Blood Games (52 page)

After giving the drug instructions, Bart revealed where some of his hope had been coming from: jailhouse scuttlebutt.

Would you believe that we’ve fairly reliable reports from at least 2 and probably 5 different people placing Neal in Washington between fall of ’87 up till the murder? All from dealers on one of the local drug streets.

Drop me a note and tell me about your Halloween exploits and tell me how everyone is doing.

He closed by telling Hank to tell his stepmother that if he won, he was going to buy her restaurant “and turn it into a shoe store for transvestites.”

A couple of weeks later, Bart wrote again to Hank, addressing the envelope to “Compadre de Postas” Foster. On the back of the envelope he drew a Kilroy face looking out from between bars and added “Happy Damn Thanksgiving.”

Hey Hank,

What’s up in the Real world? How ’bout that Berlin Wall coming down? Is that some shit or what? The single biggest problem except for nuclear weaponry erased overnight. Maybe there’s some hope for the world after all … Nah, must be a commie trick.

Good news down here. The DA’s gotten a court order to see my bank records between May 23, ’88, and July 25th, ’88, because Neal said I bought a knife at Kmart or flea market by check. Not only have I never written a check at Kmart, but I don’t think I went there all summer. Flea markets don’t take checks, and the last time I’d been to the flea market since I owned my 240Z was when you, me and Wolf and Jessica went last fall.

This may not sound like much but it’s damned important. It’s the first bit of Henderson’s statements we’ve gotten and it contains a provable lie. The more we can prove Henderson is full of shit, the less a jury will believe anything he says. His statement also said he never left the get-away car the night of the murder. On June 14th of this year, he took the police to the baseball bat, which was hidden in dense woods near the Von Stein house. How will a man be able to explain in court how he knew where a murder weapon was hidden near the house if he’d never left the car?

His statements contain a few other things that don’t make any sense at all. We expect he’ll crack up on the stand in January. Don’t let any of the specifics I mentioned about the knife or bat get out to the general public. We’re trying to appear ignorant to the D. A. Just don’t tell anybody who’ll spread anything other than Henderson’s full of shit and we can prove it.

You know, I’ve been thinking about all of this shit the last week or so, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m actually sort of getting a kick out of it. I mean, it’s like the ultimate game of me against THEM and winner take all. Win millions of dollars or lose your life for a crime you didn’t commit. I guess somebody will say it’s perverse but that’s what it boils down to. To me none of this is real, it’s just a part of THE GAME OF LIFE and somebody upped the stakes. At least that’s how I’ve come to think of it.

It looks like (from the way things are going) I’m going to be a very rich guy a year from now. I don’t think being a millionaire will suit me much. I’ve decided I’ll probably give a lot of it away to my close friends and family (but keep the Lion’s share for myself, of course!)

Peace

James B. Upchurch III

Later, Bart said that the millions he mentioned in this letter were the proceeds he planned to win from the state when he sued for malicious prosecution after his innocence was confirmed in court. And by this time, he had managed to convince himself beyond doubt that he was going to be exonerated.

Bart had no way of knowing that neither of these letters ever reached Hank. He sent them to the wrong address. The recipient opened them and took them to the police. A few weeks later, they made their way into the hands of Mitchell Norton.

On December 5, Neal walked into the superior courtroom of the Beaufort County Courthouse shortly after 5 P.M., as court was ending for the day. He was wearing a gray suit and was accompanied by his lawyers, Michael Paul and Chris McLendon. Mitchell Norton asked Judge Thomas Watts for permission to bring up a case that was not on the court calendar. Neal Henderson stood ready to plead guilty to two felonies in the Von Stein case: aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury. Norton agreed to drop all other charges against Neal.

Judge Watts read questions to Neal from a standard form, including, “Do you understand that upon your plea you could be imprisoned for a possible maximum sentence of life plus twenty years?”

“Yes,” Neal responded.

A plea bargain had been worked out with the district attorney. Under its terms, Neal was to testify truthfully against Bart and Chris. Failure to do so would nullify the agreement. Sentencing would be left to the discretion of the judge.

His lawyers had approved the agreement, Neal said, in response to questions from Judge Watts, and he had discussed it with his family, who also approved.

Judge Watts accepted the plea, postponed sentencing until after the trials of Bart and Chris, and allowed Neal to continue to remain free under the bond that had been previously posted.

Neal remained in Washington for two days after his guilty plea, talking for hours with John Taylor, Lewis Young, and prosecutors, going over his story again in minute detail, checking for contradictions and other problems. Before he left, he agreed to return to Washington on December 19, so that he could be put to a trial before the trial, a mock court session that would give him a taste of what was to come.

John Taylor, who had been promoted to detective sergeant in August, still wasn’t finished with his investigation, and in mid-December, he was back on the road once more, talking again to people in Raleigh, traveling to Caswell County to learn more about Bart.

On December 14, he met Kenyatta at the public safety office at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She told him what had happened on the night of the murder, the night Neal told her he’d taken acid and she ordered him to leave.

When Taylor asked if Neal had told her about the murder and his role in it, she said, “I’m not going to lie to you about it, because there’s no love lost between me and Neal, and there’s no love lost between me and my cousin, and I’m not going to lie to you to save either one of them.”

“All I want you to do is tell me the truth,” Taylor said.

“Yeah, the truth is that Neal did tell me about pretty much everything.”

Had she talked with her cousin?

Yes, he’d called twice in recent weeks, she said, asking questions.

About what?

