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There is a game called Dungeons & Dragons that has been very popular for decades all around the world.
It is a highly immersive role-playing game that pulls its players deep into the storyline that they chose to follow.
The players basically become the characters in the story.
Now, the vast majority of DD players understand that no matter how intense and visceral the game might feel, it is still just that a game.
However, sometimes players forget, like in 1988 in North Carolina.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious Delivered in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please remove all the zippers from the Amazon Music Follow button's.
Pants and jackets.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
It begins here.
From the director of It comes It.
Welcome to Derry, the chilling new HBO original series exploring one of horror's biggest terrors, Pennywise the Clown.
Set in 1960s Derry, Maine, the new HBO original series is streaming Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO Max.
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If you're currently eating Reese's, this is just a test.
Continue living the dream.
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Do not stay calm.
Push people out of the way.
It was the summer of 1972 in the city of Lexington, North Carolina, and 28-year-old Bonnie Bates Pritchard had just received the kind of bad news that would send most wives straight into the arms of a trusted friend, confidant or family member.
But Bonnie was not like most wives.
So when her husband of five years suddenly walked out on Bonnie and the couple's two young children, Bonnie did what she had done ever since she was a little girl who had grown up on a farm in the town of Wellcome, just one town over.
Bonnie didn't talk about her feelings, she didn't threaten to make Steve Prichard sorry for abandoning her and their three and a half year old son and two year old daughter, and Bonnie also did not throw up her hands in despair over whether she'd be able to pay the mortgage on the new little ranch house the couple really shouldn't have bought in the first place.
In fact, on that hot July day, as her husband headed off into the sunset with his latest girlfriend Bonnie, didn't even notify her parents that she was about to become the first person in the Bates family to get a divorce.
Instead, as Bonnie walked back inside the house alone, she hid her hurt as best as she could from her children, Chris and Angela.
And when she finally did have a few minutes to herself to really absorb the news that she was now a single mother, Bonnie did her best to be practical rather than self-pitying.
Bonnie reminded herself that she had a steady job with an insurance company up in the big city of Winston-Salem, 20 miles away, that it was primarily her income anyway that had been supporting the family since she and Steve five years her junior had gotten married back in August of 1967.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Bonnie spread the household bills out in front of her.
With the help of her mom and dad, who lived just two miles away, plus the church daycare where her children were already enrolled.
Bonnie told herself she would just have to find a way to make their lives work and to pay every single bill and debt that was stamped with the name Pritchard.
It wasn't until Bonnie's father happened to stop by Bonnie's house several days after Steve had walked out on her that Bonnie's emotional armor showed its first and only crack.
George Bates, a bricklayer who had helped build the Methodist church in Wellcome that Bonnie and the rest of her five siblings had attended throughout their childhood and teen years, had knocked on her door and asked if there was anything she needed.
And maybe because Bonnie and her father shared the same quiet reserve.
After telling her dad that Steve had left her, Bonnie was finally able to break down and instead of explaining or defending herself, she could just plain cry.
Bonnie knew that people were already talking about Steve and his new girlfriend and about silly Bonnie Bates, who was so desperate for love.
She had married not a grown man but a teenager.
And Bonnie knew there was a little bit of truth in that gossip.
When she had first met 17-year-old Steve Prichard, most of her friends were already married, while 23-year-old Bonnie had had very little experience with boys or with dating.
But while Bonnie's family and her friends saw Steve as a smooth talker who was more interested in flashy cars than he was in working, Bonnie had been completely smitten with his big brown eyes and what she described as the handsomest nose in the whole junior class at West High School in Lexington.
But if Bonnie worried that her father might respond to the news of her separation with and I told you so she was about to be pleasantly surprised.
Because George saw something in his daughter that most men, and even Bonnie herself, just often didn't notice.
Behind Bonnie's thick glasses and quiet manner, there was an adventurous and intelligent woman whose long hair now framed facial features that, over the last few years, had become strong and well-defined.
And while Bonnie was as slender and retiring as ever, the breakup of her marriage and the financial responsibility that was already settling squarely onto her shoulders would show an inner strength that would become one of Bonnie's most defining personal characteristics.
So even when Steve completely failed to pay court-ordered child support and alimony Bonnie, who did not want to further disrupt her children's lives by moving, worked extra hours to cover the mortgage and slowly get ahead on the bills.
And even though the risk that Bonnie took in marrying Steve Prichard had ended in divorce and four exhausting years of Bonnie slowly dragging herself and her children out of a deep financial hole, The fact was, Bonnie had taken other risks in her life that turned out to be both very smart and also very bold, especially for a divorced single mom in rural North Carolina back in the early 1970s.
