When I began to talk to Chris, he told me that as far as he could tell, Dr. Spaulding was absolutely right.
I met him for the first time on Mother’s Day of 1990, in a prison in Goldsboro, southeast of Raleigh, where he was in the midst of a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. We talked for two hours in a room thick with cigarette smoke in which metal tables had been bolted into the floor approximately six inches from one another.
Terribly nervous, he chain-smoked cigarettes with trembling hands. His legs shook so hard the whole time we talked that his knees jiggled the surface of the metal table.
Chris was trying to grow a beard and he’d just submitted to some sort of radical haircut from an inmate barber. To anyone who had seen only his high school yearbook picture, he would have been unrecognizable.
“I’m secure now,” he told me. “I know where my life is.” He said he felt better being in prison than he’d felt at NC State in the weeks that led up to the murder.
“There was not a single twenty-four-hour period when I was not drunk or stoned or tripping. From first thing in the morning until the time I went to sleep. I felt the need to escape that badly.”
“To escape from what?”
“Myself, I guess. But reality was indistinguishable from fantasy at that point. Our game characters were more important than real life.”
He said they’d go to Wildflour for pizza and beer and Moog would shout, “Five thousand experience points to anyone who beats on the table with his mug and yells, ‘Serving wench, bring us more ale!’” Moog would give them experience points for all sorts of things, such as stealing. The more expensive the object you stole, the more experience points you would get from the Dungeon Master.
“The whole point was, for doing something daring in real life, you’d be given points for your character. With the points, the character would accumulate wealth and power and advance to a higher level. And your character would do things a real person would never do. The game was a way of acting out your impulses without having to regret it later. At least that was the way it was supposed to work.
“The trouble was, with all the drugs, the distinction got kind of blurred. I just remember—as we were planning the murders—I wasn’t thinking so much about the money, I was wondering how many experience points I would get.”
He said he realized only afterward how much his character, Dimson the Wanderer, had in common with himself. “She was a loner, her family was dead, she was cut off from herself, just like me. I always made it a point to not let any one person know everything. Never let anyone get the full picture. See, I have a basic distrust of everyone, and if they don’t have the full picture, they can’t get to me. The trouble was, I don’t think I’ve ever been ‘me.’ I feel like I’m not allowed to be what I want to be. Nobody can see it, but I’ve built an invisible wall around me, brick by brick. I still feel one hundred percent alone. Even if I was in a room with a thousand people, I’d be by myself. And I know I’ll feel alone forever.”
In subsequent visits—he was eventually assigned to a prison called Craggy, just north of Asheville—we talked more about his feelings of alienation: of his sense that he’d never had a true home.
“The way it was with Lieth,” he said, “when we were good, we were ‘his kids.’ But whenever we did something wrong, he would holler at Mom about it. I didn’t like to hear him holler at Mom. In fact, that bugged the shit out of me.
“They had problems. Don’t let anybody tell you different. I can remember lots of times. I remember once when my mom called my aunt Ramona on the phone, crying, and saying she was ready to leave Lieth and all of us. That was when I was in high school, a long time before anybody could start blaming things on the fact that Lieth’s parents were sick.
“After a while, he started drinking all the time. You heard about the time he came after me in the living room, swinging at me. But that wasn’t much. The second time, it really killed me. He was drunk, he tried to beat my ass, he was yelling, ‘I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!’ He tried to kick me and I wound up having to use my oriental martial arts. Tai-kwan-do. He thumped me in the face and said, ‘Let’s take it outside.’ My mom and Angela were yelling, ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Finally, I just ran. My escape, like it always is, was to just jump in my car and get away, drive like a complete maniac for a while.”
Chris said things had been bad ever since they’d moved to Little Washington. “I guess I didn’t like living in that house. It was the exact opposite of when I was younger and the family was there for me. But my mom never knew. I never told her about any of the problems I was having, about any of the bad feelings I had. I didn’t talk to anyone in the family. I don’t know why. I think it’s an inherited trait.
“But maybe there was, for some reason, a deep-seated lack of trust of my mother. Like, when I was little, I was always afraid she’d leave me the way Steve Pritchard had. When she wouldn’t come home from work on time, I’d sit at the day care or at my grandma’s and just bawl and bawl until she finally came in the door.
“In Washington, my mom tried, but I had the feeling I just wasn’t understood. I never felt I was understood by anyone. The reason I went to State instead of ECU in Greenville was not because it was a better school but because I wanted to get as far away from that house as I could. Home was not a place I was close to. Home, to me, was not a home.”
We began to talk about feelings, and about his inability to express them in nondestructive ways.
“I have removed my emotions from the thought process,” he said. “Man, I push them suckers all the way down to the bottoms of my feet. I would push them clear out the bottoms if I could. I learned that from somewhere, maybe from my mother. That’s where escapism comes in. It was only in a fantasy that I could really let myself feel. My approach is to get up high, above my emotions. Compartmentalize. I want to get myself on a different, higher level than my emotions.
