Blood Games (50 page)

Taylor felt awkward, and he sensed that Bonnie did, too. After all, it was his efforts that had put her son in jail, awaiting trial for his life.

In the next hour, Taylor revealed all the basic facts he and the other officers had uncovered about the case, answered all of Bonnie’s questions, but even as he did it, he knew that Bonnie was not accepting his vision of the truth.

When he told her that the FBI had verified Chris’s handwriting on the map, Bonnie maintained that wasn’t concrete evidence. Somebody could have tricked him into drawing it, she said. He might have drawn it for some other purpose at some point in the past and somebody had come upon it and taken it.

The waiter brought the check while they talked and left it by Taylor’s plate. As their conversation was drawing to a close, Bonnie discreetly reached over and retrieved the check. The meeting ended amicably with Taylor assuring her that he would continue looking into the case, Bonnie thanking him for telling her much that she had not known before. Taylor’s only disappointment was that once more he had failed to sway Bonnie to the state’s view.

“Bonnie just couldn’t accept it,” he said later. “Her boy couldn’t have done that, and that’s all there was to it. She was a very stubborn woman when it came to that.”

Later, Taylor was surprised and disappointed to learn that despite their agreement that the lunch was to be personal and private, without note taking, as soon as they parted, Bonnie wrote down everything she could remember that he had told her and took it straight to her lawyer in Washington, James Vosburgh.

On Friday, July 21, Neal was taken from the Beaufort County Jail and whisked twenty-five miles north to Williamston in Martin County, where Superior Court Judge Thomas Watts was holding court. With no reporters present, Judge Watts set a bond of $200,000, $50,000 of it to be secured by money or property owned by an assortment of relatives and family friends of Neal’s mother. The arrangements had been worked out previously. Neal was released on condition that he not associate with Chris or Bart, that he reside with his mother, who had moved into a small house in Danville, Virginia, and that he report weekly to the court or to his lawyer in Washington, Michael Paul. Neal’s former employers already had arranged for him to have another job at a Wendy’s in Danville.

On the day of Neal’s release, James Vosburgh filed a motion at the Beaufort County Courthouse to have Chris released on a bond of $100,000 so that he could assist his lawyers in preparing his case and continue the psychiatric care that he had been receiving before his arrest. The motion noted that Chris “has suffered severe depression over the loss of his stepfather and the near fatal injuries inflicted to his mother.”

Not until the next week did the people of Beaufort County learn of Neal’s release. Even then, the district attorney declined to comment about it.

That week brought another flurry of motions from lawyers on all sides.

Wayland Sermons was furious when he learned that James Vosburgh had received crime scene photos and FBI evidence reports from John Taylor the week before, but he had yet to receive anything from the state. Although he was certain that Neal was to be the state’s chief witness, he still had no idea what Neal had told the police about Bart’s involvement. He prepared a volley of motions asking that Bart be released under a $150,000 bond, that money be provided to hire private investigators to help him prepare his case, and that the state be compelled to turn over evidence against Bart so that his lawyers could fight the charges.

Chris’s lawyers also filed several motions, asking that police officers be required to preserve all the rough notes from their investigation, that all court proceedings be fully recorded, and that his eventual trial be removed from Beaufort County because of adverse news coverage.

The state, meanwhile, filed a motion asking that Chris’s attorneys be required to turn over the evidence they intended to use at his trial.

Neal’s attorneys also requested evidence from the state and filed a preliminary indication that they, too, would seek money for private investigators.

Lawyers anticipated that many of these motions would be heard when the regular session of Superior Court opened in Washington on Monday, July 31.

Neal was required to be in court that morning to hear motions in his case and answered when the calendar was called. He left and returned a couple of times that morning, at one point sitting in the same row as Bonnie and Angela, who had come to court hoping that Chris’s bond motion would be heard.

