Blood Games (34 page)

Christy was furious when she came back to the office and discovered what had happened. “Why didn’t you hold him and have the deputies come here and arrest him?” she demanded, but she never got an acceptable answer. She knew that she likely wouldn’t see Bart again for a long time.

Bart got a job at a sub shop, answered a roommate-wanted ad in the newspaper, and moved into an apartment at Parkwood Village on Gorman Street, not far from where he had been living with Brew. He told all of his friends that if Christy Newsom came looking for him, they were not to tell his whereabouts.

As Bart later recalled, not long after he moved into Parkwood Village with a stranger, Hank came by. “Hey, man, the cops are looking for you,” Hank said.

“I know,” Bart said. “It’s that probation shit.”

“Nah. This was SBI and some cop from Washington. They’re investigating what happened to Chris’s folks.”

They probably were just trying to talk to all of Chris’s friends, see if they thought Chris might have had something to do with it, Hank figured. Even among Chris’s friends, the question had arisen: Could he have been involved? All thought it unlikely.

“If they come back, don’t tell ’em anything about me,” Bart told Hank. “They’ll put me in jail on that probation shit.”

Part Three

Chasing Moog

THE GODS VISIT THE SINS OF THE FATHERS UPON THE CHILDREN.

—EURIPIDES

29

One night late in 1988, Bruce Radford, the gangling city manager of Washington, North Carolina, received a call at his apartment. A man with a slightly northern accent identified himself. Radford didn’t recognize the name. John Crone was one of nearly seventy people who had sent for applications for the job of Washington police chief. Crone happened to be passing through and wanted to drop off his application personally and introduce himself. It was 10 o’clock and he was at McDonald’s on Highway 17. Radford drove out to meet him over cups of coffee.

Only a few weeks earlier, Crone, the deputy chief of police of Ocean City, Maryland, hadn’t even known that Washington existed. The father of three children, he was engaged to be married for the third time. He and his fiancee, a North Carolina native, had driven to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to attend an annual gathering of her family so that he could meet his future in-laws. While he was there, he scanned the want ads in the Charlotte
Observer
and came across the ad Bruce Radford had placed for a police chief.

Crone’s future wife, Cindy, who lived in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, wanted to move back closer to her family. He wanted to be a police chief. He got out a highway map and discovered that the town of Washington was on his route back to Maryland. He and his fiancee drove through it on their way. Nothing much impressed them about the town, except for its location on the Pamlico River, but they thought that it seemed to be a pleasant enough place, just a five-hour drive from Cindy’s family in Mooresville, in the western part of the state. When he got home, Crone wrote for an application.

John Crone had been a police officer for twenty years. The son of the one-time chief of ballistic missile defenses at the Pentagon, he had grown up in the affluent suburbs of Washington. Unable to decide what he wanted to do with his life as a young man, he had joined the Army and served in Korea while the Vietnam War was going on. He was nearing the end of his enlistment at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, when he saw a bulletin board notice that he could be discharged up to five months early by joining the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department. He took the test and passed it.

Crone really wasn’t much interested in becoming a police officer. He figured he would just go through the academy training and quit. But he finished in the top three in his class, an honor that not only accorded him a scholarship to study the administration of justice at American University on his off-duty hours, but that also got him assigned to an elite special operations team patrolling high-crime areas. Crone proved to be an able officer, but his spirited sense of humor soon got him into trouble. As a practical joke, he donned a gorilla mask while in his patrol car parked in front of the Vietnamese embassy during a demonstration. A nearby ABC-TV news crew taped him, and he made the evening news. He soon found himself summoned before a captain who was holding a photo enlargement of the D.C. gorilla cop and demanding to know, “Is this you?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied, ending his career in special operations.

He rebounded quickly as a precinct cop in Georgetown, was named officer of the year in his third year on the force, and was promoted to sergeant in his fourth year, six years ahead of the normal schedule. In 1977, he got his degree from American University with one of the highest grade averages ever attained by a D.C. police officer. That same year, he married for a second time, this time to a fellow officer in the department, who always had dreamed of living in Colorado. They quit the department and moved to the town of Arvada, a Denver suburb, where Crone joined the police force while his wife tried to start a rental business. After a year, Crone was fed up with the petty jealousies and politics of a suburban police department, and he and his wife moved back to Washington. He soon joined the Ocean City Police Department as a lieutenant and began a ten-year climb through the ranks. But he knew that he wasn’t likely to become chief there any time soon, and he had reached the point that he wanted to do things his way.

Crone was an amicable and amiable man with a quick and easy sense of humor and an ability to charm strangers. And his on-the-way-through encounter with Bruce Radford had the effect Crone hoped that it would.

“I liked him, which was what I was trying to avoid,” Radford said later.

Radford had set up an elaborate system for choosing a police chief that would nullify his personal feelings: a panel of police chiefs and city managers from other North Carolina towns and cities would winnow down the applicants and settle on the best. The seventy applicants were cut to six, one of them being John Crone. The six were called before the panel for interviews. From those, the panel chose two, one being John Crone. Both men were sent to Cary, near Raleigh, for a full day of psychological testing. John Crone came out on top, and the town that liked to call itself the original Washington got a former police sergeant from the upstart Washington as its new chief of police.

Crone knew that he faced a challenge. He’d been told that the police department was a mess. His instructions were simple and twofold: Straighten out the department and solve the town’s most glaring crime, the murder of Lieth Von Stein.

Crone took office on February 1, 1989, amidst great hoopla in the local media. “They made me into a hero before I ever got here,” he said later. “Said I was going to solve the Von Stein case and all this crap. I thought, Good Lord, this is really wonderful, but what if I can’t solve the Von Stein case?”

