Blood Games (11 page)

Perhaps the bat had been abandoned earlier, closer to the murder scene. A person carrying a bloodied bat in an upper-class subdivision at three-forty-five in the morning would have risked suspicion and detection if spotted. Maybe he had tossed it somewhere near the house

So Wednesday afternoon a group of officers descended again on Smallwood. They prowled through backyards and empty lots, waded drainage ditches, poked into hedgerows, looked into storm drains, but they saw no sign of a baseball bat, a club, a steel pipe, or anything else that might have been used to split open Lieth’s head.

Some of Bonnie’s relatives were at the Von Stein house that afternoon. Her only brother, George Bates, and his wife, Peggy, spotted Hope and Young searching near the house and called them over.

Earlier that day, George had taken Chris to Raleigh to pick up his car, the ’65 Ford Mustang fastback.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” George told the officers, “but Chris and Angela aren’t acting right. They’re going on just like nothing’s happened.”

He went on to tell some things that had been bothering him about Chris particularly, about his problems with grades at school, about his disappearance earlier that month, and the outrageous tale he’d told to explain it. Something just wasn’t right with Chris, George said.

“I don’t know if Chris is involved or not,” said his wife, “but if he is involved and you need a family member to run interference, just let us know.”

11

Thursday’s Washington
Daily News
reported that a ten-thousand-dollar reward was being offered for information leading to the conviction of Lieth Von Stein’s killer. Police Chief Harry Stokes and SBI Supervisor R. P. Hawley had requested that Governor Jim Martin approve a five-thousand-dollar reward, and he had done so. National Spinning Company had agreed to match the state’s reward. The story quoted Chief Stokes, who said that the investigation of the murder “is definitely still a priority,” and that he was confident the case would be solved. “I have a very positive outlook on it,” he said.

Just as every other newspaper story about the murder had done, this one also mentioned that Angela Pritchard had “apparently slept through the attack in another upstairs bedroom” and that her brother, Chris, was away at N.C. State when the attack occurred.

Angela and Chris were much on the minds of Detective Hope and Agent Young. And on Thursday afternoon, they went to a local company to talk to a young man who knew both teenagers. The young man, who was a couple of years older than Chris but had been in the marching band with him at Washington High School, described Chris as a “wussy.”

“Not the most masculine individual I ever saw,” he said with obvious contempt.

Chris wasn’t lucky with girls, he said, but he tried desperately to pretend otherwise. After Chris graduated from high school, he started spending a lot of time in Greenville, the young man said, and word on the street was that he had started using drugs, both marijuana and cocaine.

As for Angela, the young man said that if she didn’t like her stepfather, she didn’t make it known. She sometimes complained about her mother, he said, but usually only when her mother wouldn’t let her do something that she wanted to do.

The young man supplied the officers with the names of Chris’s closest friends who, he said, should be able to tell them a lot more.

A funeral service for Lieth Von Stein was held at four o’clock at Paul Funeral Home in Washington while a thunderstorm raged outside. The chapel was packed with Bonnie’s relatives, Lieth’s coworkers, neighbors, and friends of the family. Lieth’s body was not present. It had been cremated, the ashes to be buried in Winston-Salem later, following a second service. Bonnie, wearing a black bedroom gown, was brought to the service from the hospital in a dark blue Lincoln Continental sent by the funeral home. Angela and Chris rode with her. She walked into the chapel helped by her son and a mortuary employee.

The service was conducted by the Reverend Charles Pollock, pastor of Washington’s First United Methodist Church. He had never heard of the Von Steins before he was called by a representative of the funeral home, but Bonnie had requested a Methodist minister, and he was the most prominent in town. He had gone to the hospital earlier to talk with Bonnie, but he hadn’t been certain what to say or ask. He had difficulty preparing a eulogy, not only because he did not know Lieth and had found it difficult to ask Bonnie questions about a husband who had been murdered beside her, but also because he had heard that Lieth considered himself an atheist. In the end, he kept the service short, saying only a few words about Lieth and being careful not to emphasize the awful tragedy that had occurred. Instead, he spoke of how all people have needs, especially when faced with the mystery of death. And from the Bible he read Philippians 4:19: “But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.”

No police officer attended the funeral. As the service was beginning, the two detectives investigating the murder were at the office of Bonnie’s attending physician, Zack Waters, Jr., questioning him about the seriousness of her wounds. The stab wound was serious, Dr. Waters assured them, but he could not determine the depth of it without opening the chest again and measuring it, and he was not about to do that. Bonnie was responding well to treatment, and he planned to release her from the hospital on Monday, just a week after she had been attacked. It was his understanding that she intended to move to Winston-Salem but would remain in Washington for a few days after her release. He had recommended that she not return to her house on Lawson Road for emotional reasons. She had told him that she would be staying at the Holiday Inn with her family. It was clear that Dr. Waters considered his patient to be a victim, and the possibility that she might have submitted willingly to such injuries probably never crossed his mind.

Asked if he objected to the police taking a blood sample from Bonnie, Dr. Waters said that he didn’t object, but he would not order it. It would have to be voluntary on her part.

On the day following the funeral, Hope and Young returned to Beaufort County Hospital to talk again with Bonnie. She had been moved from intensive care to room 268, and she was doing well enough that she was able to sit up for the interview.

The detectives questioned Bonnie closely about the locks on the doors at her house and who had keys. Both front and back doors had dead-bolt locks which had been installed a few years earlier, she said, although they were used only when the family went out of town Those locks had not been set on the night of the attack.

