hear about what had gone on in the house? Why did you tell him to shut up?”

  “Because I was disgusted about the whole thing. I didn’t want to hear anything about it. I did not want to hear a word about it. And I was afraid of the boy, you know.”

  “Why were you afraid of him?”

  “Because he was the one that was supposed to have gone in the house and killed my parents.”

  The next morning, as Chris returned to the stand, Mitchell Norton asked him about Angela.

  “You stated that in your initial plan, the fire plan, you did not talk specifically about Angela, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How about in the burglary plan?”

  “Yes, sir, we did.”

  “What was discussed at that time?”

  “She was to be murdered also.”

  “And was there any particular reason for that?”

  “Not any particular reason, no, sir.”

  “What, if anything, did you stand to gain by Angela’s death?”

  “The entire insurance,” Chris said.

  * * *

  On cross-examination, Wayland Sermons pressed Chris about all the lies he had told, going back to the first time he’d been questioned by Lewis Young, and continuing up to the moment his lawyers negotiated his plea bargain.

  “On the twenty-fifth day of July 1988, at ten forty-five P.M., you were not telling the truth, were you Mr. Pritchard?”

  “No, sir, I was not.”

  “On the first of August 1988, at five-fifty P.M. in the Washington police department, you were not telling the truth, were you?”

  “No, sir, I was not.”

  “On the twenty-fourth day of August 1988, at eleven-forty A.M., at the Washington police department, again, you were not telling the truth, were you?”

  “No, sir, I was not.”

  Then Sermons went into the details of the statements Chris had made. Again and again, Chris admitted, tonelessly, “I was lying . . . I was lying . . . I was lying.”

  Finally, Sermons asked, “Prior to making your statement on December twenty-seventh, isn’t it true that you knew Neal Henderson was prepared to testify that you asked him to drive your car down to Washington?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And did you not know that Mr. Henderson was contending that Mr. Upchurch actually did the killings?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And isn’t it true that you knew that if you were convicted of first-degree murder, you stood a chance of being put to death in the gas chamber of North Carolina?”

  His face now openly displaying anguish, Chris said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Isn’t it true that by your plea bargain, you no longer face that possibility?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you knew at the time you made the deal that that was saving your life, did you not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You knew that if you had not made that deal, your life was on the line, didn’t you, Mr. Pritchard?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The implication was clear, even to Bonnie. If Chris had lied so many times to so many people in an attempt to save himself, why would he not lie this one more time, falsely implicating Upchurch in the plot, in order to escape the death penalty?

  For if Norton hadn’t been assured by Bill Osteen that Chris’s statement would point to Upchurch’s guilt, there would have been no plea bargain.

  Outside the courtroom, at the end of the day, Wayland Sermons was even less charitable as he spoke to the press. He said Chris “obviously has a reason to lie. It’s not the first time someone has testified to save his own life.” He predicted that the jury would “see through” the story Chris had told.

  “In four days of testimony,” Sermons said, “the only evidence the State has is from someone who did seventeen hits of acid in thirty days.”

  35

  On Tuesday, January 16, Neal Henderson was called to the stand. He was well-dressed, composed, and reserved. Even Bonnie noted that he “gave the appearance of being respectful.”

  She did not experience the same burst of terror as in September when she’d first seen him. Since then, at subsequent motion hearings, she’d grown at least marginally accustomed to the sight of him. Also, she later said, on this occasion, she was fully absorbed by the story he told.

  “Speak up as loud as you can, Mr. Henderson,” Judge Watts said. “It’s obviously important that all these folks hear what you have to say. And it’s important that I hear what you have to say. And I have a terrible cold.”

  Henderson said he was twenty-one years old, lived with his divorced mother and his sister in Danville, Virginia, where he worked as an assistant manager at a Wendy’s. Before that, he’d worked at a Wendy’s in Raleigh.

  As early as fifth grade, he was found so gifted that he’d begun to take eighth-grade classes. Then he’d attended Bartlett Yancey High School in Yanceyville, the seat of Caswell County (and if there was a lesser county than Caswell, with a lesser county seat than Yanceyville, few in the courtroom—even in Pasquotank County—were likely ever to see it).

  Two things had happened in high school, he said. He’d met James Upchurch, and he’d become obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons. His junior year had been spent in Durham, at the state’s special school for students gifted in mathematics or science.

  Next came the same sorry tale told by small-town boys from all over the state who had gone off to NC State and been overwhelmed by its size and impersonality.

  By the end of his freshman year, Neal Henderson, with an IQ of 160 and SAT scores of 1500–760 math, 740 verbal, the highest in the history of Caswell County—had flunked out of college, unnoticed and unmourned.

  He had, however, continued to live near the campus, eager to play Dungeons & Dragons, and unwilling to go home and admit failure to his sorrowing mother. At som
e point in the summer of 1988—he wasn’t sure when—his Caswell County buddy James Upchurch had mentioned that the newest player in the game, Chris Pritchard, was heir to a fortune that might be worth $10 million.

  And then, he said, “approximately two weeks, maybe three,” prior to July 25, Upchurch and Chris paid him a visit.

  This was the first of the serious conflicts in terms of time. But there was nothing Mitchell Norton could do about it. Chris had already testified that Henderson had not known about the plot until the day before the murder was committed.

  “James and Chris came in,” Henderson said. “We chatted for a couple of minutes about Dungeons and Dragons. Then James said he and Chris had a plan for Chris to come into his inheritance early. I remarked to them, ‘Oh, you’re going to rob the place?’ And James shook his head and said, ‘No. We are going to murder his parents so that he inherits.’ ”

  “And what did you say?”

  “My exact words were, ‘Isn’t that a little extreme?’ Chris laughed. James said, ‘No, no. We are serious. Here, let me show you.’ And they started outlining a plan.”

  Henderson—who Mitchell Norton feared would come across to the jury as a “plastic man,” and who, to Upchurch’s defense attorneys, resembled “a robot”—said mechanically that Upchurch had done “most of the talking,” while Chris sat nearby, drawing a map.

  The plan was for Upchurch to enter the house, to steal enough small valuables to make it appear that a burglary had occurred, “and then go upstairs and murder Chris’s parents. I don’t think at that exact time we talked about methods, or anything like that.”

  That first meeting, Henderson said, had lasted about an hour. They’d gone over the map in great detail, explaining just where he was supposed to drop off Upchurch, how to find the cul-de-sac at the end of the dirt road where he was to park, and the route Upchurch would take on foot from the car to the Von Stein house and back again. But, he said, no date was set.

  “They asked me to drive the car down. Just drive it down, drop him off, pick him back up, and drive him back.”