Even before she met Steve, Bonnie had left the small town of Wellcome.
After graduating from high school And while working as a sales clerk at a department store in Lexington, she had enrolled in courses at Lexington Business College that taught her the basic data entry skills that led to her job with the insurance company in Winston-Salem.
And now that Bonnie was on her own again.
No matter how tired she was when she arrived home after work with her equally tired small children, Bonnie would stay up late into the night making sure to teach herself the latest advances in data entry.
Of course, Bonnie's children also paid a high price for their parents' divorce.
Steve seldom came back to visit his two children, and even when he did, he never seemed to have the money to pay what he owed to Bonnie.
In the end, Bonnie's struggle paid off.
By the time she was 32 years old.
Bonnie was not only a supervisor at Intagon Insurance, she was also the only person at that level of management who had achieved that distinction, even though she did not have a college degree.
But Bonnie's hard work also paid off in another way, one that she could never have dreamed of for herself.
Because in 1976, four years after Steve had left Bonnie and the kids, Bonnie was stunned to discover that she had attracted the romantic attention of one of Intigan's highly regarded financial executives.
And not only was Leith von Steen several big rungs above Bonnie at the insurance company where they both worked, to Bonnie he also seemed totally out of her reach socially.
One year younger than Bonnie, Leith was the only child of a very well-to-do family.
And when Leith was still a baby, his parents had moved from Queens in New York City to North Carolina, where they became even more prosperous.
Once in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, Leith's father had partnered with his brother, Leith's uncle, in running a highly successful dry cleaning business.
And by the time Leith was in high school, Camel City Laundry and Cleaners had become one of the most successful businesses of its kind in the entire country.
Although Bonnie and Leith only had their first social encounter right before Leith was about to leave North Carolina to take a job in Cincinnati Ohio, Leith surprised Bonnie by courting her even after he moved.
And despite the difference in their financial and social backgrounds, Bonnie and Leith actually had a lot in common.
Like Bonnie Leith, was an extremely private person, although among his friends he was well-liked for his sharp sense of humor and the fact that he let you know if something was bothering him, but he was not someone who held a grudge.
And while Leith may have had more self-confidence and definitely more formal education than Bonnie, both of them seemed to be shy and reserved when it came to dating.
But it turned out that Leith had seen in Bonnie the same qualities that were so apparent to her father and her family.
Behind Bonnie's appealing but shy exterior, Leith found himself strongly attracted to Bonnie's keen mind, gentle disposition and her dedication to her children and to her work.
So a romance that had begun with Leith overhearing Bonnie ask a friend where to get a pair of boots for a Halloween costume would culminate three years later in marriage.
Leith had started out by asking Bonnie if she wanted a ride to go get those costume boots.
And by August 17 1979 the couples were saying I do.
And right after exchanging those vows, Bonnie left her job at Intigan Insurance, Leith left his job in Cincinnati Ohio, and after a short stop in Indiana, the new family had moved back to their home state of North Carolina.
There.
In 1981, three years after their marriage, Leith and Bonnie and their two children settled into a roomy two-story home on Lawson Road in the small town called Little Washington.
Leith had a top job as a financial auditor for a local yarn company called National Spinning.
And over the next three years Bonnie would also reenter the workforce as a computer programmer analyst, and Chris and Angela would be enjoying the kind of comfortable, upper-middle-class life that had seemed so completely out of their reach when they had been children.
And then, in the summer of 1987, the Von Steen family got the phone call that would again change everything.
After an 18-month-long period during which Leith's beloved parents first his father and then his mother four months later became sick and then died, Leith was notified that his uncle had also passed away.
And suddenly, practically overnight Leith, the beneficiary of all three of his relatives, had become a very rich man.
Now that all the estates were finally settled between the inheritance from his parents and his uncle, Leith was now looking at a financial portfolio that was worth 2 million, a sum that today would be worth more than 3 million.
By 1988, the Von Steins had also passed some other important milestones.
Leith and Bonnie had made it through Chris's teenaged years, a rite of passage that Leith had found much more challenging than Chris's childhood, when Leith spent weekends and evenings taking his stepson to sports activities and after-school events.
But now Chris was 19 years old and enrolled at the North Carolina University campus in Raleigh, almost two hours to the west.
Chris's first semester grades had not been great, so he was staying on campus for the summer semester.
