The Murder Book: A True Crime Podcast

The Von Stein Family Tragedy Part VI: Rumors, Leaks, And A Family Under Suspicion

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Rumors don’t just color a homicide investigation—they can steer it. We return to Washington, North Carolina, where whispers of a roadside fire, a condensation-ringed bedside glass, and a fat life insurance policy turned into a map of motives and suspects. As the town’s fear eased, the volume of talk rose, and leaks from inside the department gave everyday gossip the weight of evidence.

We walk through the pivotal leads that shaped the case: the discovery of burned items off a country road, the slow creep of financial motives tied to trusts and insurance, and the messy realities of campus life—LSD experiments, a $35 marijuana check gone sideways, and friends with knives, schemes, and late-night dives into steam tunnels. Interviews with Chris’s circle offer clashing portraits of influence and intent, while Angela’s world adds fresh uncertainty with a rumored ex-con acquaintance and a boyfriend who believed the killer knew the house too well.

Bonnie stands at the center, scarred yet steadfast, convinced her children could not be part of the crime that killed Leith and nearly took her life. Her faith collides with investigative suspicion as we test each thread—occult calendar dates, strict house rules, jealous colleagues, and an ex-husband facing money trouble—against access, opportunity, and common sense. What emerges is a study in how communities turn fragments into narratives and how those narratives can cloud or clarify the truth.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the murder book on your host Ciara, and this is part six of the Von Stein family tragedy. Let's begin. As weeks passed without any new murders, the fear that the death of Leith Von Stein had fomented in Washington began to subside. But talk about the murder was as widespread as ever, and rumors continued to mushroom. One thing that was upsetting to the officers investigating the case was that many of the rumors were true or contained germs of truth. Clearly, information was leaking from the police department. One of the rumors that fit into this category was that Leith might have died earlier than Bonnie had said because his supper had not been digested. Another was correct in one aspect that Leith had a million dollars worth of life insurance. Yet another rumor was that Angela was not asleep when the police entered her room to find her in bed, and that the officer saw a glass of tea by her bedside with ice in it. This was true to the extent that Danny Edwards, the officer who awoke Angela, had seen a glass by her bedside with condensation on the outside. The rumor that angered the detectives most, however, was that an area farmer had seen a car stop on a road on the morning of the murder and watched as somebody got out and set a fire. He reported it to the police. The rumor had it, and they found bloody clothes and a knife in the fire. All the officers who knew about the fire had been sworn to secrecy, but word got out about it anyway. Ashley Footrell later said he knew about the fire on the morning after Hope and Young first went to inspect the site. A man called and told him about it, but wouldn't reveal his identity. Footrell said that his newspaper didn't publish anything about it because he was unable to confirm it. Although the initial rumor about the fire placed it in the wrong location, word eventually got around not only of the correct location, but of the identity of the person who had found it. Noelle Lee was startled when a few weeks after the murder he got a call from his banker asking him what he would found on the roadside. What did he find? And soon others were mentioning it to him or questioning him about it. Lee had thought that his identity would be kept secret, at least until an arrest was made. And now that it was out, he worried that the murderer might seek retribution against him and his family. The rumor about the fire even reached Bonnie Vanstein, and she called Melvin Hope to ask him about it. And Hope, remembering his vow not to reveal anything about the fire to anybody, was put on the spot. And he said that he didn't tell her the truth, but he didn't lie to her either. Although Bonnie later would tell another officer that she thought he had indeed lied to her. One rumor made around so often that even Hope began to wonder if it might have some validity. It was that Chris belonged to a satanic cult. In other variations, Angela and Bonnie also practiced the occult, and that Leith had been killed to raise money to perpetuate the cult. Hope recently had attended a special training session on occult groups with Detective John Taylor, and Taylor got out some of the material from the classes and discovered that July 25th, the day of Leith's murder, was a voodoo holiday in honor of Papa Ogu, calling for blood sacrifices, particularly of sheep and goats. And according to Hope, the thing just kept getting stranger and stranger. Bonnie spent another long session with the detectives when she returned to Washington for a checkup on August 15th, she offered a possibility that Hope and Young thought absurd. Perhaps somebody at the bank where Lee's trust