The Murder Book: A True Crime Podcast

The Von Stein Family Tragedy Part VIII From Aristicratic Beginnings to a Family on the Brink

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Old houses hold more than portraits and creaking floorboards. In Caswell County, they carry a family’s rise, their best intentions, and the kind of secrets that echo longer than footsteps. We follow the Upchurch and Moore line from civic ambition and pew-deep piety to a hard turn into illness, widowhood, and a second act as a preservationist matriarch. Carolyn’s restored landmarks shine like trophies, yet the people inside them struggle to hold their shape: sons searching for purpose, a community that forgives its own, and a lineage that both protects and pressures.

The heart of the story centers on Jim and Joanne, two gorgeous college kids who trade campuses for vows when choices narrow. Cedar Hill becomes their experiment in self-reliance—gardens, canning, and the hush of rural nights—until career, children, and a move to the historic Thompson House complicate the romance. Their son Bart outpaces his classroom, pushing a fraught switch to an all-white private school that exposes the county’s fault lines around education and class. Meanwhile Jim’s draw to a primitive farmhouse near Hico Reservoir collides with Joanne’s need for people and momentum. Add the centrifugal pull of Jim’s brother Bill and Lydia’s freewheeling, rumor-magnet life, and Joanne’s mother moving close enough to set the dinner table and the agenda, and the gap between partners stops looking temporary.

What begins as a love story turns into two lives running side by side, too quiet to fight and too different to meet halfway. The moment of separation is almost gentle: a night of truth, a Carolina-blue pickup, two boys on the back steps, and a wave that feels final. Around them, Caswell’s memory is long and its standards flexible—for some. The whispers that once seemed harmless start to form a darker outline, hinting at where this saga is headed as the Von Stein Family Tragedy deepens.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Murder Book. I'm your host, Ciara, and this is part eight of the Von Stein Family Tragedy. Let's begin. Isolated by geography and circumstances, Caswell County in North Carolina became a place with little to offer its more promising people. The offspring of its educated aristocratic families continued to become dealers in business, politics, education, religion, but most had to go somewhere else to do it. By the turn of the century, Castwell was a place to leave, not to go to, the sustaining land offering little opportunity. Yet Ernest Frederick Upchurch saw it differently. Upchurch was an ambitious young lawyer from Wake County with political aspirations, and in 1909, he and his wife Mary and their four-year-old son Norman set out in a buggy for their new home in Jansenville, the county seat of Caswell County, where Fred Upchurch set up practice. Caswell had a reputation for being wary of strangers and newcomers, but their young family found a hospitable reception. Caswell became their home. Within six years, Fred Upchurch was returning regularly to Raleigh as the state senator from Caswell County, and later he became the county's prosecuting attorney, a job he held for many years. Fred and Mary Upchurch had three more children after moving to Castwell County. Two sons, Fred Jr. born in 1910 and James, called Jimmy, born two years later, were followed by a daughter, Emmy Lou, born in 1919. The Upchurch sons all followed their father to Wake Forest College, a Baptist institution, and all of the Upchurch children were reared with a strong sense of right and wrong and the fear of hellfire that came from regular attendance and Janssenville's First Baptist Church, where the parents were staunch members. Jimmy, the youngest son, always his mother's baby, had the shortest and perhaps most tragic life of the four Upchurch children. He contracted tuberculosis, apparently from his mother. Although the disease went into remission, allowing him to resume a normal life, he seemed to some family members to be without drive or direction. He married and drifted from drop to drop before his disease flared anew. He died at 35, leaving two young sons as his legacy to the county that had taken up his family and become their home. The town of Milton, hard by the Virginia Line, but in northeastern Castro County, has been described as a museum without walls, a picture perfect image of the 19th-century American town. The town's beginnings date to 1796 when a station to inspect tobacco and flour was built near the Dan River by Act of the States General Assembly. A warehouse was constructed, a few houses grew around it, a store opened, then a tavern. By the early 1800s, the town was thriving and lots were selling for high prices. In the decade preceding the Civil War, Milton was the home of five tobacco factories and one of the most modern cotton mills in the South. But Milton, like the rest of Caswell County, deteriorated after the war. By the time Caroline Moore was born in 1915, Milton was practically a ghost town. Caroline Moore's ancestors were among Caswell County's earliest settlers, and she grew up in Milton in a two-story brick Antebellum hilltop house just up the street from the old Tavern Turn residence in which she was born. She was a sensitive child with an interest in history and a fancy for an art for the art and reading. At age 15, Caroline was at the house of a friend, Mary Motz, when an acquaintance of the Motz family stopped by for a visit. He was a slim young man with short curly red hair and sharp good looks. Although he was quiet and reserved, Caroline