Blood Games (15 page)

Chris was easily influenced by his friends, said Parker, which was one reason he did so poorly in school. He’d do whatever his friends wanted him to do, whether or not he had classes to attend or homework to do. He spent a lot of time playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Asked about the group Chris played with, Parker could only recall a couple of names, a first name, a nickname, no last names at all. Hank played sometimes. And another long-haired guy called Moog. A black dude. A skinny white guy who was a resident adviser in Lee dorm. A guy called Brew.* A short, overweight guy. Usually, they played in one of the dorm rooms. Sometimes they’d get trashed and go down into the labyrinth of steam tunnels beneath the campus.

Asked if any of them had weapons, Parker said he thought that some had Buck knives and darts. “I don’t know of any guns or anything like that,” he said.

When asked about girlfriends Chris might have had, Parker only laughed.

“He’s a wimp,” he said. “He couldn’t get a piece of ass.”

Parker admitted knowing the high school student the detectives had talked with earlier that day. And he knew about the marijuana deal that went bad. After the incident Parker said, the young man told him, “I ripped off your roommate.”

Did Parker think the young man could know something about the murder of Lieth Von Stein?

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Parker said. “He would do something stupid. He’s always working some kind of hustle.”

Bonnie had returned to Washington with a bodyguard to visit her doctor, and on the day after their Raleigh trip, Young and Hope interviewed her yet again at the Washington Police Department.

Questioned about the reason for installing dead-bolt locks at the house, Bonnie said that Lieth’s car had been broken into while it was parked in the driveway and they were away from home. A radar detector was stolen. That was during the time of the illness of Lieth’s parents when they had to be away from home a lot to look after them. They just thought that the dead-bolt locks would make it more difficult to get into the house and to carry things out. The locks were never used when they were at home, she said.

The detectives asked her about names that they had come upon from tips, rumors, and interviews, but Bonnie recognized none of them. Then Bonnie brought up the name of a woman that Young had asked her about earlier. She’d been thinking about it, she said, and she thought she had heard Lieth mention the name before. She thought the woman had something to do with business matters at National Spinning.

One thing she felt confident about: that Lieth had not been involved in any love affairs. At least not in the past four years or so. During the first four years of their marriage, she said, they had lived largely apart because Lieth’s work demanded that he be gone all week and they were together only on weekends. What he did then, she couldn’t be sure about, she said, but she doubted that he’d had affairs even then.

“He was a one-woman man,” she said.

During more recent years, his life had been so structured that there simply wasn’t room or time for any other women, she said.

The detectives used this moment to bring up another difficult subject. The possibility of homosexuality. One of Lieth’s coworkers had told the detectives that she and Lieth had a long-running but good-natured argument about homosexuality. Lieth contended that there was nothing wrong with homosexuality and defended the rights of anybody to practice consensual sex of his or her choice privately without the interference of government or self-appointed moralists. His coworker argued that homosexuality was morally wrong and went to the trouble of giving Lieth several pages of hand-written biblical quotations to prove it.

Bonnie said that Lieth had several homosexual friends with whom he was open and receptive, but she didn’t think he’d ever had any sexual involvements with them. After one of Lieth’s friends died of AIDS a few years earlier, she said, she had become concerned about the possibility that he might have had sexual liaisons with some of his friends, and questioned him about it. He denied it. (Lieth had met this friend, an architect who grew up in a small town near Greensboro and later moved to San Francisco, while in college. He had been surprised to learn of his friend’s homosexuality, other friends said, but had not allowed it to affect their friendship.) And she was almost certain that he never had done any such thing. She had no doubt that if he’d been sexually involved with anybody else, male or female, in the past three or four years, she would have known about it.

There was a woman at work with whom Lieth had to make a few business trips, Bonnie said. She was certain that nothing had happened between them, but she’d heard that the woman’s husband was very jealous. She hadn’t heard of any trouble he’d caused, however. It was just a thought.

In trying to think of suspects, Bonnie also had come up with the name of her former husband, the father of Chris and Angela. The detectives knew from earlier interviews that she held a low opinion of Steve Pritchard. He had stayed in the Von Stein house several times while visiting the children, and he and Lieth got along fine, she said. But recently she’d heard that he had a setback of some sort with his trucking business and was badly in need of money. She didn’t know how much he might have known about the money Lieth had inherited, but if he’d found out about it, he might have figured that if Angela and Chris inherited it, he could manipulate them to get some of it. She didn’t think he could commit murder himself, but he might be capable of plotting it, she said.

The detectives were still unclear about several aspects of Lieth’s financial affairs, and they questioned Bonnie more closely about them. Hope also brought up Lieth’s life insurance again. Bonnie said that she had gone over the policies with her attorney recently, and she thought that the face value of the life insurance was only about $770,000, not $1 million. The order of beneficiaries, she said, was first, herself; second, Chris and Angela; third, her parents; four, Lieth’s mother, who, of course, was dead. It was just that order that was bothering the detectives.

On August 31, Young and Hope drove to Williamston, twenty-three miles north of Washington, to talk to Stephen Prettyman. He’d dated Angela for three months that spring before she caught him with another girl. They had broken up after that, he said, but they still talked.

Prettyman said that he got along okay with Lieth, but that Lieth was rough on Angela’s male friends. He was strict with Angela, and any time Angela wanted to do anything, she and her mother had to scheme to get around Lieth so that she could do it. He thought Lieth’s strictness had made Angela rebellious. Lieth seemed to get along better with Chris than with Angela, Prettyman said, but both of them used the same nickname for Lieth: Asshole.

Prettyman said he’d been told that Lieth was worth $3 million. Angela had told him that Lieth’s parents were rich and that when they died their money went to Lieth. Prettyman said he thought that whoever killed Lieth knew the family, because he had gone straight to Lieth’s and Bonnie’s bedroom and hadn’t disturbed Angela.

