Blood Games (54 page)

Norton began his case by calling to the stand Michelle Sparrow, the Beaufort County dispatcher who had taken Bonnie’s call on the night of the murder and had kept her on the line until officers could get to her, Michelle had been so nervous with anticipation about the trial that her digestive tract had been in turmoil for days.

It was not just the prospect of testifying that had upset her. Her experience that night had affected her deeply. She knew that it would be painful to go through it again. Also she still had not met Bonnie and she knew that finally meeting her would be an emotional moment.

Michelle’s husband, David, who was to testify after her, had pointed out Bonnie when they arrived at the courtroom that morning, and Michelle had been struck by how tiny and fragile she seemed. How, she wondered, had she ever survived so brutal an attack?

Michelle tried to avoid looking at Bonnie when she took the stand. She was determined to be professional and not break down in tears. As she sat down after being sworn, her eye caught her husband’s and he winked. Everything would be all right.

When the district attorney tried to introduce the tape recording of Bonnie’s call that night, Sermons objected. Sermons and Johnston didn’t want the jurors affected by the raw emotion of the tape if they could avoid it. The jurors were asked to leave the room while the lawyers wrangled, and court was recessed for lunch without the matter being settled.

When Michelle and David got back to the courtroom after lunch, before court reconvened, two of Bonnie’s friends came up to Michelle and thanked her for saving Bonnie’s life. Then, suddenly, Bonnie was standing there.

“She just kind of eased up to me,” Michelle recalled later. “She said, ‘I’m Bonnie.’ I said, ‘I know, and you don’t know how bad I’ve wanted to meet you.’ We hugged. She said, ‘I just wanted to tell you thank you for all you did. If it hadn’t been for you, I might be dead.’ When somebody tells you something like that, it makes the whole job worth it, low pay and all.”

After hearing the tape, some of which was nearly inaudible, the judge ruled it admissible, and Bonnie and Michelle had to listen to it again, Michelle still maintaining her professional demeanor.

After David Sparrow came off the stand from telling what he had seen at the house that morning, Mitchell Norton called Bonnie to the stand. It was 4:45 P.M., not long until normal stopping time, and everybody in the courtroom knew that she would only begin to tell her story this day. Bonnie had asked that her testimony not be taped for TV, and the judge had ordered the camera shut off to preserve her privacy.

She wore a short-sleeved black dress with a capelike white linen collar, and her long dark hair, flecked now with gray, was pulled together at the back and held by a wide white barrette. She was composed, and her face looked thin and haunted. She spoke so softly that after a few questions, the judge interrupted to make certain the jurors could hear her.

Mitchell led her through an abbreviated story of her life from the time she met Lieth until they settled in Washington. He had her identify a photograph of Lieth and another of their house in Smallwood. He questioned her about the difficult year in which Lieth’s parents died and about the inheritance. He took her through Chris’s relationship with Lieth, including the outburst that nearly caused a fistfight between them. Bonnie acknowledged that both Chris and Angela occasionally called Lieth an “asshole” before the judge interrupted to declare a recess for the day.

The second day of testimony was Bonnie’s. She took the stand shortly after court opened at nine and did not step down, except for breaks, until nearly three-thirty. Norton took her carefully through the events of the weekend of the murder, right up to the attack, when Lieth awoke screaming.

“And can you describe Lieth’s scream to us, please.”

“It was short. It sounded piercing right in my ears, just a series of short screams like—ah, ah, ah—very loud to me.”

“And as best you can, can you duplicate for us here in the courtroom, you say it was very loud, can you duplicate the scream for us that awakened you?”

“Objection,” said Sermons.

“Overruled.”

Bonnie tried, but the sound was soft and feeble, hardly a scream.

“And with the volume that Lieth used that you heard that night?”

“I don’t know if I can or not.”

“Can you try?”

“Objection,” said Sermons.

“Well, sustained,” said the judge.

“Is there some reason that you feel like that you can’t do it, Mrs. Von Stein?”

“Yes,” said Bonnie after the objection had been overruled. “That’s one thing that I’ve not been able to face for myself.”

Bonnie went on to describe the attack in detail. “Everything looked dark, black. Everything looked black to me. It was just dark.”

Of her attacker, she said, “He looked bulky, big through this area,” indicating the shoulders and chest. “It looked like he didn’t have a neck. It looked like the head just sat right on top of his shoulders.”

Later, after asking her to describe the injuries she received, Norton said, “Can you pull up your bangs—I guess that’s what they call them—and show us where those…”

“Well,” said Bonnie pulling back her hair, “I’ve had plastic surgery on two occasions since the injuries, but you’ll always be able to see it if you look closely.” She pointed to the scars, which were hardly visible from the jury box.

A little later, Norton asked if she had suffered any permanent effects from her injuries.

“I’ve had some seizure-type activity and had testing done because of that.”

What kind of seizures?

“I would be in the shower or driving down the highway and all of a sudden it was like I was standing on the outside watching somebody else doing something totally different. And it was explained to me as a daydream-type seizure.”

“Did you ever have those prior to being beaten?”

“No.”

After telling how she had summoned help and the police had arrived, shining a light into the room—“Everything—everything was red. The whole room looked red to me”—Bonnie remembered somebody telling her that nothing could be done for Lieth and she recalled asking about Angela.

“I didn’t want Angela to see what I saw in the room,” she said. “I heard her voice and that was a beautiful sound.”

“All right. Now you say that you saw Lieth?”

“Yes.”

