Before He Wakes (4 page)

Russell feared for his safety with his wife, Barbara. Russell no longer believed that her first husband’s wound was accidental.

Buchanan’s interest suddenly picked up. First husband’s wound?

He, too, died from a gunshot wound and Barbara was the only person with him. Russell always said that if anything suspicious happened to him that he would want me to remember his telling me that.

Barbara Stager had had another husband who died from an accidental gunshot wound in her presence? What were the odds of that?

Buchanan did not betray his surprise, though. He never wanted anybody to be able to guess what he was thinking or anticipate what he might do.

Russell thought Barbara did not have a firm grasp on reality. Supposedly she was writing about her first husband’s death in a book entitled
Untimely Death
. She told him a publisher wanted to publish the book and showed him a letter from the publisher. He later found where she had written for information from the publisher, cut the letterhead from the response and made up her own stationery to write herself letters from the publisher.

Russ found huge sums of money missing and she would not account for it. He insisted she get a job so he could monitor her whereabouts during the day. He also thought she was having an affair and followed her one weekend morning to a parking lot where she parked her car, got out and got into a man’s car and immediately began heavy petting.

Barbara received a huge insurance settlement from the accidental shooting death of her first husband.

Russell completed army basic training in the late 1960s, and I believe he has been in the army’s reserves for at least 10 years, maybe more. He received the best training this country had to offer in the use and proper storage of the handgun. Russell had a gun during our marriage, but I only saw it on maybe two occasions. It was kept safely in a drawer unloaded. Russ had a very healthy respect for guns, and I remember his comments about accidental shootings and how they would never happen if people handled their guns with respect. He would never have slept with a loaded gun under his pillow. I pray that God’s will be done in this tragedy.

Money problems. An affair. Bizarre behavior. Insurance. Nobody had to tell Buchanan that all of that could add up to murder. Nor did anybody have to tell him that murder could be difficult to prove.

“Well,” he said, looking up at this woman who suddenly had changed everything, “the evidence is consistent with her story.”

But he knew now that he would have to find out whether Barbara Stager could be believed. And to do that he would have to find out who Barbara Stager really was.

Part Two

Paths Not Taken

4

People who had known Barbara Stager from childhood could not believe what they would hear about her in the wake of her second husband’s death. It was as if they were being told about a total stranger. That this woman they knew as a loving mother, a doting wife, a devoted Christian and church leader, a respected and rising employee at one of America’s most prestigious medical centers could be a woman obsessed with sex, possessed by spending money, a pathological liar willing to do anything to cover herself, was simply inconceivable.

“She was raised in church, and she just knew those things were wrong,” said a lifelong friend who could not bring herself to believe that Barbara could do such things.

Although Barbara and her family would closely guard the details of their lives, Barbara’s childhood and the events that led her to become seemingly two entirely different persons can be pieced together through records and the remembrances and observations of family, friends and acquaintances.

Her parents, James and Marva Terry, were country people, hard-working, churchgoing, with rock-solid values, “as fine a people as ever walked the earth,” as some of their closest friends described them. Both grew up in large families on farms in Durham County, but after they married they settled in Durham, where the tobacco empire built by James Buchanan Duke had created a strong economic base upon which they would build their own lives. James got a job with Duke Power Company, where he would make a career beginning as a meter reader and rising to better positions. Marva went to work as a secretary at Duke University Medical Center, where her mother was employed and where she, too, would eventually make a career, rising to the position of staff assistant to the director.

Later, people who knew them had little doubt about who was dominant in their relationship. Marva was clearly stronger and more ambitious than her husband. James was quiet, easygoing, amiable, liked by almost everybody. “As good as gold,” one friend described him. “He would do anything for you.” Although Marva was talkative and could be warm and friendly to people she knew, she presented a different face to the world. She was reserved, cool, poised, precise, rigid, a person much concerned about appearances. Some thought of her as aloof, even smug. “Marva operated in a vacuum,” one former coworker said, “the kind of person who would walk by and you would almost feel a chilly breeze.”

As Marva rose to positions of greater authority at work, she began to associate with doctors, administrators and other important people in the community. These people, whose education, income and social standing were much greater than her own, she admired and wanted to impress. Some would come to think that the life she had made for herself did not live up to her dreams, and later they couldn’t help but wonder if she had not transferred those expectations to her daughter.

When Barbara, her first child, was born at Watts Hospital in Durham on October 30, 1948, Marva was twenty, James twenty-two. Only a year later, a second child was born, a son, Alton. Both children were fair-haired and hazel-eyed, and people sometimes mistook them for twins.

Perhaps because she was the firstborn, perhaps because she was a daughter, Barbara was expected to be a perfect child, and she was. From the beginning she was shy, reserved and instinctively obedient, always striving to please. Her mother was closely protective of her and quick to reprimand her if she made a misstep. Some close to the family would recall that her mother continued to correct her even into adulthood, often saying, “Barbara, stand up straight.”

Part of this drive to be perfect stemmed from Barbara’s awareness even at an early age that physically she was not. She suffered an astigmatism that left her nearsighted and caused her to wear thick glasses even before she started school, and she did not grow as quickly as her brother, always remaining smaller than others her age. The awkwardness she felt may have been the reason that her favorite doll was big, freckled and considered ugly by some of her family and friends.

In other ways, though, Barbara was a parent’s dream. Quiet and studious, she proved to be an outstanding student at Hillandale Elementary School. Teachers commented not only about her industry, but on her good conduct and proper manners. Her high grades did not come easily, however. Her eighth-grade teacher noted on her report card that she had to work exceptionally hard to maintain them, and that she remained immature emotionally.

