Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411160037
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Barbara Stager is a remarkable woman.
Born in 1948 and raised in what appeared to be a conventional middle-class, white, North Carolina family, she became what appeared to be an equally conventional wife, homemaker and working mother. At the same time, she was a liar of astonishing imagination and ambition, and before her 40th birthday, she had killed two husbands.
Shot both of them in the head with a .25 caliber pistol as they slept in their beds. Said it was an accident both times.
Eventually, a jury disagreed and that's the subject of Jerry Bledsoe's "Before He Wakes." True-crime writing gets more unbelievable every day, and this book - scrupulously factual - will strain any reader's credulity to the limit. It involves precedent-setting legal maneuvers, reversals and evidence that no fiction writer would dare try to pass off.
The circumstances that led up the killings could hardly be more mundane. Barbara is the first child in a church-going family. She's a good daughter all through high school. When she goes off to college, she turns a little wild and winds up pregnant and married before the end of her freshman year. But the young couple make the best of their situation, and after the birth of their second son, they seem happy enough.
They're not happy, though. Something is horribly wrong. Barbara is given to wild stories about sex and attempted rapes by strangers. There is at least one potentially psychotic "episode" that elicits a surprisingly nonchalant response from her parents. Some years later, a pistol "accidentally" goes off.
Later there are more lies - much richer and grander - and then with the second marriage come extravagant spending and a secret life of sexual adventures. Those adventures are only suggested, never described - much like Barbara herself.
Jerry Bledsoe is able to document much of what she did in precise detail. He covered her trials for the Greensboro News & Record and he's the author of two other popular accounts of North Carolina murder, "Blood Games" and "Bitter Blood."
In a recent interview, he said that the police gave him free access to their evidence in the Barbara Stager case. Many of her friends and co-workers talked to him, too, almost always expressing a degree of disbelief. But at the center of the story, Barbara herself remains a mystery.
"No one in Barbara's family cooperated," he said, "which leads you to believe there's some deep dark secret in the family. But there's no admitted trauma, either by family members who were interviewed separately or by Barbara - no trauma of any kind. No emotional trauma or physical trauma in her childhood.
"She came up with all the same values we all were taught. That's why people trusted her and believed her so. They simply can't accept it, because to accept that is to accept that evil can come in and just grab anybody."
The keys then, as he sees them, are "Barbara's mother and sex. And repressed religion is a vital factor." But he's reluctant to speculate much beyond that.
"That's the scary thing about Barbara: she's the most evil person I've ever dealt with, and she's utterly normal. So she's a psychopath, and the question is: what makes psychopaths? We don't know that. We have no idea. They're simply people without consciences.
"Are you born that way? Does something come along and force that into you? Is it the expectations of mama trying to make you perfect? I don't know."
In the end, Barbara Stager's secrets and contradictions are inevitable. And the book itself is more satisfying for acknowledging them and not relying on easy psychological answers.
by CNB