Leith hoped Chris was taking to heart his parents' warning to focus on his schoolwork or run the risk of losing his 50 a week allowance.
As for Leith's stepdaughter, who was at least as quiet as her mother, Angela was still at home, but she had her own circle of friends and she had fallen in love with horses.
So much so that even on weekends, the 17-year-old was willing to give up the chance to sleep in and instead get up early so she could head to the stables and do some riding.
And so on.
The warm and cloudy evening of Sunday, July 24th 1988, feeling like their life had not only improved but was actually settling down in a way that would give Bonnie and Leith more time alone together, Leith and Bonnie decided to treat themselves to a small celebratory dinner at Sweet Caroline's, a restaurant about 30 minutes away from their home that offered New Orleans-style cuisine.
Sitting in the dark, intimate dining room splashed with color from handcrafted quilts hung from the ceiling.
The two of them enjoyed a carafe of wine and the beef and chicken sundae specials.
Leith especially was feeling happy and hopeful.
Even though Bonnie had often come along to keep him company, the four-hour drive every weekend from Washington to Winston-Salem to take care of his mom and dad had taken a huge toll on Leith.
He had gained weight, and he also knew he was drinking too much.
Now he was looking forward to taking better care of himself.
He was also looking forward to quitting his job at National Spinning and working with Bonnie on a computer program so they could manage their new investments together.
Leith and Bonnie were also looking forward to doing a little traveling.
Even though they had lived in Little Washington for more than three years, neither he or Bonnie thought of it as home, and both of them would enjoy seeing more of the world.
Now, as Leith looked across the small table at his wife, he smiled at her composed and familiar face.
When Leith had told his few close friends five years ago that he was planning to marry Bonnie Lou Bates, they had been surprised to hear he was even dating Bonnie, let alone that he was in love with her.
But even though marrying into a ready-made family had its own challenges, Leith knew he had found the right partner.
And it wasn't just that neither he or Bonnie felt the need to socialize or spend time with neighbors or coworkers.
It was also the physical passion of their relationship that held them together.
Just that afternoon, while Angela was out horseback riding, he and Bonnie had spent what his wife shyly referred to as a few private moments together in their bedroom.
And now that life appeared to be presenting the two of them with all kinds of new opportunities, he and Bonnie both looked forward to enjoying more of those private moments.
Of course, Leith had no intention of wasting their newfound wealth.
He and Bonnie had already met with an estate lawyer and set up a trust for Bonnie as well as trusts for Angela and Chris that would set any inheritance aside until each child was 35 years old and had already established their own lives and careers.
Not that Leith had any plans of dying anytime soon, not with so much to look forward to and not with Bonnie standing so strongly and quietly at his side.
By the time Bonnie and Leith had returned home to 110 Lawson Road, it was close to 9 p.m.
The sky had cleared and was now lit by a bright moon.
Once inside, Leith headed straight for bed, while Bonnie sat down on the sofa in the living room to watch TV.
Two hours later, at about 11 p.m., Bonnie went upstairs to join her husband in the master bedroom.
On her way, she paused to say goodnight to Angela, who slept in the bedroom directly across the hall.
Bonnie had to raise her voice to be heard over the hum of the fan that Angela kept running every night and the music Angela was listening to.
But a few minutes later Bonnie was back in the master bedroom, where she slipped into her nightgown before joining Leith in bed.
An hour later, Bonnie had finished reading one of the romance novels she enjoyed, turned out the light next to her side of the bed, taken off her glasses and fallen asleep.
Even though the night was warm, Bonnie enjoyed feeling Leith's body pressed against her own.
Four and a half hours later, at 427 am on the morning of July 25th, the Beaufort County Sheriff's Department received a 911 call from 110 Lawson Road in Little Washington.
The caller was speaking so softly that the emergency dispatcher, Michelle Sparrow, could hardly understand what the woman on the other end of the line was saying and actually wondered if this was a prank call.
But when Michelle asked the woman to speak louder, the caller's faint reply chilled Michelle to the bone.
My name is Bonnie Leith, the woman whispered.
Please hurry.
My husband may be dying, and I think I may be dying too.
Within minutes of Bonnie dialing 911, the first police and medical personnel had arrived at the neat white frame house on Lawson Road.
And the sight of what lay behind the door of the Von Steen's master bedroom shocked even the most hardened and experienced of the first responders.
The walls and ceiling of the bedroom were literally dripping with blood.
Even before the medics checked for a pulse, it was clear that the stocky man on the bed, dressed only in his boxers, was dead.
