Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinniss Page B

school boys in the car. One of them, Steve Pritchard, knew Bonnie’s younger sister, Ramona. He was sixteen and about to start his junior year at Lexington West. Bonnie, though twenty-one, had done very little dating in her life. In Winston-Salem, no men paid attention to her. In Welcome, there just were no young men.
    Steve Pritchard had already lived a hard life, involving an alcoholic father and foster homes and the sort of turmoil that the emotionally sheltered Bonnie Lou Bates had never known. Even at sixteen, he had developed a smooth-talking veneer to deal with the world at large and with women in particular.
    He was no virgin and Bonnie was. He was good-looking and Bonnie wasn’t. And he could, in the words of Bonnie’s mother, “charm the horns off a billy goat and the skin off a snake.”
    Everybody Bonnie knew from high school was already married and having children. She had a good job and a hot car, but it looked as if she’d still be living with her parents when she was forty.
    Ramona introduced Bonnie to Steve Pritchard, and the two of them began to date. The following summer, a month after Bonnie had turned twenty-three, and when Steve was still seventeen, they got married. Everybody in Bonnie’s family told her they thought Steve was no good and she was crazy. She responded that Steve was wonderful and she wasn’t crazy, only lonely. Besides, she said, she was in love.
    Although they lived only a few miles apart while dating and saw each other almost every day, she would, on occasion, write letters to him, such as this one from January 1967:
    Â 
    Hi Tiger,
    Â 
    Don’t expect too much from one of my letters ’cause I’m not quite all right at the moment. You see, I’ve met this wonderful person whom I love very much. Because of him, I can’t quite keep my brain and heart clicking in the same direction. I don’t remember his name but they call him Steve Pritchard, or something almost like that.
    Hey, do you know him? He has big beautiful brown eyes and lots of cute little freckles on the handsomest nose in the Junior class at West!
    I’ll go to the next page now and change the tempo a little. Maybe it’ll make a little more sense.
    I sat by the fire but it was too lonesome without you there to help keep me warm. The fire could only warm me Outside. Steve, you worry me. You work too long and get too little rest. Hope you’re strong enough to take it because we’ll never make it if you are forced to take a year or two out to recuperate in a psychiatric ward. I love you too much to lose you that way, so please take it easy and don’t worry so much.
    You and I will probably have to prove ourselves to our parents before they can really accept our attitudes. You know I love you and I know you love me, but it’ll be hard to convince them that we can really make it work for a lifetime. I guess it goes back to the same old solution—time. I just get so tired of waiting for everything. I know anything that really means a lot to me is worth waiting for but it’s so hard. Much harder than waiting for anything before.
    Smile for me now and let’s face the future together . . .
    Till Friday—
    Love always,
    Bonnie
    In retrospect, what’s most surprising is that the marriage lasted almost five years. During the first year, Steve was still in high school. They lived in a rented mobile home. Once he graduated, Steve jumped quickly from job to job, working first for an oil company, then for a dry cleaner, then for a photographer.
    As time passed, Bonnie came to suspect that Steve was also jumping from girl to girl, but it was not until the summer of 1972, when Chris was three and a half years old and Angela almost two, that Steve walked out of the new house they’d bought in the Winchester Downs section of Lexington (even though they couldn’t nearly afford it), and into the arms of the newest girl he had waiting