Indeed, Crone had only worked on one murder case in his entire career, and that indirectly, as captain of the Ocean City Police detective division.

But before he could think about murder, he first had to learn the personalities and problems of his twenty-five-person police department, so that he could begin improving it. After a few weeks, he had become familiar enough with the department that he felt free to begin looking at the second part of his directive, solving the Von Stein murder. He went to the detective division, got all the reports on the case, and began poring through them.

Crone quickly saw that the initial months of the investigation had passed without anything of substance happening, and nothing at all had been done since Bonnie and Angela had passed lie detector tests in early January. Clearly, the case had been left to languish until his arrival. After finishing the reports and having noted that Bonnie’s son, Chris, had declined to take the polygraph test, Crone’s impression of the case was the same as those of the officers who had worked it without success. He thought the murder was an inside job, a family affair. And Chris Pritchard was the most likely suspect.

Crone also thought the only way to bring new life to the case was to assign a new investigator. He’d had time now to evaluate his staff of four detectives, and he knew the one he wanted for the job.

Bruce Radford was still keeping close tabs on the police department and the progress of its new chief, and he was not surprised when Crone came to him and said he planned to put the department’s youngest and most inexperienced detective on the cold trail of the town’s biggest murder. Radford had been impressed with John Taylor, too. Taylor was just twenty-seven years old, a country boy with only four years in the department, but everybody connected with law enforcement in Beaufort County had taken note of him.

“He was and is the brightest star of the young people in the department,” Radford said of Taylor after Radford had left the job of city manager. “Kind of lean. Kind of hungry. Very dedicated. Always wants to do a good job.”

The only person surprised by the assignment was the one chosen.

John Taylor’s early years had been the nomadic existence of an Air Force brat: Georgia, where he was born, South Carolina, England, France, California. But his father retired when John was twelve; he returned to Beaufort County, where he had grown up in a farm family of nine brothers and sisters, and settled into a job at the post office.

John Taylor spent his teenage years living in the country, playing baseball, and working part-time in a grocery store. After graduating from high school in Chocowinity, across the river from Washington, Taylor went to work for an electrical contractor doing industrial construction. He left that job to study electrical engineering at Beaufort Community College for two years. Following his graduation, he went to work for the region’s biggest employer, Texas Gulf, at the company’s huge phosphate mine in nearby Aurora, where he operated a drag line in the pit mine until he was laid off in company cutbacks.

While he was out of work, Taylor encountered a cousin who worked at the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department. There were openings for deputies, his cousin told him. Why not give it a try? Taylor was accepted and joined the department in October 1982 as a patrol deputy. Less than four months later, he got a taste of just how dangerous law enforcement work can be.

After answering a call to Terra Ciea, a Dutch flower-growing community in the county, he and other officers encountered a berserk armed man who had barricaded himself inside his house. The man had lost both feet and thought the Mafia was coming to take away his disability payments. While Taylor and other officers hunkered behind cars and other cover, a neighbor decided to try to talk the man into surrendering. When the neighbor stepped from behind a car to start toward the house, the man inside opened fire with a deer rifle. The neighbor fell from a shot that passed completely through him, side to side. He died gurgling and gasping on the ground, his eyes still open wide in disbelief. The man fell only a few feet from Taylor, but neither Taylor nor anybody else was able to help him. Taylor did reach out, however, and pull the neighbor’s farm cap down over his open eyes.

After twenty months as a sheriff’s deputy, Taylor joined the Washington Police Department as a patrol officer in June 1984. When a detective’s job came open two years later, he applied and got it.

In many other places, Taylor might have been considered unconventional, but in Washington he fit right in. He drove an old Chevrolet pickup truck, wore tight blue jeans, western-cut shirts, and cowboy boots to work. He liked Jack Daniel’s whiskey and the “outlaw” country music of Waylon Jennings, David Allen Coe, and Hank Williams, Jr. Tall and athletic in appearance, Taylor was the strong, silent type. His closely cropped hair lay in tight curls on his head, and his light blue eyes betrayed a sense of constant amusement. An impish grin gave him a boyish look that women found irresistible.

Early in March 1989, Taylor’s captain, Danny Boyd, told Taylor that he needed to talk to him, but he couldn’t do it in the close confines of the small detective office, where everybody’s desks abutted. They got into the crime lab van, and as they rode aimlessly around town, Boyd laid it out for him. The new chief wanted Taylor assigned full-time to the Von Stein case, and he could follow it wherever it led. The chief wanted the case solved and he would work closely with Taylor on it himself.

“What about Melvin?” Taylor asked.

Melvin Hope, Taylor’s sergeant, had been in charge of the Von Stein case.

Hope would not be working the case anymore, Boyd said.

Taylor was concerned about Hope’s reaction. He was sure that Hope would resent having to hand over his case to a younger subordinate, even though Hope had not been able to find time to work the case.

He was not to worry about that, Boyd told him. Boyd and the chief would be talking with Hope.

Nonetheless, Taylor dreaded having to go to Hope to ask for his notes and files after Hope had been informed of the decision. “I hope you’re not pissed at me,” Taylor told Hope. “I didn’t ask for this and I’m not sure I particularly want it.”

“I’m not pissed,” Hope said. “I understand. This is not a ballgame. We’re trying to get something done here. Look, let me know how I can help you.”

Much later, Hope would say, “It was time for somebody to come in with a fresh perspective, and John is a good investigator.”

His concern about Hope had not been Taylor’s only worry about taking the case. The greater burden was personal and more enduring. Could he find the killer? “Now everybody’s eyes were on John Boy,” he said later.