With his swollen eyes and crushed skull, he was clearly the victim of one of the most gruesome and violent attacks that Beaufort County law enforcement had ever seen.
But it was the person lying on the floor next to the bed who commanded the attention of medics and later police, because it was clear that whoever had just killed Leith von Steen had also intended to kill his wife Bonnie.
And from the look of the cuts on Bonnie's face and the two and a half inch long stab wound in the center of her chest, that attempt had very nearly been successful.
By the time Bonnie had been rushed to the hospital, she was already suffering the effects of a collapsed lung and massive blood loss.
But even as medics raced to stabilize Bonnie's dangerously low blood pressure, one of the first responding police officers who had cleared the house of intruders had opened the door across from the master bedroom and found Bonnie's daughter Angela, still fast asleep, with a box fan positioned right next to her bed, blowing air directly onto the young woman.
When Angela finally heard the officer's voice, she seemed to come fully awake, sitting up abruptly and wanting to know what happened.
But what the officer would remember most about Angela was how little emotion she showed even after walking into her parents' blood-drenched room and talking briefly to her gravely injured mother just before Bonnie was rushed to the hospital.
But if Angela's response seemed cold and distant, her brother's response was just the opposite.
Just a few minutes after the call from Angela telling him that their stepfather was dead and their mom injured, Chris made a hysterical emergency call to the campus police at North Carolina University in Raleigh.
Unable to find the keys to the 1965 classic Mustang that Leith had given him on his 16th birthday, Chris desperately begged campus security for a ride back home to Little Washington.
And by 8 am, Chris was standing next to his mother's hospital bed, holding Bonnie's hand and crying uncontrollably.
Meanwhile, back at 110 Lawson Road, the two lead investigators in the case were already putting together their first impressions of the crime scene.
To 26-year-old local detective John Taylor.
It seemed obvious that whoever had committed the crime had taken pains to make it look like a burglary, starting with a pane of glass in the back door that had been broken, as though someone had reached through the opening to unlock the door from the inside.
But whoever had broken the glass had chosen one of the panes that was so high above the inside door lock that it was impossible to reach down and actually unlock the bolt.
As for the open purse on the kitchen counter and a few open drawers and cabinets, they appeared to be signs that someone may have searched the house, but none of the money and jewelry that had been left out in plain sight had been taken.
And then there was the attack itself, which had been so over-the-top and violent that Detective Taylor believed it had to have been personal and premeditated rather than the work of some random stranger.
If that was true, the detective thought he would be very interested in interviewing the people who had been closest to Leith von Steen, and that included not only his two stepkids but his wife Bonnie.
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Detective Taylor's observations about the crime scene being staged to look like a burglary were confirmed when he was joined at about 9am that same morning by an agent from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.
Together, State Agent Lewis Young and Detective Taylor began overseeing the collection and photographing of possible evidence.
They also ordered local law enforcement to process the crime scene and dust for fingerprints, as well as interview neighbors and search for a possible murder weapon.
Local officers were also sent to National Spinning Company, where Leith worked in the finance department, to follow up on the possibility that the murder had been in response to Leith uncovering some kind of fraud or firing a disgruntled employee.
But by 11 pm that night it was clear to law enforcement that they were not likely to find any quick answers in the Von Steen murder case.
Because so far, the initial interviews they had conducted that day with neighbors and with family members always prime suspects in a homicide had created more confusion than clarity.
It turned out that, aside from co-workers, very few people in the neighborhood and in the town of little washington really knew the von scenes.
Instead, the couple had been viewed as standoffish, and the community's first glimpse into the Von Steen's private lives had only increased the public perception that the family was odd or somehow peculiar.
There was the discovery by police that morning that the Von Steen residence was home to 13 cats and one pet rooster, all part of a menagerie that Bonnie had collected as a result of her work with the Beaufort County Humane Society, the one organization in which she had been very active.
And then there was the reaction, or rather the lack of reaction, on the part of the Von Steen children to the attack on their parents.
After Chris's outpouring of grief that morning at his mother's side in the hospital, he seemed more agitated and edgy than heartbroken.
As for Angela, neighbors whispered that not only did she seem totally emotionless, she didn't even seem curious about what had just happened in the bedroom right across from her own.
But one thing the neighbors did agree on was that the Leith family may have recently come into a lot of money, but that didn't mean they didn't have problems.
According to neighbors, Leith in particular was very upset over Chris's failing grades at North Carolina State University.
There were other rumors too.
Maybe Bonnie had killed her husband in order to inherit his newfound wealth, and then she had turned the knife on herself to deflect police suspicion.
