The Murder Book: A True Crime Podcast

The Von Stein Family Tragedy part IX: A Family Unravels, a Dungeon & Dragons Master Rises

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A father’s quiet exit, a boy who won’t be seen crying, and a farm that demands everything—this chapter traces how fracture and hard work shape a family’s center of gravity. We walk through drafty rooms warmed by wood Jim split himself, goat milk poured for a child who needed it, and the kind of rural routine that makes a marriage feel strong until it doesn’t. When a wool venture scales too fast and the books don’t add up, the bill is paid in dollars and trust. The church that offers community also opens the door to a forbidden bond, and another departure leaves the house tense and airless. He returns for the land and the children, but forgiveness never sticks.

At school, structure arrives in the form of a gifted program and a teacher who sees past the camouflage jacket and the long silences. Still, the strongest gravity is a cafeteria table, a grid, and a set of dice. Dungeons & Dragons is not just a pastime here; it becomes an architecture for control and belonging. As dungeon master, Bart builds worlds he can steer—worlds where strategy beats small talk and prestige is earned by craft. Outside, headlines warn about the game’s dangers. Inside this small county, the nuance is sharper: creativity flourishes, grades wobble, and a moral spine that prizes winning over virtue draws concern from the one adult who truly pays attention.

Across the hour, we connect the dots between isolation and identity, between chores at dawn and late-night storycraft, between loyalty broken in a church parking lot and alliances forged over character sheets. A new player returns and shifts the table’s balance, hinting at episodes to come. If you’ve ever asked why some kids cling to fantasy so fiercely, this story offers hard, human answers. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves true crime stories, and leave a review to help others find the show.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Murder Book. I'm your host, Ciara, and this is part nine of the Von Stein Family Tragedy. Let's begin. Bart Up Church, four months shy of being nine years old, watch with an air of detachment as his father drove away that spring in 1977. Later he remembered the moment clearly but attached no emotional significance to it. He says, end quote. They explained it to me. I thought, okay. I didn't really understand it. There was some sort of trouble going on, but I didn't know what. There wasn't any commotion. At that time there wasn't really anything traumatic. Later, Jim thought that his leaving had no special effect on either of his sons. He said that he never detected any emotional problem from either one of his kids because of it. If he was there, it was something that he didn't see. His mother Carolyn, whom Bart called Nanima, did see a change in her grandson. Bart never showed his emotions. In that way, he was like Carolyn and his father. He wouldn't allow anybody to see him cry. If he were about to cry, he would duck his head or run away. But when he came to visit his grandmother after his father left home, he would cry when the time came to leave. It caused her to recall the crying jacks Jim has had as a child from after she married Charles Thomas. She was certainly that the separation was the reason for Bart's crying. She said that it was it had a devastating effect on him, and it was turning point, it was a turning point in his personality. He was without his father. Bart's crying, she thought, was a symptom of a security breakdown, a weakness sensed by bullies among his classmates who began taking lunch money from him on the school bus. Bart also developed another problem soon after his father left, one Carolyn didn't know about until later. He began wetting his pants. Joanne wasn't concerned about the wedding at first. She saw that Bart could control it if he wanted to. He never did it at school. He didn't wet the bed at night. He only did it after school at home. She thought he did it for attention and didn't really associate it with Jim's leaving. Like Jim, she thought that the boys were not greatly affected by the separation. For one thing, they already there was already uh an emotional distance between Jim and his sons, she said later. She said that Jim was not close to the children. Jim is very private, very a very individual person, very quiet, passive, reserved, a very inward person. He's a good father, but he didn't really do things with the children. He didn't take care uh of them in the sense that he didn't take them to school, do plays, took them to the scouts. He would not sit on the sofa and read to them. She was the one, the one to that read to them. She took them up to bed, tucked them in, and gave them hugs. Jim never gave the kids hugs, and he didn't know how to do that. With Bart, Jim thought, the separation between father and son was not just one way. Jim said later that Bart Bart maintained a certain distance all the time. Even as a little boy, he was that one for