Blood Games (13 page)

The young woman did tell the detectives several things of interest, though. Chris was “strange,” she said. He talked all the time about a game called Dungeons and Dragons that he played regularly with his friends Jonathan Wagner and Eric Smith. She didn’t know much about the game. No girls ever played with them, but Chris was so deeply into it that he would dress up in costumes and act out his parts. She also had been told that Chris was “heavy into drugs,” marijuana and cocaine, although she had no firsthand knowledge of it.

She’d heard one other thing, too, that she couldn’t confirm: that Chris and Angela had murdered Lieth. Her boyfriend had told her that, she said.

The detectives also talked that day to another young woman who was a friend of both Chris and Angela. She’d heard that Chris had “really flipped out” when leaving another friend’s house on Wednesday night, two days after the murder. Chris had told this other friend, another young woman, that he needed to talk to her in private. He’d given her some notebooks containing material he’d written.

This piqued the detectives’ interest. Could Chris have written something about the murder that he wanted to keep but didn’t want to be found in his possession?

This young woman also had heard something about the murder: Angela had a boyfriend who was an ex-convict and Lieth had kicked him out of the house the night before the murder.

How did she know this?

A friend’s mother had told her.

Bonnie Von Stein was released from Beaufort County Hospital on Monday, August 1, one week after she was attacked and her husband killed. That afternoon, she came voluntarily to the Washington Police Department to be fingerprinted so that police would be able to eliminate the fingerprints of family members from others that were recovered at the house.

After washing her hands, Bonnie was interviewed again by Lewis Young, who questioned her about friends of Chris and Angela. Police had heard that Angela had a boyfriend from Belhaven who could have been involved, but Bonnie knew of no such boyfriend. She named Chris’s roommates at the university, but she also made it clear that she had no concerns about any of Chris’s friends.

Young also went over a list of the contents of Bonnie’s pocketbooks to see if she noticed anything missing, and for the first time she realized that something had been taken on the night of the murder. On Friday, she’d gone to a bank machine and withdrawn one hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, she said. She’d had one of those bills in a pocket and had put it on a table in her bedroom Sunday night. But at least another eighty dollars should have been in the purse in the kitchen, the one that had its contents strewn across the stove top.

Angela and Chris also came to be fingerprinted that afternoon, Chris following his mother by an hour. After Chris was finished, Young and Hope took him aside to question him again about his activities on the weekend of the murder.

He’d come to Washington that Friday night because he hadn’t been home much during the summer and he just wanted to visit, he said. After he returned to Raleigh Saturday night to work on a paper, he actually went off with a friend to look for a party, he said. When they didn’t find one, they returned to his friend’s room and drank beer.

He’d worked on his paper for a little while Sunday but didn’t finish it, and Sunday night he’d drunk beer and played cards with other friends until about three-thirty in the morning. The paper wasn’t due until nine-fifty that morning and he’d planned to get up at seven and finish it. But Angela had called about five, not long after he’d gone to sleep. His roommate took the call and woke him, but his roommate went back to sleep. Chris said that he couldn’t find his car keys and had left the room and called the campus police, who picked him up and later brought him to Washington. His roommate found the car keys under a chair cushion later, Chris said.

Chris gave the detectives the names of the three roommates he’d had at college. But none of them, and none of his other friends, had ever had any problems with Lieth, he said. He didn’t know of any boyfriends of Angela who’d ever had problems with him either.

“I don’t know of any problems Lieth had with anybody,” he said.

By Tuesday, August 2, all the evidence that had been taken from 110 Lawson Road and the fire site in Pitt County had been tagged, packaged, and catalogued. Detectives John Taylor and Melvin Hope loaded it into an unmarked cruiser and, in an unprecedented move, headed for Washington, D.C., to deliver it to the forensics labs of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Normally, evidence was routinely sent to the SBI labs in Raleigh, but this case was special, and the police chief, the city manager, the district attorney, and other officials wanted it to go to the more sophisticated labs of the FBI, where it likely would get a quicker and better analysis. A lot of hope was being placed in this evidence, and they wanted it to reveal all that it could in as short a time as possible. The local newspaper carried a story the following day about the evidence being sent to Washington. Detective Captain Danny Boyd was quoted. “It will answer a lot of questions,” he said.

After Melvin Hope returned from Washington, he and Lewis Young continued chasing rumors and tracking leads that led nowhere. Although their suspicions were focused on Chris and Angela, they couldn’t risk passing up any possibilities. And several people who had the misfortune of having their license tag numbers jotted down by suspicious residents of Smallwood soon found the two detectives at their doorsteps.

Hope’s and Young’s attempts to trace rumors to their sources proved frustratingly unending, particularly when they tried to find out if Angela indeed had an ex-convict boyfriend. Their efforts to delve more deeply into the lives of the Von Stein family were more fruitful.

They returned to National Spinning Company and talked with more of Lieth’s coworkers. One told them that he had talked with Lieth on the Thursday or Friday before he was killed, and that Lieth was upset with Chris about his studies at N.C. State.

“If he doesn’t make it this semester, that’s it,” the coworker recalled Lieth saying. “I won’t pay for Chris to flunk out.”

The detectives also talked to two of the company’s top executives, Phil Wander, the chief financial officer for whom Lieth had done special jobs, and Don Barham, the vice president for human resources, both of whom had been in New York when Lieth was murdered. Other than Wander’s information that he was certain Lieth never had extramarital affairs while he was in New York, because he stayed at Wander’s apartment while he was there, nothing new was turned up.

