The Von Stein Family Tragedy part V: Fear in Smallwood

A quiet suburb woke to sirens and never slept the same. The murder of Leith Von Stein didn’t just shake a neighborhood; it cracked the illusion that safety lives behind manicured hedges and porch lights. We follow the ripple effects—from a neighbor’s raw letter of shared grief to a town that left lamps burning, phoned in every strange car, and asked whether a killer was still walking among them.

As fear swelled, so did the rumors. Some sounded like pulp fiction: mafia plots, undercover identities, even a flock of chickens meant to distract the family’s cats. Others cut closer: talk of strained family dynamics, money whispers, and late-night timelines. We unpack how investigators sift noise from signal, chasing every tip without letting gossip dictate the case. You’ll hear why the decision to route evidence to the FBI mattered, how lab timelines clash with public impatience, and where forensics can turn speculation into hard fact.

The civic storyline is just as gripping. A newly installed city manager faced a flood of anxious calls while an old-school police chief bristled at oversight. That tension shaped trust, transparency, and the way information flowed through the community. Interviews with friends, classmates, and first responders layered in behavioral details—Dungeons & Dragons obsessions, alleged drug use, flat affect under stress—that demanded careful interpretation rather than snap judgment. Along the waterfront festival crowds danced as whispers followed the Von Stein children, proof that life and dread can share the same street.

If you care about true crime beyond sensational headlines, this story lays bare what happens when fear moves faster than evidence. Press play to dig into community psychology, investigative discipline, and the fragile line between theory and truth. If the episode resonates, share it with a friend, follow the show, and leave a review to tell us which detail shifted your view.

Chapters

• 2:45 A Community In Shock
• 5:54 Fear Spreads Through Smallwood
• 11:17 Echoes Of Past Cases
• 14:07 Prank Calls And Public Panic
• 17:58 City Hall Versus The Police Chief
• 22:36 Pressure From Media Power Brokers
• 27:34 Gut Instincts: An Inside Job
• 30:08 Festival Crowds, Whispered Theories
• 34:06 Rumors Target The Family
• 37:54 Probing Chris And Angela
• 42:42 Dungeons, Drugs, And Doubt

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:23

Welcome to the murder book. I'm your host, Kiara, and this is part five of the Von Stein Family Tragedy. Let's begin. The murder of Leith Von Stein affected Washington as no other crime ever had. On the morning of the murder, as Mollwood was a swarm with police officers, a neighbor whom the Von Steins did not know, Hiran Grady, sat down to write a letter to the editor of the newspaper. And he wrote that he was feeling frustrated, confused, and saddened, and he was too numb at this point to feel much else. And then he goes on in his letter. He continued in his letter saying the following, and quote, I do not know the family in Smallwood, whose world has been shattered this morning. I have never spoken to them, although they live only a few houses down from my backyard. I do not know them, but I share their grief. It overwhelms me. How can such a crime happen in our own backyards? How can anyone commit such a violent, unfeeling act upon anyone? This terrible act of violence does not affect just the family and friends of the victims. It affects us all. We are all victims. Let us pray to God we will never feel the pain of such a terrible crime in our backyards again. Many in Smallwood were thinking the same thoughts and asking themselves the same questions. And they were fearful of just the thing that Hiran Grady suggested, that they might indeed again feel the pain of such a terrible crime, and next time, not just in their backyards, but in their own houses. If the Von Stein murder was not the ultimate suburban horror story, it was close to it. Here were Bonnie and Leith, decent, respectable people to all appearances, hardworking, successful, healthy, well off, involved in no wrongdoing, thinking themselves safe in the comfortable home in the manicured subdivision far removed from the fears and dangers of big city life. Yet they have been invaded by a fearsome shadow in the night, attacked in their sleep. And Leith von Stein had died a terrified death, screaming and helpless. And then the Shadow Week Killer had slipped back into the night from and he had come from where he had come, and even now he might be walking among the people of Smallwood of Washington, stalking still with new victims in mind. And just the thought of this fearsome possibility sent a collective shudder through Old of Beaufort County. Nowhere was that awful possibility felt more intensely than in Smallwood. Nobody knew whether or not a maniacal killer might be loose in the area. And as days passed