showing his feelings. Bart was difficult to communicate with. He would not open up. He didn't want you cuddling him. As Joanne remembered it later, the boys never even asked about their father after he left. And she even mentions that, quote, it wasn't as if Jin left and they never saw him again. He began seeing each other again almost immediately. End quote. The farm was only a few miles away and only a couple of weeks after he left, Jim was coming over regularly. He sometimes ate dinner with Joanne and the boys, sometimes even spent the night. Occasionally he would take the boys to the farm for the weekend. Later, Bart remembered feeling resentment about only one aspect of his parents' separation, having to spend weekends at the farm with his father. He said that his dad didn't have a collar TV. Jim had gotten fed up with his job at the social services department and quit before he and Joanne split up. He went to work as a salesman at a lumber company in an adjoining county, but the job was no more satisfying and not much better, paying them the one he had left. And in the 4th of 1977, he returned to work for the Caswell County Department of Social Services. If he was not finding his professional life satisfying, Jim was at least enjoying the isolation and primitive lifestyle of the farm. He spent a lot of time hunting and walking alone in the woods. Fortunately, he also devoted a lot of time to cutting and shopping wood for heating and cooking. That winter proved to be one of the hardishest in years, and he felt good about surviving it in the drafty, uninsulated house, his only warmth provided by his own labor. He said that he would get up in the morning and have to break the ice on a bucket of water to make coffee. By winter, he and Joanne were again finding warmth in one another, and before the season was out, she discovered that she was pregnant again. Pregnant. And the relationship still unresolved. Jim did not want to return to live again in the house in Leesburg. He had grown too attached to the foreign, and the problem of Joanne's mother remained. She was still at the house regularly, constantly reminding Joanne of what a mistake she had made in marrying Jim and getting stuck in the wiles of Caswell County. At one point, at her mother's urging, Joanne even had considered taking a job in a distant town and living Caswell County forever, but something held her back. On her birthday late in January, Joanne came home from work to find her mother had cooked dinner and made a cake for her. That was to be her birthday. She and her mother dinner and a cake. She could see an endless string of similar birthdays into her future, and she suddenly knew she wasn't it was what she wanted. But Joanne couldn't bring herself to admit that to her mother just yet. Within a few months, though, the explosion would finally come. One day that spring, Joanne came home to find her mother and stepfather at the house again, sitting at the kitchen table. It had been a frustrating day, but later didn't she didn't remember what touch of the bitter confrontation that followed. She said later that it was not planned. It was just one of those things where you get out of your car and words just come out of your mouth. She blew up. She guessed that she said things she wanted to say all her life. Her mother is a very strong-willed person. She had to be a strong person. But if her mother says the sky is purple, that is right. You don't argue with her. There is no compromising with her. And she told her that. She told her, quote, there is no compromising with you, mother. It's either your way or nothing. Since there can be no compromise, that's it. End quote. She ordered her mother out of the house and told her she never wanted to see her again. She had cut her mother out of her life for good. But she was not willing to do that with Jim. She was more than three months pregnant, and now that she had resolved the problem with her mother, she wanted to resolve the problem with her marriage too. She told um Jim, you quote, you're going to have to make a decision. Either I'm going to have an abortion or we go back together. And so Jim said, okay, well, let's try it again. End quote. Jim was even willing to make a major concession. She was ready finally to move to the farm. She and the children moved in with Jim in April 1978 in time to plant a big garden. The house into which they moved was in splendid isolation at the end of a narrow lane that wound up uh it went through deep woods to an open ridge crest with uh a view of the southwest of distant uh ridges. And the house had been built in the 1830s. It was a solid two-story structure on a stone foundation with a dark and dank cellar underneath. Never painted, its bore walls had cured a dark grey. The tin roof had rusted to a deep maroonish orange. A dilapidated front porch stretched the full width of the house. Inside were two high ceiling plastered rooms downstairs, both with fireplaces. One served as a living room, the other as a dining room, and then upstairs were two bedrooms. The boys share one. Jim and Joanne took the other. A kitchen