Van Brett Watkins walks slowly into the visitation room, using a cane.
He wears a brown jumpsuit, standard issue for inmates at maximum-security Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C. He sits behind double-paned glass embedded with metal bars. A small grate at the bottom allows conversation if you speak loudly, which Watkins will do for the next three hours.
"I don't get many visitors," he begins. "Mostly because I don't want any."
There are two competing accounts of the night Cherica Adams was shot in 1999. This is the man at the heart of both of them.
No one disputes that Watkins fired five shots, four of them striking Adams, that night.
Watkins was a hitman _ and a prolific one, he said. Former Carolina Panther Rae Carruth hired him to kill the woman carrying Carruth's baby and her unborn child, too, according to Watkins.
But Adams was not the first person Watkins killed, the hitman said, revealing that information for the first time.
The essence of Watkins' story about the Cherica Adams shooting hasn't changed from the one he told during Carruth's trial in 2000, but Watkins sprinkled in new information and details in our interview.
Not everyone buys Watkins' story, however.
David Rudolf, Carruth's defense attorney and later the man who would become one of the stars of the Netflix true-crime documentary "The Staircase," still believes Watkins shot Adams on his own.
In an August interview, Rudolf offered new details, too, shared with him by Carruth earlier that month when Rudolf visited the former Carolina Panther in prison.
Rudolf was authorized by Carruth during that visit to speak to the Observer for this story. The attorney said Carruth was at the scene of the shooting that night, in his Ford Expedition directly in front of Cherica Adams, just before the drive-by shooting began.
When Watkins pulled alongside Adams' BMW, with his .38 special loaded and the window rolled down, Carruth fled, Rudolf said, because he thought Watkins was coming after him.
"He was scared, and he took off," Rudolf said. "And he's not particularly proud of that. It's not sort of a heroic thing to do _ big football player, you know, running.
"But that's what he did."
So was Carruth a killer? Or simply a coward?
