Murder in Little Washington

Could a Vicious Attack and the Murder of a North Carolina Businessman Lead Back to Dungeons and Dragons? 

Lieth Von Stein around the time of his murder (photo source)

The Crime

It was 4:24 a.m. on Monday, July 25, 1988 when the call came in to North Carolina's Beaufort County Law Enforcement Center.  It had been a slow night, with dispatcher Michelle Sparrow reading a Stephen King novel throughout much of her 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift.  The woman on the other end of the emergency call was speaking so softly that Michelle couldn't fully understand her.  The woman asked for police and an ambulance and when Michelle asked her to speak up, she demurred.  She claimed that the intruder could still be in the house.  The dispatcher at first wondered if the caller was one of their "regulars," those few mentally disturbed people who would call emergency services to report terrible, yet false, acts.  She asked the woman her name and upon learning it -- Bonnie Von Stein -- and that the woman, Bonnie, said that she, as well as her husband, might be dying, Michelle Sparrow knew this was no crank call.  She advised the officers on duty, as well as rescue, to respond immediately to 110 Lawson Road for the possible beating and stabbing of two people.  "Please hurry," Bonnie Von Stein begged Michelle Sparrow.

The first officers to arrive at the scene, Danny Edwards, Ed Cherry, and Sergeant Bradford Tetterton, approached the two-story house with their weapons unholstered, fearing the intruder Bonnie Von Stein mentioned might still be in the house.  The house itself was dark and the men scoped it out with heavy flashlights, noting the enclosed back porch, with the porch door open and the broken window beside it.  Edwards and Tetterton entered the home through the open door where, in the kitchen, they found a fluorescent light on over the sink, cabinet doors opened under a microwave oven and a woman's white handbag on a stovetop with its contents strewn.  Edwards immediately detected the coppery scent of blood and mentioned it to Tetterton in a whisper, correctly ascertaining "Somebody's dead."  The pair made a sweep of the downstairs, finding no one or nothing unusual, and after turning on the hallway light, headed upstairs.  There were five closed doors and they took the first one on the right at the top of the stairs, a room that turned out to be the master bedroom.  In the darkness, they couldn't see Bonnie Von Stein but she called to them in desperation.  Sweeping his flashlight throughout the room, Tetterton was confronted by the most horrible sight he had ever encountered in his twenty-six years of service.  The room was awash in the red of the blood that was splattered everywhere.  On the bed, lying diagonally across it, was a stocky man clothed only in cotton briefs that had once been white but were now stained red with blood.   Stab wounds were visible in the man's upper back and left shoulder area.  Worse was the massive crater in the back of his head, so horrible that Tetterton believed he could look directly into the man's skull.   He immediately knew that this man was beyond human help.  Bonnie Von Stein, 44 years old, who lay on the floor next to the bed, told Tetterton that her husband, Lieth, 42 years old, was trying to help her and the intruder had attacked both of them with a "big club" or "baseball bat" and a knife.  

Meantime, Danny Edwards had gone into another bedroom after being advised that Bonnie's seventeen-year-old daughter Angela Pritchard was in the house.  He found the teenager asleep in her bedroom, the room directly next to the master bedroom, dressed only in a t-shirt and with a big square fan humming and blowing.  Despite the humidity and the heat of summer in North Carolina, a glass of ice water, with the ice cubes having not yet melted, sat on her bedside table.  Edwards awoke Angela, advised her there had been a situation in the house and asked her to get dressed as quickly as possible, which she did without question.  Leaving her to do so, he checked the remainder of the upstairs rooms and found no one else.  

Dispatcher Michelle Sparrow's husband, David, had been an EMT before becoming a police officer.  On duty that night, he responded to Lawson Road, armed with his shotgun and his medical equipment.  Let in the house by Edwards, he hurried upstairs to the master bedroom, finding Bonnie Von Stein lying on the floor in a bloodied nightgown.  He gave a compulsory check on Lieth Von Stein, agreeing with Tetterton that it was too late to render any aid, before turning his full attention to Bonnie.  He noted that she had been stabbed in the chest and was having difficulty breathing and so put an oxygen mask on her.  Although Bonnie was fading fast, she begged the officers not to let Angela in the room and to not harm her many cats and pet rooster that were roaming through the house.

The two EMTs that arrived by ambulance only moments later were stunned by the Von Stein bedroom.  They had expected some blood but the room was literally awash in it.  Blood had been sprayed and spattered on the ceiling and on three walls of the room.  The carpet was bloodied on both sides of the bed for more than three feet out.  They went first to Lieth, turning him over and discovering that in addition to the stab wounds in his back and the horrific head injury he had sustained, there was also a large and mean stab wound in the center of his chest, right above his heart.   Both his eyes were swollen and closed, his neat beard was matted in blood and his left hand was clenched.  Of the five gaping wounds on his head, three of them were across his forehead, one above and slightly to the side of his left eyebrow and the worst, above and to the back of his left ear.   There were six stab wounds from a large-bladed knife in his upper back, near his left shoulder and the one vicious stab wound to his chest, which would later be revealed to have gone straight through his heart.  His body appeared to have been bathed in his blood.   He had no pulse and the blood on his chest was already beginning to gel.   

Having done what they could do for Lieth, they began working on Bonnie.  They found she had cuts on her head and a stab wound to her chest that no longer appeared to be bleeding but she had lost a massive quantity of blood and her blood pressure was dangerously low.  The local hospital was notified to be prepared for her, as she was gravely injured and quickly fading, and permission was given for an IV drip and to wrap Bonnie in anti-shock trousers.  After a dressing was placed on her stab wound, a stretcher was brought into the house to transport Bonnie as quickly as possible to the emergency room.  