was impressed by his obvious intelligence and quick wit. He was a teen, she learned, a student at Wake Forest College, and his father was one of Caswell's County's most prominent men. The young man's name was James Barlett Upchurch. But everybody called him Jimmy. His father had given him his middle name in honor of one of Caswell's County's most famous figures, Barlett Jancey, a U.S. Congressman elected in 1915, who sometimes presided over the House in the absence of his close friend, Speaker Henry Clay. When next Jimmy Upchurch drove his father's cumbersome Packard to Milton, he was coming to call on Carolyn Moore. Carolyn went on to graduate from Castle County's only high school and then attended Appalachian State Teachers College at Boone in the mountains of Western North Carolina. During that time, she saw little of Jimmy Upchurch. In her first year at Appalachian, he fell ill with tuberculosis, and his worried family was seeing that he got the best treatment available. Soon after Caroline returned to Castle County with her degree in 1936, she and Jimmy began seeing one another again. His disease was in remission, and he had regained his strength and his spirit while working as a bookkeeper in the mountains of Virginia, where the pure air was thought to be a help to his condition. They were wed two years later. Carolyn gave up teaching at the local elementary school when her first child, a son named William Nanning, was born March 28, 1943. Wanting a bathroom of their own, the family moved out of their apartment over Fred Upchurch's law office into a one-bedroom apartment in an old two-story house, the Johnson House, next to the Methodist Church. A second son, this one named James Barlett Upchurch Jr., was born on October 2nd, 1945. By the time James Jr. was born, his father's tuberculosis was reactivated. Jimmy was working then at a closing store in Burlington, 25 miles away, but he had to give up his job as his condition worsened. And with Caroline not working, Fred Up Church had to help out with expenses. Jimmy deteriorated quickly and soon had to be committed to a sanatorium in Danville, Virginia, just north of the Castro County line. Carolyn, whose father had died when William was eight months old, took her two young sons and moved back in with her mother and Milton to be closer to her husband. She went weekly to visit him, taking the children and holding them up outside so that he could see them through the window. But after Jimmy had to be moved to a state sanatorium in eastern North Carolina where the most contagious tuberculosis patients were confined, she had to make a long trip by bus to visit him. She only got to see him a few more times before his death on January 27, 1947. Jimmy Upchurch's eldest son was not yet four when his father died, and later he had only the faintest memory of him. His youngest son and namesake was not yet 16 months old and later had no memory of his father at all. In 1952, five years after her husband's death, Carolyn, now 37, remarried. Her new husband, Charles Thomas, a widower of only six months, father of three grown children, was almost 20 years her senior. She had known him all her life. A busy man, always on the go. He now owned what was called the Big Store, a general store in downtown Danville. It filled a huge brick building that had been used as a prison during the Civil War. He had used his store profits to buy land in Castwell County, where it was very inexpensive during the Depression, and his holdings were among the largest in the county. He owned 22 tracks, ranging from AV to several hundred acres, all of them farmed by tenants who made the crops and paid him a share of the income. His health had begun to fail, and he had turned his store over to a manager and retired to indulge his passion for bridge. That was how Carolyn had become reacquainted with him. Thomas had a house in Danville, but after their marriage, he moved into Caroline's small brick house in Jansenville so that she could complete her teaching contract. She soon learned that he tended to be impatient with children. Both of her sons were having problems and the situation only irritated her new husband. Bill, the elder son, pitched terrible, uncontrollable tantrums, and Jim began having crying spells after his new stepfather moved in. They became so bad that Carolyn finally took him to a doctor in Danville, who told her that the problem likely would take care of itself, and after a period of months, it did. Carolyn quit teaching again, and she and Charles played bridge as often as they could. Two years after their marriage, Carolyn discovered that she was pregnant again. Soon afterward, Charles Thomas suffered a devastating stroke. Her third son, John Thomas, was born seven months later on September 21, 1955. And Carolyn found herself in the inviolable position of having to take care of a baby and an invalid husband at the same time. As his son grew, Charles Thomas gradually deteriorated, and in his last years he was mostly bedridden, although, with help from Carolyn, he sometimes could sit in a wheelchair. His condition eventually became so bad that Caroline had to put him in a local nursing home. She said that she just needed a rest because she was about to fall apart. Charles Thomas died on November 27, 1960, leaving most of his estate to Carolyn. Caroline returned to teaching for a while, then toured Europe and came back to Castwell County to restore old houses and fill them with the antiques that she loved collecting. Her three sons all finished high school at the same school from which their mother had graduated, and then went off to college. Carolyn had great expectations of all three. She