Another Cold Case and Hot Nights

At this point, about the only way to do that was to have the police find them and bring them in for questioning. I thought we had enough on both Mr. Upton and Mrs. Blair to do that, so I went to a judge and got an arrest warrant for them for suspicion of murder. I then sent copies to Chief Reynolds in Charlotte because the cases you see on TV where they find the killer living a thousand miles from where the murder occurred are rare. Most killers don't go far from where they lived at the time of the murder and especially not if they think they've gotten away with it.

If Emma Blair had been part of the murder, there was a good chance she was with Mr. Upton. Mr. Upton needed to control people, and I couldn't see him just letting her go. When I called Chief Reynolds to confirm that he'd gotten my warrants, he said he already had an officer working on it.

I'd also put both warrants out to all the jurisdictions in Tennessee. It wasn't likely they were in Tennessee, but it was still a possibility. After that, it was just a matter of waiting to see what turned up.

What turned up was Charles Upton. A week after I'd sent the warrants to Chief Reynolds, he called me and said he had Charles Upton in custody. When I asked him how long he could hold Mr. Upton, he chuckled.

"I can hold him for as long as I want. We found him on a construction site in Charlotte while he was eating his lunch in his truck. When the officer approached him, Mister Upton did something with his hands that alerted the officer so after he cuffed Mister Upton, he searched his truck. What he found was a nine millimeter handgun under the seat. We booked him on possession of a firearm by a felon, and when he was arraigned, the judge denied his lawyer's request for bail.

"There's more that might interest you. Because of the charge we booked him on, we searched the house trailer where he was living. We found a couple rifles and three shotguns and one more handgun. One of my officers, Bobby Lade, served two tours of duty as an armorer in Afghanistan in charge of disposing of captured weapons. He recognized the pistol as a Russian PSM. It's an old design that was basically a self-defense weapon for Russian general officers and the caliber was specifically designed to make the pistol small but effective. They're still currently issued. Bobby figured this one was taken from a Russian officer when Russia was still in Afghanistan and somehow made its way to the black market.

"The guy had a box of cartridges for it too. They look to be pretty old because the brass is corroded to beat hell, and they're not like anything I've ever seen used in a pistol. They're not straight. They're necked down like a.223 and have about about the same size and shaped bullet, but the case is shorter. I'd never heard of the caliber, but the box said it was 5.5 x 18 millimeter. When we translated the Russian, we found out they had a steel core. Bobby said those rounds were meant to pierce several layers of Kevlar body armor."

I'm sure I smiled then. I figured Chief Reynolds had found my murder weapon. The fact that both victims had been shot through and through had bothered me quite a bit even if the bullets had come from a rifle. Most bullets expand at least some and if they hit bone, they usually expand a lot and slow down enough they probably wouldn't be going fast enough to embed in a wall like one of them had. A bullet designed to go through body armor wouldn't be stopped by anything as soft as bone.

The next morning, I drove to Charlotte to interview Mr. Upton. When I got there, I asked Chief Reynolds if anybody had already talked with him. He smiled and said, no, the pleasure was all mine, and that they hadn't told him they'd searched his house trailer. I wasn't sure what he meant by that until I sat down across from Mr. Upton in an interrogation room.

He was sixty-one by then, but he was still pretty intimidating because of his size. The waitress had told Rochelle he was fat, but it was more like he was just huge everywhere. His NCIC record said he was six-six and weighed in at two-eighty and it didn't look like he'd changed much over the years except to gain maybe another fifty pounds or so. His hair was graying at the sides, but his size and the look on his face would probably make a lot of men think twice about squaring off with him.

As soon as I sat down, he looked me in the eye and said, "Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want to talk to me about...that fucking gun they found in my truck? One of the other guys on the site must have put it there. I never lock my fucking truck."

I smiled. Rochelle had been right. He was a control freak and he was trying to control me. I decided to play his game, for now.

"I'm Detective Owens, and that's Chief Reynold's territory. I just want you to look at a few pictures and tell me if you know who the people are."

