Before He Wakes (35 page)

“She didn’t want somebody at home finding out about it,” Long said.

After Long moved to another branch, she received a call from loan officer Rob Willingham in July saying that Barbara wanted to renew the loan and increase its amount.

“I told him Barbara had not lived up to our verbal agreement not to use the First Advance and I would not increase the loan amount,” Long said.

Willingham followed to tell that he had renewed the note for another ninety days after Barbara paid the interest. Later he renewed the note again, after once more denying Barbara’s request to increase the amount, he said. The loan was paid off in October. Not until Wednesday did the jurors hear how Barbara eventually paid the note.

Eunice Peterson, manager of the Duke University Medical Center branch of Wachovia Bank, where Barbara had done her banking in recent years, said that Barbara had come to her on August 5, 1987, to ask for a $5,000 loan to pay off a ninety-day note at another bank and to pay her son’s college tuition.

Barbara came alone, she said, and took the note home for Russ to sign. The loan was granted, with Barbara to pay back the money in forty-two monthly installments of $144.62 beginning on September 21.

Evenson asked why she had allowed Barbara to take the note home when policy required both spouses to sign in her presence.

“People I know and trust, you know, I felt were fine, I let them take the application home to the spouse to sign simply because it is difficult for employees’ spouses to get to Duke and park in the deck and pay for parking.”

Barbara had the loan for only two months before she returned asking for more money, Peterson said, telling her that she needed extra money to pay for braces for her younger son and to finance a study trip to Europe for herself. Again Peterson allowed her to take the note home for her husband’s signature.

“I knew Mr. Stager was a teacher, and I knew it was difficult for him to leave and I knew Barbara and felt good about her taking it home,” she explained.

This time Barbara wanted $10,000. When she returned with the note, the section requesting optional life insurance had been filled out, Peterson said.

Evenson asked who was insured.

“Russ’s name is on that line.”

“Okay, so that provides for what in the event of his death?”

“It pays off the loan.”

“Okay,” he added for emphasis, “in event of his death, is that correct?”

“Right.”

The loan was secured by a lien on Russ’s Blazer, Peterson said, and it was to be paid back in installments of $303.98 drafted monthly from Barbara’s checking account. But when the first payment came due, there wasn’t enough money in the account to pay it. Peterson said she called Barbara about it, and Barbara told her that she would make the payment soon.

When the second payment also came up short, Peterson testified, she called Barbara again.

“I told her that I would have to call Mr. Stager and see if I could get the payment and she told me not to,” Peterson said. “She said that they were having problems and that there was, you know, some other person involved, female involved, and she would prefer I not call him and I did not.”

Barbara, she said, had sounded “slightly upset.”

The first two payments were finally made late by Barbara, and by the time the third payment was due, Peterson had been promoted to branch manager and no longer was personally handling Barbara’s account.

The third payment was due January 28, 1988, and on February 1, a subordinate came to her, Peterson said, and told her that that payment, too, had been returned for insufficient funds.

“I told her to call Barbara about the payment…and if we couldn’t get Barbara we were going to call Mr. Stager. And before we did that, someone called us from downtown, or we just got news, that Mr. Stager had died.”

Evenson pointed out that Russ’s signature on the loan application and car lien had been notarized by a bank employee.

“You asked her to notarize the signature, is that correct?”

“Right.”

“Was Russ Stager in the bank at that time?”

“No, he wasn’t. When Barbara brought it back, like I said, Barbara was a nice person, I had no reason to believe that Russ had not signed this, so I asked my employee to notarize this, which was not an unusual request.”

Cotter got Peterson to read the monthly incomes of Barbara and Russ from the loan application, $2,800 for Russ, exactly half that amount for Barbara.

“It is true, isn’t it, that the person who is going to be insured on any note is going to be the person with the greater income?” he asked.

“No, that’s left up to the customer.”

Cotter finally got her to admit that it made sense to insure the one with the greater income. “I mean, that would be the normal way of doing it, wouldn’t it?”

“Uh-huh, the usual way.”

Still piecing together motive, Evenson brought to the stand a former bank teller who identified the $500 check drawn on Russ’s credit union account that had caught the attention of his former wife and mother when they had sifted through the investigative files searching for clues. Barbara had deposited the check into her account on January 7, 1988, the teller said. Evenson wanted the jurors to see that this had been Barbara’s desperate means of making the overdue monthly payment on the $10,000 loan that Russ knew nothing about. It was this check that had actually led to Russ’s murder on February 1, Evenson believed, for soon after that date, he would have received his monthly statement containing the cancelled check. That surely would have led him to discover Barbara’s new indebtedness. And that, Evenson was convinced, likely would have brought about a confrontation that would have been the death blow to Barbara’s marriage. With Russ out of the way, the debt would be paid and Barbara would have a whole new pile of insurance money to begin spending.

To prove his theory, Evenson continued his parade of damning witnesses.

An insurance company official described two life insurance policies Russ had bought by mail, one for $50,000 only a year before his death, another for $23,000 eleven months before that. Barbara, he said, was the beneficiary of both.

Cotter objected to this testimony as irrelevant, but was overruled. He did bring out on cross examination, however, that Barbara also bought a $50,000 policy from the company, naming Russ as beneficiary.

Doris Stager returned to the stand to identify signatures of Russ and Barbara from cards, checks and other sources, the first of a series of witnesses who would demonstrate Barbara’s guile. The next person called was Claire Clayton, the deputy clerk of court in Durham County.

