Blood Games (38 page)

The arrest was confirmation of one thing that Christy and John suspected: that Bart was supporting himself by selling drugs.

They also knew that he still was around. One of Chuck’s suitemates reported one day that Moog had been by the dorm just the day before. Confronted at the restaurant one afternoon, Hank said that he had seen Moog on the street only a few hours earlier. Both said that Moog hadn’t changed his appearance. His hair was still long, still bleached. He had a scraggly beard. If other people could spot him, John and Christy kept asking themselves, why couldn’t they?

Once, when an informer told Christy that Moog was staying at a certain apartment, John kept an all-night vigil outside: no Moog. Later, Christy talked the young man who lived in the apartment into letting her search inside, but she found no evidence that Moog ever had been there.

John and Christy began checking every rooming house near the campus, showing Moog’s picture without success. They got a list of homeless shelters and began checking those. At the Salvation Army shelter one night they encountered a group of gay men in the parking lot who immediately recognized them as cops, despite their casual attire.

John approached the group to ask if any of them recognized Moog’s photo. None did, but one smiling young man recognized the opportunity to needle a cop.

“Why don’t you take her in there and come back and talk to me,” he said, touching John’s arm in an exaggerated, feminine gesture.

“Man, don’t touch me,” John muttered, walking briskly away.

“You don’t like gay men?” the man asked, following along.

“Look, man,” John said sternly, “don’t give me any trouble. Just leave me alone.”

“I don’t have AIDS,” the man called after him, as his friends laughed.

Christy was enjoying the scene immensely.

“He thinks you’re cute, John.”

“Shut up,” John muttered.

The taunting gay in the parking lot was almost symbolic of the helplessness and frustration that John and Christy were beginning to feel. Both had devoted untold hours to the search for Moog, including most of their off-duty hours. Christy’s supervisors had begun to complain that she was obsessed with the search and spending too little time with her other probationers. She recognized that their complaints were more than a subtle hint that she should leave Moog to the police.

Christy had applied for a job in the probation office with the new house arrest program. On April 20, she learned that she had gotten it and called John to tell him about it. The hunt for Moog had forged a close and comfortable friendship between them, and each had come to respect the other’s professional abilities immensely, despite their inability to find Moog. Christy would assume her new duties in May and no longer be able to devote working hours to the hunt for Moog. But she still could work with John until then, perhaps on a curtailed basis, and afterward she would be willing to devote her off-duty hours to the hunt.

April passed, and neither John nor Christy, nor the SBI, nor the campus police, nor the Raleigh police had been able to find Moog. He had become a phantom, seemingly appearing and disappearing at will. Christy knew that he hadn’t fled. She sensed that he was watching them, enjoying their frustration, laughing, mocking and taunting. For her, the capture of Moog had become a personal quest, and she vowed that she never would quit until she had kept her promise to put him in jail.

33

On May 1, the officers involved in the Von Stein case held another strategy session. The SBI’s Murder Unsolved Team and Agent Lewis Young had worked on the case full-time for about a week in March, then had been pulled away by other investigations. They still helped on the case now and then as their duties allowed, and most were present for the strategy meeting.

John Taylor, the only detective working the case full-time, brought the other officers up to date on his activities in recent weeks, relating at length the frustrations of his futile search for Moog.

The inability to locate Moog caused the group to decide on a new strategy. They would confront Chris directly, let him know they had evidence that he was involved in the planning of the murder, face him down, and try to provoke a confession.

The following day, Taylor, Washington Police Chief John Crone, SBI agents Lewis Young and Terry Newell, and Assistant District Attorney Keith Mason drove to Winston-Salem and met SBI Agent Tom Sturgill at the Holiday Inn.

The group was in high spirits, everybody certain that Chris would break under pressure. He would tell them who else was involved—they had no doubt that he would be mentioning the name Moog—and with murder warrants in hand, an all-out manhunt for his accomplices could be launched. The case soon would be over.

But when Young called Bonnie to try to arrange separate interviews, the high spirits dissolved. Bonnie said that she would be happy to come for an interview, but Chris would not. She had retained William Osteen, a Greensboro lawyer, to represent Chris, and he had advised Chris not to talk with any police officers.

The officers did not have to ask who William Osteen was. A former U.S. attorney and one-time legislative leader and congressional candidate, he was one of North Carolina’s most esteemed criminal lawyers. Bonnie earlier had retained another of the state’s top criminal lawyers, Wade Smith, to represent herself and Angela. The officers knew that no better defense team could have been assembled in North Carolina, and likely few better anywhere. Clearly, Bonnie was willing to spend the money Lieth had inherited to keep any member of her family from being connected to his murder.

The officers’ spirits plummeted with the news that they would not have the opportunity to confront Chris and get the confession they expected. But Bonnie had agreed to meet with them, even though her son would not. And the officers clung to some hope that she might be swayed to their side. That hope was faint, however.

When Bonnie came to talk with the officers at seven, Young told her that they had evidence proving that Chris had taken part in planning the murder. They felt obligated to tell her that they thought she could be in danger from within her own household.

Bonnie listened coolly and politely. When she spoke it was in a calm voice. The officers simply were wrong, she said. She had no concern at all that she might be in any danger from Chris. “I
know
my son’s not involved,” she said. “I
know
he didn’t have anything to do with it.”

She said it with such conviction that Terry Newell suddenly realized what had given her such confidence.

“I know what you’re taking about,” he told her. “Just remember this. You get what you pay for when you buy a polygraph test.”

After Bonnie left, Newell told the others, “That little son-of-a-bitch took a polygraph and passed it, and she’s banking everything she’s got on it.”