with no arrest and no news to relieve worried minds, the subdivision's frightened residents grew tense, jittery, and extremely suspicious. Lock missed and installers of alarm systems couldn't keep up with the demand from Smallwood. Unknown cars or strangers passing through the area brought immediate calls to the police. Outside and inside, lights were left on at night, and all the police patrols were stepped up in the area. Some residents kept all night watches. Others began locking their bedroom doors when they went to bed. Detectives found themselves going back to Smallwood time and again to talk to fearful residents who had things to report. One woman, the wife of another National Spinning Company executive, thought that perhaps she and her husband were supposed to be the victims, that the murderer might have mistaken the Vansteins for them. Her husband had left for an extended business trip to England on Sunday, the day before the murder. On the Friday before, he had received a substantial check for expenses. Many people knew about that check, she said. Perhaps the murderer had wanted that money, but had confused the two houses. Both Von Stein and her husband drove similar company cars, the same color, she pointed out, and their house numbers would be the same if only a single digit were transposed. Another small wood resident called the detective to his house to tell them that he had been awakened by a mysterious noise almost every morning about four for more than a year. He didn't think he needed to point out that the murder had occurred at about that time. He just thought the two things might be connected. The detectives thanked him for the information and left shaking their heads. For all they knew, the guy might be being startled or awake by the sound of his own gas passing. It was not only in Smallwood that people were uneasy and losing sleep over Von Devon Stein murder. Michelle Sparrow, the dispatcher who had kept Bonnie on the line until officers could get to her, was so disturbed by the murder that she had trouble sleeping for days. Danny Eders, the second officer into Bonnie's bedroom, began locking his own bedroom door when he went to bed, and for several nights he was awakened by dreams of Leith Van Stein's bloodied body. In Pitt County, Noel Lee, who had come upon the fire that contained the murder weapon, was looking at his neighbors with suspicion, wondering if one of them might have been the murderer, and if he had put himself and his family in danger by reporting the fire to police. Not since another killing 14 years earlier had murder been such a topic of conversation in Washington and Beaufort County. He was nude from the waist down and had semen on his left leg. The cell in which he was found had been occupied by a 20-year-old black woman named Joan, oh Joanne Little, who had been serving time for larsen and burglary, and was alone in the female wing of the jail. She was missing, as were the dead jailer's keys. Tracked down and arrested for murder and escape, Joanne Little claimed that the jailer had forced her to perform oral sex and she had killed him and fled. Her cause was taken up by women's and civil rights groups, and Washington found itself the unwilling focus of national and international attention. Reporters flocked to Washington, and many times people found themselves unfairly portrayed as ignorant, redneck, and racist. In the eight-week trial and rally, a year after the killing, Joanne Little was defended by a flamboyant liberal attorney named Jerry Paul, a native of Beaufort County. A jury of six whites and six blacks took just over an hour to acquit her of the murder charge. Although that case had caused a lot of talk and resentment in Washington, it not being the source of nearly as many rumors as the Von Stein murder. And it had produced none of the fear that now had the entire town on edge. As each day passed, more calls came to the police department, the newspaper, the town's manager's office, wanting to know if certain rumors were true, asking when an arrest was going to be made. And each day, the pressure grew greater on Lewis Young and Melvin Hope, the detectives who had primary responsibility for the case. And they still had nothing conclusive to connect anybody to the murder. To make matters worse, shortly after 4 on Friday morning, July 29th, four days after the murder, a series of telephone calls sent new waves of fear through Washington. Three times that morning, telephones rang in or near Smallwood. When sleepy residents answered, a male voice whispered, You are next, and quickly hung up. One of those calls was made to the home of Angela Pritcher's best friend Donna Brady. Young and Hope thought that these calls probably came from somebody with a warped mind, exciting himself by exploiting the community's fears. But they couldn't ignore the possibility that there might be a crazed killer in their mist preparing to strike again. Bruce