Blood Games (12 page)

Another Smallwood resident called the detectives to his house to tell them that he’d been awakened by a mysterious noise almost every morning about four for more than a year. He didn’t think he needed to point out that the murder had occurred at about that time. He just thought the two things might be connected. The detectives thanked him for the information and left shaking their heads. For all they knew, the guy might be being startled awake by the sound of his own gas passing.

It was not only in Smallwood that people were uneasy and losing sleep over the Von Stein murder, however. Michelle Sparrow, the dispatcher who had kept Bonnie on the line until officers could get to her, was so disturbed by the murder that she had trouble sleeping for days. Danny Edwards, the second officer into Bonnie’s bedroom, began locking his own bedroom door when he went to bed, and for several nights he was awakened by dreams of Lieth Von Stein’s bloodied body. In Pitt County, Noel Lee, who had come upon the fire that contained the murder weapon, was looking at his neighbors with suspicion, wondering if one of them might have been the murderer and if he had put himself and his family in danger by reporting the fire to police.

Not since another killing fourteen years earlier had murder been such a topic of conversation in Washington and Beaufort County. At 3:55 A.M. on August 27, 1974, a sixty-two-year-old white jailer had been found stabbed to death in a cell at the Beaufort County Jail. He was nude from the waist down and had semen on his left leg. The cell in which he was found had been occupied by a twenty-year-old black woman named Joan (pronounced Jo Ann) Little, who had been serving time for larceny and burglary and was alone in the female wing of the jail. She was missing, as were the dead jailer’s keys. Tracked down and arrested for murder and escape, Joan Little claimed that the jailer had forced her to perform oral sex and she had killed him and fled. Her cause was taken up by women’s and civil rights groups, and Washington found itself the unwilling focus of national and international attention. Reporters flocked to Washington, and many townspeople felt themselves unfairly portrayed as ignorant, redneck, and racist. In an eight-week trial in Raleigh a year after the killing, Joan Little was defended by a flamboyant, liberal attorney named Jerry Paul, a native of Beaufort County. A jury of six whites and six blacks took just over an hour to acquit her of the murder charge.

Although that case had caused a lot of talk and resentment in Washington, it had not been the source of nearly as many rumors as the Von Stein murder. And it had produced none of the fear that now had the entire town on edge.

As each day passed, more calls came to the police department, the newspaper, the town manager’s office, wanting to know if certain rumors were true, asking when an arrest was going to be made. And each day, the pressure grew greater on Lewis Young and Melvin Hope, the detectives who had primary responsibility for the case. And they still had nothing conclusive to connect anybody to the murder.

To make matters worse, shortly after four on Friday morning, July 29, four days after the murder, a series of telephone calls sent new waves of fear through Washington.

Three times that morning, telephones rang in or near Smallwood. When sleepy residents answered, a male voice whispered, “You are next,” and quickly hung up.

One of those calls was made to the home of Angela Pritchard’s best friend, Donna Brady.

Young and Hope thought that these calls probably came from somebody with a warped mind, exciting himself by exploiting the community’s fears. But they couldn’t ignore the possibility that there might be a crazed killer in their midsts, preparing to strike again.

Bruce Radford, a gangling, gregarious man, had been in Washington two months, barely time enough to acquaint himself with the problems he was facing, when he found himself deeply and unexpectedly entangled in the murder of Lieth Von Stein. Radford was thirty-three, and he had just been named the town manager of Washington, his second such job in what he expected to be a long career in municipal government.

Nobody had to brief him about the fear that the murder had engendered in his town. His telephone was ringing constantly. Citizens kept demanding to know what the police were going to do to protect them. Radford thought that the reaction bordered on hysteria, and he realized that he had a serious problem in quelling it, for part of that fear, he knew, lay in the town’s lack of confidence in the Washington Police Department.

“The police department was in shambles,” he recalled later. “High turnover, low conviction rates, low morale. I had been told when I came here, ‘Your biggest problem is the police department.’ I could see that it was my Achilles heel.”

The main problem, Radford thought, lay at the top. Chief Harry Stokes, Radford thought, was “from the old school,” not attuned enough to current management techniques to run a modern police department of twenty-eight officers. Stokes had been born in Pitt County, the son of a farmer who moved his family to Washington when Harry was thirteen. After high school, Harry joined the army and saw combat in Korea. He returned home to Washington and went to work at a service station until a job opened up at the police department in June 1953. He had been in law enforcement ever since, leaving the police department for only one six-year break in the early ’60s when he served as the county’s Alcoholic Beverage Control officer. After returning to the police department in 1966, he began climbing through the ranks. He had commanded both the patrol and detective divisions before being appointed chief in 1986, when the former chief took a job in another town.

Radford had met many times with Stokes and several times with the entire police department about the problems, which included carelessness, damaging property, and verbally abusing citizens. He already had begun cracking down and instituting changes, suspending some officers, reprimanding others. He was considering personnel changes to control the problems when the murder of Lieth Von Stein threw everything into turmoil.

Stokes had called Radford at five-thirty on the morning of the murder to tell him about it, and at eight Radford had gone to the house on Lawson Road to look into the situation himself. He talked to the detectives and realized that this case would produce problems. The type of murder that it was, the location of it, the prominence of the victim, would create a great public outcry to solve the case quickly. He also knew that a solution was not apt to be forthcoming any time soon.

“At the end of the first day, Harry came to me,” he recalled later. “He said, ‘We just don’t have any clues, not a lot of leads.’ He seemed perplexed by the whole thing.”

Radford decided then that he would have to take a strong hand in the investigation himself. He instructed the chief to present him with a daily written report on the progress of the investigation and other major activities in the police department.