were held had instigated the murder out of concern that he might be planning to remove all of his money. The detectives were interested in Lee's financial affairs, however. Having learned that others knew about his inheritance, they wanted to know just how much Chris and Angela knew about these matters. They were aware that Lee's father had more than a million dollars from the sale of his share of the laundries in Wisdom Salem, Bonnie said, and they probably would have known that Leith inherited it. But the only other people who would have known about it, she maintained, were his banker, a couple of his bosses at work, and a cousin who was a stockbroker, from whom Leith occasionally sought investment advice. Without any prodding from the detectives, Bonnie began talking about an incident involving her son, Chris, that had happened on the weekend of the murder. She told about receiving a call from the mother of a young man near Raleigh to whom Chris had given a check for$35. Although both the young man and Chris had lied about it, Chris later admitted that he had given the check to the young man for marijuana. The young man was supposed to pick up the pot and deliver it to him, but he didn't come back. Chris also had bought marijuana from this young man earlier, she said. And the young man, only 16, was a friend of Tim Parker, a friend of Chris's at NC State. Chris had told her that Parker also was a drug dealer and kept the gun in his room. Chris was very scared of Parker, she said, and fearful that his life could be in danger because of what he knew about the drug dealings. Although other friends of Chris's had come home with him, Bonnie said that Parker never had been to their house. If Chris was indeed so afraid, that could be an indication that he had been involved in drug dealing himself. The detectives reasoned, then the attack on his parents might well have something to do with it. If Chris owed a drug dealer money and the dealer thought his parents to be wealthy, the dealer might also reason that if his parents died, Chris might receive their money and be able to pay his debt. And even if Chris were not involved in drug dealing himself and had only been looking for somebody to kill his parents so that he could claim his inheritance early, a former roommate who sold drugs and kept a gun might be a good place to begin looking for an accomplice. Especially one who never had been to the Von Steinhouse and would need a map. While Bonnie was talking about her son, the detectives remembered Bonnie's brother telling them about Chris turning up missing earlier in the summer, and they asked her about it. And according to her, uh that happened about the 1st of July. She and Leith were planning to go to Winston Salem for several days, and Angela and her friend Donna Brady decided that they wanted to stop off to spend the night with Chris at NC State before going on to Winston Salem the following day. They had called and arranged to stay with Chris, but when they arrived that night, Chris was not to be found, and none of his friends knew where he might be. Angela and Donna spent the night in Angela's car and drove on to Winston Saline as planned the next day. Bonnie was worried when she learned what had happened, so she began a search for Chris that produced no results. He had not even shown up at the clothing store where he worked. She discovered and his boss also was concerned. Bonnie worried and searched for a day and a half before she finally called the campus police and filed a formal missing persons report. Later that night, Chris called her from NC State. He had just arrived back on campus only to be met by the police who instructed him to call his mother. Chris said that he had gone on what was intended to be a short trip to the mountains with a friend called Moog. They were going to visit Mook's uncle, and on the way, the fan belt broke on Chris's car and they had to go to an old lady's house to call for help. She offered them a bologna sandwich and a glass of goat's milk. After they got the car repaired and got to Mook's uncle's house, they both became deathly ill with food poisoning and stayed in bed for three days. Mook's uncle lived back in the hills and didn't have a telephone and they didn't have any weight of getting word to anybody. Later, Bonnie had learned that Chris and his friend actually had been at her sister's house in South Carolina the whole time. Bunny said that her sister's daughter had a friend whom Chris had dated and he had gone there to see her. He had asked her Anna to reveal that he was not there if his mother called. When Bonnie called her sister to ask if she had heard anything from Chris, her sister had cover for him. Bunny said that she didn't hold it against her because her sister had had a lot of problems lately. Bunny said that she had been concerned at that time that Chris might be getting involved with drugs and she wondered if that trip might have something to do with drugs. Leith had not believed Chris's story from the beginning, Bunny said. He knew that Chris was very intelligent and he always had strongly supported and encouraged Chris in every way, but he had been very disappointed in Chris when he got in trouble with the BB gun and wine coolers in high school, and he had