Blood Games (14 page)

One thing that was upsetting to the officers investigating the case was that many of the rumors were true,
or
contained germs of truth. Clearly, information was leaking from the police department.

One of the rumors that fit into this category was that Lieth might have died earlier than Bonnie had said because his supper had not been digested. Another was correct in one aspect: that Lieth had a million dollars’ worth of life insurance.

Yet another rumor was that Angela was not asleep when the police officer entered her room to find her in bed, and that the officer saw a glass of tea by her bedside with ice in it. This was true to the extent that Danny Edwards, the officer who awoke Angela, had seen a glass by her bedside with condensation on the outside.

The rumor that angered the detectives most, however, was that an area farmer had seen a car stop on a rural road on the morning of the murder and watched as somebody got out and set a fire. He reported it to the police, the rumor had it, and they found bloody clothes and a knife in the fire. All the officers who knew about the fire had been sworn to secrecy, but word got out about it anyway.

Ashley Futrell later said he knew about the fire on the morning after Hope and Young first went to inspect the site. A man called and told him about it but wouldn’t reveal his identity. Futrell said his newspaper didn’t publish anything about it because he was unable to confirm it.

Although the initial rumor about the fire placed it in the wrong location, word eventually got around not only of the correct location but of the identity of the person who had found it. Noel Lee was startled when, a few weeks after the murder, he got a call from his banker asking him what he’d found on the roadside. Soon others were mentioning it to him or questioning him about it. Lee had thought that his identity would be kept secret, at least until an arrest was made, and now that it was out, he worried that the murderer might seek retribution against him and his family.

The rumor about the fire even reached Bonnie Von Stein, and she called Melvin Hope to ask him about it. Hope, remembering his vow not to reveal anything about the fire to anybody, was put on the spot. “I didn’t tell her the truth, but I didn’t lie to her either,” he said later, although Bonnie later would tell another officer that she thought he had indeed lied to her.

One rumor made the rounds so often that even Hope began to wonder if it might have some validity. It was that Chris belonged to a satanic cult (in other variations, Angela and Bonnie also practiced the occult) and that Lieth had been killed to raise money to perpetuate the cult. Hope recently had attended a special training session on occult groups with Detective John Taylor, and Taylor got out some of the material from the classes and discovered that July 25, the day of Lieth’s murder, was a voodoo holiday in honor of Papa Ogou, calling for blood sacrifices, particularly of sheep and goats.

“The damn thing just kept getting weirder and weirder,” Hope recalled later.

Bonnie spent another long session with the detectives when she returned to Washington for a checkup on August 15. She offered a possibility that Hope and Young thought absurd: perhaps somebody at the bank where Lieth’s trusts were held had instigated the murder out of concern that he might be planning to remove all of his money.

The detectives were interested in Lieth’s financial affairs, however. Having learned that others knew about his inheritance, they wanted to know just how much Chris and Angela knew about these matters.

They were aware that Lieth’s father had more than a million dollars from the sale of his share of the laundries in Winston-Salem, Bonnie said, and they probably would have known that Lieth inherited it. But the only other people who would have known about it, she maintained, were his banker, a couple of his bosses at work, and a cousin who was a stockbroker, from whom Lieth occasionally sought investment advice.

Without any prodding from the detectives, Bonnie began talking about an incident involving her son, Chris, that had happened on the weekend of the murder.

She told about receiving a call from the mother of a young man near Raleigh to whom Chris had given a check for thirty-five dollars. Although both the young man and Chris had lied about it, Chris later admitted that he’d given the check to the young man for marijuana. The young man was supposed to pick up the pot and deliver it to him, but he didn’t come back. Chris also had bought marijuana from this young man earlier, she said. The young man, only sixteen, was a friend of Tim Parker*, a friend of Chris’s at N.C. State. Chris had told her that Parker also was a drug dealer and kept a gun in his room. Chris was very scared of Parker, she said, and fearful that his life could be in danger because of what he knew about the drug dealings. Although other friends of Chris’s had come home with him, Bonnie said, Parker never had been to their house.