“Picky stuff, like he’s trying to set up a case against Neal. He’s trying to help out his lawyers.” He wanted to know if Neal had a pair of black Reeboks, and if she and Neal had gone shopping at Kmart and what they bought.

Had they shopped at Kmart that summer? Taylor asked.

Several times she said, but she’d never seen Neal buy a hunting knife.

Bart had been a totally changed person when he called, Kenyatta said. Previously, he had abused her or totally ignored her, but now he was different. “He was really interested in everything I was doing, like he was really trying to butter me up, like he really wanted to get something out of me.”

Neal had asked her to lie for him when he first told her about his involvement, she said. He wanted her to say she couldn’t recall things, particularly the night of the murder, but she had told him she wouldn’t do it.

“Has Neal asked you to lie for him since his arrest?” Taylor asked.

“No. I haven’t been in his life to have to lie for him or do anything like that. I just call him up and talk to him to make sure he’s doing okay.”

Taylor said that he wanted to ask her opinion on some things.

“Do you think Neal has the guts to kill anybody?”

“Hell no!” she said. “I have never seen him violent. He won’t even stick up for me. I’ve almost gotten beaten up by his roommate.”

Taylor sketched out the scenario of the murder as told to him by Neal. “Does that sound like something he could be led into doing?”

“Yeah,” she said. “If it’s his friends, he’ll do anything to get respect.”

Had she ever seen Neal hit anybody?

“He’s only hit me like maybe once, and that’s because I was being spastic.”

“Was he trying to calm you down?”

“Like, would you shut up, please, trying to calm me down, because I have a very bad temper.”

What was the maddest she’d ever seen him?

The time she told him that she liked his best friend. He stormed out of the room and “creamed his fist through a wall.”

Taylor asked her opinion of Bart (she’d never known him to be violent either) and of Chris.

“He sat bug-eyed in the corner all the time,” she said.

When Taylor asked what she meant, she perched on the edge of her chair, making a face at him, wide-eyed.

“Are you trying to portray a paranoid-type person?”

“A very drugged-out paranoid person. He just sort of looked very dangerous to me. It was like I would not like to be left in a room with him by myself. He just looked like he was getting ready to blow up all the time.”

“You don’t have a stake in this do you?” Taylor asked. “There’s not some great Upchurch fortune there in Caswell County?”

Kenyatta laughed. “I wish I knew about it.”

Kenyatta had a question for Taylor. “Are my grandmother and I going to be on the stand at the same time, not the same time, but the same day?”

Taylor had realized from his interview that Bart’s lawyers certainly couldn’t risk putting Kenyatta on the stand. If she testified, it would be as a prosecution witness. Her grandmother surely would be only a character witness for her grandson. They wouldn’t likely be testifying on the same day. Kenyatta seemed relieved. She didn’t want to have to ride home with her grandmother after “blowing away” her cousin on the stand, she said.

Taylor couldn’t resist a personal question before he left. “Do you still love Neal?”

“Nah,” Kenyatta said. “I mean, I love him in a kind of admiring way, you know, like he was once a great guy.” She chuckled. “I’m past the … no, we’ll never get back together or anything like that.”

The following day, Taylor was back in Caswell County, talking with Weldon Slayton and George Bush, teachers of Bart and Neal. Slayton said that Bart had called him recently from jail and told him that when he got out in February “there were going to be lawsuits.”

Taylor came away from these interviews with the impression that Bart had grown up “without a moral structure,” that he had been imbued with an attitude that told him: “You’re smarter than other people; take advantage of it, gain from it; stuff’s there for the taking; people are stupid; if you can con ’em, con ’em.”

On December 19, Neal rode from Washington to the courthouse in Williamston, twenty-five miles north, with John Taylor. There they met Mitchell Norton and Assistant District Attorney Rob Johnson. In an empty courtroom, the lawyers put Neal on the stand and led him through a scenario similar to the one he would be facing two weeks later.

The lawyers thought that Neal was not taking this whole thing as seriously as he should, that he had no idea of the stress that he might come under in court.

Norton assumed the role of DA. Johnson played the “bad guy” defense lawyer.

As they got into the proceedings, the lawyers grew more concerned about Neal. He wanted to joust intellectually with his questioners. He seemed cold, inhuman, almost robotlike in some of his responses.

Later, Neal admitted that he wasn’t taking the mock court seriously. Several times he got the giggles when one side or the other would raise objections and the other would overrule or sustain.

While trying to answer one question, Neal forgot Lieth Von Stein’s name and called him “something Von Stein.”

Rob Johnson suddenly threw down his pen and leaped from his chair, ripping off his glasses. “At least you could address the man by his true name,” he said angrily, launching into a tirade that Neal never would forget.

“He yelled at me for quite a while,” Neal said later.

“He laid into Neal’s ass,” is how John Taylor later put it.

“You are going to have to get serious about this,” Johnson told him hotly. “You may think this seems funny now, but there’s nothing funny about it. You killed a man and you’re going to have to accept responsibility for that. You are a murderer. You’re just as guilty as James Upchurch, whether you did the actual killing or not.”

Neal sat silently, his face paling as if he had just been kicked in the gut, while Johnson went on and on. When he finally had finished, Johnson turned and stalked out of the courtroom in disgust.

Saying nothing, Ned got up and walked quickly back to a jury room, closing the door behind him.

Taylor and Norton sat looking at one another. “You think you ought to go back there and check on him, John?” Norton asked.

“He’ll be all right,” Taylor said. “Let him get it out of his system.”

Several minutes later, Neal returned to the courtroom. He was composed, but his eyes were red from crying.