The Murder Book: A True Crime Podcast

The Von Stein Family Tragedy Part VII: Investigation, rumors, and a Town on Edge

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A small town’s patience thins as the Van Stein investigation grinds through rumors, leadership shake-ups, and a rare glimpse into what money really changes—and what it doesn’t. We follow the detectives through fall’s slow burn: Donna’s steady account of Angela’s sleep and stoic nature, accounts of Chris’s jittery days and drug use, and a campus subculture of games, steam tunnels, and performative bravado that seems colorful until it turns consequential. The evidence feels stingy—an inconclusive FBI report, a burned V-Buck sneaker with two hairs—and yet those minor details start to pull at a larger thread.

Behind the scenes, the pressure is relentless. City hall bristles; a police chief retires; a case manager pushes for momentum. Then the financial truth lands with weight. Leith’s will and trusts protect Bonnie and delay any payout to the children until age 35, cutting straight through any fantasy of instant inheritance. That legal structure reframes motive, not by erasing it, but by revealing how deadly assumptions can be when people act on what they think, not what is. Interviews in Raleigh sketch a portrait of Chris as easily influenced, approval-seeking, and impulsive, surrounded by friends who remember card games, classes skipped, and stories that feel increasingly relevant.

The pivot arrives with polygraphs. Bonnie and Angela sit for the exam and clear the bar for truthfulness, while Chris—after consulting a top defense lawyer—does not appear. The circle narrows. We’re left weighing behavior against data, rumor against record, and the uneasy possibility that the clearest path forward lies with the people Chris trusts most. If you’re following the Von Stein case, this is the point where the noise drops and the questions sharpen: Who benefits, who knows, and who finally talks?

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the murder book. I'm your host, Ciara, and this is part seven of the Von Stein Family Tragedy. Let's begin. Summer turned into fall with a major development into the Von Stein murder case. And Melvin Hope and Louis Young had continued chasing rumors, checking out false leads, talking with friends of Chris and Angela. Donna Brady, who had spent much of the weekend of the murder with Angela, told the detectives about her activities with the Von Steins that weekend, all of it meshing with what the detectives already knew from talking with Bonnie, Chris, and Angela. Donna said that the rumor that Leith had had a fight with one of Angela's boyfriends and ordered him from the house had no foundation. She knew of no friends of Angela or Chris who ever had had problems with Leith. Angela had not had a boyfriend since she broke up with Stephen Prettyman, according to Donna, and the young man that Prettyman had seen Angela and Donna with at the beach was just a friend and not an ex-convict. She gave the detectives his name. Donna also was confident that Angela had slept through the attack, and not just because Angela had told her so. Donna said that she is hard to wake up. Besides, Angela had a fan blowing on her and her door was closed. About Angela's seeming lack of emotion following the murder, Donna said she thought that Angela was in shock. But even if Angela wasn't in shock, Donna wouldn't have expected any great show of emotion from her. Angela was like her mother, neither talked about her feelings nor displayed them. Donna knew that Angela and Chris sometimes called Leith an asshole, but she pointed out that lots of teenagers occasionally call their parents dad or something similar, that she wasn't being hateful, according to Donna. Angela and Leith had been getting closer, she said, and Angela had begun calling him dad instead of Leith. Angela knew that Leith had received a substantial inheritance, but she didn't know how much, according to Donna, because Angela just wasn't concerned with money. She felt certain, however, that Chris knew how much Leith had inherited. Steve Outlaw told the detectives that he had been Chris's closest friend all through high school, but that they have drifted apart after Chris went off to college. He had seen Chris about six weeks before the murder, he said, and had not seen him again until the day of the murder when he went looking for him at Donna Brady's house. He described Chris's actions that day as odd. He seemed nervous and jittery. According to Outlaw, he talked incessantly to everybody, chain smoke, rocked back and forth in the chair, but he did not seem to be grift stricken. He appeared to be a little more normal at the funeral. Outlaw also said that he heard that Chris had gotten deeply involved in drugs, marijuana, cocaine, and acid. He said that he also heard that Leith had been killed by a drug dealer to whom Chris owed money, but when Young and Hope pressed him on that, he couldn't recall