If Chris was indeed so afraid, that could be an indication that he had been involved in drug dealing himself, the detectives reasoned, and the attack on his parents might well have something to do with it. If Chris owed a drug dealer money and the dealer thought his parents to be wealthy, the dealer might also reason that if his parents died, Chris might receive their money and be able to pay his debt. And even if Chris weren’t involved in drug dealing himself and had only been looking for somebody to kill his parents so that he could claim his inheritance early, a former roommate who sold drugs and kept a gun might be a good place to begin looking for an accomplice. Especially one who never had been to the Von Stein house and would need a map.

While Bonnie was talking about her son, the detectives remembered Bonnie’s brother telling them about Chris turning up missing earlier in the summer, and they asked her about it.

That happened about the first of July, she said. She and Lieth were planning to go to Winston-Salem for several days, and Angela and her friend, Donna Brady, decided that they wanted to stop off to spend the night with Chris at N.C. State before going on to Winston-Salem the following day. They had called and arranged to stay with Chris but when they arrived that night, Chris was not to be found, and none of his friends knew where he might be. Angela and Donna spent the night in Angela’s car, she said and drove on to Winston-Salem as planned the next day. Bonnie was worried when she learned what had happened. She began a search for Chris that produced no results. He hadn’t even shown up at the clothing store where he worked, she discovered, and his boss also was concerned. Bonnie worried and searched for a day and a half before she finally called the campus police and filed a formal missing persons report. Later that night, Chris called her from N C. State. He had just arrived back on campus, only to be met by the police who instructed him to call his mother. Chris said that he had gone on what was intended to be a short trip to the mountains with a friend called Moog. They were going to visit Moog’s uncle. On the way, the fan belt broke on Chris’s car, and they had to go to an old lady’s house to call for help. She offered them a baloney sandwich and a glass of goat’s milk. After they got the car repaired and got to Moog’s uncle’s house, they both became deathly ill with food poisoning and stayed in bed for three days. Moog’s uncle lived back in the hills and didn’t have a telephone and they didn’t have any way of getting word to anybody.

Later, Bonnie had learned that Chris and his friend actually had been at her sister’s house in South Carolina the whole time. Bonnie said that her sister’s daughter had a friend whom Chris had dated; and he had gone there to see her. He’d asked his aunt not to reveal that he was there if his mother called. When Bonnie called her sister to ask if she’d heard anything from Chris, her sister had covered for him. Bonnie said that she didn’t hold it against her, because her sister had had a lot of problems lately.

Bonnie said that she had been concerned at that time that Chris might be getting involved with drugs, and she wondered if that trip might have had something to do with drugs.

Lieth hadn’t believed Chris’s story from the beginning, Bonnie said. He knew that Chris was very intelligent, and he always had strongly supported and encouraged Chris in every way. But he had been very disappointed in Chris when he got in trouble with the BB gun and wine coolers in high school, and he had been more questioning and suspicious of him after that. The wild tale about his disappearance, and the later incident with the check, when he revealed that he had indeed been using marijuana, had caused Lieth to be even less trusting of Chris, she said.

After Chris’s graduation from high school the year before, Lieth got Chris a summer job at National Spinning Company, and he had been very proud of how Chris handled it. Lieth had been proud, too, that Chris wanted to study engineering, but he got upset at Chris’s low grades.

The only serious argument between her husband and her son that Bonnie could remember had been about Chris’s study habits and grades at college. It happened at the dinner table one night, she said, and she had never seen Lieth so angry. His face grew red and he doubled his fists. She was afraid that he might hit Chris. Chris was shocked by his reaction, she said. He got up from the table, stepped back and said, “Look, I’m not going to do this with you.”

