Cruel Doubt
They told him they’d give him “either two thousand or twenty thousand dollars, I am not sure exactly which.” He said, no problem, he’d be glad to drive the car.
“Two or three days” later, he had dropped by Upchurch’s dorm room and had found Chris there. “They were sitting around talking,” he said. “If I remember correctly, they were talking about Dungeons and Dragons. When I got there, the conversation turned to the plan. Mostly, about what would happen afterwards. Chris said he was going to become very depressed after the murder, and he was going to listen to a suggestion that someone was going to make, most likely James, to take a beach trip to cheer himself up. He was going to invite all his friends. Everyone was going to the beach—whoever he could find. At that point, he was going to feel much better and then buy everybody a car.
“You see, James was concerned that if only he received a car, people would wonder why he was getting a car. Well, Chris said, that was no problem. He would buy everybody a car.
“Maybe three or four days after that, late evening, I happened to come by James’s room. He was there alone, and we started talking about the plan. He pulled a bat out of a closet and laid it on one of the beds in the room. He said he’d been thinking about how he was going to do it, and he had the bat as the primary weapon he was going to use. He also showed me a knife that he had gotten.” This, too, contradicted Chris’s story. Chris had testified that he’d not bought Upchurch the knife until the day before the murder.
“He said he wanted something that would knock someone out in one hit. He was not at all sure he could use just a knife and quickly do anything. But he said one good hit from the bat should do what he wanted. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s always had a bat like that.
“Then he opened the drawer on his desk and pulled out a pair of gloves. They were the type batters use. And with, I think it was shoe polish, he blackened the gloves. They were black and white batting gloves, and he blackened the portion that was white.
“Then he said we were going to try for a day in the upcoming week. I think this meeting was on a Thursday or a Friday. He said Chris had either already left to go home or was going to go home the next day to find out the family’s plans for the upcoming week, and I think, to get a house key. He asked me what my schedule was for the coming week, and I told him I had Sunday night off. He told me to keep it open—that that would probably be the night we would go.”
Henderson made no mention of any prior plan to burn down the house, saying only that on the morning of Sunday, July 24, Upchurch came to his apartment to give him the map Chris had drawn two or three weeks earlier.
“He told me he would meet me later that night, at about eleven-thirty, twelve o’clock, and he told me where the car would be parked: in a lot known as the fringe lot, on Sullivan Drive. He told me to just keep the map until that night, look it over.”
Henderson said he’d stayed in his apartment for the rest of the day, spending much of it with his girlfriend, Kenyatta, who was James Upchurch’s cousin. In order to have an excuse for spending the night away, he’d told Kenyatta that evening that he’d just taken a hit of LSD, knowing that this would infuriate her, and that she’d tell him to get out and stay out until all effects of the drug had worn off.
At about eleven-thirty P.M. he’d met Upchurch by Chris Pritchard’s car. Upchurch carried a green canvas knapsack and a baseball bat. The knapsack, Henderson said, “contained some clothing that he was going to change into.” He said Upchurch changed as they drove, putting on a black sweater, black running shoes, and a black hood or ski mask.
When they reached Washington—coming in on a back road so Chris’s loud and distinctive white Mustang would not be noticed—“James asked me to pull into the Smallwood area on Lawson Road. He wanted to see the area in front of the house. So I pulled in. We went by Chris’s house from the front. James kind of counted down five houses and said, ‘That’s the place.’ ”
By then, Henderson said, it was about two-thirty A.M.
But by then, in Judge Watts’s courtroom, it was five-twenty P.M., and he declared a recess until morning.
* * *
That night, Bonnie drove to a waterfront restaurant half an hour out of Elizabeth City. This was not something she’d done before, nor would she do it again. Normally, she would eat a quick, simple, and solitary meal near her motel. Some nights, she would just get a takeout order from a fast-food restaurant and eat alone in her motel room.