had been built onto the back of the house, standing high on the slapping ground. In it was an old wood-burning range that was used not only for cooking but for warming water and for supplemental heating of the house. There was no kitchen sink. There was no running water. Water came from a stone-lined well outside the kitchen, brought up by hand in a bucket attached to a rope on a rusted pulley. The outhouse was down the hill. Baths were taken in the kitchen in a huge galvanized tub. The house was shaded by big trees, hackberry, wild cherry, black walnut, cedar. Jim set out fruit trees, apple, and cherry to go with the big pear tree beside the house. Two locked tobacco barns stood at the edges and a third was out of sight just down the hill. Behind the house, a corn crib slanted precariously on its stone foundation. A hundred feet beyond it was a small livestock barn. Nearly ten acres had been fenced for pasture, plenty of room for horses and cows, but goats came first. Emory was allergic to cow milk, and Jim and Joanne had been buying goat milk for him. Now that they had room for goats, what should they buy milk? They ended up with a herd of six and more milk than they knew what to do with. Some they sold, some they gave away. Joanne began making cheese with the rest. Goats led to sheep, they began raising lambs for slaughter and a calf each year for beef, eating only meat they had raised. If they ran short, Jim always could supplement the supply in the freezer by hunting. Some mornings he would rise early and see more than a dozen deer grazing in the midst of his pastures. Years later, Jim would think of these days on the farm after he and Joanne were reunited as his Walton family days, perhaps the happiest period of his life. It was just something he wanted to do. It was almost like he was driven to do it, and to him, it was fun. Certainly Joanne had never slept had never seen him happier. The farm was his passion, and he loved the farm dearly. According to Joanne, Jim was happy there. They were very, very, very happy. And it was the first time that he has seen Jim really come into the picture of family life. He was more open. He was doing things as a family. All of them were. The mule spun yarn, as it was called, was as light and floppy as if it had been hand spun. After the wool was spun, it had to be trucked back to Caswell County where it was hand-dyed. That was done in an old tenant house at Melrose in a roll of huge stainless steel pots heated by portable gasoline stoves. It seemed fun at first, although it was hard, backbending work, a regular weekend project for the two couples, and Coleman accompanied at first by much beer drinking and laughter. After the yarn was hung out and dry, it was packaged and placed in a few outlets to see how it would go. It sold so quickly and at such good prices that the group bought four more tons of wool with other sheep farmers and began producing their yarn on a bigger but no less primitive scale. By December 1982, they were so encouraged that Coleman sold off some of his flock to raise capital, and he and the two couples incorporated their partnership as the Caswell Sheep and Wool Company. Joanne had given up outside work when she moved to the farm pregnant with Carrie three and a half years earlier. As the only one in the group without a full-time outside job, she was chosen to keep the company's books and be its marketing director, although she would receive no salary for the extra work. She went at the job with great enthusiasm. The idea in the beginning was to sell the yarn at craft shows, but Joanne had a grander vision. She not only got several major retail outlets around the state to carry their yarn, but she wanted to distribute it nationally as well. She began flying off to trade. In Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and St. Louis, setting up booths and trying to interest dealers. She got really obsessed with it. The company began to get attention. A reporter for the Greensboro News and Record wrote a story about it that nearly filled the entire feature page, including three colored photographs, one of Joanne holding a baby lamp, another of her knitting, and a third modeling a jacket and cap that she had designed and made from the yarn. The business was expanding rapidly, but more money seemed to be going out than coming in. Soon the company had gone through James Coleman's original investment, and the partners had to sign a note for a loan from a Durham bank to keep going. When that was gone, the partners had a falling out. Coleman demanded to see the books. Joanne just turned a deaf ear to everything, according to Jim. She was real sluggish in getting those books to him. And not long after Joanne turned over the books, Jim got a call from a lawyer who represented the company, a friend and neighbor who asked him to drop by his office. Jace Coleman was there with a cardboard box full of records for the Caswell Sheep and Wool Company. The lawyer told Jim that it seemed as if Joanne had not accounted for some of the company's money. And Jim recalled saying, Maybe she made some