been more uh questioning and suspicious of him after that. The wild tear about his disappearance and the later incident with the check when he revealed that he had indeed been using marijuana had caused Leith to eat to be even less trusting of Chris. So after Chris's graduation from high school the year before, Leith got Chris a summer job at National Spinning Company, and he had been very proud of how Chris handled it. Leith had been proud too that Chris wanted to study engineering, but he got upset at Chris's low grades. The only serious argument between her husband and her son that Bunny could remember had been about Chris's study habits and grades at college. It happened at the dinner table one night, she said, and that she had never seen Leith so angry. His face grew red and he doubled his fists. She was afraid that he might get, you know, he might get up and hit Chris. Chris was shocked by his reaction, she said, and he got up from the table, stepped back, and said, Look, I'm not going to do this with you. And this incident lasted only a few minutes, uh, according to Bonnie, and after Leith calmed down, she told him in private that he had been wrong in the way he handled the situation and that Chris had conducted himself in a more adult fashion than he had. He told her that from then on she could handle the problems of the children, whatever they might be. Young questioned Bonnie about Chris's involvement in Dungeons and Dragons. He and some of his friends had been playing the game since he was about eleven, she said. In fact, this summer he had taken his Dungeons and Dragons materials to college with him. It was just a tablecloth game, she said, nothing else. Neither she nor Leith had any concerns about him playing it. They thought it was a game that required high intelligence, and they considered it to be innocent. She had never heard of Chris dressing up in costumes and acting out the game in anybody's backyard. The detectives also had learned that Chris showed up at a local pawn shop four days after the murder and hawked his saxophone. Why did he need money? Could it have been for drugs? But it was a surprise. It was the first she had heard about it. On August 23rd, Young and Hope went to Raleigh, hoping to talk with some of Chris's college friends. They stopped first in a town called Garner on the outskirts of Raleigh and found the 16-year-old high school student who had ripped off Chris in the marijuana deal on the weekend of the murder. He seemed a little nervous. The detectives interviewed him in the presence of his stern faced father. He admitted knowing Chris, but not well. He had just met him that summer, he said, and only had not seen him two or three times. He had only seen him only two or three times, never for more than 15 or 20 minutes. He had been to Chris's dorm room, he said, but never alone with Chris. Others always were there, and Chris bragged a lot about how rich he was. Um more than once he had heard Chris say, Yeah, my mom gave me some uh some more money. He had a nice car too, a hot mustan. Question about the$35 check, the young man admitted taking it from Chris because Chris couldn't it uh it get a cash anywhere. The young man said he would first take the um the check to Tim Parker, Chris's friend, but Parker didn't want to mess with it. So the young man then took it to his father, who questioned him about it. He had given his father several reasons for having the check, and his father eventually had called Chris's parents to ask about it. With careful questioning, Young finally got the young man to admit that Chris had given him the check for marijuana, which he had not delivered. Asked about Parker, the young man said that he had known him only for a couple of months. He described him as just a normal person. Was well um he they asked, was he into drugs? And the young man said that he might drink a beer, but he never heard him say anything about drugs. Before Hope and Young left, the frightened young man offered to give them$35 to return to Chris, but the detective declined and left him to deal with his father. After talking to the young man, Hope and Young drove to NC State and interviewed the campus police dispatcher who had taken the cop the call from Chris on the morning of the murder. They also talked with the two officers who picked up Chris and later drove him to Washington. Hope and Young found Tim Parker at his mother's house in a rally suburb. Parker said he had not seen Chris since the end of June when the first summer session ended, but he had heard about the attack on Chris's parents. Chris never said much to him about his parents. Parker said he didn't know that Leith wasn't Chris's real father. He had mentioned that his family was rich, though Parker said he and he was aware that Chris got a weekly allowance from his parents. Chris was always throwing money around, he said, spending a lot, particularly on alcohol and drugs. At one point, Parker remembered Chris had gotten in a bad financial bind and had to borrow money to get out of it. What kind of drugs was he using? The detectives wanted to know. And Parker said that he has seen him with pot, but there was an um LSD too. Crit has first tried the hallucinogenic drug on a Friday night after about the middle of the