Or maybe it was Angela who rarely visited her mother in the hospital.
Or maybe it was Chris, whose life at university was clouded with reports of drinking and drug abuse.
Or maybe it was all three of them, Bonnie and her two kids who now had all the money in the world.
But the Von Steins themselves totally rejected these reports as completely inaccurate.
And, as police soon found out as far as motive and alibi went, immediate family members were all in the clear.
Not only could multiple witnesses confirm that Chris was two hours away in Raleigh when his parents were attacked, He told investigators that any friction between him and his stepdad had been totally minor.
And when police turned their attention to Angela, her story lined up with what her brother had told them.
She and her brother didn't always see eye to eye with their parents, but that didn't mean the kids wanted to kill their mom and dad.
As for the night of Leith's murder, Angela had nothing to add to what police already knew.
Between the whirring of the fan right next to her bed and the fact that she was a heavy sleeper, she had heard nothing and had slept through the entire attack.
As for Bonnie, police went to speak with her just hours after the attack on Monday afternoon in the hospital.
She would survive her injuries, but the three messy gashes on her forehead would eventually require several rounds of plastic surgery.
And her doctors dismissed the idea that her injuries, which were serious enough that she would not be allowed to leave the hospital for another seven days, could have been self-inflicted.
But despite Bonnie's best efforts to tell police what happened on the night Leith was killed, all she could offer were a series of disjointed memories.
She'd been awakened by screams from her husband, who had seemed to be leaning over and trying to protect her from something or someone, and the only image Bonnie had of their attacker was that she thought it was a man with bulky shoulders who had been swinging a club of some kind.
As for the exact time of the attack, it must have happened after midnight, when Bonnie had fallen asleep.
But she also believed that she had lost consciousness at some point after the attack and it was only when she came to later that she made the 911 call to Beaufort County Dispatch at 427 am.
As for problems within the Von Steen family, Bonnie just shook her head.
Leith had really been the only father her kids had ever known, and he had been a very good dad.
Yes, Bonnie told police.
Of course there had been arguments, but even the very worst of those between Leith and Chris had never resulted in any physical violence.
And even though Bonnie was pleasant and cooperative with investigators throughout the interview, it was also clear that she was frustrated that police seemed to be focusing their suspicions on her and her children.
Because to Bonnie that just didn't make any sense.
Someone had obviously intended to kill her as well as Leith, and now that the murderer had failed, what if they came back and tried again?
And even worse, what if this person also tried to hurt her kids?
So, even as Bonnie told police that she understood that they had to rule out family members from their suspect list, What she really wanted to know was what other leads police were pursuing in their hunt for her husband's killer.
And it wasn't until the evening of the next day, Tuesday July 26th, almost 48 hours after Leith had likely been killed, that local police had an answer to Bonnie's question.
It would turn out that just minutes after Bonnie's 911 call in the early morning hours of Monday, July 25th, Washington police had also received another call reporting suspicious and possible criminal activity in that same area.
While driving his pickup truck along Grimesland Bridge Road just a mile west of the Beaufort County line, a tobacco and hog farmer named Noel Lee had been surprised to see a fire burning out in the middle of nowhere, maybe eight feet off the side of the deserted stretch of road he was traveling.
As a former volunteer fireman, what caught Noel's attention was the fact that the flames, which burned so brightly and shot straight up into the air, had to have been fueled with some kind of accelerant.
After making sure that the fire had no chance of spreading in the wet, swampy surroundings, Noel put in a call to the Little Washington Police Department.
Maybe it was nothing the farmer reported, but he knew it had to have been arson, meaning someone had set this fire on purpose.
In the uproar over Leith's murder, Noel's report did not make it onto Detective Taylor's desk until almost two days later.
But by 1130 pm on Tuesday night the investigator and several officers were out on Grimesland Bridge Road examining the site of the fire.
And that's when investigators got their first important break in the Von Steen murder case.
Poking through the charred remains of the fire, Detective Young found a partially melted hunting knife with a six-inch long blade.
The fire may have destroyed any fingerprints or traces of blood, but the medical examiner would later confirm what police already knew.
They had just found their murder weapon.
And that wasn't all.
In addition to several pieces of burned clothing and a sneaker, police also discovered a singed but still readable hand-drawn map of Smallwood, the exact neighborhood where the Von Steen family lived.
And right there on a road clearly labeled Lawson, was an X next to the house numbered 110.
Police now had several new and critical pieces of information.