mistakes. They chuckled and said, it's more than that. Coleman was claiming that a lot of company money was missing and Joanne had embezzled it. Jim had a hard time accepting that. If she had any money, it didn't show up anywhere, he said later. He knew that Joanne had mishandled the books. It was a job she never should have taken in the first place, he thought. She couldn't even keep her own checkbook straight. But he also thought that most of the money that was unaccounted for had been legitimately spent, although Joanne didn't have the receipts or records to prove it. Jim consulted a lawyer friend, George Daniel. Daniel learned that Coleman had talked with the county district attorney, Phil Allen, Jim's old body from high school and college. Allen let Daniel know that if Coleman chose to press the matter, an indictment might be forthcoming. And Jim recalled the following. He says, George said, Well, they have got a case. We didn't have any choice but to deal with it. Let's do what we can to keep it out of court. The kids will have been devastated by it. I just didn't want it to be publicized. End of quote. The alternative was to come to a settlement with Coleman so that he wouldn't press charges. He wanted the bank loan repaid and his original investment returned. And Jim said that he had them over a barrel. What could they do? Either go to court on a felony charge or pay him what he wanted. Jim went to his mother, who had paid off some bills Joanne had accumulated where they were separated and told her about the situation. And Carolyn asked, What do you want me to do? And Jim said, Well, we need$30,000. She arranged a loan and the lawyers took care of the matter. But the situation opened a new rift in Jim and Joanne's marriage. Jim said, Quote, I was really upset about it. It really cost us some terrible hardships at the time. We have this terrible debt. We had to struggle along after that. It really hurt our relationship. End quote. Soon Joanne would be hurt and turn, and the source of her anguish would stem, ironically, from the church going. After the girls were born, Joanne had decided that the family should start going to church. Although Jim was not particularly religious, he went along for the sake of the children and family unity. They joined St. Luke's Episcopal Church, which Jim's family had helped to found. It was a small church that shared a priest with another church in Adjane County. On a good Sunday, maybe 25 people attended services. The up churches added miserably to the congregation. Bart and Emory were confirmed and became acolytes. Joanne was selected president of Episcopal Women, and Jim became a church warden. Not long after Jim and Joanne joined the church, they became acquainted with another couple, Ted and Judy Gold, who had three children. The two families soon were attending social functions together. Joanne didn't like Judy from the beginning. She thought that Judy was flirtatious and had an eye for Jim. And Joanne told her husband, she's after you. She's chasing you. Jim laughed it off, but he soon found himself involved in volunteer work with Judy. And one thing led to another, and they started an affair. Jim said he didn't plan it, he didn't go looking for anybody, he had not had any affairs, but he was so disillusioned with his marriage. Later in June, Joanne found a letter from Judy and Jim's billfold and confronted him about it, but he denied that anything was going on between them. Drew the call and invited Jim, Joanne, and the children to their house for a cookout on July 4th. They went. Joanne was friendly but also wary and watchful. Not long afterward, Joanne saw a blanket in the back of Jim's four-wheel drive Japanese pickup truck and became even more suspicious. One day, she was driving two person counting with Bart and Emery to help with a church cleaning project, and she spotted Jim's truck park at Haiko Lake with nobody around. She might have stopped and searched for Jim if the boys had not been along, but she already had a picture of what she likely would have found. After more than a year and a half, Jim and Joanne finally were finishing work on their old farmhouse. They had torn off the front porch, moved one chimney, replaced boards, painted the house blue. Inside, they had added a large bathroom, a modern kitchen, plumbing, and new wiring and lighting. They had redone the floors, and Joanne had painted and wallpapered and added new moldings. They moved back into the house in early August. A time that should have been joyous returning to the decorated house on the farm that Jim loved so dearly was instead sun. Jim seemed preoccupied and even more remote than usual, as if embroiled in some inner conflict. Suspicious about her husband's fidelity were gnawing at Joanne. The air in the house was nearly palpable with tension. On Bart's birthday, August 17, Joanne was driving him and Emory and some of their friends to the Pizza Hut and Danville for a party. Joanne drove past the business where Judith worked and saw Jim's truck part outside, rekindling her turmoil and anger. She recalled later I was falling apart. I was