Before He Wakes (27 page)

On Monday, a week after Russ’s death, Doris called Barbara to tell her that she and Al wanted Russ’s Campbell College ring and the train set he’d had since he was a little boy.

During the conversation Barbara mentioned that she was remaining in her job at Duke. A woman she liked, Mrs. Watkins, would be replacing her boss, Tim, who was resigning, and she had begged her to stay.

Barbara also told Doris that she had an appointment to see a psychiatrist to help her over the trauma of Russ’s death. She was sure, she said, that Doris would be glad to know that the psychiatrist was a Christian.

Doris said that she and Al would come the following night to pick up the train set and ring.

“I’ve got plenty of food,” Barbara said. “Would y’all like to have supper with us?”

“No, thank you,” Doris had said. “I’m not eating very much.”

“Well, I understand if you’re not comfortable.”

Doris and Al drove to their son’s house the following evening. Russ’s Blazer was there, along with another car they didn’t recognize when they pulled up the driveway, but Barbara’s Mustang convertible was missing. As Doris and Al were getting out of their car, Barbara turned into the driveway behind them. She got out of her car carrying a sackful of fast-food hamburgers. It was hard for Doris to face Barbara, knowing in her heart that she had killed Russ, but she forced herself to control her rage and hide her true feelings.

The train set had been put in the garage for them, Barbara said before taking the hamburgers on inside. Doris and Al went to the garage and began loading the train set into the car. Barbara soon returned with Russ’s college ring and the Masonic ring that Russ’s grandmother had given him.

Barbara went back into the house, and shortly afterward Doris followed. She wanted to get Barbara alone to ask more about the psychiatrist she had mentioned so that she could pass the information to Buchanan. She found Jason sitting at the dining room table, wolfing down hamburgers with his best friend, Josh Burch. Barbara was in the living room chatting with three members of Russ’s baseball team, the same three who had been at Barbara’s parents’ house when Doris and her family arrived on the night of the shooting to plan the funeral.

“Could I see you for a minute?” Doris asked.

Barbara left the baseball players and followed Doris to Jason’s bedroom with a concerned and quizzical look upon her face, as Doris later recalled.

“Are you going to finish your education?” Doris asked.

“Yes, but I’m not going to be able to do it right now,” Barbara said. “Maybe a little later on.”

Was the psychiatrist Barbara had mentioned the same one Marva had offered to pay for after the financial crisis nearly six years ago?

No, Barbara told her. That was just a counselor that she had been seeing. This one was a “real psychiatrist” at Duke, Dr. Wallace. Her mother had made the arrangements and her first appointment would be on Thursday, two days hence.

Barbara seemed edgy, uncomfortable with this conversation, and when she heard Al coming into the kitchen, it gave her the excuse to break away. She returned to the living room with the baseball players. Doris followed her and said that she guessed she and Al would be going, but Barbara was busy talking and didn’t respond.

“We’ve got to go,” Doris said, trying again to get Barbara’s attention, but she continued talking.

Only when she saw Doris and Al leaving did Barbara come to see them out.

She and Russ had a small television in their bedroom at the Stagers’ lake cottage, Barbara said as they walked to their car. Would they mind bringing it back the next time they went to the lake? Her brother Steve was going to be staying with her to see her through this difficult period, and he could use it in his room. Al said he would get it for her.

Then Barbara mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that she’d given Russ’s clothing away. “I didn’t think Dad could wear them,” she said, meaning Al, “so I gave them to two churches.”

The Stagers went to their lake cabin on Saturday morning, February 13, to get the TV Barbara wanted. They didn’t linger. Doris couldn’t stand to walk into the bedroom that Russ and Barbara always used. All she could think about were the wonderful times Russ had always had at the cabin and how he never would again. She and Al returned home, and Doris stayed there while Al took the TV to Barbara and hooked it up in Bryan’s bedroom, where Steve now was staying.

Doris was cleaning house that afternoon when Barbara called and said that she wanted to have a talk.

No, Doris told her, she was too upset.

“With me?” Barbara asked.

No, Doris said, only because of Russ. “If it was Bryan, you’d feel the very same way,” she added.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Barbara said.

“No. My stomach is real upset.”

“Do you have a virus?’

“No, it’s my nerves. My stomach is bothering me day and night, and I’m having a lot of headaches.”

“Well, when you feel like it,” Barbara said, “call me.”

That night Barbara’s mother called, wanting to know how Doris and Al were doing.

On Monday, two days later, Doris worked up her nerve and called Barbara at a little after 7:00
P.M
.

“Dad has gone to a deacon’s meeting at church, so if you still want to talk, this would be a good time to come over,” she said.

She had no idea what Barbara wanted to talk about and she didn’t want Al to be there and run the risk of getting him more upset and agitating his heart condition. She mustered all her willpower to control herself as she waited for Barbara, who arrived only minutes later.

“When I called Saturday, I knew exactly what I was going to say,” Barbara said after seating herself on the couch in the family room, the same place where she had sat on the last night of Russ’s life, “but I don’t know how to say it now.”

She had been to see the psychiatrist, as scheduled, Thursday, she said, and had told him about her distress over Russ’s death.

“He said my feelings were normal and to talk it out,” she said.

She wanted Doris to know that she loved Russ and that living with him for nine years had been the best years of her life.

“I want you to know that it was an accident,” she said, “and I want y’all to forgive me.”

“Talk to God, Barbara,” Doris said coolly. “He forgives.”

“I do talk to Him,” Barbara said. “And I go to the cemetery all the time and talk to Russ.”

