Blood Games (40 page)

In talking with the man whose house Bart and his friend had broken into in high school, Taylor had learned that the group had left something behind in the house: a club-like weapon. The owner had kept it because he thought it a handy thing to have around. Taylor had asked the man to take a snapshot of it, and the man had sent it to him from California where he now was living.

Taylor showed the snapshot to Bart and asked if he recognized the weapon. He said that he didn’t.

Taylor also produced an enlarged photograph of the burned knife that had been used to kill Lieth Von Stein, and asked Bart if he’d ever seen it.

“Is this lifesize?” Bart asked.

“Yes.”

“No,” Bart said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”

The interview had taken about two hours, and it had not accomplished what Taylor and Lewis had hoped. They hadn’t expected a confession, but they had hoped to get something more solid to work with. They had been a little taken aback by Bart’s openness, and they had let him go on without pressing him on certain matters out of concern that he might clam up. They thought that he was lying about some things. For example, no one in the group that gathered at the dorm with Chris on the night of the murder remembered seeing Bart that night, and no one had mentioned anybody calling him to come down. But Taylor and Young wanted Bart to say as much as he wanted to say. Maybe he would slip up and say more than he intended. That hadn’t happened, but at least they now knew his position. They also knew that they weren’t apt to get much out of him that would help them, and as they drove him back to the jail that night, they realized that they would have to find somebody else to give them the break that they needed in this case.

35

Bart spent ten days in the Wake County Jail before being brought to district court to face charges for probation violations that Christy Newsom had filed against him.

Christy did not attend the hearing. She was now working with the house arrest program, and Bart had a new probation officer, Brian Strickland. Christy had thoroughly briefed Strickland about Bart’s long record of violations and defiance so that he could plead for a prison sentence from Judge James R. Fullwood.

But the judge thought that Bart deserved another chance to straighten out his life and sentenced him to six months of house arrest. Bart would have to wear a waterproof electronic band around his ankle that would set off an alarm if he wandered more than two hundred feet from his monitor. He would have to remain at his residence—for now, Neal’s apartment—whenever he was not at work or in class. A computer would randomly call the telephone at the apartment whenever Bart was supposed to be there, and he would have to answer it to confirm his presence. His voice would be recorded for the computer, which would be able to tell his voice from that of any person pretending to be him. The computer also supposedly could tell from his voice patterns whether he had been drinking or using drugs, two things he was prohibited from doing.

When Christy came to work that afternoon, she was greeted by a colleague who told her, “You’re going to be in a bad mood today.”

She had been certain that Bart would go to jail this time, and she was incensed about the judge’s decision. Once again Bart had outsmarted her and defied her promise to put him in prison. She could just feel him smirking at her. She thought that the judge was putting herself and others in danger by giving Bart any opportunity at freedom. So angry that she could not let the matter rest, she went to see Fullwood that afternoon to try to get him to change his mind.

“If he hasn’t already killed somebody, he will,” she warned him.

“I can’t judge him on intention,” Fullwood told her. “I have to go by the facts.”

He made it clear that he had no intention of reconsidering and that he didn’t want to talk anymore about it. “He told me I was too spunky, but not to worry about it. When I got older, I’d calm down,” Christy recalled later. “He said I’d realize I couldn’t change the world. I told him, ‘I’m not trying to change the world. I’m just trying to put the people in prison who need to be there.’”

To make matters worse, now that Bart was in the house arrest program, Christy once again had the frustrating and personally infuriating job of supervising him.

After Taylor and Young interviewed him in jail, Bart was certain that they were trying to entangle him in the murder of Lieth Von Stein. “I knew I was in serious shit,” he recalled later. He talked to other inmates about it.

“Man, you need to leave town,” said one who once had been charged with murder. “Murder trial ain’t no joke.”

Several others agreed.

“I decided if I ever get out, I’m going to split,” Bart said. “I ain’t going to let ’em pin a murder on me.”

Surprisingly, after his court appearance, he was turned loose without restriction until he could be outfitted the following day with his electronic band. His inclination was to leave immediately, but he had an old problem: no money. He was due a paycheck from the painting company, but it would be a while coming. Also he wanted to see his friends, maybe even throw a big good-bye party before he took off. And he knew the cops didn’t have evidence to charge him with murder or they already would have done it.

After leaving court, feeling really free for the first time in months, knowing that for now no cops were searching for him, he went first to the restaurant where Hank worked, a place he had been avoiding for more than two months. The place fell silent when he walked in.

“It was like watching a cowboy movie where the bad guy walks into the bar, everybody gets quiet, the piano quits playing,” he recalled. “People’s mouths dropped open. It looked like Jesus Christ had strolled through the door.”

Hank wasn’t working, but his stepmother was behind the counter. Bart knew her well, was always joking with her. He greeted her with a smile, sat on a stool, ordered iced tea, started making small talk, but he could tell that she was uncomfortable. She leaned over and began whispering to him.

“What are you doing here? Don’t you know the police are looking for you all over? The SBI has been in here I don’t know how many times.”

Bart tried to assure her that he had taken care of everything, but he could tell that she wasn’t sure whether to believe him and that she didn’t appreciate him bringing the cops down on her place.

He took his tea and left, strolling across the campus that he had first come to not quite three years earlier for freshman orientation, letting his mind wander back over all that had happened since that innocent day.

“I was asking myself, ‘Man, how did things get so fucked up?’” he later recalled. “I was telling myself, ‘It’s a bit more serious than I’ve been thinking. I’ve got to do something.’”

That morning, Thursday, June 1, John Crone had driven to Raleigh to meet John Taylor at the motel where he had stayed the night before. Crone and Taylor still were trying to find something to connect Moog to the murder, but they also had to follow up other possibilities.

