Blood Games (16 page)

Hope wasn’t the only one feeling frustrated about the progress on the case. Washington City Manager Bruce Radford was seeing less and less hope for a solution in the brief written reports that he still was requiring Police Chief Harry Stokes to submit to him daily. And although the public outcry about the murder had waned, people had begun saying that they knew the case would never be solved, not with the Washington Police Department looking into it. After all, two other recent murders in the town remained unsolved, one of a convenience store clerk killed in a robbery, another of a suspected drug dealer assassinated while he slept. Radford was feeling pressure from the mayor, the town council, and others.

“Nothing seemed to be happening,” he recalled later. “We had sent all of this stuff to the FBI for the quicker turn-around time, and we still hadn’t got anything back.”

Radford had involved himself in the case to the point of reading Hope’s reports, personally inspecting the evidence and making suggestions to the chief, and he wasn’t about to let it go unsolved for what he saw as a lack of leadership and initiative within the police department. “This was the biggest thing in the town of Washington,” he said, “and I was putting on the pressure on a lot of fronts.”

By mid-October, Radford had decided that the case would not be brought to a successful conclusion until he had solved the major problem at the police department, which he saw as a failure of leadership. The only way to do that, he decided, was to start at the top and work down. He first had to rid the department of its chief, Harry Stokes. He called the town’s personnel director and asked her to tabulate how much money the chief would draw each month should he choose to retire. She soon came back with a figure that gave hope to Radford.

“I called Harry and said, ‘Come over and let me talk with you,’” Radford recalled later. “When he got here, I said, ‘I just found out that you can make the same amount retired as you’re making working. I wanted to see if you might be interested in retiring.’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know. Let me take that home to the wife.’ Next morning, he was back all teeth and smiles, said he’d decided he was going to retire.”

Later, Stokes said that the Von Stein case had no direct bearing on his decision to retire, and that he reached that decision on his own. “He was trying to put pressure on me and trying to control everything,” he said of Radford. “I didn’t feel like I wanted to work under somebody who put pressure on me. I didn’t have to put up with that. I said, ‘I’m fifty-eight years old and I don’t need it.’ And I was beginning to lose money working.”

Stokes submitted his resignation, effective November 30, and Bruce Radford began advertising nationally for a new police chief. One requirement the new chief would have to possess was an advanced degree in police science. That effectively eliminated any candidates from within the department.

On October 18, Bonnie called Lewis Young to tell him about a rumor she’d heard about Chris. Chris supposedly had talked to a minister in the South Carolina town where her sister lived, and the minister had told her family that Chris had some problems as a result of playing Dungeons and Dragons in the steam tunnels at N.C. State and was in fear of his life because of them. Chris supposedly had overheard other players laughing about Lieth’s death and calling it punishment for Chris’s wrongdoing in the game. Chris had told her nothing about this, she said. It was only a rumor. But she planned to ask him about it, and would let Young know if there was any truth to it.

Bonnie also had some news about her son. Chris had not been doing well at N.C. State, and she had taken him out of college for the time being. He’d been seeing a university psychologist who had determined that he had serious emotional problems stemming from his senior year in high school, she said. The psychologist hadn’t been able to get to the root of the problems but recommended that Chris drop out of school until he could control them. She thought it significant that the psychologist had been able to trace Chris’s problems back to his last year in high school. That was just after Chris took a cross-country trucking trip with his father, Steve Pritchard. Chris was going to move in with her, Bonnie said, and would begin seeing a psychiatrist in Winston-Salem.

Bonnie also called Melvin Hope from time to time, and he knew that she was aware of his suspicions of Chris. “She remarked to me one time, ‘If Chris is involved, I want to see that he gets the full measure of what’s coming to him,’” Hope recalled later. “She said, ‘If either one of my children had anything to do with this, I’m not going to try to protect them.’” But Hope was convinced that nothing short of Chris confessing to her would ever get her to believe that her son had anything to do with it. And even then, he thought, knowing that Chris had tried to have her killed, her maternal instincts probably would take over and lead her to protect him still.