“At the same time, I want to be open. I want people to know me. The fact that I’m not open, I trace that back to my mother. That tells me where I got it from. My mom and I talked very, very seldom.”
* * *
Once, I said that the way he described his family life made it sound like a connect-the-dot picture in which none of the dots were connected.
“Not dots,” he said quickly. “Because at least dots have something in common. At least dots have the same shape. This was worse. This was more like a tetrahedron, a square, a circle, and a polygon. Four different people living under the same roof, trying to lead separate lives.
“The conflict between us was always there, but most of the time it was like a ghost—not quite tangible. We all knew we weren’t okay, but we felt we had to pretend. There was something out there that nobody knew how to deal with, or wanted to try to.
“It came down to the feeling, well, we have to live together, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. Everybody was always on edge. We’d go to restaurants and Lieth would raise hell and complain, but he’d raise hell and complain at home, too.
“And it really wasn’t the same with Lieth after Chocowinity. He could just never let that go. So, after that, whenever I could, I just cleared out. When I could be gone, I was gone. Somewhere else. Anywhere else. It didn’t matter. And whenever I could be, I’d be drinking. I remember coming home one time totally blitzed. Mom was there, I called her a bitch, then I went out to her car and threw up in it.
“But why did I want them dead? I can’t blame it all on the drugs. These feelings had to have been there before. It was just the drugs that brought them out, and the game that gave me a way to do it.”
“Why did you want them dead?” I asked. “So they’d never be able to reject you?”
There was a long pause. Then he said, “No. I think I wanted to kill them because if they were dead, I couldn’t disappoint them anymore.”
42
br /> I also spent time in Little Washington. The best place to eat, incidentally, isn’t Wendy’s or Hardee’s or even the Stage House, where Angela delivered the place mat to John Taylor. The best place to eat in Little Washington is Bill’s Hot Dogs on Gladden Street, right next to A. P. Gerard and Son—Feed, Seed, Lawn and Garden Supplies, and just up the street from the First Presbyterian Church.
What you order at Bill’s is an All-the-Way, which comes with chili that they make right there in the kitchen; and with mustard, and with most anything else you might want to put on it. You have to order two because, as they say at Bill’s, “they’re small in size but big in taste.” The preferred drink is Pepsi-Cola, an original North Carolina product. At lunchtime, Bill’s is one of the busiest places in town.
* * *
As Keith Mason had told Bonnie at the end of the trial, many people in Washington still believed that both she and her daughter were involved in the murder of Lieth.
I had one long conversation with Mitchell Norton during which, after several hours, and after he’d smoked innumerable Salem Lights, he mentioned what he called his Plan B, which he might have implemented if Chris had been a defendant.
This consisted, in essence, of putting Bonnie on trial for the murder: of suggesting that even though she hadn’t been charged, much suggested that she had masterminded the plot in order to collect the money that would come to her when Lieth was dead.
Norton conceded that no physical evidence linked Bonnie to the crime, but none had linked Upchurch either. And Bonnie had a far better motive: a $2 million motive.
His goal, he said, would not have been to convict her—after all, she hadn’t even been indicted—but to cause the jury to view her with suspicion and thereby to disregard anything she might say in support of her son.
To imply that she’d been involved, he would have referred to the undigested rice, the letters to Lieth from the woman in California, and the blood-spattered pages from A Rose in Winter. He would also have made an issue of Bonnie’s demeanor: how she had not displayed grief or sorrow at appropriate times, in appropriate ways. And he would have dragged in Angela, too, as Upchurch’s lawyers had tried to do.
* * *
The rice remained an unresolved question. More than a year after the trial, Page Hudson was still troubled by its implications.
“Rice is pretty easily digestible,” he said in an interview. “Cooked chicken is pretty easily digestible. But the rice had undergone very little change. The chicken had undergone very little change. The longer in the stomach, the more frayed-looking the particles become. These didn’t look frayed at all. If they’d told me he had eaten ten or fifteen minutes before, I would have said okay. But when they said four or five hours . . .
“I would have expected him to have had an empty stomach, or close to an empty stomach within a couple of hours. By midnight, I would have thought he would have had an empty stomach. Or that the material in it would at least have been practically unrecognizable.
“Look, most everything in life I’ve found an exception to, so I won’t say it’s impossible. I’ll just say I’m astounded. In many cases, there’s an item or two that doesn’t seem to fit with everything else. So you sort of go along with the total mass of evidence. I’m not going to get up on a soapbox and say, ‘Hey, justice wasn’t carried out here because the rice wasn’t digested.’ But I’m still terribly surprised. I still have a great deal of difficulty believing that I was looking at five or six hours of digestion.