Ratford, a gangling gregarious man who had been in Washington two months, barely time enough to acquaint himself with the problems he was facing when he found himself deeply and unexpectedly entangled in the murder of Leith von Stein. Ratford was 33 and he had just been named the town manager of Washington, his second such job and what he expected to be a long career in municipal government. Nobody had to brief him about the fear that the murder had endangered in his town. His telephone was ringing constantly. Citizens kept demanding to know what the police were going to do to protect them. Ratford thought that the reaction bordered on hysteria, and he realized that he had a serious problem in quelling it, for part of that fear he knew, lay in the town's lack of confidence in the Washington Police Department. The police department was in shambles, according to him. High turnover, low conviction rates, low morale. He had been told when he came there that his biggest problem is the police department, and he could see that it was his Aquiles heel. The main problem, according to Radford, lay at the top, Chief Harry Stokes. Radford thought that he was from the old school, not attuned enough to current management techniques to run a modern police department of 28 officers. Stokes had been born in Pitt County, the son of a farmer who moved his family to Washington when Harry was 13. After high school, Harry joined the Army and saw Comeback in Korea. He returned home to Washington and went to police at a service station until a job opened up at the police department in June 1953. He had been in law enforcement ever since, leaving the police department for only one six-year break in the early 60s when he served as the country's alcoholic beverage control officer. After returning to the police department in 1966, he began climbing through the ranks. He had commanded both the patrol and detective divisions before being appointed chief in 1986, when the former chief took a job in another town. Rafford had met many times with Stokes and several times with the entire police department about the problems, which included carelessness, damaging property, verbally abusing citizens. He already had begun cracking down and instituting changes, suspending some officers, reprimanding others. He was considering personnel changes to control the problems when the murder of Leith Von Stein threw everything into turmoil. Stokes had called Ratford at 5:30 on the morning of the murder to tell him about it. And at 8, Rafford had gone to the house on Lawson Road to look into the situation himself. He talked to the detectives and realized that this case would produce problems. The type of murder that it was, the location of it, the prominence of the victim, would create a great public outcry to solve the case quickly. He also knew that a solution was not apt to be forthcoming anytime soon. At the end of the first day, Harry came to him and said, quote, we just don't have any clues, not a lot of leads. He seemed perplexed by the whole thing, end quote. Radford decided that he would have to take a strong hand in the investigation himself. He instructed the chief to present him with a daily written report on the progress of the investigation and other major activities in the police department. Stokes resented that order and considered Radford to be meddling in his department. And he said later, quote, that was nonsense. I didn't have time to do all that mess. He wanted to keep his hands on everything going on. He wanted to run everything, make the decisions and call the shops. I didn't like that. When a city manager tries to tell the chief of police what to do, that just don't cut it. End quote. Radford made no excuses for pressuring Stokes and the detectives working the case. He was feeling pressure himself, not just from fearful citizens who were calling to ask if an arrest was forthcoming. On Friday, July 29, Radford got a call from Ashley Foutrell. Fouttrell had been in Washington for 40 years. He had been editor and publisher of the Washington Daily News for most of that time, and he kept close touch with all the town's power brokers. Now in 77, he had moved to remark the status at the newspaper, but he still came to work every day, still wrote a regular column and occasional editorials, still kept in his fingers on the post of the community. And he was a force to be reckoned with. He asked Rafford to come to his office for a chat, and Rafford went immediately. Fortrell took him for riding his car to talk, and he said that, according to Rafford, he said, quote, he that he had received dozens and dozens of calls. He said this thing had gone on for four days and the police department just wasn't doing its job. We had to bring somebody to justice. He felt like it was just that simple. End quote. Later Foutrell would recall the conversation a little differently. He recalls it this way. He said, quote, I told him this was a