One of the ways to tell if a person is lying is to ask them a question that they can't be lying about and then ask them the real question and see if their response is different. It's a techinque used in polygraph examinations and it also works in face to face interrogation. To that end, I showed him a picture of Rochelle and then a picture of Sun, one of our crime lab technicials.

He looked at Rochelle's picture for a several seconds and then chuckled.

"No, don't know her, but wish I did. She's got a helluva nice set of jugs".

When I showed him Sun's picture, he looked a little longer and then frowned.

"Never seen her either. 'Course I wouldn't have paid any attention to her anyway. Them slant bitches don't like sucking cocks. Got no use for a woman that won't suck my cock. Their tits are always real little too and I like big tits on a woman."

I tossed Beth's picture down in front of him and then watched.

He looked at that picture for about a second and a half and then looked up at me.

"Never seen her before either. I seen autopsy pictures before though. What happened to her?"

Mr. Upton had just screwed up twice. The first time it was because he only glanced at the picture before telling me he didn't know Beth. If he didn't know her he'd have looked longer, just like he did for the first two pictures.

The second time was when he asked what happened to her. He was trying to get me to tell him how much we knew about her death. It's common for people who are guilty of a crime to try to find out how much the police know. They think they can tailor their answers to fit that. Mr. Upton should have remembered that no officer ever tells a suspect what he knows about the case until the suspect has pinned himself or herself into a corner with his or her lies. They teach that at the Academy.

"What happened to her isn't important right now. I just wanted to know if you knew her."

I picked up Beth's picture and laid the autopsy picture of Mr. Blair in front of him.

"Would you happen to know this man?"

Once again, he looked for a second and then glared at me.

"I know what you're fucking trying to do. You're showing me pictures of dead people and thinking I'm gonna admit to havin' something to do with it just because you found a gun in my truck. Well, I'm on to your game. I used to be one of you guys and I know how you work."

I was still smiling. Now it was my turn to lie.

"Mister Upton, I don't know what you used to be, but all I'm trying to do is establish the identity of these people. Yes, the two were murdered, but I don't know the name of the woman. I know who the man was, but not anything about her. Any identification she might have had was missing from her purse, but there was a business card in her purse from a restaurant in Clyde, North Carolina. Since you once lived there and Clyde isn't a very big town, I thought you might know her.

"It's hard to believe you didn't know her, really. I mean, the owner of the restaurant said she was a waitress there and you probably ate there once in a while since it was the only restaurant in Clyde. Are you sure you've never seen her? Here's a different picture of her."

The picture I laid in front of him was Beth's face and most of her torso. The small bullet hole in her chest was plainly visible. I wanted him to see that bullet hole because of what I was going to say next.

"If you used to be a cop, you probably saw your share of shootings. Does that bullet hole look odd to you? I mean, to me it looks like the size of a.22 long rifle bullet, but it was through and through. We pulled the bullet from the woman out of the mattress she was laying on. The guy had the same size bullet hole in his chest. We pulled that bullet out of the wall behind him. You ever see any bullet that small that would to all the way through a person?"

He fidgeted for a couple seconds, and he kept sliding one hand up his arm. That was unconscious body language that told me he knew exactly what bullet would have acted that way.

Finally, he said, "No, well, except for a bullet from an M-16 like I carried in Germany. They might do that."

He was nervous now and trying to seem like he wasn't. I wanted to put him at ease a little before I hit him with the hard questions I wanted answered. That's another interrogation technique Mr. Upton had apparently forgotten. You keep the suspect off balance by alternating between asking questions and friendly conversation. That makes it difficult for the suspect to figure out what you're really doing and you can catch them off guard.

"You were in the Army in Germany? Well, I'll be damned. I was in Germany too, Checkpoint Charlie, '78 and '79. Where were you?"

He smiled then and I knew I could get him to talk because he thought he was back in control of the situation. It might take a while, but he'd talk eventually.

"I was at Checkpoint Alpha, two years before you."

I leaned back in my chair to put him even more at ease.