where he had heard it. As far as he knew, Outlaw said Chris and Leith got along great, especially after Chris graduated from high school. Melvin Hope was frustrated with his inability to produce anything decisive in the case and he lost a lot of sleep worrying about it. He recalled later that it got to be almost an obsession with him. They were looking at Chris and Captain Boyd and him agreed that Chris was in it up to his eyeballs, but they couldn't prove it. It was just a mess, and he wouldn't find himself out there at 110 Lawson Road at 3 o'clock in the morning, almost willing himself to be a fly on the wall back on the morning of July 25th. It was one he wanted to solve bad. By the end of September, the investigation had slowed. Both Young and Hope found themselves having to deal with other matters, with previous cases coming to court, with new and less flashy crimes that had to be dealt with. In October, Hope came to work one day to be told by his captain, Danny Boyd, you left holding the bag now. Lewis has been kicked upstairs. Young has been promoted to a special unit that worked on sensitive cases out of SBI headquarters in Raleigh, but he planned to continue living in Washington and to keep an office at the Sheriff's Department. He wasn't going to give up the Van Stein case, however. He still wouldn't be, would be available to work it on a limited basis. Hope wasn't the only one feeling frustrated about the progress on the case. Washington city manager Bruce Ratford was seeing less and less hope for a solution in the brief written reports that he still was requiring police chief Javi Stokes to submit to him daily. And although the public outcry about the murder had waned, people had become saying that they knew the case would never be solved. Not with the Washington Police Department looking into it. After all, two other recent murders in the town remain unsolved. One of a convenience store clerk kill and a robbery, another of the susp of a suspected drug dealer assassinated while he slept. Radford was feeling pressure from the mayor, the town council, and others. Nothing seemed to be happening. And he even said, quote, he had seen all of his stuff, we have seen all of this stuff to the FBI. We have sent everything to them for the quicker turnaround time, but we still have not got anything back. End quote. Rafford had involved himself in the case to the point of reading Hope's reports, personally inspecting the evidence and making suggestions to the chief, and he wasn't about to let it go and so for what he saw as a lack of leadership and initiative within the police department. This was the biggest thing in the town of Washington, and he was putting on the pressure on a lot of fronts. By mid-October, Radford had decided that the case would not be brought to a successful conclusion until he had solved the major problem at the police department, which he saw as a failure of leadership. The only way to do that, he decided, was to start at the top and work down. He first had to rid the department of his chief, Harry Stokes. He called the town's personnel director, asked her to tabulate how much money the chief would draw each month should he chose to retire. She soon came back with a figure that gave hope to Rafford. So he called Harry and he said, Come over and let me talk with you. And when he got here, he said, um, he said, I just found out that you can make the same amount retired as you're making working. I wanted to see if you might be interested in retiring, he said. And so of course he said, uh the captain said, or Stokes said, uh I don't know. Let me take the ho that home to my wife. So the next morning he was back with teeth and spinals, and he decided he would he had decided he was going to retire. So later Stokes said that the Von Stein case had no direct bearing on his decision to retire, and that he reached the decision on his own. Um he said to Rafford that he was trying to put pressure on him and trying to control everything, and that he didn't feel like he wanted to work under somebody who put pressure on him, and that he didn't have to put up with that. He said, I'm 58 years old and I don't need it. I was beginning to lose money working. So Stokes submitted his resignation effective November 30th, and Bruce Radford began advertising nationally for a new police chief. One requirement the new chief would have to prop to possess was an advanced degree in police science. That effectively eliminated any candidates from within the department. On October 18, Bonnie called Louis Young to tell him about a rumor that she had heard about Chris. Chris supposedly had talked to a minister in the South Carolina town where her sister lived, and the minister had told her family that Chris had some problems as a result of playing Dungeons ⁇ Dragons in the steam tunnels at NC State and was in fear of his life because of them. Chris supposedly had overheard other players laughing about Leith's death and calling it punishment for