Blood Games (6 page)

“I think I heard my daughter talk,” Bonnie Von Stein said over the phone to Michelle Sparrow in communications.

“C-thirty-two, please advise me if that subject’s daughter is all right so I can calm her down,” Michelle said over the radio.

“Ten-four,” Edwards responded. “She’s okay.”

“Okay, Bonnie, your daughter is fine. Okay?”

Tetterton had reentered the blood-splattered bedroom where Bonnie Von Stein lay on the floor and was checking the body on the bed.

“My husband must be bad, oh god,” Bonnie said.

“I think he’s gone,” Tetterton said.

“I see him,” Bonnie said into the telephone.

“Okay, don’t look at him, Bonnie,” Michelle told her. “Bonnie, don’t look at him.”

“He was trying … he was trying to help me.”

“Okay, do you remember seeing anybody?” Michelle asked, trying to divert her attention.

“Oh, it was dark, I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

“I know he had a big club or a baseball bat…”

The phone rang and Michelle answered it. Captain Lewis at the fire station, a meticulous record keeper, wanted additional information.

“… And a knife,” Bonnie said.

For a few moments Michelle tried to talk to Bonnie and Lewis at the same time. “Captain Lewis, I’ve still got ten-thirty-three traffic,” she finally said. “I’ll call you as soon as I get some more, buddy. Bye-bye.”

“Bonnie?” she said into the other phone.

“Yes.”

“Okay, now you hang in there with me.”

“Don’t let my daughter in here,” Bonnie said.

“Okay, tell her not to come in here,” Tetterton called to Edwards in the hall.

“She advised not to let her daughter in there,” Michelle radioed.

“Ten-four,” said Tetterton.

“Bonnie,” Michelle said.

“Yes.”

“The rescue’s coming, okay?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, don’t look at your husband.”

She looked up instead to see Tetterton looming over her.

“Officer Sparrow,” she said.

“This is the policeman, hey,” said Tetterton, reaching for the phone.

“Tetterton?” Michelle said into the phone.

“Yo.”

“God…” Michelle said with a sigh of relief. “… I’m glad to hear you.”

“We got to have a uh … uh … a rescue right quick,” he said

“They’re on the way.”

“Okay, I’m going to hang up, then.”

David Sparrow had heard Tetterton’s frantic calls for rescue over his car radio. He had been an emergency medical technician before becoming a police officer. Still carrying his shotgun, he got a portable oxygen tank and mask from his car and sprinted to the house. Edwards opened the front door for him. Sparrow hurried up the stairs and entered the bedroom to see Tetterton taking the telephone receiver from a woman lying on the floor in a bloodied nightgown. He quickly checked the man on the bed, searching for a pulse, but realized that he was dead. He took the oxygen tank to the woman, and saw that she had been stabbed in the chest and was having trouble breathing.

“Okay, we’re going to take care of you,” he said, preparing the mask.

“Don’t let my daughter in here,” the woman repeated.

Sparrow had seen the young woman in the hallway outside the door, and he went out and asked her to go downstairs and wait.

“Don’t touch or move anything,” he said as she descended the steps.

The ambulance turned onto Lawson Road, its siren further rending the shattered silence of the morning. It came to a halt, and the two men inside, David Hall and Mike Harrell, both firefighters and emergency medical technicians, jumped from the vehicle. Hall was carrying the trauma bag, and Harrell, who had been driving, followed him to the front porch at a trot.

Through the glass storm door they saw a young woman sitting on a step near the bottom of a staircase, chin in hand. She stood when she saw them and opened the door.

“Upstairs,” she said.

At the top of the stairs they encountered Edwards and Tetterton.

“You got one on the bed and one on the floor,” Tetterton said. “I think one of ’em’s gone and the other one’s fading fast.”

Hall and Harrell were expecting some blood, but they were startled when they entered the room and saw blood everywhere. Both men pulled on rubber gloves and went first to the man on the bed. They rolled him over and saw a big stab wound in the center of his chest, right above his heart. Blood already had begun to gel on the man’s chest, and he had no pulse.

Both men turned their attention to the woman on the floor.

“How’re you doing?” Hall asked, kneeling beside her in a small puddle of blood.

“Not too good,” she said.

He began wrapping a blood pressure gauge around her arm.

“Is he dead?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, at least he’s not suffering,” she said.

She had cuts on her head and a sucking chest wound that no longer was bleeding. But she had lost a lot of blood, and her blood pressure was dangerously low. A call had to be made to the hospital emergency room to alert the staff to the situation and to get a physician’s permission to start an IV and wrap the patient in Military Anti-shock Trousers, an inflatable suit used to stabilize injured patients. Not wanting to report the woman’s condition in her presence, Harrell went downstairs to find another telephone. The young woman directed him to one on a kitchen wall, but the receiver was disconnected and missing. He found it on the table. David Sparrow held his flashlight on the phone while Harrell reconnected the receiver and made the call.

He had two patients, he told Dr. Elizabeth Cook, the young emergency room physician. One was DOA, and a hospital vehicle would have to be sent for the body. The other was conscious, but appeared to be gravely injured and declining rapidly. Dr. Cook approved the IV and the application of M.As.T. trousers, and began to prepare for the patient’s arrival.

Upstairs, Hall was ripping open a dressing to put on Bonnie’s chest wound.

“I’m going to have to cut your gown, is that all right?” he asked, and she nodded her approval.

Harrell returned to help him get her into the stabilizing trousers, then he went to the ambulance, and, with the help of officer Ed Cherry, carried the stretcher into the house.