Barbara’s rapt attention and good behavior also were noted at Rose of Sharon Baptist Church, the church in which her father had grown up and in which he and Marva were among the most active members. Barbara was baptized there at the age of ten, and she not only attended Sunday school and Sunday services regularly but was always present with her family at prayer meetings, gospel singings, revivals and homecomings as well. Every summer she attended vacation Bible school with her brother. The family left the church soon after Barbara was baptized, however, because of controversy over the church’s pastor. They moved to Ridgecrest Baptist, where Barbara joined the Baptist Training Union and became one of the church’s most faithful young members.

Several years later, the family changed residence as well. James Terry helped his father and other family members raise tobacco every summer, and he wanted to be out in the country again, where he could have a big garden and be free of city strictures. Just before Barbara was to enter ninth grade, he built a four-bedroom brick house—trimmed in white, with a bay window in the living room—on seven acres carved from his father’s farm north of Durham in a thickly wooded, sparsely settled area.

Barbara started the ninth grade amid strangers at nearby Northern High School and continued on the path her mother had set for her. In her first year she was selected as a member of the Knights and Ladies, an honorary society that recognized academic achievement. She also joined the Future Teachers of America. She liked children, she said, and hoped to become an elementary school teacher.

In the summer after Barbara’s freshman year, her mother gave birth to a third child, another son, Steve. The Terrys always had been a tightly knit family, but the baby provided a new focus that brought them even closer. Barbara doted over her new baby brother and would become as fiercely protective of him as she always had been of Alton.

She and Alton were extremely close, often doing things together, and that fall Alton joined Barbara at Northern High and, like her, became a member of the band. Barbara, who looked tiny and lost in the heavy navy blue and gold uniform when she marched in parades and the halftime shows at football games, played clarinet, an instrument she had learned in grade school. Alton was a bass drummer, tall and stiffly erect. Several years later, Barbara would recall for a friend an incident on the band bus that year when an older boy picked on Alton. She rushed to his aid and later admonished him for not standing up for himself. “If he ever does that again, you kick him in the crotch,” she said. As she told the story later, she seemed to relish the thought of such retaliation.

If Barbara harbored secret resentment toward boys, it may have been only because her desires were so strong. Few seemed even to notice her. She worried about her popularity and thought herself unattractive. She was slender, like her mother, but not nearly as tall, only five feet four inches. Her shoulders were narrow and tapered, her hips too big. Her chin was weak, her lips too fat, her mouth too wide. The toothiness of her smile made her look like a cartoon character. Her shoulder-length hair was mousy brown, and she still peered through unflattering heavy-framed glasses.

“We were shy,” her childhood friend Brenda Hunt, recalled years later. “We were brought up in a Christian atmosphere. We were told always to act like ladies, and that’s what we tried to do. We were not outgoing and what I would call provocative, because that was not the way we were brought up.”

Her church taught that sex outside marriage was hell-sent. Even thoughts of sex were to be repressed, for fantasy was considered as sinful as the act itself. Although Barbara’s was not one of them, some Baptist families did not even allow their daughters to go swimming for fear that all of that exposed skin might provoke sexual thoughts. While a good-night kiss between young couples might be tolerated by liberal Baptist families, a roving hand always was taboo, and a young woman who allowed such transgression was expected to pray for forgiveness. Such teachings created tremendous burdens of guilt when young libidos began to bud. Barbara’s later affairs indicate that sexual fantasies not only budded in her teenage years but were kept under unnaturally rigid control. There were no secrets from God, as she well knew.

For the time being, however, it was enough for Barbara to keep such thoughts from her parents. In a time when almost all parents were strict, Barbara told friends that her parents were stricter than others, especially her mother. And although later she would suggest that she felt overprotected and resented her restrictions, people outside the family never knew her to challenge them. She was always home at whatever curfew her parents set, never complained when she was told that she couldn’t go somewhere or do something. “She never talked back to her parents,” one of her mother’s friends recalled.

She didn’t drink, smoke, use foul language or sneak out. She was just as polite, responsible and serious-minded as a perfect daughter should be. In her sophomore year, Barbara got her driver’s license and her parents bought her an old blue Rambler to drive to school. When other students were cruising with dates, Barbara and her brother were seen riding together in the Rambler. That spring, Barbara took a part-time job at Duke University Medical Center as a clerk in the collections division of the bookkeeping office, a job she would keep until she went away to college. Her job, regular home chores, helping with her baby brother, church, school, band practice and homework left Barbara little free time. Still, she kept up her grades, and every year she was selected for Knights and Ladies. Somehow, too, she managed to find time for other school activities and to help family members or friends whenever they needed it.

Barbara graduated from Northern High in 1967, thirty-third in her class of 233. It was a given that she would attend college, and although her Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were barely average (395 verbal, 450 math), she had a choice of schools. She was accepted at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, not far from home. But Appalachian State Teachers College at Boone in the mountains of western North Carolina, nearly two hundred miles from Durham, offered her a modest scholarship, one of many presented to prospective teachers, and that decided her choice.

That summer, Barbara worked full-time at Duke University Medical Center, saving money to see her through her first year of college. Friends saw that she clearly was excited about the prospect of getting out on her own, away from the restrictions of home. But they did not know the depth of her longings, the strength of her resentments, and they could not foresee the nearly explosive urges that were stirring within her.