Lewis Young’s new assignment and the impending changes in the police department distracted him from the Von Stein investigation. Hope greatly admired Young, especially his extraordinary gifts as an interviewer, and he had let Young, with his greater education and training, take the lead in the investigation. Hope knew that Young wanted to resolve the case, despite his new duties, and he didn’t want to plan moves without Young’s approval and participation. Hope himself had problems attending to the case. He had tried to get approval to continue working it full-time, he said later, but had been told that was not possible. He still had three other detectives to oversee, other cases that had to be worked, paperwork that had to be done, court appearances that couldn’t be put off. Arranging interviews on the Von Stein case to fit both detectives’ schedules became extremely difficult.

Still, they managed to get together early in November for another trip to Raleigh to try to find some of Chris’s friends and acquaintances at N.C. State.

They found Chuck Jackson* at the frozen yogurt place where he worked near campus. Jackson had met Chris soon after they both arrived at N.C. State the year before, and he had roomed with him during the second session of summer school when the murder occurred. He had gone home with Chris on several weekend visits.

Jackson remembered answering the phone on the morning of the murder, handing it to Chris and going back to sleep. He also remembered Chris waking him before he left and saying something about his parents being attacked by a burglar. But his other memories of that weekend were vague. He didn’t remember Chris going home at all that weekend and thought they might have just sat around watching TV. They could have been playing spades the night before the murder, he just couldn’t recall. There were a couple of girls, Sandra* and Sybil,* who came to the room a lot to play spades. They could have been there.

He did remember that when Chris returned after the murder he said that his stepfather had died, the police didn’t know who had done it, and he didn’t want to talk about it.

Jackson described Chris as the kind of person who never looked to the future and lived one day at a time, his activities mostly spur-of-the-moment. He was easily influenced, Jackson said, and did a lot of things out of a need for approval and attention from his friends. Using drugs, for one thing. Jackson, who kept up his own grades and often could be found in his room studying, said he’d been concerned because Chris was smoking so much pot, skipping class, and never studying. He’d got onto him about it, but it did no good.

Chris had renounced drugs on several occasions, Jackson said, but he always went right back to them. And it wasn’t just marijuana. He tried cocaine but didn’t like it. And during the summer he’d been using acid. Jackson said that a guy named Hank probably was Chris’s drug connection.

Questioned about Dungeons and Dragons, Jackson said he had played in some of the games that summer but had been too busy with his studies to play since. In the summer they’d had a campaign going in the game. A female cavalier had been wronged by an evil baron and had asked for help, he said. He identified several others who had played in that campaign.

Did they play in the steam tunnels?

They didn’t play D&D there, but they had gone exploring in the tunnels, he said. A large group had gone, including the two girls, Sandra and Sybil, and they had carried some large Japanese swords, just to be carrying them. They had spray-painted their names on the walls of a big room under the central campus, he said. Jackson said that Chris and his friend Moog went into the tunnels more than the others.

Did he know about anybody having a gun or a knife in the dorm?

No.

Did Chris talk about his stepfather’s wealth?

Jackson recalled a conversation instigated by another friend, Brewster Simpson*, called Brew by his friends, about how financially well off their families were, and Chris had boasted that his had a lot of money. Jackson said Chris told of opening Lieth’s financial portfolio once and seeing stock of the R J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

But Jackson thought that Chris and his stepfather got along fine. He’d spent the night with them, he said, and Chris and Lieth talked and laughed and seemed to enjoy one another.

The detectives did not think Jackson the type to be involved in murder, and they went looking for other acquaintances of Chris’s. They tracked Hank, whom Vince had said was Chris’s drug connection, to an apartment building on Hillsborough Street but got no answer. They tried to find Sandra and Sybil, but couldn’t locate either one. Neither did they have any luck in searching for the friend called Moog. Several students knew him, but they said that Moog had dropped out of school, and nobody seemed to know his whereabouts.