At communications, Michelle Sparrow was still busy. She called Captain Danny Boyd, chief investigator for the Washington Police, and he told her to call Melvin Hope and John Taylor, two of the department’s four detectives. She called Captain Zane Osnoe, second-in-command at the police department, and asked him if she should call the chief. No, Osnoe said; he would call him. She returned Captain Lewis’s call at the fire department. When she found a spare moment, she stopped the device that recorded all calls, removed the big tape reel, marked it, and put it in a special place. She knew that investigators would want it for evidence.

While the technicians worked on the injured woman, Tetterton went downstairs and found her daughter sitting calmly in the den. He needed some basic information for his preliminary report, and he wanted to get it before she found out just how bad things were upstairs and perhaps lost control. He told her that her mother had been stabbed, but that she was conscious and talking and he didn’t know how seriously she was hurt. Her father, he said, also had been beaten and stabbed and was seriously injured. He was surprised that she showed no reaction to what he was telling her and calmly agreed to answer his questions. Her name, she told him, was Angela Pritchard. She was seventeen. Her mother was Bonnie Von Stein. She was forty-four. The man upstairs was her stepfather, Lieth Von Stein, two years younger than her mother. He worked at National Spinning Company, a yarn plant, the biggest employer in Beaufort County, and was an executive there.

Only then did Tetterton realize that he had met the bloodied man upstairs before. He had seen this young woman before, too. More than a year earlier, while off duty, he had been witness to a minor car wreck in which Angela had been involved near the high school. He had waited at the scene to tell the investigating officer what had happened. Liability for the accident later fell into dispute, and Von Stein complained to Police Chief Harry Stokes about Tetterton’s version of events. Tetterton had been summoned to accompany the chief to Von Stein’s office at National Spinning to talk about the matter. Tetterton felt that Von Stein implied that he had lied and wanted him to change the truth to benefit his stepdaughter, and he had left the meeting in a huff.

Now the young woman was telling him that she also had a brother, Chris Pritchard, who was away at N.C. State University. Should she call and tell him what had happened? Tetterton told her to go ahead and call, and if she wanted to call somebody to come and be with her, that would be all right, too, but she should stay at the house. Detectives would be wanting to talk with her later.

7

The call came at 5:17 a.m. from emergency call box EO8 next to Burgaw dormitory on the campus of N.C. State University. Such call boxes were spread strategically around the campus, mounted on poles topped by blue lights so that they could be easily spotted. None was more than a minute or two away from a patrolling campus police officer. A male, apparently young, was on the line, and dispatcher Barbara Dew had trouble understanding him. He sounded hysterical and he kept saying something about losing his keys and his parents being stabbed, and he needed to get to Washington, North Carolina. Dew asked his name, but all that she could understand was “Christopher.” She tried to calm him to learn more, but he grew even more hysterical.

“Just hold on,” she told him. “I’m sending an officer out.”

When call box EO8 came into sight, Lieutenant Teresa Crocker saw a young man dressed in shorts and T-shirt. His back rested against the pole on which the phone was mounted, his knees pulled up, his head on his knees. When she brought her red-and-gray campus security car to a stop beside the box, the young man leaped up and came to her car yelling. He was thin and of medium height, with a shock of dark hair and a wild look in his eyes, so agitated that she couldn’t make out what he was trying to tell her. “I couldn’t find my fucking car keys,” he kept saying. He also kept repeating something about his parents being beaten and stabbed. As he was flinging his arms and stalking back and forth, “ranting and raving,” as Lieutenant Crocker later described it, a second campus security car arrived, and Patrolman Michael Allen got out.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Crocker said in exasperation. “I can’t make it out. See if you can talk to him.”

Allen couldn’t get much more out of him, and he suggested that they take the young man to the Public Safety Office. Both officers were certain that the young man was either drunk or on drugs and thought that he might be hallucinating.

Melvin Hope always claimed that he was a bear to wake up, but he had no trouble stirring himself when the phone rang shortly before five and Michelle Sparrow told him there had been a murder in Smallwood. He pulled on blue jeans and moccasins and hurried out.

At forty-four, Hope no longer cut the same trim figure that he had when he first joined the marines at eighteen. His waistline had been creeping up on him, and his hairline had done something that marines didn’t do: retreat. Hope had served fifteen years in the marines, including two tours in Vietnam, before he left the Corps as a staff sergeant, due to problems with his first wife. He had joined the reserves to complete his military retirement and had become a police officer in Jacksonville, a town sixty miles to the south, on the edge of the sprawling marine base, Camp Lejeune. Eventually, he had grown weary of wrestling drunk marines and followed a friend to the Washington Police Department at the end of 1981. He had been made an investigator the following July and now was the department’s detective sergeant. A gruff man with a bushy mustache, seldom without a cigar between his teeth, Hope was filled with macho bluster and war stories, and others in the police department sometimes referred to him as their John Wayne.

Hope arrived at 110 Lawson Road to find his captain, Danny Boyd, had arrived before him and had already been upstairs to see the body.

“What happened?” Hope asked.

“We got a mess,” Boyd said, going on to explain the situation briefly. Hope went on up to see how big a mess for himself.

Whoever had set out to kill Lieth Von Stein had done a thorough and vicious job, Hope saw. The savagery of the attack was impressive.

Von Stein now lay on his back, his eyes swollen and closed, his neatly trimmed beard matted with blood. His pale legs, which looked almost too thin to support his thick, hairy body, were spread. His left hand was clenched, and his entire body was bathed in its own blood. He had five gaping wounds on his head: three across his balding forehead, one just above and slightly to the side of his left eyebrow, and the biggest above and to the back of his left ear. Hope counted six stab wounds from a large-bladed knife in Von Stein’s upper back, near his left shoulder. Another, in the center of his chest, had gone straight to his heart. The carpet was bloodied on both sides of the double bed for more than three feet out. Blood was splattered on the ceiling and on three walls of the sixteen-by-twenty-foot room.