Later, the officers discovered that was exactly the case.

The jubilant celebration the officers had expected to follow Chris’s confession turned into a glum motel-room gathering in which the officers drank beer and told stories about cases with happier outcomes.

John Crone had never seen Chris, and before he left Winston-Salem, he was determined to at least get a glimpse of him, perhaps introduce himself, look him in the eye, and let him know that another master gamesman was at play, this one on the side of the law. Next morning, he drove by the tire place where Chris worked, only to discover that Chris had called to say he would be late coming in that day.

On the way back to Washington, Crone and Taylor stopped in Raleigh to see Brew Simpson. They wanted to get the word out that they knew Chris had planned the murder and they figured that Brew would spread it.

Brew appeared surprised when told about Chris, and became noticeably edgy afterwards.

“What we want to know,” Crone said, “is who Chris would have gone to to help him with the plan?”

Brew said nothing for a few moments. Finally, he spoke. “Moog would be the only one.”

“Would you help us find Moog?” Crone asked.

Brew nodded.

Two days later, on Friday, Taylor drove to Raleigh again with David Sparrow, one of the first officers at the murder scene, who just had been made a detective. They photographed the steam tunnels where Chris had wandered and went to talk again with Brew, who told them about the dorm-room conversation the summer before in which somebody had suggested to Chris, “You ought to off your parents and inherit that money.” Brew said he’d heard that Moog was saving up money to leave town, and he told Taylor and Sparrow the name of an apartment complex near campus where he’d heard that Moog was living.

Taylor and Sparrow checked the apartment complex without finding anybody who had heard of Moog or recognized his photograph. When they met Christy Newsom for lunch at Rock-Ola Cafe near the campus, she gave them two new criminal summonses for Moog, both for passing bad checks to a deli delivery man.

Later that afternoon, the deli owner told the detectives that Moog had written the checks for sandwiches delivered to room 235 in Tucker dorm on campus the previous semester. He had put off filing charges for about six months, but in March, when another order for subs came from that room, the delivery man recognized the young man who again wanted to pay by check and asked for identification. When the young man handed him a Virginia driver’s license, he kept it and told him that he would get it back when he paid off the earlier checks. When the young man didn’t come to get the license, he filed charges.

The deli owner still had the license, issued to James B. Upchurch III at his mother’s Virginia Beach address, and he gave it to Taylor.

Taylor and Sparrow went to room 235 in Tucker dorm only to find it unoccupied. Classes for the spring semester were just ending and many students already had left for the summer.

As Taylor and Sparrow were knocking at the door, one of the dorm’s resident advisers recognized them as police officers and said, “If it has to do with drugs, you’ve got the right room.”

Shown a photo of Moog, the RA recognized him and said he’d seen him going into the room as recently as a couple of weeks ago.

Taylor got the names and addresses of the two students who had occupied the room, and on Monday morning, he and Terry Newell drove to their hometowns of Benson and Four Oaks, east of Raleigh, to interview them. Each denied knowing Moog and claimed that he’d never been in their room.

Taylor was spending so much time in Raleigh that he had emptied the police department’s travel budget. City Manager Bruce Radford had to raid other funds to keep the investigation going, but Radford was determined to do what it took to break the case.

Taylor was back in Raleigh the following day. He had obtained a list of the names and addresses of all students who were in Lee dorm in the summer of 1988, and Christy was going to help him check out each one, to see if anybody knew anything that could help them.

Taylor also called Brew, who told him that he’d heard Moog was now working for a painting company, but he didn’t know the name of it. Moog had found out about the job from a notice on a dorm bulletin board, Brew said. Taylor went to the campus to check bulletin boards, only to find all of them had been cleaned off at semester’s end.

Taylor had begun to expect that kind of thing. Nothing he did seemed to work when it came to finding Moog. He was back where he had been weeks earlier, he and Christy still riding the streets around campus, searching the now familiar spots were Moog was believed to go, checking out reported sightings and tips from informers, talking with police officers, tracking down everybody who had any association with Moog and Chris in the summer of 1988. Taylor found himself visiting with a self-proclaimed witch who was supposed to be advising Moog but claimed she’d never heard of him, and sitting alone through another all-night stakeout outside an apartment, only to discover next morning a case of mistaken identity. In the search for Moog, frustration was proving to be the only reward.

34

Bart was well aware that the police were searching for him. He kept getting reports from friends and acquaintances who had been interviewed by John Taylor, Christy Newsom, and the SBI agents who joined the search whenever possible.

Hank told him that cops were regularly watching the restaurant where he worked, and Bart quit going there early in April. He still moved freely around the N.C. State campus and surrounding area, however, usually on foot, often by skateboard. He still had not acquired another car or gotten back his North Carolina driver’s license, which had been revoked. He had become adroit at avoiding detection, always checking from windows and doors before leaving buildings to make certain nobody was watching, always fading into crowds or shadows, stepping into shrubbery or into doorways or behind buildings at the approach of police cars or other official-looking vehicles.

At the beginning of March, Bart had moved out of the apartment he had been sharing. He had not gotten along with the guy with whom he was living. The guy was a “Dead Head,” a fanatical follower of a rock group called the Grateful Dead, and he frequently let other Dead Heads stay at the apartment. Bart had had disputes with them. At the same time, he had to give up the job he’d held for only a few weeks at a bar on Hillsborough Street because Christy had discovered he was working there. He had moved into a boardinghouse near Dorothea Dix Hospital but he didn’t like it. It was a little too far from campus and Hillsborough Street.