Tetterton had been speaking with Angela downstairs while the EMTs worked on Bonnie.  She claimed to have slept through the violence that went on in the room next door to hers, not even hearing Lieth's screams as he was being murdered.  She seemed oddly detached to the news that her parents had been beaten and stabbed.  She said she had a brother named Chris who was away at N.C. State University and Tetterton advised her to call her brother.  

(photo source)

Detective John Taylor was the youngest detective in the Washington Police Department at twenty-seven and he arrived at the crime scene after Bonnie Von Stein had been taken out of the house on a stretcher.  It seemed apparent that the intruder had entered and departed the home by the back porch but the broken window by the door was curious, as the door itself had nine individual panes of glass.  Furthermore, it would be impossible for someone to reach an arm in through the broken higher window to unlock the door (and silly, as one of the panes of glass by the lock itself could have been broken instead.)  Taylor found that the cuts in the window screen did not match the breaks in the glass.  Also curious was a faded and torn military knapsack that seemed out of place, lying on the back porch by a plastic garbage can. 

Although the white handbag found on the stovetop in the kitchen had been rifled through - and two additional handbags were found on a countertop - there were too many other things left behind that robbers typically take, like televisions, VCRs, stereos and computers.  A twenty-dollar bill and change were in plain view on a dresser in the master bedroom.  Lieth Von Stein's wallet and watch were untouched.  Bonnie's wedding rings were in a small bowl and other jewelry was in an unlocked box on a chest.  Detectives quickly came to the conclusion that robbery was highly unlikely and it whoever had entered the home had done so with the sole purpose of killing Lieth and Bonnie.

At the Beaufort County Hospital's emergency room, the doctor on duty found that Bonnie had suffered three very ragged lacerations on her head, two near her hairline at the center of her forehead of about an inch in length, and another, in a C-shape, over her right eyebrow.  Her left thumb, swollen and bruised, was likely broken.  Above her right breast was a grapefruit-sized bruise and to the right of her sternum was a two-inch stab wound.  The blade had bounced off bone and cut into the chest wall, causing a partial collapse of her lung.   But she was still alive. 

Chris Pritchard arrived in Little Washington around 8:30 that Monday morning, driven into town by N.C. State Safety Patrol officers, who had found him, hysterical, at one of the university's emergency call boxes.  After receiving the call from Angela that his mother and stepfather had been attacked, he had woken his roommate and torn their dorm room apart in search of his car keys, which he had been unable to locate.  He had then gone outside and seeing the emergency call box, used it to beg for help in getting home.  During the two-plus hour drive back to Little Washington, Chris had curled up in the backseat of the patrol car and gone to sleep, awaking only when they arrived at the Washington Police Department.  He was informed there that his mother was in the hospital but expected to survive and his stepfather was dead.  While Angela had been oddly unemotional, Chris, according to the officer who informed him, attempted to be grief-stricken "but he wasn't quite making it."  Chris asked to go to the hospital to see his mother before speaking with authorities, a request that was granted.  He was allowed to sit and hold her hand in the ICU while she recounted what had happened and Chris cried.

Lieth and Bonnie

Lieth, in his 1963 high school senior photo (photo source)

As with any homicide investigation, the authorities looked closely at the victims to discern who might want to harm them and why.  

Lieth Von Stein had been born in Queens, New York, the only child of parents of German descent who both came from prosperous families.  The Von Steins moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina when Lieth was a baby and began running a laundry that would expand to become one of the most successful in the country, with several branches and more than 130 employees.  Lieth, after graduation, went to the School of Engineering at N.C. State University but flunked out by the end of his junior year and, with the Vietnam War raging, was soon drafted and sent to Germany for clerical work.  Honorably discharged in 1970, he returned to North Carolina and enrolled at Guilford College in Greensboro.  He was well known for his intellect, outspokenness, and wry sense of humor, as well as his continued close relationship with his parents, whom he unfailingly introduced to all of his friends, male and female.  He became enamored with computers during his time at Guilford and following graduation, he got a job working with them at Integon, an insurance company in Winston-Salem.  

While working at Integon, he met a woman who had also taken a strong interest in computers.  Bonnie Bates Pritchard was two years older than Lieth with two small children and had recently separated from her husband.  A native of Welcome, North Carolina, located in the rolling farmland of northern Davidson County, she had grown up in a family with three sisters and a brother and regular churchgoing parents.  Quiet and shy, Bonnie's main passions were reading and animals.  She had gone to work at Integon two years after graduating from high school and three years before she had married Steve Pritchard, who was only seventeen at the time of their wedding and attending his senior year of high school.  Fifteen months after the wedding, a son, Christopher, was born; under two years later, daughter Angela joined the family.  The addition of children to the already shaky marriage proved the death knell and the couple separated days before Bonnie's twenty-eighth birthday and weeks before Chris's fourth birthday, with the divorce becoming final the following year - the first in the Bates family.  

Lieth and Bonnie began to see each other outside of work in October of 1976, with their first date being dinner at Bonnie's house and then watching television after Chris and Angela were put to bed.  Two weeks after this dinner date, Lieth moved to Cincinnati, where he had taken a job with Federated Department Stores.  He had seen Bonnie for the two weekends before he moved and although she expected things to fizzle with him out of town, he continued to call and write to her.  Each trip he made home to visit his parents, he saw Bonnie as well.  About six months after he moved, he introduced Bonnie and her children to his parents, an indication that things were serious.  As Chris and Angela had had little to no contact with Steve Pritchard after he had left the marriage, Lieth stepped into the role, watching the kids in their school plays, taking them out to eat and even traveling together as a family on vacations at the beach.  Following a visit to Welcome at the home of Bonnie's parents, Lieth arranged to have a washing machine and an air conditioner delivered to their home, telling the Bateses that it would make him feel so good knowing they would be comfortable in the North Carolina summers and that Bonnie's mother could have more time to herself if she had help with the wash.  