Assuming the fire had been deliberately set by Leith's murderer in an effort to dispose of any evidence related to the crime.
The map police found confirmed that attack on the Von Steens was definitely not a random burglary.
And since the murderer had apparently needed detailed directions to find the Von Steen's house, the murderer probably wasn't from Little Washington.
But even using the clues they had uncovered in that fire, it would still take police another 11 months to track down the person who had murdered Leith Von Steen.
And during that time, the physical and mental health of the Von Steen family deteriorated.
After getting discharged from the hospital on August 1st eight days after her husband's murder Bonnie moved herself and her children first to a Holiday Inn in Little Washington, then to her parents' house in Wellcome and finally up to Winston-Salem into the cramped, dark house that had once belonged to Leith's parents and that now belonged to Bonnie.
Meanwhile, Bonnie continued to suffer adverse effects from her injuries and Chris dropped out of North Carolina State University.
Angela's attempts to move on with her life also failed when she enrolled and then withdrew from a small college in southwestern Virginia.
But it wasn't until June of 1989, almost a year after Leith's murder, that police were finally able to give Bonnie and her family the answers Bonnie had so desperately wanted.
And those answers would not only shock all of Little Washington and Bonnie's hometown of Wellcome.
It would catapult the Von Steen murder onto the front pages of national newspapers for weeks and months to come.
Based on the information and evidence police discovered from the site of the fire on Grimesland Bridge Road on July 26th, a day after Bonnie's 911 call to local police, here is a reconstruction of what happened in the early morning hours when 42-year-old Leith Von Steen was murdered.
After Bonnie said goodnight to Angela, sometime after 11pm on the night of Sunday, July 24th, she walked back into the bedroom she shared with Leith and changed into her nightclothes.
Just before getting into bed, Bonnie gently roused her husband to see if he might like a glass of iced tea or water.
After a mumbled no, Leith turned over and immediately fell back to sleep.
After reading quietly for 30 minutes, Bonnie took off her glasses, turned off her bedside light and she too fell fast asleep.
Meanwhile, the killer had made their own preparations for the night, packing a baseball bat and hunting knife into a green canvas knapsack.
And now, at 230 am, the hand-drawn map spread out on their lap had led the killer directly to their target here in the town of Little Washington.
They had actually arrived a little earlier than expected.
So for the next half hour the killer just sat in their car and absently fiddled with the key to the back door of 110 Lawson Road and they made a mental review of the inside of the house.
The killer didn't think getting in or out of this house would be a big problem.
And, sure enough, about 30 minutes later, dressed in dark clothes and carrying the green knapsack, the killer made no sound as they slipped inside the back door and just as quietly made their way up the stairs to the first bedroom on the right.
If need be, they would kill the girl named Angela too.
It all depended on the next few minutes and whether or not she slept through what was about to happen.
Stepping across the threshold into the master bedroom, the killer paused, allowing their eyes to further adjust to the dim moonlight shining in through the partially curtained windows.
Then the killer took a deep, steadying breath and gripped his weapons.
First the bat, then the knife, he told himself.
And then, feeling ready, he stepped forward and got to work.
By the time Bonnie woke up to the sound of her husband's short, piercing screams, Leith was sitting up in bed.
In the minutes that followed, the assailant would hit Leith at least five times in the head with the baseball bat, causing deep skull fractures and multiple cuts and gashes.
The assailant would also strike Bonnie in the head and sides, including a blow aimed at Leith that would break Leith's wrist and fracture Bonnie's thumb.
Along with cataloging defensive scrapes and bruises, the medical examiner who would later conduct the autopsy on Leith's body reported a total of seven stab wounds in Leith's upper back and shoulder and one stab wound to the left side of his chest that had completely punctured his heart.
Throughout the attack, Bonnie was aware only of a single dark figure at the foot of the bed striking her and her husband again and again.
And with each blow and each downward plunge of the hunting knife, another spray of blood spattered across the walls, the bed, the floor and the ceiling.
At least twice during the attack.
Bonnie lost consciousness and the last image she had of the attacker was when she woke up on the floor next to the bed and the assailant was standing at her feet.
Then the figure disappeared and Bonnie heard a whooshing noise and the soft click of a bedroom door closing, before she once again drifted into unconsciousness.
What the murderer did not know was that Bonnie was not dead.
The knife strike into the very center of Bonnie's chest had glanced off bone and cut not onto the heart but into the chest wall, causing her lung to collapse and her chest cavity to fill with blood, but leaving her heart intact.
