Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinniss Read Free Book Online

policemen were there, asking her questions. It was hard to hear them, hard to think, hard to talk. She just wanted to sleep and never wake up. But Angela had not been hurt—the one piece of good news she’d been given.
    What happened? they kept asking. How many intruders? Black or white? What did she see? What had she heard? What could she remember?
    She’d seen only one, but there could have been ten or fifteen. She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember. Her head hurt. Despite seeming “alert” to her physician, Bonnie felt she could not get her mind to focus. They’d already told her she’d lost 40 percent of her blood. How much was that? How long would it take to get it back?
    Beneath the bandages that covered her forehead, Bonnie’s face was haggard and drawn. She spoke in a voice so soft that listeners had to strain to hear her. Even so, speech exhausted her. Tubes still seemed to be everywhere.
    Lieth was dead. Angela had not been hurt. There had been so much blood. So much red, when the police had turned the light on.
    She tried to answer their questions. A killer was loose. The man who’d murdered Lieth. The man who’d tried to murder her. These men were trying to catch him. She forced herself to listen, to remember, to speak.
    They’d been out to dinner. When they’d come home, Lieth went to bed. That would have been about nine P . M . She’d stayed up to watch television, the first half of a miniseries about Ted Bundy, the serial killer.
    Some would later say it was ironic—and others, less charitable, would deem it suspicious, that in the last hours before the murder of her husband, Bonnie, with only her pet rooster for company, had been watching a movie about the crimes of Ted Bundy. But she saw nothing peculiar about it. She simply liked the actor who played Ted Bundy. Harmon was his name. Something Harmon.
    By the time she went upstairs, Angela was already in bed. She told the police that Angela had her fan on, and her radio on, and that the door to her bedroom had been closed.
    Bonnie had read for half an hour, then fallen asleep just after midnight. What woke her was the sound of Lieth screaming. Never had she heard screams like that. So loud, so sharp. She didn’t know how many screams, maybe ten, maybe fifteen. She didn’t know what time this was. She, too, had screamed, then she’d been hit by a club, then she’d been stabbed. She’d fallen off the side of the bed.
    As she lay on the floor, she was hit again. Then she passed out. It was terribly exhausting to tell all this. And it was all so jumbled in her mind. When she woke up, on the floor, she had reached up and felt Lieth’s hand in the darkness. That, she did remember clearly: feeling Lieth’s hand. It was sticky, and she knew the stickiness was blood.
    She tried to get to the phone, which was on the nightstand next to the bed, but passed out again. When she next regained consciousness, though too weak to sit, she pushed herself backward across the carpet with her heels until she reached her nightstand. Then she pulled the phone down on top of herself by yanking the cord. With the phone on the floor, in the dark, she pushed the buttons, one by one, until she hit the one that brought the operator on the line. Then she’d asked for the police.
    No, she couldn’t give a description of the attacker. She said she “couldn’t see anything but the dark form of a man.”
    * * *
    Chris left the hospital that morning in the company of his best friend from high school, Jonathan Wagoner. He asked Jonathan to drive him past his house. There was a big crowd outside. Neighbors, cops, friends, reporters, a TV truck. And Angela still hanging around across the street.
    Chris saw the blood-soaked sheets hanging from the boat, garish in the morning light, in plain view of anyone driving by. Chris wanted to stop and find out who’d hung them there and