In early August of 1979 Lieth accepted a new job at a finance company in South Bend, Indiana and asked Bonnie to go with him as his wife.   She said yes and the two were married on August 17.  Bonnie gave up the job she had held for fifteen years and she and her children moved with Lieth to a suburb in South Bend.  The winters didn't suit him and he worried about his aging parents and so in 1981 he accepted the position of head of internal auditing at National Spinning Company in Washington, North Carolina.   In July of that year, Lieth, Bonnie and the two children moved to the Smallwood subdivision, where they purchased the two-story frame house at 110 Lawson Road.   Although Lieth was happy to be back in North Carolina, he never cottoned on to Little Washington, as it was known, wanting instead to be in a larger city like Winston-Salem.  

In 1983, Bonnie began teaching data processing at a local community college.  The following year, she accepted a job as a programmer analyst with Hamilton Beach at the appliance factory only a handful of miles from the Lawson Road home, a position she would hold for two years.

In 1987, Lieth's father died suddenly of an aortic aneurism, leaving an estate valued at more than $1.2 million (nearly $3 million in 2021 dollars).  Lieth's mother, already suffering with health issues herself and thoroughly grief-stricken over her husband's sudden passing, followed him in death only four months later.  The loss of both of his parents in so short a time not only left Lieth relatively wealthy but had him thinking hard on his own life, which he felt had fallen into a rut.  He had apparently never much liked his job and by the last weekend of his life, he was talking to Bonnie about quitting by the end of the year and perhaps traveling or starting a business of his own.  Bonnie would later say that on the last day of his life, Sunday, July 24, 1988, Lieth had been jovial and in good spirits, looking forward with great anticipation to their future.  

In addition to the $1.2 million-plus inheritance, Lieth also had around $1 million in life insurance.  As expected, Bonnie was his beneficiary although she was fairly quickly ruled out as a viable suspect, not only due to her life-threatening injuries but also after speaking to the Von Steins' neighbors, who all said that they were decent, if less than sociable, even standoffish, people.  Should Bonnie also die, that left Chris and Angela Pritchard to inherit. 

The Investigation

Detectives spoke to Chris Pritchard that Monday night around 10:30 p.m., at a friend's house where he and Angela were staying.  Although he was nineteen, in appearance he looked closer to sixteen, a slight young man who wore a baseball cap and chain-smoked nervously.  He told them he had come home to visit that weekend, spending Friday night in the family home on Lawson Road.  He had had a term paper due that Monday though and so had headed back to school on Saturday evening after dinner.  On Sunday night, he had gone out with friends and then returned to the dorms, where he had stayed up until three or three-thirty drinking beer and playing cards.  He had only been in his dorm room and in his bed a very short time when Angela had called him about the attack.  The school's public safety officers had driven him back to Washington because he had been distraught and he couldn't find his car keys.   As far as Chris knew, his parents weren't having any problems and he knew of no one who disliked them, much less would would want to hurt them.  When asked if he and Lieth had gotten along, Chris assured the detectives they had and very well, something that was contradicted by other family members and friends who said that Lieth and Chris had frequently butted heads.  Chris claimed that he knew that Lieth had come into stocks or money but he really knew no details about it.  This too was contradicted by Bonnie, who told detectives that she herself had told Chris not only how much Lieth inherited but how much he was insured for.

Detectives go not only on facts but also on their gut feelings - and the detectives not only did not trust Chris Pritchard, they did not like him.

The map that broke the case and the house on Lawson Road (photo source)

What would eventually break the case came courtesy of  a Pitt County farmer by the name of Noel Lee.  Around four-thirty in the morning on Monday, Lee had just finished the hour-long process loading up hogs at his farm that was roughly one mile over the Beaufort County line and seven miles from Little Washington.  He had just been heading back home when he noticed a fire burning in the pre-dawn darkness.  He had been curious enough to drive his truck over and note that the fire was about three or four feet in height and a foot or two in diameter.  It burned so brightly that Lee instantly knew it had been fueled by something.  He didn't get out of his truck -- perhaps exhaustion, perhaps an ominous feeling -- but when he heard about Lieth Von Stein's murder, he instantly thought of the unusual fire and called authorities. 

Lee proved to be an excellent witness who remembered the exact time he first noted the fire and recalled precisely where it had been burning.  On Tuesday evening, he was able to take detectives to where he had spotted the fire and then over to Grimesland Bridge Road off State Route 264, where it had been burning.  The fire, naturally, had burnt out, leaving a blackened circle and charred debris.  In those debris were what appeared to be a socket for an extension wrench, burned remnants of blue jeans, molten remains of a sweater, the bottom of a Reebok sneaker and a large hunting knife, its handle melted and its six-inch blade blackened.  Also found were some wadded sheets of paper, one of them partially burned, that had blown out of and away from the fire. 

On Wednesday morning, detectives returned to photograph the area in daylight and give a more thorough search (although nothing more of significance was found).  

The knife was found to be consistent with the wounds that Lieth Von Stein had suffered.  More amazingly, once the singed sheets of paper were examined, one of them was determined to be a map, crudely drawn with a ballpoint pen,  One word was notated on the map - Lawson.  Blocks were drawn in, obviously to represent homes, and the one with an "X" had 110 written on it.  110 Lawson Road, the Von Stein home. 

The funeral service for Lieth Von Stein was held on Thursday, July 28.  What started as a gray drizzle turned into a raging thunderstorm by the time the service began.  Lieth's body was not present; he had been cremated and the cremains would be buried in Winston-Salem following a second, later, service.  The chapel was packed with Lieth's co-workers, neighbors and Bonnie's family.  Bonnie, attired in a black bedroom gown, was brought from the hospital in a car sent by the funeral home.  Chris and Angela rode with her and Chris, along with a mortuary employee, assisted her up the aisle and to her seat.  Following the service, she returned to the hospital, where she remained for four more days.   