had reared them in the small episcopal church that her family had helped to found, and she had tried to instill in all a sense of history, family, and a deep respect for education. Her dream was that Bill, like his grandfather, would become a lawyer and later possible John too. She wanted Jim with his deep and thoughtful silences to be a priest. And if they would if they should choose to live in Castwell County, she would be very proud. All three sons eventually did return to Castle County to make their lives and rear the families near their mother, all on farms that Charles Thomas once owned. Carolyn had become a well-known figure in the county by that time, and with her wealth of land, she reigned over her family as a respected matriarch. They're just solid old Castlewell cornbred aristocracy. And that's what a prominent Castlewell County resident described years later of Carolyn and her sons. They have been around here for generations, he said. And this person had been in Castlewell County for only 28 years and recognized that she was still considered a newcomer. He says there are a lot of things acceptable for those families that are not acceptable to newcomers. A tolerance of idiosyncrasies that doesn't exist for others. In coming years, there would be idiosyncrasies in Carolyn Moore of Church Thomas' family that would steer much talk in the county and even be tolerated. But there also would come a time when idiosyncrasies would step beyond the line of tolerance when they led to charges of murder. We'll be right back. Carolyn Thomas's two older sons showed no indications of living up to her dreams for them. Bill, the eldest, went off to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but stayed only a semester before dropping out and joining the Air Force. His younger brother, Jim, followed him to UNC, but with no intentions of becoming the priest, his mother hoped that he would be. Although he had been briefly in Acolyte and Jansseville's Episcopal Church, he had no genuine religious leanings of any type. His major was history, but his major interests were drinking, partying, and chasing girls, and his grace showed. But Jim didn't have to drive that far to see her, for she was a student at Greensboro College, less than an hour away. Joanne had grown up in a family of military men, the second of three children. Her father was in the Air Force, her uncles were all marines, and it was a yes, sir, yes, ma'am, no, sir, and a great deal of respect for your parents as well as your elders. Respect was sometimes difficult. She came to despise her father, who was abusive to her mother. Her parents went through a bitter divorce when she was in the fourth grade. Afterward, her strong-willed mother supported her three children by working as a secretary to a textile male executive. The children grew up in the First Methodist Church and regularly attended gatherings of their mother's big family, most of whom lived nearby. Joanne was an honor student in high school, and her major interest and favorite activity was serving as a candy striper or stripper, a volunteer and guest in memorial hospital. She dreamed of being a nurse, but that was not to be. And in her senior year of high school, John won a full four-year scholarship given through the textile industry. And in the fall of 1966, she began classes at Greensboro College. By this time, she had developed into a striking young woman with a slim figure, light brown hair, and intense blue green eyes. As a teenager, she was very close to her mother. So close indeed that later she would come to think that her mother tried to live out her own dreams through her. Her roommate Gloria Myers was a brilliant student from Castro County. Gloria was dating a young man from Castro County, Ricky Frederick, a close friend of Jim Upchurch. It was on a weekend visit to Gloria's house that Joanne first met Jim. Not long after, Jim and Ricky were driving from Chapel Hill to Greensboro almost every weekend to see Gloria and Joanne. One classmate of Joanne's, the novelist Candens Flint, later remembered thinking of Joanne and Jim as being glamorous and sophisticated. She said, quote, they both were gorgeous people. Everybody thought they should get married just for their gorgeousness. By December 1967, marriage was on both their minds. And Joanne told Jim that she thought she was pregnant shortly before Christmas. She had not yet been to a doctor, but she knew somehow that it was so. And he told her to find out for sure. She did. Abortion was illegal in North Carolina at the time and never was considered for Joanne and Jim. There was only one alternative. The wedding was set for February 3rd, 1968. It was to be a small affair, just for family and a few close friends, at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Jansenville. Jim's Family Church. Joanne's mother, Margaret, was distressed when she learned about it. She didn't think that Jim, quiet and reserved, was a proper match for her smart and outgoing daughter. She had other dreams for Joanne. Joanne recalls years later, quote, My mother always planned for a huge wedding at First Methodist Church. But it was her wedding, not mine. End quote. The wedding was Joanne's first independent stand against her mother. And although her mother was upset, she still attended the ceremony and paid for a catered champagne reception, but she passed out drunk in retribution. The young couple settled on one of Carolyn's many farms near Leesburg in eastern Castle County. The farm was called Cedar Hill for the ancient and gnarled cedars that lined the rocky lane leading to it. The story and a half-red farmhouse built in the 19th century had a huge stone