"I picked up a really nice Mauser sporter while I was there. I don't hunt deer like I thought I was going to but I still have it. A lot of guys in my unit bought guns while they were there. It seemed like there were people selling guns in every alley behind every bar. Most were German guns, converted Mauser 98's and civilian shotguns, but a few were Russian guns somebody had picked up off a dead Russian during the battle for Berlin. You get any guns while you were there?"

He started to fidget again.

"No. Never had time. I'd never buy some war surplus gun anyway."

I leaned back over the table and looked him in the eye.

"Then I suppose you have another explanation for why the Charlotte police found a Russian PSM pistol in your house trailer along with a box of Russian ammo. You know what, that ammo is the same size as the bullets that killed my victims, the people you said you didn't know, and the bullets we recovered at the crime scene look exactly like the bullets in that box of ammo.

"That pistol and the box of ammo are on their way back to Knoxville. I'd bet my next paycheck that when our firearms tech fires a bullet from that pistol, it'll match the two we recovered from the murder scene. If it does, then I'll be extraditing you to Tennessee and charging you with murder.

"I know all about your relationship with Beth, from how you dropped the prostitution charges on her to you going to Knoxville with her right before the murders happened. I figure you took her to that house and then killed her and the man you thought was her lover. It won't be hard to convince a jury of that theory if the murder weapon was found in your house trailer. I'm pretty sure the DA will ask for the death penalty. That's still legal in Tennessee, you know, and most juries in Tennessee aren't shy about recommending it for a crime that was obviously planned ahead of time.

"What I don't know is why you did it and what part Missus Blair played in all this. I haven't been able to find Missus Blair, so you're the only one who knows what really happened. If you come clean, I think I can convince the DA to settle for life without parole. You'll have to plead guilty and tell the judge what you did, but life in prison would seem to me to be better than ten minutes strapped to a table while they pump you full of chemicals before you die. I'm told you can feel the chemicals going in and then slowly stopping your heart, except you'll be paralyzed so you can't move and you can't scream."

Mr. Upton didn't say anything for a while, and when he did, he said he wanted to talk to his lawyer. That ended our conversation until his lawyer got there, but I'd given Mr. Upton something to think about. I was sure he would, because he'd gotten pretty pale when I started talking about the pistol and his legs started shaking the table. I called Rochelle that night and told her I'd be another few days getting home.

His lawyer ended up being a public defender because Mr. Upton didn't have enough money to hire one. I sat down with both of them two days later and again told them both what evidence I had including the fact I now knew that the bullet fired from the gun found in his house trailer was a match to the bullets from my murder victims. Then I again gave Mr. Upton the option of confessing and getting life without parole, or going through a trial and getting the death penalty.

The public defender listened to everything and then asked if he could be alone with his client for five minutes. I picked up my file folder and left, but I went to the room next door and watched them and listened in on their conversation via closed circuit television in the interrogation room.

It was hard to hear what the public defender said to Mr. Upton at first because he was almost whispering. It wasn't hard to hear Mr. Upton at all because he was yelling.

"What the fuck do you mean I should take their deal? They don't have shit on me. Any lawyer worth a fuck would be able to shoot the case full of so many holes those fucking lawyers would piss their pants right there in the courtroom."

After that outburst, the public defender was easy to hear.

"Look, Mister Upton, I've seen all the evidence the detective from Knoxville has gathered and all the evidence they got out of your apartment. The bullets that killed those two people were a match to the bullets they fired from the gun they found in your apartment, and the match was confirmed by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. They have your record as a policeman that shows you react to situations you don't like in a violent manner. They have a witness that can place you and your wife in Knoxville the day of the murders.

"I can maybe do something to discredit the witness, but I can't do anything about the gun and your past.

"Their case is going to be that you figured out Beth was sleeping with a man in Knoxville and you killed them both. I can argue that you did that out of rage and maybe get you off with twenty-five to life. In the meantime, you'll sit in a jail cell in Knoxville before the trial is over and you get sentenced. That time averages about two years.

