Blood Games (58 page)

“Let me see if I understand you correctly,” Norton said. “On the twenty-fourth of July, you are saying that you did not go to California Pizza with Mr. Pritchard that night?”

“I do not remember doing that.”

“But you do recall buying the beer at the Sav-A-Center?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you recall playing cards until three-thirty that morning?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you recall seeing James Upchurch that night?”

“No, I do not.”

Frank Johnston asked questions showing that Sandra remembered many other events of the day before the murder—that she had spent the night before with a friend, that she had come to campus to work on a computer program, that she had gone to Sybil’s room afterward—all designed to cast doubt on Chris’s story.

In response to another question, she said that she had visited in Bart’s dorm room.

“Ever see any kind of baseball bat in his room?”

“No.”

“Do you recall ever seeing James Upchurch wearing black Reebok tennis shoes?”

“No.”

Johnston then brought out the knapsack that had been found on the back porch of the Von Stein house on the morning of the murder. Sandra recalled John Taylor showing it to her, and she recalled calling him at home to tell him that after thinking about it, she had remembered seeing it earlier.

“And where did you tell him you had seen that bag?”

“On the floor in Chris’s room.”

“Do you recall telling him that you had seen it with Dungeons and Dragons material in it?”

“Yes.”

Norton leaped on this when his turn came, seizing an opportunity he had been waiting for.

“When you say Dungeons and Dragons books, what do you mean by that?” he asked. “What was the purpose of those?”

“I am not sure,” Sandra said, “except they had different books that they had about the game. I never really looked at them.”

“Just Dungeons and Dragons books?”

“Yes.”

“Chris, of course, you said Chris Pritchard was a player?”

“Yes.”

“James Upchurch was a player?”

“Yes.”

“Now, do you know what role in the game James Upchurch played?”

“Objection,” said Johnston.

“Overruled, if she knows.”

“I know that he was the one that—well, I saw them play once or twice. And he was the one that called out the plays. He’s the one that made up the stories, and then they had to choose what they were going to do to get out of their situations.”

“Do you recall hearing the phrase that he was the ‘dungeon master’?”

The objection was quickly sustained, but Norton knew that the image of control and manipulation would remain in the jurors’ minds regardless.

45

The second week of testimony began on Tuesday with problems. A juror had an eye infection and had to go to a doctor. Another juror had to be dismissed for reading news accounts of the trial, and an alternate took his place.

It was midafternoon before Mitchell Norton was able to call his feature witness of the day.

“Gerald Neal Henderson.”

Neal took the stand wearing the same gray suit he had worn in earlier court appearances, his dark hair neatly coiffed, his expression humble.

After Neal acknowledged his identity, Judge Watts asked him to speak louder. “It’s obviously important that all these folks hear what you have to say. It’s important that I hear what you have to say. And I have a terrible cold.”

Norton took Neal through his years of school, his fast advancement, his year at the School of Science and Math, his two years as a senior at Bartlett Yancey. Neal answered in a monotone, sounding rehearsed to some in the courtroom.

Why had he remained a senior for two years after all of that acceleration in earlier grades? Norton asked.

“My parents and myself decided that I wasn’t ready to go to college at that point, so I wanted to stay around another year to, well, catch up on some aging.”

“Catch up on some aging?”

“Yes, sir. Academically I was ready to go, but I wasn’t mature enough at that time to deal with college.”

Neal went on to tell about meeting Bart, about his first two years in college, about moving off campus. He told about getting together with Bart in the spring of ’88 to start another Dungeons and Dragons campaign. He described meeting Chris and went on to tell about the D&D games that they played. Norton asked if there had been any discussion of Chris’s family.

“James and I discussed it once, after a trip he had made with Chris; he mentioned that Chris’s parents were quite wealthy. That’s the only time Chris’s parents were mentioned up until the conspiracy.”

Frank Johnston objected.

“Well, sustained to the use of the word
conspiracy,
members of the jury. That’s for you ultimately to determine. Strike it from your mind.”

Had Bart told him exactly how much money Chris’s parents had?

“He said millions, perhaps as much as ten million.”

A short time later, Norton got to the meeting at Neal’s apartment when Chris and Bart first brought up the plan to kill Chris’s parents, which took place two or three weeks before the murder, according to Neal, not the day before, as Chris had testified.

“Describe for us what happened.”

“James and Chris came in. We chatted for a couple of minutes about Dungeons and Dragons. Then James said that he and Chris had an idea, a plan for Chris to come into his inheritance early. I remarked to them, ‘Oh, you are going to rob the place?’ And James shook his head and said, ‘No, we are going to murder his parents so that he inherits.’”

“What did you say?”

“My exact words were, ‘Isn’t that a little extreme?’ Chris laughed. James said, ‘No, no. We are serious. Here, let me show you.’ And they started outlining a plan. Most of the talking was being done by James.”

Neal described the plan and explained why he was needed as driver.

“Now at the time that you agreed to do this, what were you to get out of it, Neal?”

“I remember it was either two thousand or twenty thousand. To this day, I am not sure exactly which it was.”

“Was anything said about fifty thousand dollars and a Ferrari?”

“No sir, I don’t remember that.”

Later, Norton asked about the second time that Neal talked with Chris and Bart about the murder. That came two or three days later, Neal said, when he stopped by Bart’s dorm room in the afternoon and Chris was there.