fireplace and an airy sunroom and sleeping porch on the back. Carolyn had just finished refurbishing it. The old house was isolated, far off the paved highway with no neighbors in sight. Faced with impending responsibility of fatherhood, June dropped out of college, got a job at a textile plant in Roxboro and an adjoining county. Joanne, to her mother's great dismay, gave up her scholarship to be a farm wife and mother. She recalled later that there was a real change for her, but she liked it, and she was very happy there. Joanne deeply loved her maternal grandparents, whom she called Mama and Papa Janks. Papa Jenx always grew a large garden, and Mama Jenks canned, froze, and otherwise preserved its produce. Joanne always admired them for that. Now she began emulating them. Jim planted a garden. Joanne froze canned and dried the vegetables. Joanne surrounded the oak house with great banks of flowers just as her grandma. Mother did her own house. Carolyn, who lived only a couple of miles away in the village of Leesburg, in another antebellum house she had preserved, came to visit occasionally, but mostly it was just the two young lovers on the isolated farm until James Barlett Upchurch III was born August 16, 1968, at Danville Memorial Hospital, the same hospital in which his father had been born. He weighted six pounds, 11 ounces, had pale blue eyes. His father was 22, his mother 20, and neither was sure that they were prepared for parenthood. Jim later recalled that Dr. Spock was the reference book. That was their Bible. Fortunately, Bart, as his parents call him, was not a fretful baby. Caring for him presented no special strains. Bart began walking at seven months without ever crawling, convincing his parents of what they already had suspected, that they have a precocious child. By this time, Jin had decided that he needed to return to the university, and his mother was happy to party for it. Or to pay for it, I should say. He got his degree in history in 1970 and took a job with the Caswell County Department of Social Services in Yansseville. The following November, his second son, Emery, was born, expenses paid by Carolyn. In the spring of 1974, four years later, Carolyn suggested that Jim and John move into the house in which she had been living in Leesburg. She had bought another historic house just across the street from her childhood home in Milton, which she was restoring and planning to move into. Historic houses in Caswell County all have names, usually those of the families who built them or first lived in them. The house in which Carolyn had been living in Leesburg was called the Thomson House. Jacob Thompson, a congressman, U.S. Secretary of the Interior from 1857 until 1861, and a Confederate secret agent in Canada during the Civil War, was born in the house. It sat in an island of greenery cut off by roads on three sides. It's back to the mayor highway that passes through Caswell County, U.S. 158. A huge two-story White House with dark shutters and monstrous chimneys. It offered much more room that Jim and Joanne had in the cramped farmhouse at Cedar Hill or Cedar Hill. With the boys growing quickly, they needed more space and they moved in June. Joanne loved the house but worried about its location on the highway, fearing her child for her child, uh her children's safety, even though the yard was fenced and cut off by a barrier of trees and wild growth. Bart, who was two months shy of turning six and beginning first grade, was particularly taken with his new surroundings. He loved the grounds and garden, the huge woodpeckered riddled pecan tree that yielded tasty treasures, the giant oaks, and nearly tame squirrels that lived in them. It was like living in a park. The collection of outbuildings offered new prospects for adventure and prowling there one day. Bart had proved himself to be not only precocious, but independent and willful as well. Joanne read regularly to her sons, and Bart had begun to read well before he was old enough to go to school. Later that summer, when he began school at high school elementary, more than five miles from his home, his mother wanted to pick him up at the end of the first day. He would not allow it. He insisted on riding the bus with the other children. Joanne would never forget the image of him arriving home that day. He was wearing red shorts, a red and white stripped polo shirt, um, white socks, and navy blue kits. And she remembered him getting off that bus and he had the biggest smile on his face. He felt like he had accomplished something on his own, and he was so proud. Bart tested well above most of his fellow students in first and second grade, but halfway through the second grade, his parents were concerned. He was losing interest in school, didn't want to complete assignments, um, seemed frustrated. Bart was bored, according to his mother. He was not being challenged. That could not be allowed, and although it troubled their liberal instincts, Joanne and Jim removed Bart from public school and displaced him in the only private school in the county, all white Piedmont Academy. They felt better when his grades and interests began to improve. And the following year, when Bart was starting third grade and Emory was to begin first grade, they put Emory in Piedmont Academy too. Many things had changed by that time. Strains had crept into Jim's and Joanne's relationship. Later they would disagree about the main cause, but three factors were primary. First, Jim disliked village life. He longed for fields and woods in isolation. He had acquired another farm from his mother. This only was 80 acres, several miles from Leesburg, near Hico Reservoir. A huge lake that was its