When Bonnie woke again just before 430 am, she reached up, thinking she needed to get back on top of the bed.
That's when she felt Leith's hand.
His fingers were sticky with blood and were hanging limp off the side of the bed.
It was at that point that Bonnie, who was now sure that her daughter Angela, must also be in danger, dragged herself to the phone and called 911.
Meanwhile, the killer had already left the house.
Just before exiting through the back door, they had rifled through the handbag that had been left out on the kitchen counter, and then they knocked out a pane in the back door window, so it would look like the door had been forced open and the house had been robbed.
But even then, as he failed to grab the green knapsack he'd dropped on the back porch, the killer's thoughts were already far away.
All summer long, the killer had gotten more and more deeply involved in the game.
But until now, all the points the killer had ever earned in the game had been based on carrying out imaginary adventures, just role-playing different scenarios they'd created in their mind.
But tonight, this adventure had been real.
This time the killer had entered a real castle, killed a real sleeping overlord, spared his sleeping daughter.
This time, the killer hadn't used a game board and dice and a deck of cards to play Dungeons and Dragons.
This time the killer had brought their favorite all-consuming game to life.
This time, the killer had drawn real blood.
More blood, in fact, than he'd ever imagined a human body could contain.
As the killer slipped into the waiting car, he imagined Chris Pritchard's face when he told Chris all the details, because the killer had just done exactly what Chris Pritchard had wanted him to do to kill Chris's stepfather and mother.
James Upchurch III, known to good friends like Chris.
Gripping the steering wheel.
The driver, 21-year-old Neil Henderson, shot a questioning.
Look back at Moog.
Neil had recently dropped out of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, but Moog and Chris had invited him to join them in their conspiracy to kill Chris's parents, promising Neil a payment of anywhere between 2000 and 20000.
In a moment, Neil had his answer.
Pulling off his black ski mask, his face alive with excitement, Moog punched the air with a bald fist.
I did it, he told Neil.
I can't believe I did it.
It would turn out that by the end of his second semester at North Carolina University in Raleigh, Chris Pritchard wasn't just getting bad grades.
In fact, Chris's problems were much, much worse.
Since arriving at college, Chris hadn't just become a heavy drinker, he had also become a habitual drug abuser, a habit that was costing him more than he could possibly cover using the 50 a week allowance he got from his parents, Leith and Bonnie.
While his parents did not know the extent of their son's alcohol and drug addiction, which now included marijuana ecstasy, cocaine and LSD, they had given Chris an ultimatum.
He either used his summer semester to clean up his act and improve his grades, or his parents would stop his allowance and he would have to leave college and find a job.
But by the start of that summer semester, Chris had discovered something else at college that was just as addictive as the alcohol and drugs.
Along with two other boys on campus, Chris had become obsessed with the complicated and immersive role-playing game called Dungeons & Dragons. which Chris had first started playing back when he was 12 years old and living at home.
First introduced in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons allowed players to create and assume the identity of adventurers from all different historical periods, races, and occupations.
Each game had a dungeon master who would act both as a referee and storyteller, and by completing various adventures and challenges, each player could earn so-called experience points that would allow them to move to higher and higher levels within the game.
The theme that James Upchurch III, Neil Henderson and Chris Prichard chose for creating their adventures was medieval swords and sorcery, a theme that had its roots in the life and times of people who lived in Europe during the Middle Ages.
As the boys spent more and more time together playing the game, Chris had also begun bragging to Neil and James about how rich his stepfather had recently become, exaggerating the amount of Leith's inheritance from 2 million to 10 million.
And by mid-July of that summer semester, Chris and Moog, who was a dungeon master, had moved from role-playing adventures in Dungeons & Dragons to actually plotting the best way to murder Chris's parents and sister so Chris could inherit all that money and share it with his good friends Moog and Neil.
Their first plan, which they tried to put into action on Saturday, July 23rd, was to drug the Von Steens with sleeping pills and then start an electrical fire that would burn down the house at 110 Lawson Road and kill Leith, Bonnie and Angela.
But that plot failed completely when Chris and James were unable to crush the fuse box and start the fire.
Still, that failure didn't stop Chris.
By the very next day, he and Moog had come up with a better plan.
This time Chris would stay at college and create an airtight alibi for himself, while Neil used Chris's white 1965 Mustang to drive Moog who did not have a valid driver's license down to Little Washington, so Moog could kill Chris's parents.
Instead of sleeping pills and arson.
Moog would kill Chris's parents and possibly Chris's sister Angela, using a baseball bat, along with a knife that Chris had purchased for the job at a Kmart in Raleigh.