case that ought to be solved quickly. People were restless. It ought to be solved quickly to calm the public fears. End quote. Rafford's response was ironic in one aspect. He said it was a very serious case and it would take a long time for somebody to be brought to justice. That was almost exactly the same response Rafford was getting from the chief of police. According to Chief Stoke, he says, quote, people expect you to solve a case like they do on TV, but you don't do it. Everybody wanted an arrest made, but you don't make an arrest until you get the evidence. And the city manager didn't understand this. Stokes was well aware that his officers had no evidence to connect anybody to the murder yet, but he felt that it was just a matter of time. His own suspicions were strong, and they had begun to be formed when he sat through that first long interview with Bonnie Vanstein. He recalled later the following, and quote, I had a weird feeling. I just felt like there was something more than what I heard. I just knew there was no silver killer running loose in the neighborhood. My feelings were she was not intended to be killed, and Angela was not intended to be killed. It made me realize that there was no outsider who went in to kill anyone. There was somebody inside. Then we found the trap. We found the map. We knew that there was no doubt about it. It had to be somebody on the inside. I knew it would be resolved. I didn't lose no sleep over it at all. End quote. Washington Summer Festival began as scheduled on Friday evening, July 29th, on the town's waterfront. Bruce Ratford, the town manager, blew a deep note on a conch shell horn to mark its opening. Its opening. And the festival drew record crowds Friday night and Saturday, an estimated 24,000 on Friday and 28,000 on Saturday. Maurice Williams and the Soviets, a popular Southern Beach music group, played. Stewart Parkway was lined with food, stands, and exhibits of arts and crafts. The river was alive with boats more than anybody could ever remember seeing. Although the Von Stein murder had disappeared from the front page of the newspaper on Friday and Saturday's paper had carried only a brief and nearly hidden mention that the investigation was progressing, according to the police chief, the specter of the murder hovered over the festival, and the murder remained a chief topic of conversation. Nearly everybody seemed to have a theory about it, or had heard some inside information. Rumors had swept through the town in waves, so many that Bonnie's friend and neighbor, Peggy Smith, began keeping a list of them. Some of the rumors were outrageously far-fetched. In one, Leith was an undercover FBI agent who had discovered that national spinning was controlled by the mafia and was affront for a major drug distribution ring. The mob had sent a hit man from New York to kill him. In another, the murderer had turned loose dozens of chickens in the house to distract Bonnie's 40 cats while he went about his nefarious work. Other rumors offered gruesome details. Leith had been stabbed 52 times, his eyes had been plucked out, his stomach had been ripped from his body, a message had been carved into his chest. But most of the rumors on Peggy Smith's list had to do with Bonnie and her two children. Bonnie was having an affair with her boyfriend, and her boyfriend did it. Leith had ordered Angela's boyfriend to leave the house and never come back. Chris had been kicked out of the house after a heated argument with Leith. Chris and Angela hated Leith and the family fought constantly. Angela was secretly married and her husband did it. Angela, her boyfriend and Chris did it to collect a million dollars in insurance. Chris and Angela were on drugs and belonged to an occult group. Bonnie's injuries were self-inflicted and were not serious. While many in Washington remained fearful that the town harbored a crazed killer who might strike again, it was clear that many others had already come to the same conclusion that the police had reached. No severe killer was loose in Washington. The murder of Leith von Stein was an inside job. Chris and Angela attended the Summer Festival with friends that weekend. Whenever they were recognized, whispers followed. Detective Melvin Hope and SBI agent Louis Young had no time for merry-making at the summer festival. They were working that weekend trying to learn more about Chris and Angela. On Saturday afternoon, they went to a downtown store to talk to a young woman who had dated Chris. She said that she had not had any contact with Chris since the previous fall when he came up uh at Burger King after a Friday night high school football game and hugged her neck. She had met Chris a couple of years earlier on the blind date, she said. And uh she once had gone assistate on a roof trip to King's Dominion and amusement park in Northern Virginia, and she described the King's Dominion trip as a mistake. And the detectives asked