beginnings in Castwell County. The farm had an ancient two-story farmhouse on it with big chimneys on two sides, but it was not in good condition and lacked any modern conveniences. Jim loved spending weekends there, pottering around, taking long walks, roughing it in the old house, activities that were not quite as appealing to Joanne and the children. There was an additional attraction. The farm adjoined another of Carolyn's farms, Hickory Hill, where Jim's brother Bill was now living with his family. After getting out of the Air Force, Bill had married and eventually returned to the University of North Carolina to finish his degree. Both Bill and his wife Lydia had taught briefly in Casroum County schools, then quit to drop out of mainstream American life and toured the country in a Volkswagen van. They had returned to Carolyn's farm to live off the land, hunting and fishing, and growing vegetables and other necessities. They were, um, according to Carolyn, hippies. Long-haired friends regularly came and went in great numbers from the wooden farm where Bill and Lydia lived, and the country was abuzz with rumors of the scandalous activities that was believed to go on there. It was even whispered that people danced naked on cartops. Nobody said anything directly to Carolyn about this, of course, but she was well aware of the talk and was horrified about it. Years later, their daughter Kenyatta says, quote, My parents were hippies when it was cool, end quote. She was named for Jomo Kenyatta, the champion of African nationalism and revolutionary first president of Kenya, whom her parents greatly admire. Kenyatta was the same age as Emory, Jim, and Joanne's younger son. And Kenyatta said in an interview uh later, quote, I thought it was great when I was little. I used to lead stoned people around in the woods giggling. I was a tour guide. End quote. Joanne disapproved of Bill's and Lydia's lifestyle and didn't want her children around them. She had a strong aversion to drugs and once had walked out of Bill's and Lydia's rented house in Chapel Hill when she realized that other guests were smoking marijuana. Jim enjoyed visiting at his brother's house, though and and Joanna was certain that he used marijuana there. She was willing to tolerate that, but she laid down one rule. He was not to bring any into her house. Later, Joanne would blame her differences with Jim about Bill and Lydia for much of the strain that had come into their marriage. He blamed something else, her mother. Soon after Emory was born, Joanne's mother had remarried. Margaret and her new husband came frequently to visit, and soon they were coming every other weekend. After Jim and Joanne moved into the Thompson House in 1974, Joanne's mother persuaded her husband to move to Caswell County into the old house at Cedar Hill Farm, from which Joanne and Jim just had moved. Carolyn rented it to them. Joanne didn't encourage her mother to move so close, but neither did she protest, much to her later regret. She says, quote, My mother always ran my life, and I guess she wanted to continue to do so. End quote. As Jim saw it, that was exactly what began to happen. Joanne had gone to work in the drugstore in Jansenville after Bart started to school, and when she wasn't working, her mother usually was at the house. Often Margaret would come to the house before Joanne got home from work, cooked dinner, and had it already when her daughter arrived. Even Joanne began to feel like a family privacy. Also, Margaret, unaccustomed to feel the isolation of Castle County, constantly wanted Joanne to go places with her. She said, quote, Mother depended on me for her entertainment. End quote. Once Joanne and Jim had done everything together, Joanne had even taken up hunting to please Jim. Now it seemed to Jim that he and Joanne never did anything together. And Joanne years later said, I guess what he was wanting and what I was wanting wasn't the same. I was working out in the world for the first time in six or seven years. Jim was a homebody. He didn't want to go anywhere, didn't care to have people over, and I did. I needed more than what was just there in the house, and he didn't. He wanted to be on the farm free and loose and the earth shoes. He admired Bill and um and Lydia. They were able to do something that he couldn't do. They didn't bicker and argue about these differences. They became two people living together who had not grown together, rarely reaching out or communicating. One night in April 1977, as they sat quietly apart, Joanne broke the silence and she said, I think you need to move to the farm. And he replied, I do too. And the next day, before the boys got home from school, she helped him pack up his stuff and load it into his old, dented Ford pickup. The truck was light blue, Carolina blue, it was called in North Carolina, the school color of his alma mater. Bart was eighth then, soon to finish the third grade. Emory was sixth, just nearing the end of his first year in school. When they got off the school bus that afternoon, their parents were waiting. Joanne sat them on the back steps of the house and took a seat between them. Jim stood nearby. And she said, Your father's going to go live at the farm for a while. Your kids and I will be staying here. And he waved before uh he said, She won't be far away. He will be coming over and you will still see him. And that was it. Jing got into his truck. Juan and the boys stood at the back of the house, watched him drive away. Juan was fighting back tears, but for the boys' sake, she tried not to show it. Thank you for listening to the murder book. Have a great week.

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