The incident lasted only a few minutes, Bonnie said. After Lieth calmed down, she told him in private that he had been wrong in the way he handled the situation, and that Chris had conducted himself in a more adult fashion than he had. He told her that from then on, she could handle the problems of the children, whatever they might be, Bonnie said.

Young questioned Bonnie about Chris’s involvement in Dungeons and Dragons. He and some of his friends had been playing the game since he was about eleven, she said. In fact, this summer, he’d taken his Dungeons and Dragons materials to college with him. It was just a tabletop game, she said. Nothing else. Neither she nor Lieth had any concerns about him playing it. They thought that it was a game that required high intelligence, and they considered it to be innocent. She had never heard of Chris dressing up in costumes and acting out the game in anybody’s backyard.

The detectives also had learned that Chris showed up at a local pawnshop four days after the murder and hocked his saxophone. Why did he need money? Could it have been for drugs? Bonnie was surprised. It was the first she had heard about it.

On August 23, Young and Hope went to Raleigh, hoping to talk with some of Chris’s college friends. They stopped first in a town called Gamer on the outskirts of Raleigh and found the sixteen-year-old high school student who had ripped off Chris in the marijuana deal on the weekend of the murder. He was slim, with a bushy, helmetlike hairdo, and he seemed nervous and wary. The detectives interviewed him in the presence of his stern-faced father. He admitted knowing Chris, but not well. He’d just met him that summer, he said, and only had seen him two or three times, never for more than fifteen or twenty minutes. He’d been to Chris’s dorm room, he said, but never alone with Chris. Others always were there. Chris bragged a lot about how rich he was, the young man said. More than once he’d heard Chris say, “Yeah, my mom gave me some more money.” He had a nice car, too, a hot Mustang.

Questioned about the thirty-five-dollar check, the young man admitted taking it from Chris because Chris couldn’t get it cashed anywhere. The young man said he’d first taken the check to Tim Parker, Chris’s friend, but Parker “didn’t want to mess with it.” The young man then took it to his father, who questioned him about it. He’d given his father several reasons for having the check, and his mother eventually had called Chris’s parents to ask about it.

With careful questioning, Young finally got the young man to admit that Chris had given him the check for marijuana, which he hadn’t delivered.

Asked about Parker, the young man said that he’d known him only for a couple of months. He described him as “just a normal person.”

Was he into drugs? Young asked.

“He might drink a beer,” the young man said, “but I never heard him say anything about drugs.”

Before Hope and Young left, the frightened young man offered to give them thirty-five dollars to return to Chris, but the detective declined and left him to deal with his father.

After talking to the young man, Hope and Young drove to N.C. State and interviewed the campus police dispatcher who had taken the call from Chris on the morning of the murder. They also talked with the two officers who picked up Chris and later drove him to Washington.

Hope and Young found Tim Parker at his mother’s house in a Raleigh suburb. Parker said he hadn’t seen Chris since the end of June, when the first summer session ended, but he’d heard about the attack on Chris’s parents. Chris never said much to him about his parents, Parker said. He didn’t know that Lieth wasn’t Chris’s real father.

He had mentioned that his family was rich, though, Parker said, and he was aware that Chris got a weekly allowance from his parents. Chris was always throwing money around, he said, spending a lot particularly on alcohol and drugs. At one point, Parker remembered, Chris had gotten in a bad financial bind and had to borrow money to get out of it.

What kind of drugs was he using, the detectives wanted to know.

Well, he’d seen him with pot, Parker said. But there was LSD, too. Chris had first tried that hallucinogenic drug on a Friday night about the middle of the first summer session, some time in early June. He’d used it two or three other times since. Parker said he’d tried to warn him about that stuff, but Chris wouldn’t listen.

A long-haired dude named Hank* got Chris started on LSD, Parker said. Chris had met Hank only that summer, but Hank, who was not a student, came around frequently, and Chris often went off to do things with him. “Hank was always trashed in one way or another,” Parker said.