On Friday, July 29, Washington's annual Summer Festival began, bringing in record crowds to enjoy the live music, food stands and arts and crafts exhibits.  Two of the attendees on that opening night were Chris and Angela Pritchard.  

Chris

(photo source)

Given the estimated timing of the attacks on Lieth and Bonnie, when Noel Lee had observed the fire and the location of the fire, detectives believed that after killing Lieth and attempting to kill Bonnie, the perpetrator or perpetrators had driven west on 264, stopping off at Grimesland Bridge Road to search for a good area to dispose of the evidence.  After doing so, if they then continued west on 264 they would end up in Raleigh and N.C. State University, where Chris Pritchard was a student.    The focus of the investigation enlarged to include Raleigh and N.C. State.

Before speaking to anyone outside the Pritchard family about Chris, however, investigators asked Chris to draw a map of the Von Stein neighborhood.  This he did, with a ballpoint pen, even going so far as to label the streets.  That second map would be compared with the first, with the professional and expert opinion by a handwriting analyst that the "Lawson" Chris had printed (twice) on the second map was identical to that on first map.

Speaking to former coworkers of Chris' and a girl he had dated, detectives learned that Chris had reportedly begun using marijuana and cocaine after his high school graduation and that although he liked to think and say he was lucky with the ladies, he was anything but.  The girl he had dated briefly broke up with him after he wouldn't keep his hands off her, even after she repeatedly told him no.  That girl had had no contact with him since that time but mentioned that he had talked incessantly about a game called Dungeons & Dragons.  

Chris' roommate during his freshman year told detectives that he and Chris never hung out together as their habits were different.  Chris never studied, to the point of barely making it through his first year.  The roommate knew of Dungeons & Dragons, as Chris read books about it in their room, but had never played the game there.

Detectives also spoke to a local sixteen-year-old who had often sold Chris pot and a mutual friend who confirmed Chris' marijuana use, as well as LSD, which he said Chris had started taking in the middle of his first summer session.  Chris had been a braggart, throwing money around on alcohol and drugs, and telling his friends that his parents were wealthy; they had bought him a Mustang, a nice computer, and they sent him a weekly allowance.  Chris was easily influenced by others, they said, and the main reason he was doing so poorly at school, besides the drinking and drugs, was that he spent practically all of his time playing Dungeons & Dragons.  

Detectives located the two female students who had hung out with Chris and another friend on the night of Sunday, July 24, going out to eat and then returning to the dorms, where they recalled that Chris had parked his car in the outer, fringe lot rather than closer to the dorms.  They remembered the evening well because their card game had not started until ten o'clock or later in their dorm room and beginning around one or one-thirty in the morning, one of the girls had started to ask Chris to leave.  Chris had ignored her requests until three-thirty when, after learning the time, he left at once.   One of the girls recounted that Chris had told her that he had an outline on his computer of how to come into a lot of money but when she asked to see it he had refused, saying it was secret.  She further said that Chris was resentful of Lieth, angry that Lieth spent his money on Bonnie but not on Chris and Angela.  Chris, she said, felt that he and Angela should have better cars and better clothing.   

Other acquaintances of Chris' said the same; that Chris was resentful of Lieth, did not like him, while others claimed that Chris never spoke of his stepfather at all.  

Unsurprisingly, Chris was not a good student and was better known around campus for his alcohol and drug consumption and his utter obsession with Dungeons & Dragons, although he had been a good student in school until about his senior year.  Despite that difficult year,  he had still been accepted at NC State as a nuclear engineering student.  Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, it was the same school that Lieth Von Stein had taken and flunked out of twenty years before.

Detectives, when speaking with Lieth's coworkers, learned that the Thursday or Friday before his death Lieth had been upset with Chris over his studies, going so far as to say that if Chris' grades did not improve that semester, he would be cut off. 

The detectives felt they might have a good motive for Lieth's murder and the attempted murder of Bonnie - an inheritance the rapidly failing Chris was certain to receive should both of them die.   Unknowing to Chris, however, was the fact that even if Bonnie had died, her will and that of Lieth, stipulated that neither Chris nor Angela could receive their share until they reached the age of thirty-five.   

 The Game

Dungeons & Dragons circa 1980 (photo source) 

Dungeons & Dragons first hit the market in 1974, a precursor to the immersive videogames that would flood the market decades later.  A fantasy role-playing game derived from miniature wargames, D&D allows players to to create their own character and assume that role.  Playing with a participant that takes on the role of Dungeon Master, who is the game's referee and storyteller, they form parties who explore, gather treasures and information and do battle.  The game allows the Dungeon Master to create his or her own unique storylines and adventures.  

By 1981, Dungeons & Dragons had a reported three million-plus players around the world and three-quarters of a million copies of the rules were being sold annually by 1984.   While the game won many awards in the role-playing genre, it also came under fire for its violent incentives and allegations of devil worship and witchcraft and for leading to suicide and murder.  In 1979, nearly a decade before Lieth Von Stein was murdered in his bed, Michigan State University student James Dallas Egbert III went missing from his dorm after playing Dungeons & Dragons.  He was located by a private investigator a month later and returned to his family, where he killed himself with a gunshot to the head. 

In 1982, sixteen-year-old Bink Pulling, an honors student and avid D&D player in Montpelier, Virginia, left a note saying that his soul was no longer his after another player put the curse of the werewolf on him.  He then got his father's handgun, went out onto the front lawn of the family home, and shot himself through the heart.  

Four months after Bink Pulling's suicide, eighteen-year-old Tony Gowin of Bardstown, Kentucky walked into a local hobby shop to ask about a Dungeons & Dragons book he had ordered.  He got into an argument with the twenty-year-old clerk and impaled her with a medieval broadsword, killing her. 