Prettyman also fed more fuel to one of the rumors that had made its way through Washington: that Angela had a boyfriend who was an ex-convict. Prettyman said he’d seen Angela with a guy on a couple of occasions in recent months, once at the mall, again at the beach. He was pretty certain that the guy had recently been released from the Williamston prison unit. He thought he’d seen him on a road gang. “I knew it was bad news,” he said of seeing the guy with Angela.

Prettyman said he thought the guy he’d seen with Angela had been in a class a couple of years ahead of his at Washington High School, but later he was unable to pick out his picture in a school year book. He gave the officers a description and said that Angela’s friend, Donna Brady, should be able to identify him.

By the time September arrived, Bonnie bore only scars from her wounds. She was living alone in Winston-Salem. Chris had returned to N.C. State to start his sophomore year. Angela had begun freshman classes at Greensboro College, only twenty-five miles away. Bonnie told friends that she was angry at the police because they wouldn’t tell her anything. But she was all too keenly aware that the detectives were highly suspicious of her children. She knew from the questions they had asked her, and from the questions they had asked others with whom she had talked, that they seemed to be focusing their investigation on Chris. She thought that the detectives were wasting their time, while the real killer slipped further and further from their grasp. She knew that her children could never be involved in something so heinous. Sure, Chris had been in trouble, had experimented with drugs, had told lies and given his parents reason to mistrust him, but so had lots of other teenagers. Murder was another matter altogether.

She
knew
Chris. He simply was too sweet and gentle and nonviolent to have had any part in killing Lieth, much less in hurting her, or trying to have her killed. And she had no doubt that the killer had intended for her to die. Chris was like her. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Moreover, Chris loved her. She had no doubt about that. It was apparent in his every act. He also had been very upset by Lieth’s death, and continued to be. He was worried about his mother, and even had offered to drop out of college and get a job to help out and look after her. But she thought it would be better for him to be back in classes and among his friends so that the awful events of the summer wouldn’t prey so heavily on his mind. She could cope alone. She always managed to cope.

15

Summer turned into fall without major developments in the Von Stein murder case. Melvin Hope and Lewis Young had continued chasing rumors, checking out false leads, and talking with friends of Chris and Angela.

Donna Brady, who had spent much of the weekend of the murder with Angela, told the detectives about her activities with the Von Steins that weekend, all of it meshing with what the detectives already knew from talking with Bonnie, Chris, and Angela. Donna said that the rumor that Lieth had had a fight with one of Angela’s boyfriends and ordered him from the house had no foundation. She knew of no friends of Angela or Chris who ever had had problems with Lieth. Angela hadn’t had a boyfriend since she broke up with Stephen Prettyman, Donna said. And the young man that Prettyman had seen Angela and Donna with at the beach was just a friend and not an ex-convict. She gave the detectives his name.

Donna also was confident that Angela had slept through the attack, and not just because Angela had told her so. “She’s hard to wake up,” Donna said. Besides, Angela had a fan blowing on her and her door was closed.

About Angela’s seeming lack of emotion following the murder, Donna said she thought that Angela was in shock. But even if Angela wasn’t in shock, Donna wouldn’t have expected any great show of emotion from her. Angela was like her mother. Neither talked about her feelings nor displayed them.

Donna knew that Angela and Chris sometimes called Lieth an asshole, but she pointed out that lots of teenagers occasionally call their parents that, or something similar. “She wasn’t being hateful,” Donna said.

Angela and Lieth had been getting closer, she said, and Angela had begun calling him Dad instead of Lieth. Angela knew that Lieth had received a substantial inheritance, but she didn’t know how much, Donna said, because Angela just wasn’t concerned with money. She felt certain, however, that Chris knew how much Lieth had inherited.

Steve Outlaw told the detectives that he had been Chris’s closest friend all through high school, but they had drifted apart after Chris went off to college. He’d seen Chris about six weeks before the murder, he said, and hadn’t seen him again until the day of the murder, when he went looking for him at Donna Brady’s house. He described Chris’s actions that day as “odd.” He seemed nervous and jittery, Outlaw said, talked incessantly to everybody, chainsmoked, and rocked back and forth in his chair. But he did not seem to be grief-stricken. He appeared to be a little more normal at the funeral, Outlaw said.

Outlaw said he’d heard that Chris had gotten deeply involved in drugs—marijuana, cocaine, and acid. He said he’d also heard that Lieth had been killed by a drug dealer to whom Chris owed money, but when Young and Hope pressed him on that, he couldn’t recall where he’d heard it.

As far as he knew, Outlaw said, Chris and Lieth got along great, especially after Chris graduated from high school.

Melvin Hope was frustrated with his inability to produce anything decisive in the case, and he lost a lot of sleep worrying about it.

“I beat my brains out with it,” he recalled later. “It got to be almost an obsession with me. We were looking at Chris, and Captain Boyd and I agreed that Chris was in it up to his eyeballs, but we couldn’t prove it. It was just a mess. I would find myself out there at 110 Lawson Road at three o’clock in the morning almost willing myself to be a fly on the wall back on the morning of July twenty-fifth. It was one I wanted to solve bad.”

By the end of September, the investigation had slowed. Both Young and Hope found themselves having to deal with other matters, with previous cases coming to court, with new and less flashy crimes that had to be dealt with. In October, Hope came to work one day to be told by his captain, Danny Boyd, “You’re left holding the bag now. Lewis has been kicked upstairs.” Young had been promoted to a special unit that worked on sensitive cases out of SBI headquarters in Raleigh, but he planned to continue living in Washington and to keep an office at the sheriff’s department. He wasn’t going to give up the Von Stein case, however. He still would be available to work it on a limited basis.