But Neal Henderson’s quiet recitation of the circumstances that had led to the murder of her husband and very nearly to her own death had affected Bonnie deeply. She had been stirred by listening to this total stranger describe how casually, how thoughtlessly—almost with indifference—he had involved himself in a scheme that would have seemed preposterous if its consequences had not been so tragic.
For so long, she’d felt it necessary to deny, even to herself, her feelings of sadness and loss. For so long, it seemed, she’d been engaged in combat with law enforcement. For so long, she’d been defending her son as he had lied.
But now it was almost over. Henderson would tell the rest of his sordid tale the next day. And yes, there would be other witnesses. And perhaps some sort of defense from Upchurch’s lawyers. And then the verdict, possibly followed by a sentencing: life or death.
Bonnie was not sure it even mattered anymore. Just as, she thought, it did not matter why Lieth had not digested his rice. Her life was broken beyond repair. In only another week or two, her son would be taken from her, less violently but with no less finality than her husband had been.
She felt more weary than ever before, and especially exhausted by the effort of keeping every ounce of emotion locked inside.
Bonnie brought her notebook to the restaurant. After placing her order, she started to write. And for the first and only time during the trial, she wrote something that went beyond fact:
“As I was sitting in the courtroom, listening to Neal Henderson’s accounting of what happened, I began to realize the tremendous loss suffered here. It became very difficult to suppress the emotion which began to come forward within me. I had to work very hard to try & prevent any juror from seeing into my feelings. Suppressing one’s emotions for as long as I have done is bound to have some effect in the long run.
“As I sit here, I find myself once again dealing with feelings & emotions beyond my control. The realization that Lieth is never, never coming back is overpowering my thoughts at this moment. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to isolate myself in Elizabeth City. The feeling of complete and total loneliness is like no other I have ever experienced.”
There was a pause as the waitress served her meal. Then Bonnie began to write again:
“Thank God for the interruption of my attentive waitress! Enough of this self-sympathy. This is really a nice, quiet, small restaurant. There were only three other tables of guests when I arrived. Two of those have left already. There is soft background music from a local radio station. Just the kind of place Lieth and I could have enjoyed finding together.”
And then, for the first and only time, she addressed herself directly to her dead husband:
“Dear Lieth, I need you now as much as I ever have. I miss the time we shared; your compassion; your passion. Right this moment, I miss our lovemaking together. These things I have desperately avoided thinking about over the past year and a half. Why now? I am alone tonite by choice. Will I always be alone, or will I be brave enough to move forward to new experiences? You always had a lot of faith in my strength. I suppose in many ways I am strong. Why do I feel so weak now?”
* * *
The next day, Neal Henderson told the rest of his story.
They parked the car at the end of a dead-end dirt road behind the Von Stein house. “We both got out of the car,” Henderson said. “He told me to wait for him for about half an hour, and he would come back to meet me at th
is point at the end of the road. He put on the sweater. He got a ski mask ready, but he didn’t put it on. Went ahead and put his gloves on. He had a flashlight and he turned it on. It didn’t work very well. The batteries seemed to be weak.”
Mitchell Norton handed Henderson a photograph of a baseball bat.
“This is the bat that James had that night,” Henderson said. “I remember him taping the handle. And there’s a circle of black triangles around the bat that he drew with Magic Marker. I remember him drawing that.”
Then Norton handed Henderson the bat itself. This was, for Norton, one of the trickiest moments of the trial. When Henderson had first told his story to John Crone and Lewis Young, he’d mentioned the bat. He had said he thought Upchurch might have thrown the bat out of the moving car, as they drove back toward Raleigh. Later, he’d revised this, saying he was not sure, but it was possible that when Upchurch returned to the car after having committed the murder, he had already disposed of the bat.
The next day, in a small, wooded area across from Lawson Road, Crone found a baseball bat that had obviously been exposed to the elements for some time. The bat had been sent to a laboratory for analysis, but the report came back negative. There were no traces of blood, no hairs, no fibers—nothing that could link it to the commission of any crime.
