Blood Games (68 page)

“Your Honor,” Neal said, looking sheepish and humbled, “I have heard a lot of my friends, my family, tell me they still have faith in me even after what I did. All I want is a chance to prove to them they are right.”

“Mr. McLendon said you have an awful lot to offer this world,” the judge said after Neal sat back down. “Indeed you do. You also have an awful lot to live down.”

He went on to commend the law enforcement officers who did not let this case die, who kept looking for a solution.

“They did not quit. They were still out there digging, probing, still doing their jobs. And after panning in that stream and finding a lot of sand, they came upon the gold nugget that made their case, because without this young man there was no case. And I absolutely agree with that gentlemen.

“Quite to the contrary of what Mr. Upchurch said in this courtroom yesterday afternoon, Mr. Henderson, there was no motive for you to be untruthful in that initial statement. And there was absolutely no reason on the face of this earth that I can figure out for you to unload on James Upchurch, except that you told the truth.

“I am equally convinced that he, indeed, did invade the Von Stein house in the middle of the night, using the key that Chris supplied, and that he did indeed perform those terribly brutal and savage acts.

“But each, in the eyes of the law of North Carolina, is guilty. Your culpability at law is as great as the murderer’s. Your moral culpability may be considered by some to be less. It was not your plan. You were not the killer. And if that makes you less culpable in a moral sense, then so be it.

“But you were an active participant. You could have stopped it at any time. And you didn’t.

“So yours was more than a minor role. But yours was also the brightest star. And that’s your tragedy.

“As nice as it would be to roll back the clock and see that little fifth-grader with the shiny face—and I can see it there—my duty to society won’t allow me. But you can continue to grow, mature, and develop even in the circumstances in which you are about to be placed. And I hope you will do so. I pray you will do so.”

For the assault on Bonnie, Judge Watts sentenced Neal to six years. For the murder of Lieth, he gave a sentence of forty years, the two sentences to run concurrently. Neal would be eligible for parole in five years.

Since noon, Neal had been expectantly watching the doors at the back of the courtroom. The night before, he had talked by telephone with his father in Virginia. His father had told him that he would be there for the sentencing, arriving after the lunch break. But he never came. Once again his father had not been there when he needed him. Neal was not surprised, but the disappointment and hurt were no less for it.

After bidding farewell to his mother and other family members, Neal was led, manacled, to a waiting sheriff’s car, where he paused to answer a TV reporter’s question.

“I still have a future,” he said with a pained little smile. “It’ll take a while, but I still have one.”

Epilogue

Central prison is a squat, tan fortress of sharp angles surrounded by high fences topped with razor wire on Western Boulevard near downtown Raleigh, just down the street from the campus of N.C. State University. In the predawn hours of January, 31, 1990, Beaufort County Sheriff Nelson Sheppard delivered Bart Upchurch to its sterile confines, so close to the inviting haunts of Bart’s recent past, now impossibly out of sight and reach.

Bart was taken to the prison hospital, where he slept for a couple of hours on a wooden bench before being put into a tiny cell in the psychiatric ward that had a mattress on the floor and dung smears on the walls. If he caused trouble, he was told, he would be put into a straitjacket. He caused no trouble but refused food, and on the following day, after testing and processing, he was taken to Death Row, where he became the eighty-sixth resident. He was put in Block 15, an area of stainless steel and concrete, with fifteen other prisoners. His cell contained a bunk, a stainless-steel sink and toilet, a shelf and storage cabinet. It opened onto a dayroom with stainless-steel tables and stools and a black-and-white TV, where all on the block were free to venture from 8 A.M. until 10:30 P.M.

On the day Bart arrived on Death Row, an assistant warden came to talk with him. He offered hopeful words. The legal struggle for Bart’s life was just beginning, he pointed out. It would take a long time and Bart should not give up so quickly. He also brought a pointed message. If Bart persisted in his fast for a week prison officials would have no option but to return him to the psychiatric ward, strap him to a gurney, keep him docile with Thorazine, and feed him intravenously. The State of North Carolina would not allow him to starve.

When reporters called to inquire that day, they were told by prison officials that Bart had passed through the breakfast line. Later, he said that wasn’t true. He did not eat until the third day, he said, when he went to the mess hall with the others on his block for lunch. Chicken livers were on the menu that day. He hated chicken livers, but he ate them anyway.

Bart knew that by eating he was giving victory to the legal system that he despised, but by that time he felt that he had won a bigger, inner victory of his own.

His decision to choose death on his own terms was genuine, he said later, and the very act of making it made it possible for him to live on Death Row.

“Accepting death that way, not out of depression or guilt or remorse, is freeing,” he said. “All the toughest decisions I can ever make have been made. Everybody lives their lives always wondering if they can accept their own deaths. I already made that decision. I made that decision when I was twenty-one years old. When the time comes, I know I can deal with it. I can accept it.

“The realization comes to everybody on Death Row that one way or another, you’ll get out of here. They’ll either carry you out in a body bag, or you’ll walk out and eventually be a free man. Like it or not, one way or another, I’m going to have to make it through to that point, whatever it is. It’s a matter of sitting here and weathering the storm.”

On the day after Bart arrived at Central Prison, Neal and Chris were delivered separately to Polk Youth Center on the western edge of Raleigh for processing. They were supposed to be kept apart but they ended up in bunks next to each other by mistake.

“Chris said, ‘I don’t hold anything against you for my arrest, that was all my own doing,’” Neal recalled later. “He wanted to get over it and be friends if that was possible. I wanted to believe him.”

