Blood Games (56 page)

“Did you talk about how he was to get into the house, what weapon was to be used?”

“He was supposed to use the key to get into the house. He was supposed to take some items. At that time, he was supposed to murder my parents.”

“What type of weapon?”

“The knife, the hunting knife.”

“Was any other weapon ever discussed?”

“No, sir, just the knife.”

“What was to occur after the killing?”

“James was to come back to Raleigh. He was to leave the key in my car and then he was to come back later that day and see if the car was still there.”

“What was the purpose of killing your parents? What were you going to get out of it?”

“A large inheritance.”

“And had you talked with James about that?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“What did you tell him that you were going to do with this inheritance?”

“I told him that I would give him a car and $50,000. More to the point, a Porsche and $50,000.”

“The initial plan to kill your parents, whose thought was that?”

“I brought up the idea.”

“After that initial statement, what part did James Upchurch play in the thought process?”

“He was equal in the planning in that he came up with some ideas, I came up with some ideas.”

“Had you discussed what your alibi was going to be?”

“Not in any great detail. I was to either go out and stay up late with Chuck or with Sandra and Sybil.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“The alibi itself was James’s idea. What I was going to do was up to me entirely so long as I was seen in Raleigh.”

“And was there any timetable set for you being seen in Raleigh?”

“I needed to be up until around three o’clock in the morning.”

“Why was the time three o’clock important?”

“Because they were to have left around midnight.”

“And was this plan laid out for Neal Henderson?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was Neal to get some reward, some payoff?”

“Yes, sir. He was to get $50,000 and a Ferrari.”

Following the afternoon recess, during which time Chris chatted and laughed with his mother and sister, Norton led Chris through other details of the plan.

When Bart and Neal returned, Chris said, they were to leave the car at the same spot where they had picked it up. They were to leave the keys inside. Bart was to check back by the car later Monday. If the car was gone, it meant that Chris had taken it after receiving word about the murder. If it was still there, it meant that the call had come before Bart and Neal got back and he had to find some other means to get home. In that case, Bart was to take the keys out of the car, carry them to Chris’s room, and leave them in a chair.

Asked about Neal’s duties, Chris said that he simply was to drive James to Washington, let him out at a predetermined spot, go to another isolated spot to wait for him, then drive him back to Raleigh. Neal, he said, had never been to Washington, which was the reason for drawing a map.

“I drew a layout of my neighborhood. And I wrote down directions on how to get to that neighborhood.”

Norton handed him the partially burned map that had been found at the fire site in Pitt County following the murder. The jurors had heard testimony about the map the day before from Noel Lee, the farmer who found it, and from Lewis Young.

“I ask you to take a look at that and see if you can identify that for us, please.”

“This is the map of my neighborhood that I drew for Neal and James.”

The blocks he had drawn along the line indicating Lawson Street represented houses, Chris testified. The four-legged symbols were neighbors’ dogs that were to be avoided to keep them from barking and alerting somebody, the rectangle behind the block representing the fifth house on the street was the six-foot fence behind his house, the shaded spot on the street directly behind Lawson was a wooded lot without a house where Neal was to let Bart out so that he could slip up to the fence without being seen.

Chris said that he also had drawn a floor plan of his house and had written directions to Washington on the back of it. On the floor plan, he said, he drew in the bedroom where his parents slept and noted who slept on each side of the bed.

After he drew the maps at Neal’s apartment on Sunday, July 24, the afternoon before the murder, Chris said, Neal and Bart accompanied him back to the dorm, where he gave Neal the keys to his car.

“When I gave him the keys, I had not intended on going back out that evening, but I did go back out. And when I did, I went out with Chuck Jackson and Sandra Goodman and Sybil and James. And I sent James to Neal’s apartment to get my keys while Chuck, Sandra and Sybil and myself waited at the car for him to return.”

When he did return, Chris said, they all went to California Pizza to eat and drink beer and stayed a couple of hours. On the way back to the dorm, they stopped at a grocery store for Sandra to buy beer, and when they returned to the campus after dark, Chris parked under a street light in a fringe lot distant from the dorm.

“Why was it that you parked away from your dormitory?” Norton asked.

“So it would be easy for James and Neal to find and so that it would be—I told the girls it was because I had got my stereo stolen recently and I didn’t want any vandals coming to my car without being able to be seen.”

Chris locked his car, he later told the jurors, but dropped his keys back inside through a window vent, through which they could be retrieved later by Bart and Neal.

After the group returned to the dorm, Chris said that he last saw Bart about 11:00 P.M. in the room Chris shared with Chuck Jackson. Only the three of them were there, he said. Sandra and Sybil were in Sybil’s room.

“And what was discussed between you and James at that time?” Norton asked.

“He said that he was going to go do some homework. I said, ‘Well, good luck.’ And that was it.”

Afterward, Chris said, he went to Sybil’s room to drink beer and play cards. Brew was there, and they stayed until about three, when he returned to his room, undressed, and went to sleep, only to be awakened about five by a call from his sister telling him that their parents had been beaten and stabbed.

Norton wanted to know why Chris had initially thought about murdering his parents. “Why was it? Why did you do it?”