Chris's wrongdoing in the game. Chris had told him nothing about this. She said it was only a rumor, but she planned to ask him about it and would let Young know if there was any truth to it. Bonnie also had some news about her son. Chris had not been doing well at NC State and she had taken him out of college for the time being. He had been seeing a university psychologist who had determined that he had a serious emotional problem stemming from his senior year in high school, she said. And the psychologist had not been able to get to the root of the problems, but recommended that Chris drop out of school until he could control them. She thought it significant that the psychologist had been able to trace Chris's problems back to his last year in high school. That was just after Chris took a cross-country trucking trip with his father's tri uh Steve Pritchard. Chris was going to move in with her, Bunny said, and would begin seeing a psychiatrist in Western Salem. Bunny also called Melvin Hope from time to time, and he knew that she was aware of his suspicions of Chris. She remarked to him one time, if Chris is involved, I want to see that he gets the full measure of what's coming to him. And Hope recalled later that she said, if, quote, if either one of my children had anything to do with this, I'm not going to try to protect them. But Hope was convinced that nothing short of Chris confessing to her would ever get her to believe that her son had anything to do with it. And even then, he thought knowing that Chris had tried to have her killed, her maternal instincts probably would take over and lead her to protect him still. Louis Young's new assignment and the impending changes in the police department distracted him from the Von Stein investigation. Hope greatly admired Young, especially his extraordinary gifts as an interviewer, and he had let Young, with his greater education and training, take the lead in the investigation. Hope knew that Young wanted to resolve the case despite his new duties, and he didn't want to plan moves without Young's approval and participation. Hope himself had promised attempted to this. He had tried to get approval, but to continue. He still had three other detectives to oversee other cases that have to be worked, paperwork that had to be done, court appearances that couldn't be put off, arranging interviews on the Von Stein case to fit both detectives' schedules became extremely difficult. Still, they managed to get together early in November for another trip to Raleigh to try to find some of Chris's friends and acquaintances at NC State. And they found uh Chuck Jackson at the Frozen Yorker place where he worked near campus. Jackson had met Chris soon after they both arrived at NC State the year before, and he had roomed with him during the second session of summer school when the murder occurred. He had gone home with Chris on several weekend visits. Jackson remembered answering the phone on the morning of the murder, handing it to Chris and going back to sleep. He also remembered Chris waking him before he left and saying something about his parents being attacked by a burglar. But his other memories of that weekend were vague. He didn't remember Chris going home at all that weekend, and he thought they might have just sat around watching TV. They could have been playing spades the night before the murder. He just couldn't recall. There were a couple of girls, one of her name was Sandra and Sybil, who came to the room a lot to play spades, and they could have been there. He did remember that when Chris returned after the murder, he said that his stepfather had died. The police didn't know who had done it and he didn't want to talk about it. Jackson described Chris as the kind of person who never looked to the future and lived one day at a time. His activities mostly spread of the moment. He was easily influenced, according to Jackson, and he did a lot of things out of a need for approval and attention from his friends. Using drugs for one thing, Jackson, who kept up his own grades and often could be found in his room studying, said he would be concerned because Chris was smoking so much pot, skipping class, and never studying. He got onto him about it, but it did no good. Chris had renounced drugs on several occasions, Jackson said, but he always went right back to them. And it wasn't just marijuana. He tried cocaine but didn't like it. And during the summer he had been using acid. Jackson said that a guy named Hank probably was Chris's drug connection. Question about Dungeons and Dragons, Jackson said he had played in some of the games that summer, but had been too busy with his studies to play since. In the summer, they had had a campaign going in the game. A female cavalier had been wronged by an evil baron and had asked for help, he said, and he identified several others who had played in that campaign. Did they play in the steam tunnels? They didn't play DD there, but they have gone exploring in