Stokes resented that order and considered Radford to be meddling in his department. “That was nonsense,” he said later. “I didn’t have time to do all that mess. He wanted to keep his hands on everything going on. He wanted to run everything, make the decisions and call the shots. I didn’t like that. When a city manager tries to tell the chief of police what to do, that just don’t cut it.”

Radford made no excuses for pressuring Stokes and the detectives working the case. He was feeling pressure himself, and not just from fearful citizens who were calling to ask if an arrest was forthcoming.

On Friday, July 29, Radford got a call from Ashley Futrell. Futrell had been in Washington for forty years. He had been editor and publisher of the Washington
Daily News
for most of that time, and he kept close touch with all the town’s power brokers. Now seventy-seven, he had moved to emeritus status at the newspaper, but he still came to work every day, still wrote a regular column and occasional editorials, still kept his fingers on the pulse of the community, and he was a force to be reckoned with. He asked Radford to come to his office for a chat, and Radford went immediately. Futrell took him for a ride in his car to talk.

“He said he had received dozens and dozens of calls,” Radford said later. “He said this thing had gone on for four days, and the police department just wasn’t doing its job. We had to bring somebody to justice. He felt like it was just that simple.”

Later, Futrell would recall the conversation a little differently: “I told him this was a case that ought to be solved quickly. People were restless. It ought to be solved quickly to allay public fears.”

Radford’s response was ironic in one aspect: “I said it was a very serious case and it would take a long time for somebody to be brought to justice.” That was almost exactly the same response Radford was getting from the chief of police.

“People expect you to solve a case like they do on TV,” Chief Stokes said later. “But you don’t do it. Everybody wanted an arrest made, but you don’t make an arrest until you get the evidence, and the city manager didn’t understand that.”

Stokes was well aware that his officers had no evidence to connect anybody to the murder yet, but he felt that it was just a matter of time. His own suspicions were strong, and they had begun to be formed when he sat through that first long interview with Bonnie Von Stein.

“I had a weird feeling,” he recalled later. “I just felt like there was something more than what I heard. I just knew there was no serial killer running loose in the neighborhood. My feelings were she was not intended to be killed, and Angela was not intended to be killed. It made me realize that there was no outsider who went in to kill anyone. There was somebody inside. Then we found that map. We knew there was no doubt about it. It had to be somebody on the inside. I knew it would be resolved. I didn’t lose no sleep over it at all.”

13

Washington’s Summer Festival began as scheduled on Friday evening, July 29, on the town’s waterfront. Bruce Radford, the town manager, blew a deep note on a conch-shell horn to mark its opening.

The festival drew record crowds Friday night and Saturday, an estimated 24,000 on Friday and 28,000 on Saturday. Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, a popular southern beach music group, played. Stewart Parkway was lined with food stands and exhibits of arts and crafts. The river was alive with boats, more than anybody could ever remember seeing.

Although the Von Stein murder had disappeared from the front page of the newspaper on Friday, and Saturday’s paper had carried only a brief and nearly hidden mention that the investigation was “progressing,” according to the police chief, the specter of the murder hovered over the festival, and the murder remained a chief topic of conversation. Nearly everybody seemed to have a theory about it, or had heard some “inside” information. Rumors had swept through the town in waves, so many that Bonnie’s friend and neighbor, Peggy Smith, began keeping a list of them.

Some of the rumors were outrageously farfetched. In one, Lieth was an undercover FBI agent who had discovered that National Spinning was controlled by the Mafia and was a front for a major drug distribution ring. The “Mob” had sent a hit man from New York to kill him. In another, the murderer had turned loose dozens of chickens in the house to distract Bonnie’s forty cats while he went about his nefarious work. Other rumors offered gruesome details: Lieth had been stabbed fifty-two times; his eyes had been plucked out; his stomach had been ripped from his body; a message had been carved into his chest.

But most of the rumors on Peggy Smith’s list had to do with Bonnie and her two children. Bonnie was having an affair and her boyfriend did it. Lieth had ordered Angela’s boyfriend to leave the house and never come back. Chris had been kicked out of the house after a heated argument with Lieth. Chris and Angela hated Lieth and the family fought constantly. Angela was secretly married and her husband did it. Angela, her boyfriend, and Chris did it to collect a million dollars in insurance. Chris and Angela were on drugs and belonged to an occult group. Bonnie’s injuries were self-inflicted and weren’t serious.

While many in Washington remained fearful that the town harbored a crazed killer who might strike again, it was clear that many others had already come to the same conclusion that the police chief had reached: no serial killer was loose in Washington; the murder of Lieth Von Stein was an inside job.

Chris and Angela attended the summer festival with friends that weekend. Wherever they were recognized, whispers followed.

Detective Melvin Hope and SBI agent Lewis Young had no time for merrymaking at the Summer Festival. They were working that weekend, trying to learn more about Chris and Angela.

On Saturday afternoon, they went to a downtown store to talk to a young woman who had dated Chris. She said that she hadn’t had any contact with Chris since the previous fall when he came up to her at Burger King after a Friday night high school football game and “hugged my neck.” She had met Chris a couple of years earlier on a blind date, she said, and she once had gone as his date on a group trip to King’s Dominion, an amusement park in northern Virginia. She described the King’s Dominion trip as a “mistake.”

Why? the detectives asked.

“Chris was no gentleman,” she said.

How so?

“When I tell a boy no, I mean
no,”
she explained. “He wouldn’t keep his hands to himself.”

She had quit dating him after that trip, she said.

The young woman said she had been once to the Von Stein house with Chris and some of his friends. Angela was also there. She knew Angela but didn’t like her. She didn’t know of any particular ill feelings that Chris and Angela might have held for their stepfather, but she’d heard that they didn’t care for him.