“I honestly don’t know the answer to that question,” Chris said. “There were many reasons that went through my mind, but I honestly don’t know why I came up with this idea.”

“What reasons were going through your mind?”

“Well, money.”

“What about money?”

“I would have inherited a lot of money. I wouldn’t have had to do anything else. I wouldn’t have had to go back to school or anything. I could sit around, buy a house, and do drugs all the time. I could play D&D all I wanted to. I had a term paper due that Monday that I hadn’t even started on.”

Norton led Chris through his drug use prior to the murder, smoking pot three times a day drinking as much as three pitchers of beer a day, using LSD at least once a week.

“What effect did the LSD have on you?”

“I saw colors. I felt invincible. My mind raced. And I had incredible amounts of energy for about six or seven hours straight.”

“What about the marijuana?”

“When I was smoking it three times a day, after each time I smoked it, I would fall asleep for a little while. I listened to music. It seemed to make music better. It seemed to make TV more interesting, commercials especially.”

And the drug called ecstasy that Chris also used?

“I was very mellow. I felt very mellow. I had a lot of energy still, though. And I just wanted to sit down and contemplate life.”

“Were thoughts of money part of your life at that time?”

“No. It was generally politics. That was what I was contemplating, world politics.”

“You also said that … you had a term paper. Surely you don’t mean that you killed your father because of a term paper?”

“What I mean is that was a thought that went through my mind as one of the reasons because I was very upset over the fact that I hadn’t done it. I was very upset over the fact that my parents would be upset about it”

“Why did you feel your parents would be upset?”

“It would have directly affected my grades.”

“And what caused you to be concerned about your grades?”

“I had already had two talks with my father and mother about my grades. I knew a third would mean that I probably wouldn’t go back to school.”

Norton took Chris through his actions after receiving the call from his sister on the morning of the murder. Chris emotionally told of wandering around for a time before picking up the public safety phone.

“What was going on at that time?”

“I was in shock,” Chris said, tears showing in his eyes.

“Why were you in shock? This was something you had planned.”

“On one level I did not really believe this would happen.”

“But you had provided an automobile. You had provided keys to the house. You had purchased a knife, supplied the knife for the killing.”

“Yes, sir. But it was just like the game. In the game you sit down and you plan out things. And you get your ducks in a row. And I knew that this would happen. But at a deeper level, I didn’t believe that it would happen.”

“When you got the telephone call from your sister, did you believe that it had happened then?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“What was going through your mind at that time?”

“The only thing that was on my mind was to stick to the plan.”

Chris described how the public safety officers had taken him to Washington and how Melvin Hope had told him what had happened.

“You found out at that time that your mother was alive?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where did you go then?”

“I don’t know how I got there, but I went straight to the hospital and straight up to the intensive care unit to see my mother.”

“What occurred when you were talking to your mother?”

“I don’t remember. I was just happy that she was alive.”

“Did you go to the funeral?” Norton asked a short time later.

“Yes, sir.”

“Have any feeling about it at that time, about the killing?”

“Yes, sir, I did, very strong feelings,” Chris said after the judge had overruled Sermons’ objection.

“What kind?”

“Incredible remorse.”

“But did you also have other feelings at that time, Chris?”

“Yes, sir,” again over Sermons’ objection. “I was thoroughly disgusted.”

“Did you think about the police?”

“Yes, sir. I thought about the police. I thought about keeping myself away from them. I didn’t want to be arrested, thrown in jail. I didn’t want my mama to know.”

His voice choked when he spoke about his mother and tears welled again.

Asked what he had done to keep his mother from knowing, Chris said, “I deceived the police as best I could. I lied to my family and to my friends. When she asked me did I know what had happened or did I know who was involved or any of that, I told her no, I did not.”

“Stuck with the plan?”

“Yes, sir. I stuck with the plan.”

Chris said that he never had any contact with Neal after the murder, only with Bart. When he called his roommate from Washington to ask about his car keys, Bart was there and expressed condolences. He saw Bart again when he returned to N.C. State, he said, but not on a regular basis.

“What was the reason that you didn’t see James on a regular basis?”

“I was afraid of him and I was disgusted with him.”

Bart, who had been writing regularly on his legal pad during Chris’s testimony, was scribbling away for his lawyers at this comment: “This is simply not true. Ask Brew or any of Chris’s friends if he seemed to be scared of me.”

Chris said that he had talked with Bart once about the murder, at a party in his old dorm room before the fall semester began.

“We went to a room—I don’t remember where it was. It was in the dorm. And he said, ‘You didn’t tell me that the window on the back door was Plexiglas.’ He said he had to cut the screen and break the glass on the side window to get the door. And then before I could say anything, he said there was blood everywhere. At that point I told him to shut his mouth. I didn’t want to hear another word. I told him to forget it and make sure that Neal forgot it. And that was the end of the conversation. I walked out of the room.”

“Why did you tell him to shut up?”

“Because I was disgusted with the whole thing. And I didn’t want to hear anything about it. I did not want to hear a word about it. I was afraid of the boy, you know, and I didn’t want to hear anything else come out of his mouth about how he killed my father.”

Sermons objected and moved that the remarks be stricken from the record, but Judge Watts allowed them to stand. A few minutes later, at five-eighteen, the judge recessed court for the day.