the tunnels, he said. A large group had gone, including the two girls, Sandra and Sybil, and they had carried some large Japanese swords just to be carrying them. They had spray painted their names on the walls of a big room under the central campus, he said. Jackson said that Chris and his friend Moog went into the tunnels more than the others. Did he know about anybody having a gun or a knife in the dorm? His answer was no. Did Chris talk about his stepfather's wealth? Jackson recalled a conversation instigated by another friend named Brewster Simpson. And he called Brew by his friends. So he was brewed for short, and he um he talked about how financially well off the families were, and Chris had boasted that he had a lot of money. And Jackson says Chris told off opening Lee's financial portfolio once and seeing stock of the RJ Reynolds tobacco company. But Jackson thought that Chris and his stepfather got along fine. He had spent that night with them, he said, and Chris and Lee talk and laugh and seem to enjoy one another. The detectives did not think Jackson the type to be involved in murder, and they went looking for another acquaintances of Chris's. They tracked Hank, whom Vince had said was Chris's drug connection to an apartment building on Hillsborough Street, but got no answer. They tried to find Sandra and Sybil, but couldn't locate either one. Neither did they have any luck in searching for the friend called Moog. Several students knew him, but they said that Moog had dropped out of school and nobody seemed to know his whereabouts. Bunny had waived attorney client privilege to allow attorney John Surratt to discuss Leith's uh financial affairs with the detectives. And after spending a fruitless evening in Raleigh searching for Chris' friends, Hope and Lewis drove to Winston Saline for next the next morning to interview him. Surratt had um known Leith's parents for years, but did not even know they had a son until he wrote their wills and set up the trust that Howard van Stein established. Surratt noted that if Leith had died before his mother, Bunny and her children would have been out of luck and getting any of the million dollars that Howard van Stein had received for his share of the laundries. When Leith's mother died in 1997, leaving everything to Leith, Leith came to him and said, I got to have a will. So Surratt said that he said that and he had written the will, setting up trusts just as he had done for Leith's father. The way the trust worked, Leith could have taken out any of the money at any time, Surratt said, but when Leith died,$200,000 went into a trust for Bonnie, any amount of which she could withdraw at any time. The remainder went into a separate trust for Bonnie's lifetime that eventually would pass to the children. Bonnie would receive the income from it until she died. If she died before the children reached age 35, the children received the income. The children could not touch any of the money until their mother died, and not even when then if they were not yet 35. If Bunny died without having removed the money from the marital trust, that money would revert to the irrevocable trust for the children available to them only at age 35. Leith had been concerned about the children and was worried that because he had not adopted them, they might not be able to inherit from him unless he spelled out his desires. He set the age limit because he did not think Chris and Angela were responsible enough to handle large sums of money. He wanted them to have the money, but didn't want them to be spoiled by it, according to Surratt. Surratt estimated that Leith's estate was worth between$1.75 to$2 million, including life insurance. Surratt said he did not know whether the children were secondary beneficiaries on these insurance policies. They were. But if Bonnie had died with Leith and the children were not secondary beneficiaries, the insurance money also would have gone into the irrevocable trust that the children couldn't touch until 35. As far as he knew, Sorrat said, only Bonnie knew the provisions of Leith's will. The children did not. That being the case, the detectives knew either might have assumed that with Leith and Bonnie dead, all of the money would come to them immediately. At the end of November, the long-awaited evidence report finally came back from the FBI and nobody was very happy about it. The Washington Daily News made it a front-page news story. City manager Bruce Radford, who has maintained contact with police investigators, said the FBI report on fingerprints and fibers gathered at the scene was inconclusive. Radford became involved in the matter because of a transition of power in the police department. Chief Harry J. Stokes will retire Thursday. Captain Saint Osno will act as interim chief until a replacement is named. Only one thing in the evidence report gave any new clues. In the burned remnant of a V-Buck sneaker that had been found on the side of Grimesland Bridge Road two days after