miserable. Although Joanne had a volatile nature, she knew it would do no good to confront Jim and scream at him. He would just climb up and walk away. Besides, she had no proof that he was actually having an affair. A few days after Bart's birthday, Joanne noticed a change in Jim. And she recalled that something was wrong, and he was like a cat slipping around getting his stuff together. The next morning, Jim broke the news. And he said, quote, I'm going to move in with Carolyn for a while. End quote. He offered no explanation. He just loaded his things in the truck and once again was gone. Joanne was left to explain to the children that their father would be staying with Carolyn for a while. This time Joanne felt it did affect the children. Emery, a sensitive boy just entering his teens, showed his pain. Bart, as usual, displayed no emotion and seemed less bothered by it. He said years later, quote, somewhere subconsciously I was aware they were having trouble, but it was not something I focus on. I just went on with my day-to-day routine. Go with the float type thing. Mainly, it was inconvenient. End quote. Not until after Jim left did Joanne conf get confirmation that he was having an affair. But it was something more than just a fling she discovered. He was in love. He was in love with Judy Gold. She planned to leave Ted and they already were looking for a house together in Milton. And it tore Joanne up. She was very faithful. She couldn't accept that he would do that. The hell with this, she said. She can't live with this. She was furious and determined to get back at her rival. She called Ted Gold to make sure that he knew what was going on. When Judy arrived at a meeting Joanne was attending, Joanne quickly departed, proclaiming loud enough for others to hear that the facility was not big enough for her and a whore. When Carrie and Alex came home from a visit to Carolyn with presents, they said Judy had given them. She recalled Carolyn and made it clear that the woman was never to be allowed anywhere near the children, and she would do whatever was necessary to prevent it. Her spleen vented. Joanne decided to get on with her life. She would do what she wanted to since high school, work in medical care. She went to Danville and got a job as a supervisor in the support department at Danville Memorial Hospital, where all four of her children had been born. Once the consequences of their actions became clear, the order began to cool between Jim and Judy. They broke off the relationship only weeks after Jim left home. Judy remained with her husband and children. Jim stayed on with his mother for a while. Then, less than three months after he had driven away from his family for the second time, Jim drove back to the farm and asked Joanne to allow him to return. And she said later, he could not live without the farm and without the children. And I knew that. She allowed him to come back, but her unforgiving nature could not allow her to erase what he had done from her mind. And she said years later that she never did get over it. We'll be right back. If there is a center of community life in Castro County, it is Barlett Jansey High School in Jensenville, the county's largest town with some 1,300 people. Indeed, the auditorium of the county's only high school doubles as the Civic Center, a place for community gatherings and entertainment. The school has an enrollment of about 1,000, half of whom, like the population of the county, are black. Those students who don't come to school in big orangey, yellow buses, usually drive their own cars, and the student parking lot is always jammed during school hours. In its athletic conference, Bartlett Jancy is known as the HIPAA School. Future Pharmaceutic America is one of the school's major extracurricular clubs. Vocational training programs are popular courses of study. Teachers who come to Bartlett Jancy from outside Caswell County often are surprised by the behavior of the students. The school has no big drug problem, no real trouble with violence. On the whole, the students are attentive, well-mannered, and respectful. A veteran staff member could not recall a single incident of a student confronting a teacher in a violent way. On the other hand, Barley Jancy is not known as a bastion of academic excellence. The Caswell County School System hires only the state-allocated teachers. It employs no extra special teachers on its own and offers no salary supplements to attract better teachers, as many school systems do in wealthier areas of the state. Despite this, a sizable number of Barley Jansey students go to college and do well, although many feel deprived when they meet students from the cities and realize the differences in academic opportunities. The best students at Barley Jansey all bear a single identity. They are proudly known as Slayton's kids. Wilton Slayton started the program for gifted and talented students in Caswell County in 1975, and he still directs it. At any given time, the number of gifted and talented students, or GT students, as they are also known, numbers about 15 at each grade level. They