“I show you what’s marked for identification as State’s Exhibit No. 9, Mrs. Von Stein, and ask you to take a look at that,” Norton said, handing her a color photograph of Lieth’s bloodied body. “Do you recognize that state’s exhibit?”

“Yes,” said Bonnie, breaking into tears.

“Who is that individual?”

“That was my husband, Lieth,” she said, struggling to control herself.

“Does that photograph fairly and accurately show and depict the way he was that night in bed?”

“That morning, yes.”

Did she know who had been arrested for doing that to Lieth? She did, naming her son as one of the three. At first, she didn’t believe Chris had anything to do with it, she said. Initially he denied knowing anything about it, but he finally had told her everything two days after Christmas, just before he made his long confession to the police.

“And up until that time in December, did you believe or want to believe that your son could not and would not do such a thing?” Norton asked.

“Yes.”

Cross-examination was to begin immediately after lunch, but it was put off for more than an hour because the prosecution did not deliver copies of Bonnie’s statements to Sermons and Johnston until 1:00 P.M., leaving them no time for lunch and insufficient time to read the reports before court reconvened. Judge Watts made it clear to Norton that he would not tolerate any more such delays.

During the lunch break, Bonnie had stopped behind the rail where Bart’s parents were seated. They never had met. Now they did. Jim stood and took her hand.

“I’m sorry all of this is happening,” Bonnie said.

“I’m sorry, too,” said Jim

For a few moments they stood patting one another’s hand, uncertain what else to say, parents drawn together by their children in tragedy, their lives forever changed.

Sermons was to conduct Bonnie’s cross-examination. He knew that it would be a delicate matter. No jury would take kindly to a lawyer who was hard on a woman whose husband had been murdered in bed beside her, who had been beaten and stabbed herself and who had to face the sorrow of learning that her own son had tried to have her killed.

When court resumed at midafternoon, he took Bonnie back over her testimony, touching on the fight with Chris—“Did that cause any animosity or split feelings between you and Lieth?” “No.”—the children calling Lieth “asshole”—“Did either of these children say that to his face?” “Occasionally.”

On one point, Sermons did zero in: Bonnie’s description of her attacker.

“Now you have described this person that you saw as appearing that he had very broad shoulders and no neck, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

He handed her a photograph of Neal.

“Can you tell us when the very first time is you saw Mr. Henderson?”

“I saw him in the courtroom in Beaufort County when I was there for some motions to be heard.”

“Mrs. Von Stein, can you describe to us whether or not you had any feelings of recognition of Mr. Henderson at that time?”

The judge allowed her to answer over Norton’s objection.

“I didn’t recognize Mr. Henderson. I recognized, you know, that he had a shape that frightened me.”

“Can you describe to us how frightened you were?”

“I was upset to the point that when we broke, I left the courtroom and did not return until after the lunch break.”

“Now, did you have an occasion to see Mr. Upchurch in court after that?”

“Yes.”

“You did not feel frightened?”

“No.”

“Does the defendant, James Upchurch’s physical features match the silhouette you saw in the bedroom?”

“In the conditions I’ve seen him, no.”

Sermons continued driving home the point that Bonnie had not seen any identifying features of the person who had attacked her and Lieth except for being big, broad-shouldered, strong, neckless.

All in the courtroom could clearly see that Bart was tall and thin with a long neck and shoulders that were hardly broad.

Norton was squirming with impatience as he waited to counter that point. When his turn came, he began a long series of vivid, repetitive questions designed to show that Bonnie’s comparisons had been made under different circumstances, one in a brightly lighted courtroom, the other under the conditions in her bedroom the night of the attack.

“You’ve said that the individual that you saw appeared to be broad shouldered and appeared to have no neck. If you were laying on the floor looking up, having been struck in the head several times, bleeding from the chest, hearing your husband scream at the top of his voice, and awoken from a deep sleep, saw an individual dressed in dark clothing head to toe, something over his face, drapes drawn, dark light filtering through a side door, a bat or stick somewhere in his hands with his hands raised over his head…” Norton rose from his seat raising his hands threateningly over his head. “… in this manner…”

“Objection,” called Sermons.

“Sit down, Counsel,” ordered the judge.

Norton sat even as he continued speaking “… hands raised over the head in this manner with the bat, as you’ve described it, what happens to the shoulders and to the neck?”

“Yours appeared to blend together,” Bonnie said over another objection from Sermons.

Sermons came back with questions reconfirming that it was Neal whose physical appearance had frightened her.

“You have never seen Mr. Henderson dressed in black clothing with a baseball bat standing over your body?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Would you say the circumstances under which you saw Mr. Upchurch and Mr. Henderson in the courtroom were pretty much identical?”

“Yes.”

“And again, Mr. Upchurch did not cause you to feel frightened in any way, did he?”

“No.”

John Taylor was the first witness on the third day of testimony. He spent hours on the stand as the state slowly worked in dozens of pieces of physical evidence picturing the scene at the Von Stein house on the morning of the murder.

The significance of it all, however, was summed up in a single question from Frank Johnston during cross-examination.

“In all the tests that were submitted regarding fingerprints, fibers, any other identification procedures that were done, is there any evidence to connect James Bartlett Upchurch with ever having been in that house?”

“No, sir,” said Taylor.

The highlight of the trial on Wednesday was the appearance of Dr. Page Hudson, the highly acclaimed medical examiner who had performed the autopsy on Lieth. His testimony raised intriguing questions at odds with the evidence.

In describing the scrapes on Lieth’s shins and the front of his ankles, Dr. Hudson said that in his opinion the injuries occurred at the time of death.