In 1984, 12-year-old Steven Erwin of Colorado fatally shot his 15-year-old brother Dan and then himself.  Both boys were avid fans of Dungeons & Dragons and left suicide notes saying that death was the only way they could get out of the game.

On May 26, 1985, a trio of Ragland, Alabama high school honor students playing Dungeons & Dragons shot and killed 26-year-old convenience store clerk Missy Macon.   

In November of 1985, sixteen-year-old David Ventiquattro of New York, a Dungeon Master, took a .20 gauge shotgun and killed his eleven-year-old friend Martin Howland.  Ventiquattro claimed that in his D&D world, his role was to extinguish evil and Martin was an evil demon who had to die. 

In 1987, Long Island teen Daniel Kasten murdered his parents as they slept.  An avid Dungeons & Dragons player, Kasten believed that he was under the control of the Mind Flyer character.    

    

Although the company that produced the game denied any legitimate connection between it and violence, in 1983 it added a warning about players becoming too closely identified with their characters.

Like James Dallas Egbert had in 1979, Chris and his D&D friends liked to play the game in the steam tunnels at school, fortifying themselves with alcohol, pot and/or acid before playing out the scripts they were given by the Dungeon Master, roleplaying which would often run throughout the night.  The two friends that Chris had that seemed as dedicated to the game as he was were a current student named Bart Upchurch and a former student named Neal Henderson.

Bart

(photo source)

James Bartlett "Bart" Upchurch III was from eastern Caswell County and, like Bonnie Von Stein, had grown up on a farm.  Although his parents would stay married for years, they endured breaks in which Bart and his younger siblings were separated from their father.  In elementary and high schools, he had been a good student with above-average grades but he tended to bore easily.  He was an avid reader, though, with particular interest in the science-fiction and fantasy genres.  It was while reading one of his books that he was first introduced to Dungeons & Dragons.  He acquired the board game and soon had friends playing with him after school and even over the telephone.  By ninth grade, Bart brought the game to school with him and it would be played in the cafeteria during lunch.  So popular did it become that soon other students were creating their own groups to play.  Teachers were aware the students were involved in the game but in an isolated area like Caswell County, Dungeons & Dragons was seen as a positive outlet for kids to stimulate their creativity and imagination.   The game required intense concentration and a commitment, neither negative attributes.  For Bart, who loved to tell stories and loved to be in charge, it answered an innate need he had.  That the game had a lack of moral base, that the people who "won" weren't necessarily "good guys" but those characters who had outsmarted others, troubled him not at all.  As the Dungeon Master, he liked the power and the recognition far too much. 

Although Bart had acquired a reputation as a loner and "weird," his teachers recalled him always being very obedient and respectful to them, if with no apparent direction or goals in life.  

By the time Bart began his senior year of high school in the fall of 1985, he and his fellow players had moved into advanced stages of play and the game had taken on a new and different cast.  No longer were their characters going after monsters but were now facing off against each other, to seize each other's "treasure" and conspire to destroy other characters.  

It was at this point that Neal Henderson joined Bart's circle and D&D group.

Neal

Like Bart, Neal Henderson came from a broken family but unlike Bart, who did not communicate his feelings easily, Neal found the separation from his adored father heart wrenching.   Precocious in his youth, he had an exceptionally high IQ of 180 and was considered gifted.   So far ahead of his classmates that he made perfect scores on any tests he took, he, like Bart, became bored at school.  He turned his attention to books, books of all genres, and created his own comic books.  In the fifth grade, Neal attended eighth-grade classes in the morning and then returned to elementary school in the afternoon.  Although he could have handled a full day of a high school curriculum, Neal's mother worried about his social development if he spent all day with older classmates.  

Although the ten-year-old was considered an oddity, he was not bored at school for the first time although he was a terrible procrastinator.  At twelve, Neal went off to high school and took the SAT for the first time, outscoring the gifted academics in the senior class.  At thirteen, he heard of Dungeons & Dragons for the first time and read everything he could find on the subject.  

When he was fourteen, Neal was accepted at the prestigious North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, where joined other students who were considered the state's best at the tuition-free boarding school.  Shortly after his arrival at the school, he became involved with several groups that engaged in role-playing games that included Dungeons & Dragons.  Also for the first time in his life, he made friends, including his first girlfriend.  His habit of procrastination was still present though, as well as a lack of self-discipline and it reflected in his schoolwork.  He was placed on academic probation and although he managed to pass with Bs and Cs, he was not invited to return to the school the following year.

Although Neal felt badly about letting his mother down, he later said the school and its freedom wasn't for him, as he didn't have the self-discipline required to do the work.  He started his senior year of high school back home, where he played tuba in the band, worked on the high school yearbook, helped raise money to go towards the purchase of a computer for the Junior Engineering and Technical Society (a computer that he helped program), and organized groups for fantasy role-playing.  Like he had done in the year previous, Neal spent more time playing games than he did on his schoolwork and so repeated his senior year.  

He had also found a girlfriend.  Kenyatta Upchurch was Bart's first cousin but she met Neal through Bart's younger brother.  Their relationship would be a typical teenaged tempestuous one, peppered by Neal cheating on her with other girls during his second senior year.  Neal felt these indiscretions should not matter, as he did not love them and he was only satisfying a physical need.  He found girls easy to use and thought it their fault if they got hurt.  When told he shouldn't use people, his only reply was that people were so easy to manipulate.

A Perfect Storm

Bart had his first run-in with the law in February of 1986, when he and three friends were arrested and charged with breaking into the high school and stealing a computer and breaking into a lake house, where they stole cases of beer, wine, a television, two clocks, and a pair of binoculars.  Bart admitted his guilt to his angry and embarrassed parents, who later said that while Bart worried about the outcome (he could have faced the maximum of twenty years in prison), he had no remorse over what he'd done.  