“You know, you develop over a period of time a spectrum of what can or will happen, and when something falls outside that spectrum, you say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. I’m not willing to accept those facts.’ I got very much that feeling with the Von Stein case, and I still have it. If I had the chance to see the great instant replays of all cases—if they said, ‘Hey, you can pick a half dozen and go back and see the replay, to see what really happened’—this would be one of my six.
“Something is not quite right about this case. There’s something missing here. There’s another card yet to be dealt.”
* * *
Dr. Hudson’s feeling was shared by both of James Upchurch’s public defenders.
“My feeling,” Frank Johnston said, “is if the truth were told, there would be other people involved. I think there was involvement by those we’ve heard about that hasn’t come to light.”
He said he based his view primarily on two factors: the undigested rice and the attitude of Bonnie and her children during trial. “I detected a coldness from Bonnie, Chris, and Angela that shocked me. Bonnie just never showed—and maybe she’s an emotionless person—but she never showed any real emotion, whether she was talking about her son or her husband. She’s the most controlled individual I have ever seen.”
Asked if he questioned her story, Johnston replied, “I definitely do. When you put in this problem with the time factor and the food not digested and her saying it happened at four or five in the morning, I just think there are things that could have happened that none of us would ever know. It looked to me like the medical evidence completely overruled what the State was saying. The time interval, medically, can’t exist. So, either the medical science is not as precise as we think it is, or she’s hiding something.”
Wayland Sermons did not go quite so far, but agreed that “Bonnie was very unusual, personality-wise,” and that Dr. Hudson’s findings “pointed in an entirely different direction” from the story told by Bonnie, Chris, and Neal Henderson.
“The testimony that the death occurred in the neighborhood of twelve to one to two o’clock showed that Henderson and Pritchard were telling a tale they had manufactured,” he said. And Sermons pointed to “tremendous discrepancies,” even between their two stories, in regard to such matters as how far in advance the planning for the murder had begun, and as to where—the bathroom closet or beneath the cushion of a chair—Chris’s car keys had been returned.
Also, in his statement to police Chris had said he didn’t care when the murders were done, as long as his car was back before dawn. Yet, according to Henderson, it had not been. As the sun began to rise over Greenville, Henderson had been driving the white Mustang through a car wash.
And even in the absence of the undigested rice, there was the fact that Lieth had gone to bed—as was his custom—at nine-thirty P.M. By four-thirty, he would already have had seven hours’ sleep and might have been awakened far more easily than if he’d been attacked at midnight.
“That is what still makes me wonder,” Sermons said. “There were so many things that didn’t add up. I think, at some point, someone’s going to find there was someone else in the room.”
For Sermons to have said “someone else” suggested an implicit admission that his client had been there, too, but that was not the point he wanted to make.
“I think the someone would probably be Henderson,” he said. “Or Henderson and somebody else. There was just too much going on, too quickly, for one person to do.” This point drew the support of both Page Hudson and Tom Brereton, not to mention of Bonnie herself.
“Henderson had a year to get his story straight,” Sermons said. “And I don’t believe for a minute that what he said on the stand is the truth, the whole truth.”
Regarding Chris, he said, “By and large, I think everyone came away from the trial with the impression that poor Chris didn’t know the truth. Or maybe he knew it but didn’t know how to tell it. Or just that the truth wasn’t in him.”
As to his own opinion about what had happened, Sermons said only, “I’d rather not get into my personal beliefs.” He added, however, in regard to Bonnie, “The thing that kept on with me was, ‘Was she involved?’” And he emphasized that his colleague, Frank Johnston, was “incredulous that Bonnie could survive an attack with the superficial injuries she had.”
* * *
Even Lewis Young admitted that
for some time, even after she’d passed her polygraph test so handily, he continued to have doubts about Bonnie. “I felt like for the most part, all along, she was not a part of this. But I never ruled out that there was a lot of money at stake here, and she was the first to gain by having survived.
“But I have a hard time thinking that somebody would subject themselves to the injuries she received just to be that convincing. Even though they ultimately ended up being more superficial than life threatening, that bat could have just hit in the wrong place; that knife could have gone just a little bit deeper. And how do you control that?”
* * *
To Jean Spaulding, who examined Bonnie’s medical records, there was nothing superficial about the injuries. “Her wounds were severe. They were not wounds you would inflict on yourself, or that you would want inflicted on you.”
Indeed, Dr. Spaulding considered any suggestion that Bonnie herself might have arranged or participated in the murder to be ridiculous. “Having known Bonnie very well as her psychiatrist, I do not feel she has the capacity to have taken part in or to have planned anything like this. Not a murder in general, and certainly not the murder of Lieth, who was so important to her on so many levels.
“Every time Bonnie would go back to Lieth, in conversation, that’s where I could see the warmth. That’s where I could see so much humanity from her. The meaning of Lieth for Bonnie was bigger than life.”
* * *
But even Bill Osteen, for a time, had his doubts. For Osteen, the problem was not Bonnie’s seeming detachment or unusual degree of self-control, but something much more concrete.