People who had keys to both the regular locks as well as the dead-bolt locks were herself, her husband, her two children, and the pet-sitter who came when they were away. Lieth never carried his dead-bolt key and left it somewhere in the house. Chris had a dead-bolt key, but it didn’t work, because it was a copy that she’d had made cheaply.

The detectives took her again through the attack to see if she remembered anything new, or told anything differently, but she repeated the same story as she had over and over, and she was no more help in describing her attacker than she had been earlier.

Young turned the questioning to her son. Had Chris ever been in trouble with the police? Once, she said, a couple of years earlier. He and a friend had been at a football game at Chocowinity High School and Chris’s friend had pointed a BB gun out the car window at a black man, who took the license number and called police. Law enforcement officers stopped the car and searched it, finding wine coolers in the trunk and ninja weapons such as throwing stars and nunchakus in addition to the BB gun. Both Chris and his friend were charged with possession of alcohol by under-aged persons and possession of weapons on school grounds, both misdemeanors. Both were taken to the county jail, and she and Lieth had to go down and bail Chris out. Lieth had not been happy about it and was less trusting of Chris afterward.

Asked about Lieth’s relationship with Chris and Angela, Bonnie said that he’d always been very good to them and treated them as his own children. One of the main purposes of his life was to see that they both got good educations, she said. Indeed, he had remained at his job after coming into his inheritance just to make sure that he would have enough money to get them both through college. Lieth and the children got along well, she assured the officers. Whenever Lieth had discipline problems with them, he always went through her. They were, after all, her children. He expected her to handle the discipline problems, and she did.

The officers had been told by several people of a rumor that had been making its way around town that Lieth had had a fight with one of Angela’s boyfriends on the day before the murder and ordered him to keep away from the house. Did Bonnie know about any trouble between Lieth and any of Angela’s boyfriends or any of Chris’s friends? None that she was aware of, she said.

How much did the children know about the family’s financial situation, Bonnie was asked. They knew that Lieth had inherited a large sum, but they didn’t know how much, she said. Neither did they know what was in her will or Lieth’s, nor who was beneficiary on any insurance policies. She and Lieth had set up their wills so that if both died, their estates would go into trust funds for Chris and Angela that neither could touch until age thirty-five, except to draw money for basic needs and education, she said. But only she, Lieth, and their attorney in Winston-Salem knew the terms of the wills and trusts, she said.

This interview lasted longer than any that the officers had conducted so far, nearly two hours. And as it drew to a close, Young asked Bonnie if she would mind giving them a blood sample to compare to the blood that had been collected at her house. Not at all, she said, and a technician was summoned to take it as the detectives watched.

As they left the hospital, the two detectives had to agree that Bonnie was a highly cooperative witness, a sweet woman who seemed unlikely to be even peripherally involved in committing so atrocious a crime. But neither was yet willing to dismiss the idea completely.

12

The murder of Lieth Von Stein affected Washington as no other crime ever had.

On the morning of the murder, as Smallwood was aswarm with police officers, a neighbor whom the Von Steins did not know, Hiram Grady, sat down to write a letter to the editor of the newspaper.

“I sit here at my desk this morning feeling frustrated, confused, and saddened,” he wrote. “I am too numb at this point to feel much else.

“I do not know the family in Smallwood whose world has been shattered this morning. I have never spoken to them although they live only a few houses down from my backyard. I do not know them, but I share their grief. It overwhelms me. How can such a crime happen in our own backyards?

“How can anyone commit such a violent, unfeeling act upon anyone?…

“This terrible act of violence does not affect just the family and friends of the victims. It affects us all. We are all victims. Let us pray to God we will never feel the pain of such a terrible crime in our backyards again.”

Many in Smallwood were thinking the same thoughts and asking themselves the same questions. And they were fearful of just the thing that Hiram Grady suggested: that they might indeed again feel the pain of such a terrible crime, and next time not just in their backyards but in their own houses.

If the Von Stein murder was not the ultimate suburban horror story, it was close to it. Here were Bonnie and Lieth, decent, respectable people to all appearances, hardworking, successful, healthy, well-off, involved in no wrongdoing, thinking themselves safe in their comfortable home in their manicured subdivision far removed from the fears and dangers of big-city life. Yet they had been invaded by a fearsome shadow in the night, attacked in their sleep, and Lieth Von Stein had died a terrifying death, screaming and helpless.

And then the shadowy killer had slipped back into the night from whence he had come, and even now he might be walking among the people of Smallwood, of Washington, stalking still, with new victims in mind. Just the thought of this fearsome possibility sent a collective shudder through all of Beaufort County.

Nowhere was that awful possibility felt more intensely than in Smallwood. Nobody knew whether or not a maniacal killer might be loose in the area, and as days passed with no arrests and no news to relieve worried minds, the subdivision’s frightened residents grew tense, jittery, and extremely suspicious. Locksmiths and installers of alarm systems couldn’t keep up with the demand from Smallwood. Unknown cars or strangers passing through the area brought immediate calls to the police. Outside and inside lights were left on at night, and although police patrols were stepped up in the area, some residents kept all-night watches. Others began locking their bedroom doors when they went to bed.

Detectives found themselves going back to Smallwood time and again to talk to fearful residents who had things to report. One woman, the wife of another National Spinning Company executive, thought that perhaps she and her husband were supposed to be the victims, that the murderer might have mistaken the Von Steins for them. Her husband had left for an extended business trip to England on Sunday, the day before the murder. On the Friday before, he had received a substantial check for expenses. Many people knew about that check, she said. Perhaps the murderer had wanted that money, but had confused the two houses. Both Von Stein and her husband drove similar company cars, the same color, she pointed out, and their house numbers would be the same if only a single digit were transposed.