begin studying together in junior high school, and by the time they reach high school, they are a unit. And before they leave, they all look upon Weldon Slayton as a guru of sorts, not just a teacher, but a friend, a confidant, an advisor. And according to Slayton, who never married, he says, quote, I have a tendency to invest a lot of my emotional self into my students. I get attached to them. I get very possessive of them in a sense. I work hard to keep professional so I don't adopt them. End quote. Even in high school, Slayton, who grew up in Castro County, realized that he had a gift for teaching. And after working his way through college, he returned home to follow his calling. He really did want to give something back to the county, he said. While teaching, he enrolled at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, got a master's degree in teaching, the gifted and talented, and became one of the first gifted talented teachers in the state. So effective did he become with the best students in Caswell County that people often ask why he hasn't left to pursue great opportunities elsewhere. His answer is simple. He says, I keep thinking if I were to leave, they wouldn't get anybody who would care about my kids like I do. Amando's kids he came to care about where Bart and Emery Upchurch. After Bart had completed the fifth grade and Emory the third, Joanne and Jim took them out of Foltering Piedman Academy and allowed them to return to the public schools, which were improving. Later, the school system classified Emory as gifted and talented student. Bart was not accepted in the program. Joanne was incensed. Although Bart's grades were above average, they rarely were exceptional. Bart applied himself to that which interested him and got along with without great effort in those subjects that didn't. Joanne knew that Bart was smart, however. His IQ was 135 in the highest percentile in the county school system. He always did well in achievement tests, and she thought he deserved the best the school system had to offer. Joanne demanded that he be retested and reconsidered for the gifted and talented classes, and he finally was accepted in the program, beginning in the ninth grade at Diller Junior High in Jensenville, not far from Barley Jansen High. Weldon Slayton, who then taught English and social studies to gifted and talented students from the 9th through the 12th grades, thought that the classload that GT students had to bear was a shock to Bart, who to his mind had just been cruising through school to this point. Bart, who insisted on being called James outside his family, failed both history and English in the first nine weeks of GT classes. His mother came to the school to meet with Slayton and Bart about the problem. And Slayton recalled John telling him, he's lazy. And Slayton replied, I think he's going to be fine. He's understanding what you were doing. John said that she and Jim had discussed taking him out of the GT classes. And Bart said, You would take me out over my dead body, she told Slayton. We have never known him to care before. And Slayton said give him some time. And time was all it took. Before the year was over, Bart had brought his failing grades up to bees, although he was capable of even better. But Slayton was troubled by one thing his mother said in the first meeting. She said, I told him when he gets to be eighteen, he goes out the door. He's going to have to fend for himself. I think it bothered James for me to hear that, he said. Slayton saw that Bart kept an emotional distance from everybody, and Joanne's remark caused him to wonder if there had not been pain at home that caused Bart to shut himself off and denied things that were distressing. By the time Bart found himself under Slayton's influence, something other than schoolwork had caught his imagination, an escape that was taking a bigger and bigger hold of his time and energy. An avid reader since early childhood, Bart had gravitated to science fiction and fantasy. In his reading, he had come across mention of a game called Dungeons and Dragons, and he was curious about it. In the summer after he finished the seventh grade, Bart went into a toy and hobby shop in Denville, found the basic beginners game, and took his mother into buying it for him. He brought it home, read all the material, and taught his brother Emery to play it. He next brought his cousin Kenjara into the game. After classes resumed in the fall, he found more players and school friends. They usually play after school, sometimes by telephone. By the time Bart began ninth grade, he was bringing the game to school. Soon a group of students was playing at lunchtime each day in the school cafeteria. Others, curious about the game, began their own groups called Dungeons. Wilton Slayton had not heard of the game until Bart got it going at school, and he took the time to find out how it was played. The game, he discovered, is a medieval fantasy in which the players assume various roles thief, fighter, magic user, and sit upon adventures in which they face danger at nearly every turn. It is a game of