first summer session, sometime in early June. He had used it two or three other times since. And Parker said he had tried to warn him about that stuff, but Chris wouldn't listen. Another um young man named Hank got Chris started on LSD, according to Parker. Chris had met Hank only that summer, but Hank, who was not a student, came around frequently, and Chris often went off to do things with him. And Parker said that Hank was always trashed in one way or another. Chris was easily influenced by his friends, which was one reason he did so poorly in school. Um he would do whatever his friends wanted him to do, whether or not he had classes to attend or homework to do. He spent a lot of time playing Dungeons and Dragons. Asked about the group Chris played with, Parker could only recall a couple of names: a first name, a nickname, no last names at all. Hank played sometimes, and another long-haired guy uh named Moog, um, who was uh black. There was a skinny white guy who was a resident advisor and Lee Dorn, whose name was Brew. And um there was another short overweight guy. Usually they play in one of the dorm rooms. Sometimes they would get trashed and go down into the labyrinth of steam tunnels beneath the campus. Asked if any of them had weapons, Parker said he thought that some had buck knives and darts. Um and but he didn't know anything about any guns or anything like that. So when asked about girlfriends, Chris might have had Parker only laugh and said he's a wimp. He couldn't get um a girlfriend. Parker admitted knowing the high school student the detectives had talked with earlier the day, that day, and he knew about the marijuana deal that went bad. After the incident, Parker said the young man told him, I ripped off your roommate. Did Parker think the young man would uh could know something about the murder of Leith Vonstein? And Parker's answer was wouldn't surprise me. He would do something stupid. He's always working some kind of hustle. Bonnie had returned to Washington with a bodyguard to visit her doctor, and on the day after the rally trip, young and hope interviewed her yet again at the Washington Police Department. Questioned about the reason for installing deadbolt locks at the house, Bonnie said that Leith's car had been broken into while it was parked in the driveway and they were away from home. A radar detector was stolen. That was during the time of the illness of Leith's parents when they had to be away from home a lot to look after them. They just thought that the deadbolt locks would make it more difficult to get into the house and to carry things out. The locks were never used when they were at home, she said. The detectives asked her about names that they had come upon from tips, rumors, interviews, but Bunny recognized none of them. Then Bunny brought up the name of a woman that Young had asked her about earlier. She had been thinking about it, she said, and she thought she had heard Leith mention the name before, and she thought the woman had something to do with business matters and national spinning. One thing she felt confident about that Leith had not been involved in any love affairs, at least not in the past four years or so. During the first four years of their marriage, she said they had lived largely apart because Leith's work demanded that he had begun a week and they were together only on weekends. What he did then, she couldn't be sure about, she said, but she doubted that he had had affairs even then. In the way she described it, Lee was Leith was a one-woman man. During more recent years, his life had been so structured that there simply wasn't room or time for any other women, she said. The detectives used this moment to bring up another difficult subject, the possibility of homosexuality. One of Leith's co-workers had told the detectives that she and Leith had a long-running but good-natured argument about homosexuality. Leith contended that there was nothing wrong with homosexuality and defended the rights of anybody to practice consensual sex of his or her choice privately without the interference of government or self-appointed moralists. His coworker argued that homosexuality was morally wrong and went to the trouble of giving Leith several pages of handwritten biblical quotations to prove it. Bonnie said that Leith had several homosexual friends with whom he was open and receptive, but she didn't think he would ever had any sexual involvements with them. After one of Leith's friends died of AIDS a few years earlier, she said, she had become concerned about the possibility that he might have had sexual liaison with some of his friends and questioned him about it. He denied. Leith had met his friend, an architect who grew up in a small town near Greensboro and later moved to San Francisco while in college. He had been surprised to learn of his friend's homosexuality. Other friends said, um, but had not allowed it to affect their friendship. And she was almost certain that he never had done any such thing. She had no doubt that if he had been sexually involved with anybody else, male or female, in the past three or four years, she would have known about it. There was a woman at work with whom Leith had to make a few business trips, Bonnie said. She was certain that nothing