A plea deal was worked out in March, in which the two charges would be consolidated and reduced to misdemeanors in exchange for Bart pleading guilty, paying restitution and completing 150 hours of community service in the six months following his plea (neither of which he did).    Over the next two years, he would be arrested twice more: a misdemeanor larceny charge for stealing a cooler of beer and for driving without a license and careless and reckless driving.   

He tried marijuana for the first time around graduation, allegedly because he thought it something he should do before he started college.  Initially, due to his interest in the military, he wanted to apply to the U.S. Naval Academy but realized his chances of acceptance were slim.  A chance meeting with an army recruiter led him to decide that a three-year enlistment, in which he saved his money and earned college credits, was perfect for him - until his arrest curtailed that.  His probation officer refused to give the permission for him to enlist, saying that he had to complete at least half a term at college before he could come off probation.  Bart had applied to three or four colleges in the fall of his senior year, although he had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with his life.   He was accepted at North Carolina State University and while he wasn't particularly thrilled, he didn't want to stay in Caswell County.

Neal too had been accepted to NC State on a full scholarship.  He had achieved a near-perfect score on his SATs, the only 1500 the admissions director said he had seen.  Although not a particularly close or good friend of Bart's, Neal was friends with Bart's younger brother and he suggested that he and Bart room together at college.  Given Bart's propensity toward neatness and order and Neal's disorganization and sloppiness, as well as Bart's love of attending parties nightly and returning to the dorm drunk and Neal's dislike of any groups of more than three people, it did not turn out to be the best suggestion.  They remained roommates for their freshman year and even roommates at an apartment off campus during that summer of 1987 but went their separate ways, at least residentially, by the fall of their sophomore year.

Bart had flunked out his freshman year and was informed he would not be invited back.  Neal too had struggled, ending up on academic probation and with his scholarship in jeopardy.  Instead of applying themselves over the summer semester, they watched MTV, played games, smoked marijuana, and shoplifted from a variety of stores, despite Bart's earlier convictions.     

By the end of his sophomore year, Neal too had flunked out, with his scholarship revoked and he was forced to move off-campus.  

Bart was back in school for the summer session by the time he was hanging up posters in search of new D&D players around the campus (with a promise of "Free Beer!").  Neal was working at a local retail store but scheduled his hours around their projected game time.  Also taking the summer session, and against his parents' advice, was Chris Pritchard.  

Confessions

It would take many months but ultimately, it would be Neal that would break and confess all to the investigators.   Unlike Bart, who had been calm and alternately cordial and flippant when questioned, Neal seemed vulnerable and nervous to the detectives.  They played a hunch, telling him they knew Chris was involved and they felt Neal knew something and it would be better for him to tell them what he knew.  The story Neal told was chilling.

Neal said that within a week or so of meeting Chris, discussions turned toward future plans and Chris had mentioned that it would only be a matter of time before he was wealthy; his family, according to Chris, had millions, including multiple houses and cars.  Someone - Neal couldn't remember who - had made the suggestion that Chris should just go ahead and off his parents for the money.  Once they were dead and Chris inherited, he could buy a house in the woods for all of them to live in, where they could spend their days doing drugs, drinking, and playing Dungeons & Dragons.  Neal assumed that it was just bullshitting until July of 1988, when Chris and Bart informed him they had come up with a plan for Chris to inherit early by killing his parents.  

Their first plan had involved Chris sedating his family with sleeping pills and then setting the house on fire.  That plan was scrapped after Chris decided that it would be best if he were not in the home; he thought a home invasion would be a better choice.  Angela was not really discussed other than Chris saying at one point that he was okay splitting the inheritance with her (an amount he told Bart and Neal was around $10 million) and also saying that should she awaken on the murder night, she would also have to be taken out.

According to Neal, Bart agreed to be the actual killer.  Neal's job was to drive Chris' car to Washington, since Bart's driver's license had been revoked.  Neal believed he was going to paid either $2,000 or $20,000 for chauffeuring Bart to and from the scene.  Chris drew them a map of the neighborhood, showing not only the Von Stein house but the neighboring houses with dogs that might bark.   

The day before the murder, Neal said that Chris told him that his parents were about to disinherit him over his poor school performance and lack of ambition and if disinherited, he would have to leave school and likely find a job.  

Neal did not know when the murder plot was going down until the day of Sunday, July 24, 1988 when Bart showed up with Chris' car keys and told him to meet in the fringe parking lot behind the Lee dorms that night around midnight.  Neal said that Bart had applied black shoe polish to a white pair of batting gloves, as well as to the bat he said should "get the job done" on both of Chris' parents.  Just in case, though, Chris had purchased a hunting knife as backup.  According to Neal, Bart was excited and hyperactive about the upcoming murder mission.  

Neal maintained that even while driving Bart to Washington, he was under the impression that he was only going to commit a burglary of jewelry that Chris said was in the house.  Even when they pulled off where Chris had told them to and Bart changed into all black clothing, smeared black shoe polish around his face and put a dark ski mask on, Neal still insisted he had no idea that people were going to get hurt.

Neal told the detectives that he waited in the car while Bart went off with a key that Chris had provided.  He wasn't sure how long Bart was gone but when he returned he told Neal that he had "actually done it" and he had "never seen so much blood in my life."  Neal at first said that he had seen blood on Bart's hands and then later recanted that statement.  

It was Bart who directed Neal on where to go to dispose of the clothing, weapons and map and Bart who set the items on fire.  

Neal drove the two back to Raleigh and left Chris' car in the same lot.  He put Chris' keys on a high shelf in a shared bathroom per Bart's instruction. 

He had spent the last nearly twelve months trying to forget that night and claimed he had been in a state of depression ever since.  He knew he needed to atone by telling all but claimed that he had not come forward out of fear of Bart Upchurch and Chris Pritchard.  