why. And she said, Chris was no gentleman. He said, how so? He said, Well I tell a boy no, I mean no. He wouldn't keep his hands to himself. She had quit dating him after that trip, she said. The young woman said she had been once to the Von Stein house with Chris and some of his friends, and Angela was also there. She knew Angela and didn't like her. She didn't know of any particular ill feelings that Chris and Angela might have held for their stepfather, but she had heard that they didn't care for him. The young woman did tell the detective several things of interest. Though Chris was strange, she said. He talked all the time about a game called Dungeons and Dragons that he played regularly with his friend Jonathan Wagner and Eric Smith. She didn't know much about the game. No girls ever played with them, but Chris was so deeply into it that he would dress up in costumes and act out his parts. She also had been told that Chris was heavy into drugs, marijuana and cocaine, although she had no first-hand knowledge of it. She had heard one other thing, too, that she couldn't confirm that Chris and Angela had murdered Leith. Her boyfriend had told her that, she said. The detective also talked that day to another young woman who was a friend of both Chris and Angela. She had heard that Chris had really flipped out when leaving another friend's house on Wednesday night, two days after the murder. Chris had told his other friend, another young woman, that he needed to talk to her in private. He had given her some notebooks containing material he had written. This piqued the interest of the detectives. Could Chris have written something about the murder that he wanted to keep, but didn't want to be found in his possession? This young woman also had heard something about the murder. Angela had a boyfriend who was an ex-convict, and these had kicked him out of the house the night before the murder. And so they asked her how did she know this? And her answer was a friend's mother had told her. Bonnie Van Stein, in the meantime, was released from Beaufort County Hospital on Monday, August 1st, one week after she was attacked and her husband killed. That afternoon, she came voluntarily to the police, uh, Washington Police Department to be fingerprinted so police would be able to eliminate the records of family members from others that were recovered at that house. After washing her hands, Bonnie was interviewed again by Lewis Young, who questioned her about friends of Chris and Angela. Police had heard that Angela had a boyfriend from Bellhaven who would have been um involved, but Bonnie knew of no such boyfriend. She named Chris's room roommates at the university, but also stated made it clear that she had no concerns at the forest of she had no concerns about any of Chris's friends. Um Young also went over a list of the contents of Bonnie's pocketbooks to see if she noticed anything missy and missing, and for the first time she realized she's that something had been taken on the night of the murder. On Friday, she had gone to a bank machine and withdrawn$100 in$20 bills. She said she had one of those bills in a pocket and had put it on a table in her bedroom Sunday night. But at least another$80 should have been in the purse in the kitchen, the one that had its contents strewn across the stove, the stovetop. Angela and Chris also came to be fingerprinted that afternoon. Chris followed his mother by an hour, and after Chris was finished, Young and Hope took him aside to question him again about his activities on the weekend of the murder. He would come to Washington that Friday night because he had not been home much during the summer and he just wanted up um to visit, he said. And after he returned to Raleigh Saturday night and to work on a paper, he actually went off with a friend to look for a party, he said. When they didn't find one, they returned to his friend's room and drank beer. He had worked on his paper for a while, well, Sunday, uh, but didn't finish it. And Sunday night he had drunk beer and play um cards with the other friends until about 3 30 in the morning. The paper wasn't due until 9 50 that morning, and he had about five, not long after he had gone to sleep. Um so he was planning sorry, um, he was planning to get up at 7 to finish it, and then like at um around uh Angela called him about 5, no longer after he had gone to sleep. And his roommate took the call and woke him, but his roommate went back to sleep. Chris said that he wouldn't find his car keys and had left the room and called the campus police, who picked him up and later brought him to Washington. His roommate found the car keys under a chair cushion later. Chris gave the detectives the names of the three roommates he had had at college, but none of them and none of his other friends had ever had any problems with Leith, he said. He didn't know of any boyfriends of Angela who had ever had problems with him either. I