They didn’t talk about the case, Neal said, because they didn’t want other inmates to know why they were there. When the mistake was discovered, Chris was put into a segregation cell. Later, Neal got a note passed from Chris saying that he wished Neal would get himself moved quickly to a permanent camp so that he could get out of solitary.

Neal was eventually assigned to a prison camp at Lillington in the southeastern part of the state. Chris was sent to a camp at Asheville in the mountains, a three-hour drive from his mother’s house in Winston-Salem.

Weldon Slayton was a dedicated Pentecostal Christian, although he never made an issue of it and never tried to force his religious views on others, especially his students. After testifying at Neal’s sentencing hearing, he drove back to Caswell County praying that Bart’s life would be spared. He arrived at school after classes had ended for the day and encountered Bill Bush, another teacher who had been close to Bart, who told him of the death sentence. Feeling numb, Slayton drove to his small country house, arriving to find the phone ringing. Another teacher was on the line, calling to ask if he’d heard the verdict. After that call, he took the receiver off the hook and went to bed, seeking relief from his sorrow and depression in sleep.

A week later, he wrote to Bart, trying to encourage him, telling him that he still cared for him, that he was still his friend, that he was praying for him. He let him know that he always had found comfort, hope, and assurance in his religious faith, implying that Bart might want to explore that for himself. Bart did not reply. The letter angered him because he thought that Slayton assumed his guilt.

Bart was right about that. Slayton did not think him innocent. It seemed clear to him that either Bart or Neal had killed Lieth Von Stein. That being the case, it had to be Bart. Neal would not have the nerve or the physical strength and dexterity to do it, Slayton thought. Neal was too much a wimp. And Slayton had never doubted Bart’s nerve.

What he couldn’t understand was how either of them could have gotten into this situation. It was so senseless that he simply couldn’t fathom it. The more he thought about it, the more improbable and insane it seemed.

When Bart and Neal were his students, Slayton would have bet his life that neither ever would have become involved in such a heinous crime. How had he misjudged them so?

That question had caused him to doubt his effectiveness as a teacher. He always had struggled to instill values in his students, a moral sense and purpose. It troubled him deeply that so many of them seemed to value money, cars, popularity, fads, even games, over anything truly meaningful.

“Our whole society offers so little to young people in the way of anchors to hold onto,” he said. “We’re just telling them that there’s no rhyme or reason to anything. No wonder they cling to magic.”

Only the influence of the magic and moral baselessness of Dungeons and Dragons could offer any explanation to Slayton of how Bart and Neal could have become so embroiled in evil that they could commit murder. But how could that be more powerful than the years-long ministrations of a moral and loving teacher?

For the first time, Slayton could feel stirrings within himself of something he always had fought to keep out: cynicism. Did he ever truly know his students? Could he really make a difference in their lives? Could he ever trust them?

It was, of course, Neal more than Bart who caused those cynical feelings, Neal, the student to whom he’d allowed himself to become closest, the brightest promise he’d ever known. He wanted to believe that it was a stricken conscience that had caused Neal to tell the police, but he never had known Neal to respond to any situation in any but an intellectual manner. In a situation in which he felt threatened, Slayton knew, Neal always would see the logical and reasonable way out and take it. It bothered him that Neal had waited so long to confess, and it made him wary, even when Neal wrote from the youth center in Raleigh to tell him, “You’ll be interested to know that I am studying the Bible.”

In the future he would be cautious, but he would not turn his back on Neal or Bart.

“I still love them,” he said months after they had gone to prison. “I don’t make any excuses for them.”

Still, Slayton was touched when on Father’s Day, Neal sent him a card and poems he had written. Later, he went to visit Neal with Neal’s mother. And he was proud when Neal started taking college courses through a prison program, maintaining a perfect grade-point average, and tutoring other prisoners

Strangely, though, it was to Bart, who always kept his distance, and who now was not responding to him at all, to whom Slayton found himself most drawn.

“I believe with all my heart that James is hurting and scared, terrified and wounded beyond anything I can understand,” Slayton said. “I still believe there is that frightened child down in that being somewhere who wants so much for someone to love him. The only way he can deal with all that has happened is to keep up that bravura front.

“I have a very difficult time visualizing this child that I knew being executed. The thing I keep wondering is what’s going on in his head? I have this terrible urge to help him, to somehow touch his mind and heart, to help him find some kind of peace. Of course, he would say that he doesn’t need any peace, that I’ve just been duped into believing these people who have persecuted him.”

Yet, at Christmas, after Slayton sent Bart a card, Bart wrote back, saying there were things that needed to be made right between them, asking if Slayton would like to be added to his visitor list.

Slayton responded promptly and positively, but by the spring of 1991, Bart still hadn’t added his name to the visitor list.

Bart’s trial greatly disturbed his grandmother, Carolyn. “I wanted to believe with all my heart and soul that Bart didn’t have any part in it, that what he said was so,” she said later, “but I was just horrified at what I was hearing at the trial.”

After Bart was found guilty and sentenced to death, she found herself staying in her big gray house most of the time, unable to face her friends, unable to join her regular group for bridge.

“You spend your day wondering how it happened and why it happened and then you cry,” she said.

Over and over she recalled the sweet moments of Bart’s childhood: the concern he had shown when she seriously burned herself popping corn for him and Kenyatta, his loving response when she tended him in sickness.

“I loved him,” she said, starting to cry. “We love him now. We don’t love what he does. We don’t love his problems. We love him. To me, something about him has always caught my heart. There’s a vulnerability about Bart, a little boy in there, a gentle little fellow who has done some terrible things. We’ve died a thousand deaths about this. It’s everybody’s horror. I think of it as a family horror, and we can’t do a thing about it. We’ll have to live with it the rest of our lives.”