No one would suspect Moog and Neil played any part in the murder, since neither one of them had any obvious connection to Mr and Mrs Von Steen.
And all Chris had to do was get them a key to the Von Steen house, draw them a map of exactly where his parents house was located, then make sure that during the time of the murder he was seen by plenty of people playing cards in a friend's dorm room.
Until 3 30 am on the morning of monday, july 25th, Once Moog had committed the murder, he and Neil would stop somewhere on their way back to Raleigh and get rid of the murder weapons and any other evidence, including the map, that could tie any of them to the crime.
As for Angela, if she woke up during the attack, then James should kill her too.
And once Chris received word at university that his parents were dead, he would cover for the absence of his car, the classic white Mustang that had been a gift from his stepfather, by saying that he could not find the car keys and needed a ride from campus security to join Angela and his injured mother in Little Washington.
Chris would later say that he was happy his mom survived the attack, But friends and neighbors would tell police that, instead of asking how Bonnie was doing after the attack, the questions Chris was asking everybody was what had Bonnie said?
What had Bonnie seen?
And what did Bonnie remember about her attacker?
As for his co-conspirators, Neil and James, aka Moog, as soon as Chris got his hands on his parents' money, Moog would get 50000 and a brand new Porsche sports car as payment for killing Chris's parents, and Neil the driver would get a nice payday as well.
Except that, under the terms of Leith's will, neither Chris or Angela would be able to touch any of their parents' money until they were 35 years old.
And as it turned out, the murder might have gone unsolved except for two things.
The report of the fire that led to the discovery of the murder weapon and map, and a decision by Little Washington Police back in March, seven months after the murder, to reinvestigate all aspects of the crime.
Because, from the start, the more police saw and learned about Chris Pritchard, the more certain they were that, regardless of his alibi, Leith's stepson must have been involved in Leith's murder.
That new investigation included running the name of Chris Prichard's friends up in Raleigh through a national criminal database to see if any of them had criminal records.
That search turned up the name of James Upchurch III, aka Moog, who had been arrested on three previous occasions, once for breaking into his local high school with friends and stealing some electronic equipment, and two other times for stealing a cooler of beer and for driving without a license.
In following that new lead, investigators began a more systematic interrogation of this core group of three friends who had started to spend every waking hour together playing the potentially violent game of Dungeons & Dragons.
And as the pressure on the three boys increased and Chris's mental health declined, Investigators believed it was only a matter of time before one of them broke down and confessed to some involvement in the Von Steen murder.
And that is exactly what happened.
On June 9th, 1989, almost 11 months after Leith died, Neil Henderson cracked.
In exchange for a plea deal that would minimize his prison sentence.
Neal met with investigators and described Chris's plot in detail, while also insisting that he Neal, never really believed that Moog would actually go through with the murder.
Neal wasn't the only conspirator to strike a plea deal with the Beaufort County District Attorney's Office.
In exchange for testifying against James Upchurch III, aka Moog, Chris Prichard, who admitted it was his idea to kill his parents and possibly his sister, also agreed to plead guilty to aiding and abetting murder.
Chris, who had dropped 19 tabs of LSD in the month leading up to the murder, felt it would be better to kill his parents than face their disappointment when they learned just how badly he was doing in school and in life.
On January 24th 1990, one and a half years after Leith's murder, 22-year-old James Moog Upchurch was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in the gas chamber.
Two years later, in 1992, the Supreme Court vacated that death sentence and instead imposed a term of life in prison.
22-year-old Neil Henderson was sentenced to 40 years in prison, but was released on parole just 10 years later, in December of 2000.
As of 2021, he was living in North Carolina and managing a restaurant.
Chris Pritchard was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years.
After going through drug and alcohol rehab, he became a born-again Christian and was released on parole in May of 1997.
Immediately upon his release, Chris returned to North Carolina and moved back home with his mother.
Chris completed his parole in May of 2012.
As of 2022.
He is a manager for a men's program at Soteria Community Development Corporation and lives near Spartanburg, South Carolina, with his wife.
Chris and Bonnie remain close.
We want to thank two authors whose non-fiction books were key sources in writing this podcast episode.
The first is Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinnis and the second is called Blood Games, A True Account of Family Murder by Jerry Bledsoe.
Both books were published in 1991 and in the following year.
Each was the basis for either a TV movie or miniseries.
If you're interested in learning more about the Von Steen case, please check out our sources for links to official documents, as well as newspaper, magazine and internet articles.
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