Only Neal Henderson could do that. And now he was: saying, yes, this was definitely the bat that James Upchurch had brought with him. Those faint and faded traces of Magic Marker were proof enough, even though, he admitted, “there’s no tape, and it’s a lot darker and it has dirt on it.”
He then identified the remnants of clothing found at the fire scene as being similar to what he recalled Upchurch wearing that night.
But that was it. There was no physical evidence that linked either Upchurch or Henderson to the murder scene. There was only Henderson’s uncorroborated story, and an old baseball bat that had been lying in a near-swamp for maybe a year. Even the knapsack found in the back hall could not be identified positively as belonging to Upchurch. Henderson said, “He’s always had a bag like that. Typically, he put his schoolbooks in it, or Dungeons and Dragons books.” But again, there was only Henderson’s unsupported word.
Henderson said that after Upchurch had prepared himself for the escapade—donning a disguise that could have been taken directly from a Dungeon Master’s manual—“We drove down to a wooded lot behind the house. When I slowed down the car, he jumped out. I never came to a full stop. He disappeared into the lot. I went back down to the other road and parked back where I had parked before.”
The road behind the Von Stein house, one block past Lawson, was Marsh Road. It was here, Henderson said, that Upchurch got out of the car. He would have been less than fifty yards from the Von Steins’ back door.
The “other road” to which Henderson referred, a dirt road with big bumps and potholes that came to a dead end after only a few hundred feet, was American Legion Road. From the dead end, where Henderson said he parked, the distance to the Von Stein house was about half a mile, across a large, empty field, through woods, across a small street called Northwoods Road, across a backyard or two to Marsh Road, and then through the wooded area that bordered the Von Steins’ backyard.
“How long did you stay there?” Norton asked.
“I am not sure. It seemed like forever, but probably, maybe, half an hour. I just couldn’t tell. I was supposed to wait until he came back, but I did not.”
“Why didn’t you, Neal?”
Bonnie felt her stomach tighten as she watched Mitchell Norton, who’d been so emotionally abusive to her, acting positively fatherly toward Henderson.
“Up until then,” Henderson said, “it didn’t seem like anything bad was going to happen, and I wasn’t too worried about it. But while I was sitting there, I kept thinking something is going to go wrong, or something is going to go right. Either way, it wouldn’t be very good. I was scared to death.”
“What did you do?”
“I decided not to wait for him any longer. I pulled out and went looking for him. I couldn’t take sitting there by myself anymore. I didn’t know what was going on. I had to find out something. So I went down past the Smallwood subdivision, hoping to see some sign of him or something. I kept going past it. Then I turned around and came back. I still didn’t see any sign of him.”
What he did spot, he said, was a different dirt road—not the one where he’d agreed to wait; not where he’d already been with Upchurch; not where Upchurch, fleeing the scene of a murder, would be expecting to find him.
This new road, this little track he saw leading off into high corn, was called the Airport Road and led to a small landing strip. Though a tenth of a mile closer to Lawson than was American Legion Road, it was on the other side of the four-lane Market Street Extension, the main road leading past the entrance to the Smallwood subdivision.
Henderson said he’d driven perhaps “a couple hundred yards” down this Airport Road—a road that, presumably, James Upchurch didn’t even know existed—and turned off the engine and waited.
This didn’t make sense. It had never made sense. It never would. Why would the driver of a getaway car move it almost half a mile away from where the killer, fleeing on foot, expected to find it? What was this, a game of hide-and-seek? Henderson’s new location, on the Airport Road, was far from the route he said he’d expected Upchurch to take back to the car.
But this had been his story from the start, and Mitchell Norton was stuck with it, just as he was now stuck with Page Hudson’s testimony about the rice in Lieth’s stomach.
“Why did you go to the Airport Road,” he asked, “instead of returning to the Legion Road?”
“I wanted to be able to see him if he was going towards the Legion Road. I also figured he probably saw me. I figured that he saw me as I was driving back and forth on the main road. And if he did see me, he would see where I turned into.”