the murder were two hairs. One was from a Caucasian and the other from a black person. Hope and Young remembered that one of his players in Chris's Dungeons and Dragons group at NC State was black. It wasn't much to go on, but at the moment it was all they had, and as soon as they could get their schedules together, they intended to look into it. After the return of the evidence report, Bruce Radford had given up hope that anything would develop in the case until he found a new police chief. He realized that Louis Young was in command of the investigation and had little time to work on it. He could tell from the reports he had been getting from Stokes that Young was telling him little, if anything, about developments in the case. He thought that probably was due to the unspoken resentments between the SBI and the police department, but he knew that it might also have to do with his own involvement, which was greatly resented by Young. Hope, Rafford knew, would defer to Young and make no moves on his own. And with Young unable to do much because of other duties, the case would be dormant until a strong leader could be installed at the police department to get things moving again. Hope and Young were not leaving the case completely at rest, however, when they learned that Bonnie would be visiting in Washington early in December, they arranged to meet her at the police department for yet another interview. She was doing a little better since he had left college, Bonnie told him. He was living with her and had a job at a tire store in Western Salem, working every day but Tuesday and Sunday. Every other Tuesday he was seeing a psychiatrist and he would continue working until he felt ready to return to WC State. Angela would finish her first semester at Greensboro College soon, Bonnie said, but she had hardly studied and was seeing a psychologist who felt that it might have been a mistake to put her in college so soon after Lee's death. Angela would drop out after this semester, Bonnie said, and next fall she would be going to a small college in Virginia that had a strong equestrian program. Bonnie spent an hour and a half with the detectives, and just as the interview was about to come to a close, Young asked a question that both officers had been wanting to ask for a long time. Hope um the question was how would she, Chris and Angela, feel about taking polygraph tests? Bonnie answered without hesitation. She would be happy to do it, and she said she was certain that Chris and Angela would too. She told Young to go ahead and set up a date for the test. The polygraph examinations were set for January 17, 1989, one week short of the six-month anniversary of Leith Vonstein's murder. The detectives had put off any further investigation pending the outcome of the tests. But when Bonnie met then at the SBI office in Greenville that day, only Angela was with her. Chris couldn't come, Bonnie said, because he had an appointment with the psychiatrist. Bonnie finally said, quote, I don't know. And it was it would be his decision whether or not he takes it. Later, the detectives learned that after agreeing to the tests, Bonnie had consulted with John Surratt, who said that she needed to see a criminal attorney. She had sought out one of the best known and most expensive in the state, Wade Smith of Raleigh, who had helped to defend Greek beret Dr. Jeffrey McDonald against charges of killing his wife and children, and he advised that Chris not submit to the test. SBI Polygraph Examiner William Thompson administered the test to Bonnie and Angela. And he asked three questions of each. Of Bonnie, he said he asked, Did you plan your husband's death? Did you help plan your husband's death? Do you know who stabbed your husband? Bonnie answered, no, to each question. Of Angela Thompson asked uh Thompson Thompson asked, Did you help someone stab Leith? Were you involved in stabbing Leith? Do you know who stabbed Leith? Angela also answered no each time. After studying the results of the tests, Thompson determined that both Bonnie and Angela were telling the truth. Bonnie's results were well on the side of truthfulness, Angela's less so. On the former standards of grading, Angela's results were close enough to the line separating truthfulness from deception to be co-inconclusive. By more recent standards called for determining any results above the line to be deemed truthful, anything below the line deceptive. Regardless of the final points of Angela's examination, the results were enough to convince the detectives that neither Bonnie nor Angela had played a role in Lee's death. But Chris' reluctance to take the test only reaffirmed what they already believed, that he knew exactly who had killed Leith. And as soon as they could rearrange or arrange their schedules, they intended to begin questioning his friends and others to find out who that was. Thank you for listening to the murder book. Have a great week.

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