Blood Games (55 page)

“Sir,” asked Norton, “do you have an opinion satisfactory to yourself as to what type of object could or might have caused those injuries?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is that opinion?”

“They are not specific injuries, but they were quite consistent with and identical to injuries I have seen by the heel of a shoe.”

“Do you have an opinion satisfactory to yourself as to whether or not they could or might have been caused by the swing of a wooden bat?”

“Yes, sir, I do. And my opinion is they were probably not caused by the swinging of a wooden bat.”

Bonnie had told police that Lieth simply had tried to sit up when he was being attacked but never had gotten off the bed to face his attacker.

Asked to describe the stab wound that killed Lieth, Dr. Hudson said, “The track was through the skin, through the chest wall rib area and into and through the heart.”

“When you say through the heart, do you mean literally completely through the heart?”

“I mean at least this point of the blade penetrated into the heart and through the tissue therein, and really came a little ways out of the backside of the heart.”

All of Lieth’s wounds had occurred within a short period of time, Dr. Hudson said.

“Do you have an opinion, assuming the wounds were inflicted within a short period of time, how long it would have taken him to have died from the combination of his wounds?”

“I would have expected death to have occurred within a very few minutes.”

“What did you find in the stomach?” Norton asked a short time later.

“I found a rather large quantity of food, rather undigested rice and meat, which I thought was most likely chicken.”

Stress might have caused that food to remain undigested for six or seven hours, Dr. Hudson said, but only severe stress. Financial and family worries likely wouldn’t cause it.

Under cross-examination from Frank Johnston, Dr. Hudson said that it should have taken no more than an hour or two for the food to have cleared Lieth’s stomach and the appearance of the food, if eaten at 8 P.M., or so, as Bonnie had testified, was inconsistent with a death at 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. Of the more than four thousand cases with which he had dealt, Dr. Hudson said, he had seen a few in which trauma had slowed digestion. “But I don’t recall any at all where it stopped to the point that even some simply digested material like rice didn’t get changed any more than this was.”

The questions raised by Dr. Hudson’s testimony—Did Lieth in fact die much earlier than Bonnie said? Did something happen that Sunday other than the pleasant evening of lovemaking and dinner out that Bonnie had described?—were left to hang. Nobody ever had confronted Bonnie about them, and now that she had completed her testimony, nobody would.

44

Despite wide media coverage, the Upchurch trial was not attracting many spectators probably because the people of Elizabeth City had taken little notice of the Von Stein murder. On most days the courtroom was largely empty, populated only by those who felt an obligation to be there: the participants, their friends and family, and, of course, the small cadre of out-of-town reporters, photographers, and TV technicians.

Among those who had an interest in the trial, nobody wanted to be late when court reconvened from lunch recess Thursday, January 11. The state was about to call its star witness, Chris Pritchard. He took the stand wearing a double-breasted blazer, a wide, patterned luminescent tie, and a grave and shell-shocked expression. His face seemed pale and lined, his eyes hollow and deeply set. He looked older than his twenty-one years.

“Very dark hair that’s short and spikey on top,” Martha Quillen, a reporter for the Raleigh
News & Observer
wrote in her notebook. “Has a widow’s peak which makes him look much like Eddie on the Munsters.”

The first portion of his testimony was all background: his mother’s marriage to Lieth, his relationship to his stepfather, his Dungeons and Dragons playing, his troubles during high school, his bad grades after he went off to college, his meeting Bart and Neal, his drug use and drinking during the weeks preceding the murder, the charges against him, his plea bargain with the state.

It was midafternoon before Norton began getting to the subject that everybody was waiting eagerly to hear about: the details of the murder plot, which never had been made public.

“Now, when did you first meet with James Upchurch to begin talking with him about the murder of your parents?”

“The Wednesday prior to July 25.”

The meeting, Chris said, was at the Golden Corral, a steak house on Western Boulevard near the campus of N.C. State, but he couldn’t remember whether it took place during daytime or at night. His roommate, Chuck Jackson, and his friend Brew Simpson were there, but they had left the table to go to the potato bar.

“And I looked straight at James and said, ‘What do you think about patricide?’ He said, ‘Well, you better not believe in God.’”

“What occurred next?” Norton asked.

“Well, Chuck and Brew came back and the conversation was dropped.”

Norton led Chris through the conversations that he and his friends had had about his family’s wealth and his potential inheritance, although Chris couldn’t remember many specifics about it. He recalled boasting that his parents had about $5 million, plus houses and cars, and if something happened to them, he would have plenty of money and would set his friends up in business and they all would live together and have a big time.

“It was just daydreaming,” Chris said.

After this rambling digression, Norton brought his witness back to the plot. He and his friends left the restaurant that night and returned to the dorm, Chris said.

“James and I were alone. And he said, ‘Chris’—you know, this is a general idea; I don’t know specifically what was said. James said to me what was I talking about earlier in the restaurant. And I said, ‘Well, you know, killing my parents.’ And I don’t remember—we did discuss it further, but I don’t remember exactly what was said or even close to what was said after that point. But the conversation did continue for a little period of time … maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Did you develop any plan at that time?”

“I don’t remember.”

The next day, Chris said, they talked again, but again he couldn’t remember specifics.

“There was talk about finding some way to get rid of my parents without looking suspicious. There was talk of starting a fire with the fuse box, switch box in the house. And I told James I was going home that weekend. And I asked him did he want to go. And he said, no, he didn’t want to go with me, but if I would pick him up behind Sav-A-Center in Raleigh at one o’clock Saturday, he would come back with me and we would proceed to burn the house by using the fuse box, switch box, whatever.”

