Blood Games by Jerry Bledsoe Page B

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