To Bonnie, this was the least plausible testimony she’d yet heard. The driver of a getaway car used in a murder decides all on his own to switch locations, assuming that the killer would be able to figure out where to find him in the dead of night, fleeing the scene of what might well be a multiple homicide, in a neighborhood that neither one of them had ever seen before?
Asked how long he sat there, Henderson said, “It wasn’t too long Ten minutes, maybe more, maybe less. I just wasn’t sure.”
“And what were you thinking?”
“Well, I was hoping we wouldn’t get caught. But I was hoping that he wouldn’t do anything to get caught for. I didn’t know what to think. It seemed like whichever way I was thinking, it wouldn’t turn out right.”
“And while you were sitting there thinking, did you see James Upchurch?”
“Yes. First, I heard him running towards the car. I heard someone running and I immediately looked around to see if it was him. And I saw him coming up the road from the main road.
“He got to the car, and he opened the door. He jumped in and said, ‘I did it! I can’t believe I did it! I never want to see that much blood again the rest of my life. Let’s get out of here!’ ”
This, too, seemed somewhat improbable. Why would Upchurch’s first words not have been, “What the hell are you doing here, when you were supposed to be parked at the end of the Legion Road?”
And since the whole assault had been carried out in near-darkness, how could he have even seen the blood?
Henderson described driving off at high speed, looking for the road back to Raleigh, but missing what he thought to be the proper turn, and instead turning down a dark road he’d never seen before.
“Once we got off that main road, James told me to find a dark place, to pull over so he could change clothes. He said he had blood on him. And somewhere along that road, there was a farmer’s path off to the right or the left. I just don’t r
emember. I pulled over. There were no lights around, no houses. He walked up ahead of the car, about twenty, thirty feet where some bushes were. And he changed clothes and threw his old clothes in the trunk. He threw everything he had in the trunk.”
“What did he say, if anything, about what had happened inside the house?”
“He told me someone made a loud noise while he was in there. And he thought the whole neighborhood would wake up because of it.”
Instead, however, not even Angela, twenty feet away, had woken up.
* * *
“When he got back to the car,” Norton asked, “do you recall anything that he brought back with him?”
“He had what he was wearing and he had the knife.”
“Do you recall the bat?”
“No, sir.”
The bat continued to pose a problem for Mitchell Norton. But he decided to tackle Henderson’s inconsistent statements about it head-on. Why, he asked, had Neal said two contradictory things about the bat?
“At that point,” Henderson said, “I was just trying to give them ideas of where to look. I told them I wasn’t sure. James might have had the bat. He might not have. I just couldn’t remember.”
Henderson said he and Upchurch had eventually spotted a road sign that said, “To 264,” which was the road that would take them back to Raleigh.
“I was still very scared,” Henderson said. “I didn’t hear any police sirens, so I figured they weren’t coming after us right away. But someone had still been killed.”
Had they talked? Norton asked.
“I don’t think either of us was in any mood for talking. I was thinking what I was thinking. And he wasn’t saying anything. Once we got out of Beaufort County, though, James told me to find another place and turn off.”
“How did you know you had gotten out of Beaufort County?”
“There was a sign saying, ‘Entering Pitt County,’ I believe. And then at every intersection we came to, I would slow down and we would look to both sides, looking for a place that was dark, that didn’t have any houses in it. Eventually, we came to one. It was very empty. We could see a house off in the distance, but nothing close to the road. I drove forward until we were in a dark area, right at the beginning of a curve. I stopped the car, and I got out and went to the bushes to use the bathroom. James asked for the keys to open the trunk up. I came over and opened the trunk for him. He took out the knife. He took out the sweater, the jeans, some shoes, and a can of gasoline. He threw the stuff on the ground and poured the gasoline on top of it. He lit it somehow. I don’t know if he had a lighter or a match. I wasn’t paying close attention to him. My back was to him, but I heard a whoosh of the gasoline igniting. He went to the front of the car and took out the map, and he threw the map on top of the fire.”