had happened between them, but she would heard that the woman's husband was very jealous. She had not heard of any uh trouble he had caused, however. It was just a thought. In trying to think of suspects, Bonnie also had come up with the name of her former husband, the father of Chris and Angela. The detectives knew from earlier interviews that she held a low opinion of Steve Pritchard. He had stayed in the Von Steinhouse several times while visiting the children, and he and Leith got along fine, she said. But recently she had heard that he had a setback of some sort with his trucking business and was badly in need of money. She didn't know how much he might have known about the money Leith had inherited, but if he had found out about it, he might have figured that if Angela and Chris inherited it, he could manipulate them to get some of it. She didn't think he could commit murder himself, but he might be capable of plotting it, she said. The detectives were still clear about several aspects of Lee's financial affairs, and they questioned Bonnie more closely about them. Hope also brought up Lee's life insurance again. Bonnie said that she had gone over the policies with her attorney recently, and she thought that the face value of the life insurance was only about$770,000, not$1 million. The order of beneficiaries, she said, was first herself, second, Chris and Angela, third, her parents, fourth, Leith's mother, who of course was dead. It was just that order wasn't, and that was bothering the detectives. On August 31st, Young and Hope drove to Williamston, 23 miles north of Washington, to talk to Steven Prettyman. He had dated Angela for three months that spring before she caught him with another girl. They had broken up after that, and he said, but they still talk. Prettyman said that he had got along okay with Leith, but that Leith was rough on Angela's male friends. He was strict with Angela, and anytime Angela wanted to do anything, she and her mother had to scheme to get around Leith so that she could do it. He thought Leith's strictness had made Angela rebellious. Leith seemed to get along better with Chris than with Angela. Pretty man said, but um also that both of them used the same nickname for Leith. Asshole. Pretty man said he had been told that Leith was worth$3 million. Angela had told him that Leith's parents were rich and that they were that when they died their money went to Leith. Prettyman said he thought that whoever killed Leith knew the family because he had gone straight to Leith and Bonnie's bedroom and had not disturbed Angela. Pretty man also fed more fuel to one of the rumors that had made its way through Washington that Angela had a boyfriend who was the next convict. Prettyman said he had seen Angela with a guy on a couple of occasions in recent months, uh once at the mall, again at the beach, and he was pretty certain that the guy had recently been released from the Williamston prison unit. He thought he had seen him on a road gang. He said, I knew it was bad news when he saw the guy with Angela. Pretty man said he thought the guy he had seen with Angela had been in a class a couple of years ahead of his at Washington High School, but later he was unable to pick out his picture in a school yearbook. He gave the officers a description and said that Angela's friend Donna Brady should be able to identify him. By the time September arrived, Bonnie borrowed scars from her wounds. She was living alone and with some saline. Chris had returned to Wennis State to start his sophomore year. Angela had begun freshman classes at Greensboro College, only 25 miles away. Bonnie told friends that she was angry at the police because they wouldn't tell her anything. But she was all too keenly aware that the detectives were highly suspicious of her children. She knew from the questions they had asked her, and from the questions they have asked others with whom she had talked, and they seemed to be focusing the investigation on Chris. She thought that the detectives were wasting their time while the real killers slipped further and further from their grasp. She knew that her children could never be involved in something so heinous, and sure, Chris had been in trouble and had experimented with drugs, had told lies and giving his parents reason to mistrust him, but so had lots of other teenagers. Murder was not, you know, it was another matter altogether. She knew Chris. He simply was too sweet and gentle, nonviolent to have had any part in killing Leith, much less in hurting her or trying to have her killed. And she had no doubt that the killer had intended for her to die. Chris was like her. He wouldn't hurt a fly. Moreover, Chris loved her. She had no doubt about that. It was apparent in his area. He also had been very upset by Lee's death and continued to be. He was worried about his mother and even had offered to drop out of college and get a job to help out and look after her. But she thought it would be better for him to be back in classes and among her friends so that the awful events of the summer wouldn't prey so heavily on his mind. She could cope alone. She always managed to cope. Thank you for listening to the murder book. Have a great week.

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