Barbara had brought Russ’s will to her office at midafternoon, four days after his death, she said. “She came in. She had a lady and a gentleman with her and they were the witnesses on the will and they signed before me that this was their handwriting on this will.”

She identified the witnesses as Barbara’s mother, brother and sister-in-law, and Evenson brought out that they had signed a sworn oath that they had witnessed Russ signing the will.

When his turn came, Cotter got Clayton to say that there was nothing unusual about the will, that most husbands leave everything to their wives, that insurance was not really affected by the will and that the house was owned jointly by Barbara and Russ.

“And isn’t it true that by that kind of ownership, when one spouse dies, the house automatically goes to the other spouse?” he asked.

“That’s correct.”

“And it has nothing to do with the will?”

“No.”

“So the insurance and the house were not affected by that will whatsoever, were they?”

“No.”

A recess was called, and when court resumed, Clayton returned to the stand for more questioning by Cotter, who brought out that without the house and insurance, the entire worth of Russ’s estate, according to the estimates Barbara had filed, was only $14,500.

Evenson cut to the heart of the matter with his next witness. When Durward Matheny, the SBI’s supervisor of questioned documents, took the stand, he identified three checks supposedly signed by Russ: a $1,500 check on his First Union account and a $175 check on his credit union account that were deposited in Barbara’s account after his death, and also the $500 check on his credit union account that Barbara had put into her account in early January 1988.

None actually bore Russ’s signature, Matheny said. The signatures had “enough similarity” to Barbara’s, he said, “to warrant a degree of belief that she could have been the author.”

The same was true, he noted, for a National Guard paycheck bearing Russ’s purported endorsement that also was deposited after his death.

As to the signature on the October bank note for $10,000: “I could not identify him or eliminate him as being the author,” Matheny testified, “mainly because this was a copy. It was very dark and hard to see, and we do not like to make identifications from copies.” There were, however, “numerous differences” from his known signature.

The signature on the car lien that Barbara had brought to the bank along with the note definitely was not Russ’s, Matheny said.

When Evenson brought out the will, Matheny left the stand to demonstrate his testimony with charts of the enlarged signature from the will, plus enlargements of the known signatures of both Russ and Barbara.

“It is my opinion that this is a simulation attempt of his signature,” Matheny said of the signature on the will. “The very first thing I noticed was the letter A, which is a higher skill than Russell Stager had.”

Everybody has a set writing skill, he explained. The level of skill can go down, but never up.

Using a pointer, Matheny noted the differences in the signature. “On the letter R and the letter S, if you will observe, it is very shaky. It was written very slowly and unnaturally. Russell Stager had a very casual handwriting style, but it flowed. There was no interruption. It was very smooth throughout.”

Russ’s Ls, he noted, were always very small. “Notice how tall and slender these Ls are on this particular document,” he said, using the pointer to sweep along the letters.

“Each time he wrote the word Stager,” Matheny said, pointing to the A in Russ’s known signature, “it looks almost like a zero instead of an A. If you look closely, this looks very much like an A.” The A also was unnatural, crammed against the G in the signature on the will, Matheny noted, and the Ss were closed in. “He left his Ss open.”

There also were shoulders, marks broadening the top of the R, in his first name in the will, but Russ never put shoulders on the R.

“Someone was looking, or had a signature of his, and they were able to make this reproduction,” he said.

“Who do you think wrote A. Russell Stager on that will?” Cotter asked as his first question.

“I have no idea,” said Matheny. “In other words, it’s a simulation. I do not know who simulated it.”

“But you’re absolutely sure that it’s simulated?”

“Yes, sir. I have no doubt whatsoever.”

Cotter brought up the $1,500 check.

“So you think it was written by Barbara? You think Russell Stager was written by his wife, Barbara?”

“I do.”

This signature, Cotter brought out, was unlike the signature on the will. It was not a copy.

“There was no effort to simulate? This is Barbara Stager writing her husband’s name on a check, is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

The same was true, Cotter noted, for the other checks.

“It’s all clearly her handwriting?”

“That’s correct.”

Cotter also got Matheny to admit that he had no idea who had written the signature on the bank note.

“The only thing I can say about it is in my opinion that is not his signature.”

Later, Evenson would call Oma Smith, once a friend of Barbara and her mother, to testify about Russ’s will. Smith and her husband, a Baptist minister, had visited Barbara’s family on the day of the shooting. She now worked at the Fuquay School of Business at Duke University, but she once had worked at the medical center with Barbara. It was there, she said, that Barbara had come to see her about Russ’s will.

“Barbara brought this in and asked if I would notarize it since I knew Russ’s handwriting,” she said. “I had typed a paper previously for him, and she said, ‘You know his handwriting,’ and she said, ‘We’re going to have a will made up later by a lawyer,’ but in the meantime he travels with the National Guard and, you know, going to drill and whatever, and in the event something happened to him, and would I mind doing it for him, and I said I would be glad to.”

She had asked Barbara where she wanted her to notarize it, she said, and Barbara replied that it didn’t matter.

“I said, ‘I’ll put it underneath’ [the signature], because there was no other names on the paper.”

“No witnesses?” Evenson asked.

“No witnesses. No witnesses were in the room with us either.”

“Do you remember when she brought it in?”

Smith thought that it was in the month of March, adding, “It has been a couple of years.”

Cotter swooped in on this vagueness. “Isn’t it a fact that this was done on February 5, 1988?”