When the normally calm Bonnie caught her first sight of Neal, she became so upset that she fled the courtroom and had to be taken to her lawyer’s office nearby to be calmed. Later, she told John Taylor that Neal gave her an eerie feeling and she thought that he was the person who had been in her bedroom the night of the murder. The shadowy figure that attacked her and her husband, she said, resembled Neal’s thick and blocky body more than Bart’s long and lanky frame.

Chris’s motion for bond was heard the following morning. He was brought into the courtroom, where he hugged his mother and sister and sat attentively through the proceedings. Judge Watts set his bond at $300,000, half of which had to be secured. When Watts learned that Bonnie intended to use two certificates of deposit to meet the secured bond, he noted that he had “problems” with property that belonged to the victim being used to secure bond for the accused, but he allowed the certificates to be used anyway.

Chris was released at two-thirty. Dressed in dark gray slacks, an expensive sport jacket, a purple print tie, his mother on his arm, she wearing sunglasses, her long hair tied into a pony tail, Chris hurried from the courthouse behind his lawyer, all three ignoring questions from a reporter who trailed along.

Bart was the only defendant in the case now left in jail, and his chance at freedom came two days later, when he was ushered into court for his bond hearing. Judge Watts set the total bond at half a million dollars, all of it to be secured. Not even Bart’s grandmother, who always had come to her family’s financial rescue in the past, could afford such risk, and Bart was returned to jail to await his trial, the date of which remained unknown.

Bart actually had believed that he might be able to get out on bond—a pipe dream, his father had called it—and the judge’s ruling sent him back into depression.

His father came again to see him. Carolyn came with his Uncle John, who just had become an assistant prosecutor in Alamance County. His mother was not able to visit. After undergoing an elaborate series of medical tests during the week following Bart’s arrest, doctors determined that she needed a pacemaker implanted in her heart. Complications followed the surgery and she had to be re-hospitalized several times. It would be September before she was finally recovered enough to visit Bart.

The person Bart was most frequently in contact with was Hank. Bart regularly called him collect at his mother’s restaurant. Sometimes Hank would even hold the receiver up to a speaker so Bart could hear a favorite song on the jukebox.

But it was Bart’s inability to find out what was happening to himself that was more responsible than anything else for pulling him out of his depression.

“I didn’t know what was going on, who was saying what. It was really a strange position to be in. I had a hard time understanding it and coping with it. Wayland would come by. He didn’t know what was going on. He told me, ‘You’ve got to help me. If we’re going to fight this, you’ve got to work with me.’ What happened was I started getting mad. The SBI and the Washington Police Department were fucking me over, setting me up, doing shit to my family. I just got more and more pissed off, started getting involved, started working. Eventually, I started using a line on myself: might not be as bad as it seems, might be able to get out on bail. I said, ‘Hell, I ain’t going to give up the ghost yet.’”

The bond hearing burst that bubble of hope temporarily, but it didn’t squelch Bart’s will to fight.

“I started looking at the situation,” he said later. “As far as I could tell, there was no evidence that I did anything. I had been arrested on Neal’s word, I figured. I just started gathering all the information I could get about what Neal had been saying to people.”

Others were trying to find out what Neal had said, too, including Bart’s father. Sermons had urged him to find out anything he could about Neal from his niece, Kenyatta, who was living that summer at her grandmother’s house in Milton. That proved to be more difficult than Jim expected. Although Kenyatta liked Jim, her loyalty clearly was to Neal, not to Bart, her own blood, whom she openly detested.

That made the summer particularly difficult for her grandmother, with whom she was living. Her own grandson, Bart, her first grandchild, whom she deeply loved despite his problems, was in jail facing the possibility of the death penalty, and her granddaughter was loyal to her grandson’s accuser.

“It was the most difficult situation you’ve ever seen in your life,” Carolyn said later. “She was living here, hating her cousin. Everybody was just handling her with care. It was like walking on eggs all day long, every day.”