don't know of any problems Leith had with anybody, he said. By Tuesday, August 2nd, all the evidence that had been taken from 110 Lawson Road and the fireside in Pitt County had been tagged, packaged, and cataloged. Detectives, John Taylor and Melvin Hope, loaded it into an unmarked cruiser and in an unprecedented move headed for Washington, D.C. to deliver it to the forensics labs of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Normally, evidence was routinely sent to the SBI labs and Raleigh, the State Bureau, but this case was special, and the police chief, the city manager, the district attorney, and other officials wanted it to go to a more sophisticated labs of the FBI, where it likely would get a quicker and better analysis. A lot of hope was being placed in this evidence, and they wanted it to reveal all that it could ensure as a tide as possible. The local newspaper carried a story the following day about the evidence being sent to Washington. Detective Captain Danny Boyd was quoted. It would answer a lot of questions. After Melvin Hope returned from Washington, he and Lewis Young continued chasing rumors, tracking leads that led nowhere. Although their suspicions were focused on Chris and Angela, they couldn't risk passing up any possibilities. And several people who had the misfortune of having their license tax numbers jotted down by suspicious residents of Smallwood soon found the two detectives at their doorsteps. Hope's and Young's attempts to trace rumors to their sources proved frustratingly unending, particularly when they tried to find out if Angela indeed had excited. Their efforts to delve more deeply into the lives of the Von Stein family were more fruitful. They returned to National Spinning Company and talked with more of Leeds co workers. One told them that he had. Talk with Leith on the Thursday or Friday before he was killed, and that Leith was upset with Chris about his studies at NC State. If he doesn't make it this semester, that's it. The coworker recalled Leith saying, I won't pay him for Chris to flunk out. The detective also talked to two of the company's top executives, Phil Wonder, the chief financial officer for whom Leith had done special jobs, and Don Barham, the vice president for human history. Sorry, Human Resources. Other than Wander's information that he was certain Leith never had extramarital affairs while he was in New York because he stayed at Wander's apartment while he was there. Nothing new was turned up. Hope and Young also interviewed the two emergency medical technicians who had come to Bonnie's aid, as well as the two hospital workers who had come to pick up Edith's body later. All of them made note of one thing they had found curious at the Von Stein house that morning. The teenage daughter had acted differently than anybody they had ever seen in a situation like that. She had seen utterly unattached, emotionless. And Andrew Art Arnold told the two detectives, Well, you have to know Angela. Andrew Arnold was the young man who Angela had called on the morning of the murder. He had accompanied her to the police department and stayed at her side much of the day. Angela actually was upset, he said. She just didn't show it. He said, if you knew her good enough, you couldn't tell it was hurting her. Angela and Leith got along fine, Arno said. And when he first met Angela, she always referred to her stepfather as Leith. Recently she had started calling him her father. Arno didn't know of any boyfriend of Angela who might have been kicked out of the house. She had broken up with her last boyfriend, Steve Prettyman, a few months before the murder. Since that time, she has spent most of her time with Donna Brady. Arno knew Chris too. They have graduated in the same uh class, but he and Chris never hung out together, he said. And Chris was really into Dungeons and Dragons. But it was no big deal. He has seen Chris on the morning of the murder when Chris came to Donna Brady's house after visiting his mother at the hospital. Chris, he said, was pretty shaken up. Arno knew of no problems in the Von Stein family and no enemies that they might have. He didn't know oh, he didn't know uh one interesting tidbit of information. He had heard that Leith had inherited a million dollars, but couldn't recall where he had heard it. Bonnie was aware that he knew about it, though. He and Bonnie were very close, he said. And um she had told him that Angela and Chris couldn't touch the money until they were 35. The detectives touched the money, couldn't touch, sorry, um the detectives found this information about the money interesting, and Bonnie had told them that nobody in Washington knew about the family's financial circumstances, not even Chris and Angela. But now they have discovered that one of Angela's friends knew about it. How many others might also? After talking with Arnold, Lewis, and Hope drove to Pamlinco Plantation, another subdivision near