“How were you going to use the fuse box or the switch box to burn the house, Chris?”

“We were going to attempt to get a fuse to blow or make it look like a fuse blew and then throw gasoline on the switch box and, you know, start an electrical fire that way.”

“What about your parents? Would you state whether or not you discussed them waking up when you set the fire?”

“Yes, sir, we did.”

Again, Chris said that he couldn’t remember specifics, but he was going to make supper for his family on Saturday night.

“In making supper, I was to slip some crushed sleeping pills into the food so that everyone in the house would be asleep.”

Chris said that he came home that Friday night, went out to see friends, returned to the house to sleep. When he got up Saturday morning, he said, he told his parents that he was going to visit friends and would return to cook supper. He left about eleven, drove to Raleigh and picked up Bart behind the Sav-A-Center. On the way back to Washington, Bart gave him a cigarette box with blue powder in it that he said was eight crushed Sominex sleeping tablets. Chris was to mix this into the hamburgers that he made for his family that night.

When they got to Washington, Chris said, he left Bart at “a little metal shack” about a mile from his house, where he was to wait until he returned for him in a few hours, after cooking supper.

Back at home, Chris said, he set up the grill for cooking hamburgers, poured the blue powder into the meat, put ketchup over it, and kneaded it in. He made ten hamburgers, he said. His father ate two and he, his mother, his sister and his sister’s friend, Donna Brady, all ate one.

Norton interrupted his questions about supper to ask about another matter. “Had you and James talked either that day or any prior time about what would happen to your sister, Angela?”

“We had discussed it. It was—I don’t remember what day it was. But James said something to the effect of, ‘Well what about your sister?’ And I said, ‘Well, if she is there, then I guess her too; but if she is not, that’s fine too.’”

Angela was seated beside her mother behind the prosecution table and most eyes in the courtroom turned to her, but she showed no change of expression.

“So there was no specific intent at that time to kill Angela?”

“No, sir.”

“Unless she happened to be there?”

“Yes, that’s correct, sir.”

After supper, Chris said, he bade farewell and said that he was returning to campus. Instead he drove to the shack where he had left James, arriving “between seven o’clock and nine o’clock.”

“And can you describe for us what you did and what was said when you drove up?” Norton said.

“Well, he came out and asked if I had cooked supper. I said that I had. I then brought out a marijuana cigarette. And we smoked that and tried to figure out a way to break this fuse open.”

They had picked up a glass fuse that day, Chris had testified earlier, although he couldn’t recall where or when, with the intention of breaking it and putting it into the fuse box at the house to make it look as if a fuse had blown, starting the fire.

“We opened the hood of my car and tried slamming the hood on it and that didn’t work. I put the fuse over a pin hole where the pin that keeps my hood closed goes, and when I brought the hood down, it broke the fuse and shoved it so far down the hole that we couldn’t get it out.”

The more Chris talked, the more this murder plot sounded like some Buster Keaton farce. It was all so farfetched, so juvenile, so utterly ridiculous. These were college students with high IQs. Were they actually so naive as to believe that they could put a whole family to sleep with a few over-the-counter sleeping pills crushed into their hamburgers? That they could start a fire with a fuse in a house in which there was no fuse box, something they hadn’t even bothered to check? Did they really believe that a gasoline-fueled fire would not attract immediate attention or be detectable afterward?

As Chris discussed driving the fuse down the latch hole, some in the courtroom had to suppress their laughter. Would this movie end with the bungling plotters fleeing, their car hood flapping in the wind because the latch would no longer catch?

The fuse in the latch hole was no joke, however. After interviewing Chris, John Taylor had discovered that it was still there. He took a photo of it, and Norton now introduced it as evidence.

“Now, after you got the fuse stuck in there,” Norton said, “what was going on?”

“James said, ‘Well, this isn’t going to work, because you don’t have an alibi. And arson is pretty suspicious looking. So what do we do? Now what?’ ‘A burglary?’ He said, ‘Yes, that sounds like a good idea.’ At this point we left and proceeded back to Raleigh.”

“During the course of the trip, what was discussed?”

“The burglary basically. He said that when we got back to Raleigh that we should go to an army surplus store so that he could get a machete so that he could just chop my parents’ heads off so it would be quick and painless.”

“What was your reaction to that talk about going to get a machete?”

“I said, ‘Aren’t the army surplus stores closed?’ First of all, you know, I wanted it to be painless. But the army surplus stores were closed when we got back to Raleigh.”

“Did you go looking for an army surplus store?”

“Yes, sir. James said he knew where one was. We went by there and it was closed.”

“After you found that the store was closed, what was the next thing that you did?”

“We went back to the room and I said, ‘Well, how are you going to get back down there? You don’t have a car.’ He said, ‘Well, I could borrow yours.’ I said no way because he had lost his license. ‘You’ve got to find somebody to drive you there or use somebody else’s car because you’re not using mine.’”

Bart suggested, Chris said, that they talk to Neal.

“And did you do that?”

“We did talk to Neal Henderson. It was on Sunday, the next day. I had taken James to Kmart to buy a hunting knife. And then we went to see Neal. We—I don’t remember specifically what was said—but we talked to Neal about driving James to Washington. Neal was receptive to the idea, and they said they were going to discuss it between themselves further.”

“What was the plan that you and James had talked about?”

“James was to go into the house, steal some small items, some valuables. I told him where my mother’s purse was, underneath the microwave. And I told him that there was money lying about the bedroom, my parents’ bedroom. I also drew them two maps—one of the neighborhood and one was floor plans of the house and directions on how to get to Little Washington.”