castles and catacombs, of knights and assassins, elves and wizards, swords and daggers, truncheons and longbows, a game of gods and demons, of lawful good and chaotic evil, of deformed beasts and horrid monsters. The object is to use basic abilities granted to each character in a point system to slay enemies, overcome monsters, obtain treasure without taking hit points, which not only sap strength and skills, but can kill and end the game. Much of the action is determined by the throw of odd and many sided dice. But the game is controlled by a godlike player, the dungeon master, who creates the often terrifying scenarios and settles disputes. The game is immensely complicated. And can be played as brief adventures or in campaigns that go on for weeks, months, years, in which the characters move through many levels of development and gain immense powers. Dungeons and Dragons, or DD, as it is more often called by devoted players, was invented in the early 70s by an enthusiast of historical and war games, Gary Gygax, who started his own company to manufacture the game in 1973. Within six years, Parade magazine was calling DD the hottest fad on college campuses since streaking. By the early 80s, the game had made millions for Gygax and had spread into high schools and junior high schools, even into isolated spots like Caswell County. Slayton realized that the game was a genuine stimulus to imagination and creativity, and the students most interested in it clearly were among the brightest in the school. But he was concerned that some of them seemed to be getting too deeply involved. They played for many hours each week and talked about the characters they were playing as if they were real people. Or some of the students getting so wrapped up in the game that it became more real than reality. Slayton couldn't help but wonder, especially after some of the players' grades began to suffer. What bothered him more was the nature of the game itself. The underpinning seemed to be without any moral base. The object in winning is not that the good guy has won and just and has been served, but that you have used your power to outwit and outsmart and come out on top. Evil or good doesn't really matter as long as you win. DD takes the accepted moral values and turns them on their ear. But when he tried to caution students about his concerns, they showed little interest in listening. It was they countered just again, and one in which they found not only escape from the isolation and boredom of Castle County, but Great Pleasure as well. For Bart Upchurch, DD apparently answered a need on an even deeper level. From the time he was small, he always wanted to be in charge. At first there was only his younger brother to be in control. Later, his cousin Kenyatta. Years later Kenyatta would recall wonderful games that Bart created for them to play, but he always made up the rules. And she and Emery always had to follow them. Emery was easygoing and usually let Bart dictate their play. On the occasions when he balked, however, Bart would run to his parents saying, Emery wouldn't play. Emery won't not play. I'm tired of playing your game, would be Emery's response. Jim and Joanne would encourage Bart to leave Emery alone for a while. Then he would go off and play on his own and everything would be fine. But when they played together, Bart had to be in charge. The game had to be set up and run his way. Bart had to make his decisions. He was always the game master. Bart and D ⁇ D were a perfect match. Since he had been the first to learn the game and had introduced it to his friends, he became the dungeon master. As the games he conducted became more complicated, his group more experienced, Bart's skills grew. And as other groups formed and the game spread, Bart gained a reputation as a master of dungeon masters. And that power and recognition filled a void in Bart's life. By the time Bart was in high school, most of his fellow students and teachers thought him weird off the wall, and he seemed determined to set himself apart from others, to be different. He made his claim by being odd. And according to Slayton, he says, quote, I think he just found it difficult to deal in the social area, especially where girls were concerned. He never dated, he didn't even associate it with girls. He went around with guys who were loners. I always thought James was very lonely, and the only way he could connect was by being really weird and running with other weird kids. Tony Thin brought after the war a camouflage military field jacket to school and carry a backpack filled with D ⁇ D paraphernalia. He had taken a strong interest in the military and martial arts, and in 11th grade he began taking karate lessons after school in Danville. Rambo movies delighted him, and despite Bart's determination to be unconventional, outrageous, and unconcerned with authority, Weldon Slayton, who kept a relaxed atmosphere in his classes, found him to be obedient and respectful. Slayton said, quote, I took no foolishness. If I would say James sit down, he would sit down. He never defied me. He never phased me down about