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husband was more than she could bear. She began deteriorating, and Lieth and Bonnie frequently made the eight-hour round trip from Washington to Winston-Salem to attend to her. In July she died in the same hospital in which her husband had died four and a half months earlier.
    The loss of both of his beloved parents in so short a period—soon to be followed by the death of his Uncle Richard—hit Lieth hard and settling his parents’ estates occupied much of his time in late 1987 and early 1988. It also brought him a considerable amount of frustration and irritation.
    “I’m so relieved. I’ve just settled this thing,” he told an old friend. “Don’t ever get involved with the trust department of a bank. It’s just so unbelievable.”
    With his father’s wealth now at his disposal, Lieth had the opportunity to do something that he had been thinking about for several years: change his life.
    He had settled into a boring routine. On weekdays, he got up at seven, showered, had coffee with Bonnie until about eight-fifteen, left for work. Because he had gained so much weight (he was only 5′6″, but he had ballooned up to nearly 170 pounds), he rarely ate lunch anymore, often settling only for a piece of fruit. He was home in late afternoon, always had a few beers before supper, which was always at six-thirty. After supper, he watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy on TV, and was in bed by eight-thirty or nine. On weekends, when he and Bonnie were not visiting with her relatives, they went to Greenville for breakfast, always to the same restaurant.
    Lieth had fallen into a rut. He was aware of it, and it worried him. He thought that he wouldn’t live long. He was overweight. He drank too much. He didn’t exercise. Shortly after his mother’s death, he took out another life insurance policy, this one for $350,000.
    In the spring of 1988, Rob Lorber heard that Lieth was in Winston-Salem, staying at his parents’ house, which he did not plan to sell. They rarely saw each other anymore, but Rob decided to drop by.
    “I yelled at him for not getting in touch with me more,” Rob recalled later. Rob’s and Lieth’s senses of humor had always meshed and fed off one another. “We were really silly together,” Rob recalled. No matter how infrequent or short their visits, they always fell back into the old routines, joking and laughing.
    That happened on this visit, too, but Rob thought that he detected an underlying sadness in Lieth, a sense of fatalism about his situation.
    Rob knew that Lieth didn’t really like his work and never had. His new wealth, though, could change that. Indeed, Lieth already was thinking of quitting his job at the end of the year, of using the money his father had made to make more of his own. So work alone could not account for the sorrow Rob sensed in Lieth. Other factors, no doubt, prevailed. Family factors, perhaps.
    Lieth rarely talked with friends about his relationship with Bonnie, and as far as they knew, it was fine. But all of his friends knew that his relationship with Bonnie’s children wasn’t so fine. They knew that had to be especially distressing to Lieth, because he had wanted so desperately for them to accept him and love him as a father.
    Some of his friends thought that Lieth had made a mistake all too common to stepparents: he had tried to buy their love. He bought Chris and Angela whatever they wanted, and although he tried to attach responsibility to the gifts, that never quite worked. In Indiana, he had bought both children expensive bicycles, paying nearly six hundred dollars each for them. When Chris went out and wrecked his, Lieth got him another one. Later, when Chris wanted a classic Mustang for his sixteenth birthday, he got it. When he wanted an expensive stereo for his car, he got it. When he asked for a computer, that, too, was quick in coming. Yet there was always an underlying tension between Lieth and the children, especially between Lieth and his stepson