Hope and Young also interviewed the two emergency medical technicians who had come to Bonnie’s aid, as well as the two hospital workers who had come to pick up Lieth’s body later. All of them made note of one thing they had found curious at the Von Stein house that morning: the teenage daughter had acted differently than anybody they had ever seen in a situation like that. She had seemed utterly unattached, emotionless.

“You have to know Angela,” Andrew Arnold told the two detectives.

Arnold was the young man whom Angela had called on the morning of the murder. He had accompanied her to the police department and stayed at her side much of the day. Angela actually was upset, he said. She just didn’t show it.

“If you knew her good enough, you could tell it was hurting her,” he said.

Angela and Lieth got along fine, Arnold said. When he first met Angela, she always referred to her stepfather as Lieth. Recently, she had started calling him her father. Arnold didn’t know of any boyfriend of Angela who might have been kicked out of the house. She had broken up with her last boyfriend, Steve Prettyman, a few months before the murder. Since that time, she had spent most of her time with Donna Brady.

Arnold knew Chris, too. They had graduated in the same class, but he and Chris never hung out together, he said. Chris was really into Dungeons and Dragons, he said, but it was “no big deal.” He had seen Chris on the morning of the murder, when Chris came to Donna Brady’s house after visiting his mother at the hospital. Chris, he said, was “pretty shaken up.”

Arnold knew of no problems in the Von Stein family, and no enemies that they might have. He did know one interesting tidbit of information: He’d heard that Lieth had inherited a million dollars, but he couldn’t recall where he had heard it. Bonnie was aware that he knew about it, though. He and Bonnie were very close, he said, and she had told him that Angela and Chris couldn’t touch the money until they were thirty-five. The detectives found this information interesting. Bonnie had told them that nobody in Washington knew about the family’s financial circumstances, not even Chris and Angela. Now they had discovered that one of Angela’s friends knew about it. How many others might also?

After talking with Arnold, Lewis and Hope drove to Pamlico Plantation, another subdivision near Washington, to talk with William Lang, Chris’s roommate at N.C. State during his freshman year. Although they had roomed together, Lang said, he and Chris didn’t hang out together. Their habits were different. Chris didn’t study, he said, and barely made it through his first year. Chris announced that he was going to be one of the school’s mascots, Lang said, one of several who wear the heavy wolf suits and prance around at football and basketball games drumming up enthusiasm for the Wolfpack, as N.C. State’s teams were called, but he’d missed the practice and didn’t pursue it any further. Chris drank “a little bit,” Lang said, and was “a little into pot,” but didn’t use cocaine because it was so expensive. He liked Canadian Mist and would get drunk and type furiously on the computer his parents had bought for him. Chris never played Dungeons and Dragons in their room, Lang said, although he did read books about it. Lots of Chris’s friends from Washington came to visit him at State, Lang said. His sister Angela also came with her friend Donna to go to concerts with Chris.

Did Chris have girlfriends? Lang thought he might be dating a girl in Winston-Salem. And he went to South Carolina once to see a girl he had dated who was a friend of one of his cousins.

Asked about Chris’s feelings toward his stepfather, Lang said that Chris seemed to like him. He never even mentioned his real father, Lang said.

The hope that Chris might have written something about the murder faded when Young and Hope talked to the mother of the young woman to whom Chris supposedly had given his journals. The woman told the detectives that Chris had called her house several times during the week after the murder looking for her daughter, but her daughter was staying with her father in Greenville. The woman knew that her daughter had some journals Chris had written, but she thought that they were assignments he had written for his English classes in college, short stories or essays about incidents that had happened in his life. He’d given them to her before the murder. The woman had no idea where the journals might be now.

The woman said she’d heard that Chris was a problem child, but she had found him to be reserved, quiet, and shy.

Bonnie Von Stein and her children did not plan to live again in the house at 110 Lawson Road. They were going to move to Winston-Salem to live in the modest house that had been the home of her husband’s parents, but Bonnie did not want to move in until she could have an alarm system installed. Until then, she, Chris and Angela were keeping their whereabouts private.

On August 10, Bonnie called Lewis Young to tell him that she had talked with her family attorney and he thought that she and her children were still in danger and needed protection, especially if they came back to Washington. She had to return soon for a doctor’s appointment, and she had talked to a private detective agency about hiring bodyguards.

“Can you confirm whether I’m in any danger or not?” she said.

“I can’t confirm or deny that,” Young told her.

The August 11 edition of the Washington
Daily News
contained an editorial page column that appeared every Thursday. It was called “Puttering Around the Pamlico,” and it was written by Ashley B. Futrell. In the column was this brief item:

“Tragedy: When there is a murder and people are shaken and scared, there are demands for quick law enforcement solutions. Sometimes answers are not so easy to come by. The tragedy out in Smallwood recently has upset people. In recent days we are having people call or come in to ask about progress. Now this week we have had perhaps six or eight people to give us full accounts of what has happened, and they talk about having inside information and they vow that they know what they are saying. We have even been taken to task here at this newspaper for not publishing the full story since ‘everybody on the street is now informed.’ Well, when we are informed officially, we shall carry the full story. False information is dangerous. Half truths are damaging. Let not wild rumors be the order of the day. They can hurt tremendously. And let’s get this case solved without delay.”

There had been no mention of the Von Stein murder in the paper for more than a week until the Futrell column appeared, but everybody knew that Futrell spoke for those who held the power in Washington. The following day’s paper carried a news story with a headline that said, “Investigators Work ‘24 Hours A Day’ on Murder Probe.” The article quoted Police Chief Harry Stokes, who said that officers were still interviewing and “following up every lead.”

14

As weeks passed without any new murders, the fear that the death of Lieth Von Stein had fomented in Washington began to subside. But talk about the murder was as widespread as ever, and rumors continued to mushroom.