Washington, to talk with William Lang. Chris's roommate and NC stayed during his freshman year. Although they have a room together, Lan said he and Chris didn't hang out together. Their habits were different. Chris didn't study, he said, and barely made it through his first year. Chris announced that he was going to be one of the school's mascots. Kim uh Lan said, one of the several who were um who wear the the heavy wolf suits and prance around at football and basketball games, drumming up enthusiasm for the Wolf Cup as um as North Carolinians. State teams were cool, but he had, you know, he had missed the practice, didn't pursue it any further. Uh Chris drank a little bit, Lang said, and that he was a little into pod, but didn't use cocaine because it was so expensive. He liked Canadian mist, would get drunk, type furiously on the computer. His parents had bought him for uh bought him for him. Chris never played Dungeons and Dragons and their room, Lang said, although he did read books about it. Um lots of Chris friends uh from Washington came to visit him at state. And according to Lang, and his sister Angela also came with her friend Donna to go to concerts with Chris. Did Chris had girlfriends? According to Lang, he might be dating a girl in Western Salem. He went to South Carolina once to see a girl he had dated who was a friend of one of his cousins. Asked about Chris's feelings toward his stepfather, Lang said that Chris seemed to like him. He never even mentioned his real father. The hope that Chris might have written something about the murder faded when Young and Hope talked to the mother of the young woman to whom Chris supposedly had given his journals. The woman told the detectives that Chris had called her house several times during the week after the murder looking for her daughter, but her daughter was staying with her father in Greenville. The woman knew that her daughter had some journals Chris had written, but she thought that they were assignments he had written for his English classes in college. Short stories, essays about incidents that had happened in his life. He had given them to her before the murder. The woman said she had heard that Chris was a problem child, but she had found him to be reserved, quiet, and shy. Bonnie van Stein and her children did not plan to live again in the house at 110 Lawson Road. They were going to move to Winston Sanglin to live in the modest house that had been the home of her husband's parents, but Bonnie um did not um want to move in until she could have an alarm system installed. Until then, she, Chris, and Angela were keeping their whereabouts private. On August 10, Bonnie called Louis Young to tell him that she had talked with her family attorney and he thought that she and her children were still in danger and needed protection, especially if they came back to Washington. She had to return soon for a doctor's appointment, and she had talked to a private detective agency about hiring bodyguards. And so she said, Can you confirm whether I'm in any danger or not? And Young answered, I can't confirm or deny that. The August 11 edition of the Washington Daily News contained an editorial page column that appeared every Thursday, and it was called Pottering Around the Pomlico, and it was written by Ashley Futrell. In the column was this brief item. It says the following Tragedy. When there is a murder and people are shaken and scared, there are demands for quick law enforcement solutions. Sometimes answers are not so easy to come by. The tragedy out in Small Wood recently has upset people. In recent days, we are having people call or come in to ask about progress. Now this week we have had perhaps six or eight people to give um to us the full accounts of what has happened and they talk about having inside information and they vow that they know what newspaper sorry um what they were saying, and they have even been taking the test here at the on the street uh, you know, for the newspaper. And they sorry, they have asked the newspaper for not publishing the full the full story since everybody on the street is now informed. Well, when we are informed officially, we shall carry the full story. So false information is dangerous and half-truths are damaging. Let not wild rumors be the order of the day. They can hurt tremendously, and let's get this case solved without delay. And that's what um the column says. There have been no mention of the Von Stein murder in the paper for more than a week until the Foutreaux column appeared. But everybody knew that Foutreaux spoke for those who held the power in Washington. The following day's paper carried a news story with a headline that said, investigators work 24 hours a day on murder pro. The article quoted by the police chief Harry Stokes, who said that the officers were still um We're still interviewing and following up every lead. Thank you for listening to the motorwalk. Have a great week.