During the days when Neal was in jail, he called Carolyn’s house regularly, collect, sometimes twice a day, talking long periods with Kenyatta. Before his arrest, Neal made one request of Kenyatta. He wanted her to make peace with his mother, so that they could support one another during this difficult period.

Kenyatta had made an effort. She called Ann Henderson at Penney’s, where she worked, and arranged to meet her for dinner. Neal’s mother was not able to go out when Kenyatta arrived, because she had to be home with her daughter. Instead, they ordered a pizza and sat in the living room at Ann Henderson’s house, chatting.

“She was being really nice to me,” Kenyatta said later, but Kenyatta could tell that it was a strain for her. Kenyatta was wary and soon became skeptical about Ann Henderson’s motivation.

“The only reason she wanted to talk with me was to get information to get her son out of jail,” Kenyatta said later. “I really tried with Ann Henderson for Neal’s sake. I spent the whole summer trying to be friends, but that wasn’t possible. She hated me. Oh, God, she hated me.

“As the summer progressed, I got angrier and angrier at Neal. I got so fed up with the whole thing, I said, ‘I don’t care what happens.’ I was so mad I didn’t care what happened to Neal or to James or to anybody.”

Despite her anger, at her grandmother’s request, Kenyatta agreed to talk with Bart’s attorneys, Wayland Sermons and Frank Johnston, who drove to Milton on August 16, and met her at Carolyn’s big gray ghost of a house.

She told them about the night Neal claimed to have taken LSD, when he stayed out all night, returned agitated the next morning, and gave her fifty dollars. She told them how he had been preoccupied and depressed after that. She said that after the police began questioning Neal, he told her that he had been involved in the murder of Chris’s stepfather and that he and Bart had done it. Neal wouldn’t give her any details, she told the lawyers, although, in fact, he had. She said Neal told her that he had talked with the police because he thought it would help him. She had not been approached by anybody else about the case, she said, but Neal had warned her about Chris’s investigator who was “a bad FBI type.”

Kenyatta hadn’t wanted to tell the lawyers anything, especially if it might help Bart, who deserved whatever was coming to him, in her opinion. She had taken an immediate dislike to Sermons. “He was just covered in syrup,” she said later. “Biggest politician I ever saw in my life. I couldn’t stand him.”

Carolyn was relieved at the end of August when Kenyatta left to begin her freshman year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. No longer did she have to worry about saying something about Bart or Neal, whom she’d always liked, that might provoke Kenyatta’s volatile nature.

41

Lawyers on all sides of the Von Stein case scrimmaged throughout September and into October, filing dozens of motions, arguing in court over technicalities and procedures, the defense lawyers seeking separate trials for each defendant, trying to get those trials moved from Beaufort County, asking for rulings that would relieve their clients of the possibility of the death penalty.

In October, Judge Watts authorized the hiring of private detectives on Bart’s behalf, and Sermons called on Bill Sirgenson of Greenville, who had provided bodyguards for Bonnie immediately after the murder.

Early in October Bart was taken from the Beaufort County Jail without notice and driven to Raleigh, where he was placed in the Wake County Jail, more than a two-hour-drive away from his lawyers. The ostensible reason was to have Bart tried for probation violations.

Bill Sirgenson and another detective who worked with him, Paul Davis, went to Raleigh to talk with Bart about the case. He asked if Bart recalled anything unusual happening about the time of the murder.

“Unusual?” said Bart, thinking. “Well, the night of the murder, I guess, Henderson came by and he said that he had an outfit that he wanted to go rob. He told me he had an outfit he wanted to hit, that there was a house that he wanted to rob.”

“Who was that?”

“Henderson.”

“Was that the night of the murder?”

“That was the night of the murder. I told him that I was through doing that.”

“What time of night?”

“Around twelve or twelve-thirty, one o’clock, somewhere along in there. The next day, of course, Chris Pritchard’s roommate called and told me about the murder happening.”