On Thursday, June 15, 1989 Bart Upchurch was arrested for the murder of Lieth Von Stein and the attack on Bonnie Von Stein.  He refused to say anything and asked for a lawyer.

Although officers had done their best to keep Bart's arrest and arraignment secret so as not to tip Chris off, a friend of Bonnie's in Washington had called her in Winston-Salem to tell her that a friend of Chris' had been arrested for Lieth's murder.  Bonnie let Chris know, who had been living with her after leaving school for "psychiatric" reasons, and Chris spent Thursday night at a friend's house. 

On Friday, June 16 detectives turned up at Bonnie's home in Winston-Salem with a warrant for Chris' arrest.  Chris called his attorney before returning to the house, where he was promptly taken into custody.  On the drive back to Beaufort County, he chatted about the tornadoes that had recently struck Winston-Salem and Wake Forest, where he had enrolled in summer school.  He did not speak about the charges leveled against him but acted certain that he would not be under arrest for long.

On the morning of Tuesday, June 20, Neal Henderson was arrested in Raleigh.  He had known it was coming and was waiting for the detectives.  

The Trials

Chris, Bonnie and Angela, January 1990 (photo source)

On Friday, July 21, Neal was released on a bond of $200,000 and moved in with his mother in Danville, Virginia.  As he had been working at a Wendy's in Raleigh when he was arrested and was within days of a promotion, he was allowed to work at a Danville Wendy's while out on bail.   

On Monday, July 31, following a bond motion hearing in court in Washington, Chris' bail was set at $300,000, half of which was to be secured.  Bonnie used two certificates that had been Lieth's to secure Chris' bond.  Neal Henderson had also been in court that morning and Bonnie had a visceral reaction to him that necessitated her to briefly leave the courtroom.  She felt his thick, stocky frame may have been what she had seen that morning when she and Lieth had been attacked and not the lean and lanky frame of Bart Upchurch.

Three days later, Bart reported to the same courtroom where his bond was set at a half million dollars, all of it to be secured.  His family could not meet that requirement and he was returned to jail to await his trial.  

By December, a plea deal had been worked out with Neal and his attorneys.  In exchange for pleading guilty to the felony charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting assault with a deadly weapon and intent to kill, all other charges would be dropped and Neal would testify against Bart and Chris.  Sentencing would be left to the discretion of the judge, who could sentence Neal to as much as life plus twenty years.  On December 5, the plea agreement was accepted by the judge with sentencing to occur after the trials of Bart and Chris.  Neal was allowed to return to Danville with his family.

The trials were scheduled to begin on January 2, 1990 but on December 27, 1989, Chris plead guilty and agreed to testify against Bart after spending nine hours telling his story.  Although there were some inconsistencies, Chris' account backed up Neal's that Bart was the murderer.  Despite this crushing development for Bart's defense, he refused to admit his guilt in the crimes and attempt to seek a plea deal from the state.  He would go to trial.

Bart on trial (photo source)

Bart's trial began on Monday, January 8, 1990 in Elizabeth City, at the Pasquotank County Courthouse.  His jury compromised eight women, four men and two alternates - a man and a woman.  All of them said they could in good conscience sentence Bart to death should they find him guilty and determine the circumstances warranted such punishment.

Beginning at the end of that first day and into Tuesday, January 9, Bonnie Von Stein took the stand and recounted the horrible events of that night in July when she was attacked and her husband was killed.  Two days later, on Thursday, January 11, Chris, considered the prosecution's star witness, took the stand.  He recounted his relationship with Lieth, his troubles with drugs that included marijuana, cocaine, LSD and ecstasy, his faltering grades at college and his obsession with Dungeons & Dragons.  He then recounted the murder plot, which was the first time the general public had heard it.  It was also the first time that Angela, seated beside Bonnie in the courtroom, heard her brother say that if she had awakened on that night back in July of 1988, she was to have been killed as well for the main reason being that Chris would then stand to be the sole beneficiary of their parents' estate.  She showed no outward signs of emotion and had no change in expression.  Chris admitted to having bought the knife used to stab Lieth at a Kmart only days before the murder and testified that only the knife was discussed as being used, not the baseball bat.  

Responding to questions from his own attorney, Chris said that upon learning his mother had survived the assault, he had been "happy."  He also said that he had "incredible remorse" over the attack and murder and he was "thoroughly disgusted."   He admitted the initial idea to murder his parents had come from him.

On Tuesday, January 15, Neal Henderson took the stand, testifying as to his background in a monotone voice so low that the judge had to remind him to speak up.  He recounted meeting Bart back in high school, going to NC State with him, playing Dungeons & Dragons, meeting Chris and taking drugs.  He went over the plot to murder Lieth and Bonnie and testified that Bart had always carried around an army green knapsack, like the one found at the crime scene, and a baseball bat.  He was still on the stand Wednesday, recounting the night of the murder and asserting that neither Bonnie nor Angela nor anyone else had conspired to murder Lieth Von Stein; only Chris, Bart and Neal himself.  Neal was asked why he had gotten involved the plot to kill the Von Steins and he responded that he had poor self-esteem and was desperate to make friends and fit in.  When shown a color photograph of Lieth as he was found dead in his bedroom, Neal teared up and said he not only did not do that, but that he could not have done that.  

Chris and Neal testifying at Bart's trial (photo source)

Bart's attorneys called Jim Upchurch, his father, to the stand, then his great-uncle and then a friend of Bart's from high school.  To everyone's surprise, the defense then rested.  