“Well, it won’t do you any good to go out there and talk to him,” Doris said.

“Well, I do.”

“Barbara, Russell is in heaven, and the Bible says when you’re in heaven with Christ, you don’t have any more pain, and you don’t have any more sorrow, and you don’t have any more tears. And if my son could see me now he would have a lot of tears and he would have a lot of sorrow, so he can’t hear you.”

“Well, it makes me feel better to go anyway.”

Barbara said she knew how much Doris and Al loved Bryan and Jason, and she wanted all of them to continue going to the lake as a family.

“It’s going to take me time, Barbara. I can’t stand to go there and go in Russell’s bedroom. It’s going to take me time. I’ve always put everybody else first, but this time I’m going to have to think about me.”

“Would you feel more comfortable if we moved into another house?” Barbara asked. “I’ve been thinking about getting a condo. I can’t keep up the yard at that house. But Jason wants to stay there.”

That would be for her to decide, Doris said.

“I don’t know if I can stand to lose y’all,” Barbara said suddenly.

“Barbara, I didn’t say you were going to lose us. I just said it’s going to take time.”

“Well, I don’t know what I’m going to tell the boys why y’all aren’t coming around.”

“Your mother will help you.”

Her parents were helping some with the bills, Barbara said.

“Well, it’s good that they can help a little,” Doris said.

Because Russ had been handling the money, Barbara said, she had no idea what was facing her in that regard, and the prospect of dealing with it all was almost overwhelming. They didn’t have any mortgage insurance on their house, she said, and the monthly house payments would take her whole paycheck. But she thought that the life insurance Russ had with the school system and National Guard would knock down the mortgage to the point where she could handle it. “But I guess I’m going to have to sell the convertible, because it’s got the biggest payment,” she said.

Barbara noted that Jason had been particularly hurt by Russ’s death. “He loved him so much.”

“We all loved him,” Doris said.

“I thought the kids at school might say cruel things to him,” Barbara went on. “But everybody is being real nice.”

Before she ended the conversation, Barbara offered one other observation.

“You know, this all brings back my experience with Larry.”

22

On February 15, Barbara called Buchanan to ask why Russ’s death certificate listed the cause as “pending.” Hadn’t he told her that the case had been closed as accidental?

Buchanan was immediately wary. Death certificates always listed the cause as pending until the autopsy was complete, he said.

“The death certificate says the autopsy
is
complete,” Barbara countered.

“The autopsy is, but the final report isn’t,” Buchanan said.

Could she file for insurance with the death certificate as it was?

“I don’t know whether the insurance company would accept it that way or not,” Buchanan said. “It might be best to wait a couple of weeks until all the paperwork has been submitted.”

Later, Barbara would tell her friend Brenda Monroe that this was the first indication she had that something wasn’t right, that Buchanan hadn’t been telling her the truth when he said he was closing the case as accidental. It was beginning to appear that once again she was going to have to endure the harassment from law enforcement officers that she had suffered after Larry’s death.

The “harassment” had in fact been stepped up. Several more officers were now working on the case. Three agents of the State Bureau of Investigation joined it that very day. Two of the agents, Dave McDougald and Valerie Matthews, were still in training, Matthews just out of the academy. The third was the resident SBI agent in Durham, Steve Myers.

As it turned out, Myers was a perfect choice to investigate the death of Larry Ford, which would be his major responsibility. He had grown up in High Point, the son of a police officer, and knew the area well. An SBI agent for six years, Myers, sandy-haired and freckled, was twenty-nine, the same age Larry had been when he was killed.

By the end of February Buchanan and the other officers were well on course in building a case against Barbara. They had interviewed all of the emergency workers who had gone to Barbara’s house, and had begun talking to her former employers and to friends from her past.

Bill and Carol Gordon, who had dropped Barbara from their list of friends after her book hoax, became emotional during their interview with detectives. When Carol’s mother, Virginia, came to tell her that Russ had been shot, Carol had blurted out, “Barbara did it, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” her mother had said, “but she said it was accidental.”

Carol could think only of getting to Bill to tell him, but before she could leave for his dental office, she learned that Russ had died.

When she got to his office, she had one of her husband’s staff members call him into his lab. He came in carrying a can of Coke.

“What’s wrong?” he asked as soon as he saw Carol’s grief-stricken face.

“Russ is dead,” she said.

Bill suddenly flung the Coke can against the wall and it exploded in a spray of foam.

Carol had never heard her husband use profanity.

“Dammit,” he said, “she killed him, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” Carol said, and they fell into each other’s arms crying.

They cried again as the detectives interviewed them. They had seen Barbara’s instability early on, and since Russ’s death, they had been torturing themselves with guilt, asking themselves over and over if they could have done something to prevent it. One statement they made impressed the detectives so much they put it in their reports verbatim: “Barbara Stager would do anything for money.”

When the detectives tracked down Preston Adams, he, like the Gordons, said that the first thought that had gone through his mind when a friend called to tell him about Russ’s death was that Barbara had murdered him. He also said he was certain that he had not been Barbara’s only lover in recent years. “Barbara loved men,” he said, “and she liked to have a lot of them.”

Barbara had told him of working briefly for a major housing-development company. The company had a house that executives used as a party spot, he said, and he was sure from the way she talked about it that she had visited there with at least one of her bosses.

When Buchanan and Myers went to talk with one of the executives of the development company, the man was extremely nervous and evasive. He claimed that he didn’t recall Barbara and had no record of employing her. “Both officers believe he was being less than truthful,” Buchanan later wrote in his report.