“I just dropped by,” Neal said. “They were sitting around talking. When I got there, the conversation turned toward the plan. Not much was discussed about the actual plan at that point. More it was discussed about what would happen afterwards.”

He told about Chris saying he would have to be depressed after the murders and that he would go to the beach to cheer himself up and buy cars for all of his friends.

“How did the business about buying everybody cars come up?”

“James was concerned that if only he received a car people would wonder why he was getting a car. Well, Chris said that was no problem, he would go ahead and buy everybody cars.”

Neal said that he left that day with no timetable set for the murder and no plan for another meeting. Three or four days later, he went by Bart’s room again. This time Bart was alone, and he pulled a baseball bat from the closet, Neal said.

“He laid the bat on one of the beds in the room. He said that he thought about how he was going to do it and the bat as the primary weapon. He said that he wanted something that would at least knock someone out in one hit. He was not at all sure that he could use a knife and quickly do anything. He said one good hit from a bat should do what he wanted done.”

“Was that the first time that you had ever seen that bat?”

“No, sir. For about as long as I’ve known him, he’s always had a bat like that.”

“That’s bullshit,” Bart scrawled on his legal pad.

Neal continued, saying that Bart showed him a hunting knife that he planned to use, then pulled out a pair of black-and-white batting gloves and began putting black shoe polish on the white parts.

“He said that we were going to try for a day in the upcoming week,” Neal said. “I think this meeting was on a Thursday or Friday. He said that Chris had either already left to go home or was going to go home the next day to find out the family’s plans for the upcoming week, I think to get a house key. I am not sure whether he had one with him at State or not. He asked me what my schedule was for the coming week, and I told him that I had Sunday night off. He told me to keep it open, that that would probably be the night we were going to go.”

On Sunday morning, Neal said, Bart came to his apartment, gave him the map and told him to meet him at the parking lot about midnight. And that was what he did.

“Now, did he have anything with him at that time?”

“Yes, sir. He had a green book bag or backpack and the baseball bat.”

“And what, if anything, did he say to you when you arrived?”

“‘Let’s go.’ That’s about it.”

Norton retrieved the knapsack that had been introduced as evidence, handed it to Neal, and asked if he recognized it.

“Yes, sir. This is James’s book bag.”

Neal went on to describe how Bart had the bat stuffed into the bag along with the knife and clothing. Always before, Neal said, Bart had used the bag to carry school books or Dungeons and Dragons books.

Norton got Neal to describe the Dungeons and Dragons books and asked, over Frank Johnston’s objections, why Bart would need them.

“He would have to have access to the books frequently as he was the games master.”

“Is that what it was called, the ‘games master’?”

“Its technical term would be dungeon master.”

Despite all of the defense efforts to keep it out, Bart, the dungeon master, with all of its sinister connotations, was finally and formally in evidence.

Neal went on to describe the route he took to Washington and how Bart had changed clothes—shirt and pants—in the car as they neared the town. “I believe he changed shoes. I think he was wearing boots when he arrived at the car, and he changed into tennis shoes.”

“Do you recall anything about the tennis shoes he put on?”

“I think they were black.”

Jim Upchurch shook his head. To him, all of Neal’s testimony sounded planned and practiced.

Neal carefully described the route he took to Smallwood, pausing to identify photographs of landmarks that the district attorney submitted into evidence. They arrived about two-thirty, he said, and drove past the subdivision without noticing it at first, then turned and went back.

“James asked me to pull into Lawson Road. He wanted to see the area in front of the house. So I pulled in. You know, we went by Chris’s house from the front. I didn’t identify it. James kind of counted down five houses and said, ‘That’s the place.’”

They drove on around the block and found the wooded lot that Chris had marked as the spot for James to get out, Neal said.

“We didn’t stop. We kept on going. He wasn’t ready. We were just looking around and seeing what things looked like.”

The judge, however, was ready to stop. It was well after five, and he called the attorneys to the bench and declared a recess.

Neal returned to the stand Wednesday morning to finish his story of the murder mission, telling it just as he first had told it to the police months earlier. He identified the baseball bat as being the one Bart had carried that night (he had been present when Bart drew the black triangles on it with a Magic Marker, he said), identified the burned remnants of clothing as being the sweater and jeans Bart had worn that night. He told of talking with Bart about the murder in the weeks after it happened, then not seeing him again for months until Bart came asking for a place to stay the previous spring. He described Bart’s reaction after John Taylor brought the knapsack around to ask if they’d ever seen it.

“He admitted to me that he had forgotten the bag and left it in the house,” Neal said. “He then said that the police were closing in on him and he was heading out of town. He told me that I didn’t have anything to worry about. His exact words were, ‘Look, you just drove the car. If worse comes to worst, and Chris confesses, it’s your word against his. And no one’s going to believe Chris over you. So don’t worry about it. But I’m getting out of town.’”

After leaving the apartment, Bart called him at work rather than at home, Neal said. “He was afraid of the phones being tapped. He asked me to get together as much money as I could and to get it to him as fast as possible, that he was going to get out of town.”

Neal went on to describe his confession and to explain that no deal was offered beforehand. He told of making his plea bargain with the state in December.

Norton asked specifically if Bonnie Von Stein, Angela Pritchard, Butch Mitchell, or Quincy Blackwell had anything to do with the plot to murder Lieth and rob the house. Neal answered no in each case. Only he, Bart, and Chris were involved, he said.