Bonnie had waived attorney-client privilege to allow Attorney John Surratt to discuss Lieth’s financial affairs with the detectives. And after spending a fruitless evening in Raleigh searching for Chris’s friends, Hope and Lewis drove to Winston-Salem the next morning to interview him. Surratt had known Lieth’s parents for years, but did not even know they had a son until he wrote their wills and set up the trusts that Howard Von Stein established. Surratt noted that if Lieth had died before his mother, Bonnie and her children would have been out of luck in getting any of the million dollars that Howard Von Stein had received for his share of the laundries. When Lieth’s mother died in 1987, leaving everything to Lieth, Lieth came to him and said, “I’ve got to have a will,” Surratt said, and he had written the will, setting up trusts just as he had done for Lieth’s father.

The way the trusts worked, Lieth could have taken out any of the money at any time, Surratt said. But when Lieth died, $200,000 went into a trust for Bonnie, any amount of which she could withdraw at any time. The remainder went into a separate trust for Bonnie’s lifetime that eventually would pass to the children. Bonnie would receive the income from it until she died. If she died before the children reached age thirty-five, the children received the income. The children could not touch any of the money until their mother died, and not even then if they were not yet thirty-five. If Bonnie died without having removed the money from the marital trust, that money would revert to the irrevocable trust for the children, available to them only at age thirty-five.

Lieth had been concerned about the children, Surratt said, and was worried that because he had not adopted them, they might not be able to inherit from him unless he spelled out his desires. He set the age limit because he did not think Chris and Angela were responsible enough to handle large sums of money. He wanted them to have the money, but didn’t want them to be spoiled by it, Surratt said.

Surratt estimated that Lieth’s estate was worth between $1.75 million and $2 million, including life insurance. Surratt said he did not know whether the children were secondary beneficiaries on Lieth’s insurance policies (they were), but if Bonnie had died with Lieth and the children were not secondary beneficiaries, the insurance money also would have gone into the irrevocable trust that the children couldn’t touch until thirty-five.

As far as he knew, Surratt said, only Bonnie knew the provisions of Lieth’s will. The children did not. That being the case, the detectives knew, either might have assumed that with Lieth and Bonnie dead, all of the money would come to them immediately.

At the end of November, the long-awaited evidence report finally came back from the FBI, and nobody was very happy about it. The Washington
Daily News
made it a front-page news story.

“City Manager Bruce Radford, who has maintained contact with police investigators, said the FBI report on fingerprints and fibers gathered at the scene was inconclusive,” wrote reporter Michael Adams.

“Radford became involved in the matter because of a transition of power in the police department. Chief Harry J. Stokes will retire Thursday. Capt. Zane Osnoe will act as interim chief until a replacement is named.”

Only one thing in the evidence report gave any new clues. In the burned remnant of a Reebok sneaker that had been found on the side of Grimesland Bridge Road two days after the murder were two hairs. One was from a Caucasian, the other from a black person. Hope and Young remembered that one of the players in Chris’s Dungeons and Dragons group at N.C. State was black. It wasn’t much to go on, but at the moment it was all they had, and as soon as they could get their schedules together, they intended to look into it.

After the return of the evidence report, Bruce Radford had given up hope that anything would develop in the case until he found a new police chief. He realized that Lewis Young was in command of the investigation and had little time to work on it. He could tell from the reports he had been getting from Stokes that Young was telling him little, if anything about developments in the case. He thought that probably was due to the unspoken resentments between the SBI and the police department, but he knew that it might also have to do with his own involvement, which was greatly resented by Young. Hope, Radford knew, would defer to Young and make no moves on his own. And with Young unable to do much because of other duties, the case would be dormant until a strong leader could be installed at the police department to get things moving again.