Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinniss

wash, that they wound up feeling they couldn’t disappoint this fine young man by turning away his generosity.
    Besides, they saw how much he loved their daughter. They saw how good he was to Chris and Angela. And they saw character beneath the surface. This was no Steve Pritchard, gussied up with a college degree. This was a man they felt privileged to know.
    Slowly Bonnie’s fears of rejection subsided. In August 1979, Lieth said he was taking a new job with a finance company in South Bend, Indiana. He asked her to marry him. She said yes.

6
    The newspaper headline said, “Interview With Wife No Help . . . Woman Is Unable to Give Description.” The story quoted a police spokesman as describing an interview with Bonnie as “not fruitful,” and said, “She told police nothing that they had not been able to discern from other evidence.” The attack was still said to have been “the work of intruders” who had broken into the home, but already burglary was losing credibility as a motive. “Police have said that apparently nothing was taken from the house,” the story said.
    Bonnie said later that she was never able to untangle her confused impressions of those first days. Lieth was dead. She would live. Angela had not been hurt. Nothing else mattered. She just wanted to be left alone. And she wanted the police to catch whoever did this. Already, she was impatient. Why did they keep asking her questions? Why didn’t they just catch him, whoever he was?
    And she was tormented by the question of why this had happened at all. The police told her that little, if anything, had been taken from the house. It had not been a robbery gone awry. It appeared to have been premeditated murder. But who would want to kill Lieth—or her?
    True, they were not a sociable couple. They’d made few, if any, friends in Little Washington. But neither did they have enemies, unless there was someone at work who hated Lieth, or feared him. Someone he’d never talked about. But she could not imagine even that. Her head still hurt, it was still hard to breathe, and the tube in her chest hurt most of all.
    Her mother and father and her brother and sisters and their respective wife and husbands had come to Washington. It seemed to Bonnie that they should be fearful for their own lives, as well as for hers and for Chris’s and Angela’s. A madman was out there somewhere. A madman who, for some reason, had singled out Bonnie and Lieth.
    A uniformed policeman remained stationed outside Bonnie’s door. The killer might not know she couldn’t describe him. If he learned she was still alive, what assurance was there that he would not try to silence her?
    A representative of the funeral home came. Bonnie told them to cremate the body. Lieth had always said that’s what he wanted.
    A minister came. He would be conducting the funeral service. He asked questions about Lieth. Neither Bonnie nor Lieth had attended church in Washington, so no minister knew anything about them.
    The ex-president of the Humane Society came. Bonnie didn’t want to see her. She didn’t want to see anyone. But the ex-president of the Humane Society just had to tell Bonnie what she’d heard. Her neighbor had been at the annual summer festival and had seen Angela there with two friends. It seemed strange, she said, that Angela, whom one would have expected to be deep in grief, had been at the summer festival in the first place, but what was even more peculiar, and what the ex-president of the Humane Society just had to rush over to the hospital to tell Bonnie right away, was that a “very, very reliable person” had overheard Angela saying to one of her friends that “Lieth deserved to die.” She didn’t want Bonnie to get upset about this—Lord knows, Bonnie had been through enough—but it was the sort of thing she felt she had a duty to pass on.
    That evening,