anything. He didn't argue. End quote. And there were times where Slayton found Bart to be uncommonly conventional. Whereas most of his other students simply call him Slayton, Bart always called him Mr. Slayton. Slayton was an instructor at the prestigious governor school, to which top high school students from around the state were sent for six weeks of summer study and activities each year. Bart was chosen to attend after he completed the 11th grade. Slayton, who encouraged informality as a means of making students feel comfortable and accepted, offered Bart an opening. And he says, Why don't you call me Weldon? He said. And Bart said, No, I can't. And he went right on calling him Mr. Slayton, always keeping a formal distance between them. The place where Bart felt most comfortable, creative, and accepted was where he was in control in the DD games over which he ruled. By the time the regular players in Bart's dungeon were high in high school, they were such experienced participants and had moved into such advanced stages of play that the game had taken on a different cast. No longer were the characters going out on adventures to face mere monsters. They now were competing against each other in long-running multi-level campaigns, scheming and plotting and conniving to destroy one another and seize the other's treasure. Everybody's character disliked everybody else's. It gave a comedic edge to the game. Bart says, We used to joke. And you will, you know, you become you will become nothing. And they will laugh when that somebody was stepping in traps or falling in pits. He says, you really want to win when you're competing against each other. It's a matter of prestige. It stimulated a lot of thought about the game, generated a lot of theory. It was hard to make it run smoothly. They would challenge every ruling that he made. Although Joanne sometimes complained that Bart was spending too much time playing D ⁇ D when he should be studying, neither she nor Jim really knew much about the game, nor were they especially concerned about Bart and Emery playing it. They were pleased that Bart had an activity he could enjoy that also simulated his fertile and creative mind. Yet concern about DD was growing among other parents around the country. On June 9, 1982, Pat Pooling of Montpellier, Virginia, came home to find her 16-year-old son Bink, a straight A honor student dead on the front lawn. He had shot himself through the heart with his father's handgun. Bink, an obsessed DD player, left a note revealing that his soul no longer was his because another player had put the curse of a werewolf on him. Only four months later, Tony Gowen, an 18-year-old DD salad, walked into a hobby shop in Bartston, Kentucky to inquire about a DD book he had ordered, got into an argument with the 20-year-old clerk and impaled her with a medieval broadsword, killing her. So many teenage suicides and murders were being connected to DD that Pat Pooling began a crusade against the game. She was joined by Thomas, Dr. Thomas Verdecki, an Illinois psychiatrist who headed the National Coalition on Television Violence and had studied several cases of teenage violence that had be that he related to DD. By the fall of 1985, when Bob Upchurch, the most accomplished dungeon master in Castro County, was beginning his senior year at Barlett Gensey High, Pooling and Radeki had begun generating national attention. The popular TV show 60 Minutes featured a segment on the dangers of DD. An article appeared at Newsweek, and newspapers were writing about the possible perils of the game. Ministers were denouncing it as a doorway to their cult and Satanism. As many as 50 teenage child uh murders, suicides, had been tied to playing the game and the number was growing monthly. The company that was now producing the game, TSR Hobbies Inc., denied any proven links between the game and the rush of violence. Players who killed themselves or others had deeper problems from other causes, the company said. DD, it claimed, was being made a scapegoat by parents seeking desperately to blame anything but themselves for their children's actions. Millions of teenagers play the game every week without harming themselves or anybody else, the company pointed out. Still, in 1983, the company had added to the games a warning about players becoming too closely identified with their characters. None of this controversy affected the most ardent DD players in Caswell County, doves in the dungeon over which Bart Upcho was a master. But the game had begun to go in a different direction. A new player had been added to the group. Otherwise the players had known him for years, even had played DD with him on occasion. But he had spent a year away from the county at a special school where he had been master of his own dungeons. Now he was back and playing in Bart's group. His name was Neil Hendelson. He was martyr than Bart, and to some minds, even weirder. Thank you for listening to the Murder Book. Have a great week.

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Kiara Coyle

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