The Negroid hair that had been found in the burned Reebok tennis shoe at the fire site where evidence had been destroyed led them to believe that Moog might have had a black accomplice. They had learned that he had one black friend, Quincy Blackwell, a high school classmate who had sometimes played Dungeons and Dragons in his group back in Caswell County. Blackwell also had come to State but had dropped out recently and was rooming with another black acquaintance of Moog’s, Butch Mitchell, Neal Henderson’s former roommate. Mitchell, the officers had been told, could be volatile when drinking. Moog might have turned to either for help, they thought.

Taylor had spent much of the previous day in Caswell County asking questions about Moog and Quincy. He had talked with a county detective, with Quincy’s father, and with Bart’s companion in his high school night of crime, Gary Hampton, but he had come away with little that was helpful. From what he had learned, Quincy was harmless. And he turned up nothing damning about Bart.

One of his purposes in talking to Hampton was to show him a photo of the knife used to kill Lieth Von Stein. The owner of the lake house that Bart, Hampton, and their friends had broken into had reported a hunting knife missing. Taylor had sent a photo of the murder knife to the house owner, who responded that it looked similar to the one taken from his house. Hampton, however, said that he didn’t know a knife had been taken that night. And he’d never seen James, as he called Bart, with a knife like that. Furthermore, he said he couldn’t imagine James hurting anybody. He’d never known him to have any violent tendencies.

Crone wanted to get a feel for Moog himself, and shortly before noon, he and Taylor drove to the Marcom Street apartment where Bart was now staying with Neal. Their knock was answered by Neal, who allowed them to step inside the apartment, where Bart, just freed from jail, was seated on the sofa. Another young man, a roommate who never spoke in the officers’ presence, was also in the living room. All three looked as if they had just gotten up.

Crone and Taylor were taken aback by the incredible clutter. There was little furniture: the sofa, a chair, a stereo, a TV. A monstrous inflatable dinosaur occupied one section of the room. The floor appeared to be the place where most activities took place. It was littered with dozens of Dungeons and Dragons books, scores of figurines of monsters and warriors Sleeping mats were spread about. Shed clothing lay amidst empty pizza boxes and beer cans. A computer with a keyboard and joysticks used for playing games also were on the floor.

Crone and Taylor didn’t want to talk to Moog in the presence of others, and they asked if he would mind stepping outside to their car. Bart got into the front seat with Taylor. Crone sat in the back.

Taylor showed Bart the photo of the burned knife that was used to kill Lieth, telling him he thought it was the knife that had been taken from the break in in Caswell County. Bart remembered a knife being taken but said this one wasn’t it. The knife they’d taken was bigger. He hadn’t kept it, he said, and didn’t know who ended up with it. He already had a hunting knife and didn’t need one.

The officers wanted to know more about the discussions Chris and his friends had about “offing” Chris’s parents, but Bart said Chris never got serious about that and never talked about how it might actually be done.

Did he know the names of any blacks with whom Chris would have associated?

Only Quincy Blackwell and Butch Mitchell.

Were either violent?

Not Quincy, for sure. But Butch had been in fights.

Asked about Brew Simpson, Bart said he hadn’t talked to him in a couple of months. Brew was “unbalanced mentally,” Bart said, a former “cokehead.” He believed Brew was now using cocaine again and selling it to support his habit.

As the questions continued, Bart’s sometimes flippant answers and smirking smile irritated Crone and Taylor, leading them to believe that he wasn’t really taking this seriously.

“You think this is a game?” Taylor asked him. “You think this is funny?”

“Have you still got those pictures, John?” Crone asked from the backseat.

“Yeah, they’re in the trunk,” said Taylor.

“Get ’em,” Crone said.

Taylor went to the trunk. When he returned, he was carrying an eight-by-ten color photograph of Lieth Von Stein’s bludgeoned and bloody body, which he held out to Bart.

“Does this look like we’re playing?” Taylor asked.

Bart flinched and turned his head away.

“Man, I don’t want to look at that,” he said. “That ain’t my business.”

“Little son-of-a-bitch was about to puke,” said Crone as he and Taylor drove away a short time later, leaving Bart with what they hoped was an indelible image.

After leaving Moog, Crone and Taylor met SBI agents Lewis Young and Terry Newell and Assistant DA Keith Mason at the Rock-Ola at Mission Valley for lunch. Young, Newell, and Mason had been on another mission that morning. They had taken all of their evidence against Chris to Bonnie’s Raleigh lawyer, Wade Smith. Their objective was not to try to get Smith to convince Bonnie that her son had tried to have her killed. They had given up any hope of that. They wanted to go through Smith to get word to Chris’s lawyer, Bill Osteen, that they had a strong case. If Osteen knew the evidence, they reasoned, he might get the truth from Chris, and once broken, Chris might want to make a deal, come forth with his story, and reveal his accomplices. Smith had been cordial and heard them out, and Young, Newell, and Mason had no doubt that he understood their purpose.

After lunch, Taylor and Crone drove to Ligon Street to call on Quincy Blackwell and Butch Mitchell. Quincy was not there, but Butch invited them in. The apartment was much neater than the one the officers had been in earlier that day, but they took note of all the violent Japanese comic books lying around. Those, Butch said, were Quincy’s. He always had his nose in one.

A blocky young man of medium height, with a broad face and thin mustache, Butch boasted that he was himself a practitioner of martial arts, particularly kung fu, and considered himself to be a good fighter. Indeed, he said, he was such a good fighter that he had to watch himself. That was why he couldn’t drink or take drugs.

“When I do that I get mad and like to hurt people,” he said.

Asked about his background, Butch said that his father died when he was eleven and his mother had supported the family afterward. He described his mother, an employee of a manufacturing company, as “amazingly perfect.”