"That will give them another two years to refine their case. Once your arrest hits the news, there will be more people who come forward and swear they saw you or your truck in Knoxville on the day of the murder. Most will be false claims, but it'll only take one to reinforce their case.

"You need to face some facts. At your age, twenty-five to life isn't any different than life without parole because you probably won't make it another twenty-five years. Do you really want to spend the next two years in a Knoxville jail with a bunch of strung-out drug addicts and guys who'd get some prison credits if they killed a man as big as you are, and then if you're still alive, get life without parole?"

Mr. Upton glared at the lawyer.

"Put me on the goddamned stand and I'll convince them I didn't do it. I'm smarter than those fucking lawyers and I'm smarter than anybody on any jury."

The lawyer stood up and picked up his case file.

"And just how are you going to do that...tell them somebody else put the gun in your trailer and that the witness is lying about what she remembers? I'd like to hear you prove either.

"What if the prosecutor asks you why you sold your wife's car right before she was killed. That looks a lot like you were trying to stop her from driving to Knoxville on Fridays because you knew what she was doing there.

"What if the prosecutor asks you why you assaulted a woman you stopped for speeding? That's proof to any jury that you have a history of reacting to situations with violence.

"I know what you'll do. You'll start yelling just like you are now, and that'll only convince the jury that you're capable of murdering two people. No lawyer who knows what he's doing would ever allow you to testify in court.

"If you don't agree to their offer, I'm going to ask the judge to have another public defender assigned to your case. It'll be a waste of my time trying to defend you and there are other people I can actually help. By my watch, you have a minute and forty seconds to decide what you're going to do."

The lawyer was putting his case file in his briefcase when Mr. Upton said, "Can you get them to agree to twenty-five to life?"

The lawyer sat back down

"All I can do is ask, but they won't change the conditions. You'll have to agree to write down what happened and then sign it, and then plead guilty and tell it all to a judge."

I got home that Friday afternoon. The DA had agreed to twenty-five to life if Mr. Upton confessed. I wasn't upset by that deal. I didn't expect to get more than twenty--five to life even if it had gone to trial. The jury would probably believe the murders were committed in a fit of rage, and Mr. Upton was old enough the jury would understand he probably wouldn't live another twenty-five years anyway.

He had confessed in writing and was in the process of being extradited to Tennessee. The Knoxville DA had gotten a court date the following Tuesday, so Mr. Upton would be in a Tennessee prison by Wednesday night.

Rochelle wanted to know everything that happened, so between the time I got home and when I took her out to dinner at seven to celebrate. I filled her in.

"It wasn't exactly what we thought, but we were really close. The lovers were Missus Blair and Missus Upton not Mister Blair and Missus Upton. What we didn't know is that Mister Blair knew his wife was bisexual and encouraged her. Apparently he liked to watch them have sex. I still don't know how they met the first time, but it was probably in Clyde like you thought.

"What happened is Mister Upton was working construction six days a week in Charlotte while Beth stayed in Clyde, except she didn't stay in Clyde on Fridays. She'd drive to Knoxville and spend the night with Missus Blair and then drive back to Clyde before Mister Upton got home on Saturday night. He was suspicious because if he called her on Friday night she didn't answer. When he asked her about that, she said she started doing her shopping on Friday night so she wasn't home.

"He didn't believe her so he started checking the mileage on her car and figured out she was driving too many miles for just going to work and shopping. When he told her what he'd found, she told him what was happening. Well, that's what he said. I think he probably threatened her to get her to talk. As big as he is, he probably wouldn't have had to touch her. Just the threat that he would was probably enough.

"He sold her car so she couldn't do it anymore, and the next Friday night, the Friday after Christmas, he drove them both to Knoxville and parked in the alley behind the house. His plan was to have Beth do what she always did. She was to make sure the front door was unlocked, and he'd come inside while they were in bed together. He told her all he was going to do was tell Mister and Missus Blair to leave Beth alone and then they'd go back to Clyde. Apparently she believed him.