In closing, which ran over an hour-and-a-half, Bart's attorneys stressed there was not one piece of physical evidence that linked their client to the crime, but both Neal Henderson and Chris Pritchard had admitted their guilt.  The "cold, callous and bloodthirsty" Chris had hired Neal to kill his parents.  The medical examiner had testified that the object used to bludgeon Lieth and Bonnie had been swung by a right-handed person.  Bart, seen writing at the defense table, was clearly left-handed - but Neal was right-handed.  The jury just needed to use common sense with the case.  They closed with a reminder to the jury that despite the testimony, no one knew exactly what had happened and by whom that night at the Von Stein house.

The case went to the jury on the morning of Tuesday, January 23.   Their deliberations continued through lunch and into the afternoon until 5 p.m., when the judge called the end of the day.  Deliberations resumed on Wednesday morning, continuing through lunch until the jury reached a verdict at 4:05 p.m.  None of them looked at Bart as their verdict of guilty was read.  Bart, who on Tuesday morning, had expected the jury to return within minutes with an acquittal, paled visibly and put a hand to his mouth.   His mother, whose birthday it was that day, sobbed and grabbed her son's shoulder.

(photo source)

The jurors' jobs were not yet done.  Under North Carolina law, they had to decide the punishment for Bart: life in prison or death in the gas chamber.   

The sentencing hearing began on Friday, January 26.  As expected, Bart's family took the stand to beg that his life be spared.  What was unexpected was Bonnie taking the stand outside the presence of the jury to speak of her general objection to the death penalty and that she did not want Bart Upchurch to be executed.  Feeling that her words would invite the jury to use passion and emotion in their decision, the judge found her testimony constitutionally unconscionable and did not allow the jury to hear it.  

Shortly after 3:30 p.m. on Monday, January 29, the jury began its deliberations on sentencing.  They were sent home at 5 p.m. and picked up deliberations on Tuesday morning.   When they returned later that day with a verdict, two of the female jurors were openly crying and once again, none would look at Bart.  Bart's attorneys knew that they had not chosen to spare his life and instead, sentenced him to death.  

Angela Pritchard, who had sat through Neal Henderson's testimony and who had heard the painful details of her brother recounting his plans to end their parents' lives, and possibly her own with boredom bordering on thorough disinterest, burst into tears upon hearing that Bart had been sentenced to death.  

End Game

(Photo source)

Neal Henderson was sentenced to 40 years for aiding and abetting second-degree murder and six years for aiding and abetting assault with a deadly weapon, with the sentences to run concurrently, and was sent to the Harnett County Correctional Institution south of Raleigh.   He was given a recommendation for a "study release," which meant that Neal could have been out of prison in as little as five years.   He ended up serving double that, being released from the Orange Correctional Center in Hillsborough on December 11, 2000 and still resides in North Carolina, where he manages a restaurant.  During the entirety of his incarceration, Neal did not commit a single infraction or have one write-up.   

(Photo source)

Following his conviction and sentence of death, Bart Upchurch filed an appeal and in October of 1992, the Supreme Court of North Carolina found that errors had been made in his sentencing trial and vacated his death sentence, remanding his case for a new capital sentencing proceeding.  At the new hearing, he was sentenced him to life imprisonment.  After serving time at Alexander Correctional Institute and Hyde Correctional Center, Bart was transferred to Davidson Correctional Center, near Lexington, where he remains.  

Unlike Neal Henderson, Bart has had seven infractions since 1995, ranging from theft to disobeying orders.  His last infraction, in September of 2021, was for substance possession.    

He is eligible for parole in 2022.    

            

(Photo source)

Judge Thomas Watts, who had presided over Bart's trial and who had sentenced Neal Henderson, also sentenced Chris Pritchard.  Before handing down the sentence, Chris spoke on his own behalf, saying that while he had forgiven Neal and Bart for their parts in the crime, he had not yet forgiven himself.  Judge Watts believed that Chris was remorseful but also stated, "The midwife may have been Dungeons & Dragons and drugs - I would not argue with that - but the genesis was Christopher Pritchard." 

Judge Watts imposed the maximum sentence on Chris; life plus twenty years.  He was allowed to step into a side room with Bonnie and his attorney for a final, brief, goodbye.  Angela, for whatever reason, did not accompany them.

Chris was sent first to a prison in Goldsboro, southeast of Raleigh, where he underwent a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program before transferring to the Craggy Correctional Institute, north of Asheville.  While in prison, he became a born-again Christian.  Shortly before he was convicted, Bonnie reestablished her relationship with him.  She stayed in touch with him while he was incarcerated and drove to visit him every visitation day.     

He was released from the Davidson Correctional Center near Lexington on May 13, 1997 and moved in with his mother.  He finished his probation on May 31, 2012.    

He currently resides in Winston-Salem with his wife and works with at-risk youth, an advocation he began while imprisoned.  He remains close to his mother.

  

And yet unanswered questions still remain.  

During Lieth's autopsy, the coroner found undigested chicken and rice in his stomach.  Bonnie always said that she and Lieth had dinner that night and then returned home, where Lieth went to bed at 9 p.m.  Rice and chicken, being easily digestible, should have long since left his stomach between three and four in the morning, when the attack would have happened.   Extreme stress can slow down the body's normal digestive functioning but this fact, combined with the abnormal lack of emotion shown not only by Chris and Angela but by Bonnie herself had some wondering whether she had been telling the truth.

Bonnie's initial and visceral reaction to seeing Neal Henderson for the first time supported the theory of some experts who believed that two people were involved in Lieth's murder.  Bonnie had described the assailant, whom she had only glanced briefly in the dark and without her glasses, as being big and bulky with a neck that sat right on his shoulders - a description that would never been given to Bart Upchurch, unless Bart had padded himself substantially that night.  The experts believed that Lieth had been struck by an instrument wielded by a right-handed person; Bart was left-handed.  If the experts were correct, Bart used his less dominant arm to strike Lieth and Bonnie or someone else was in the Von Stein bedroom wielding a weapon.    

In Neal's statement to the police and in his testimony, he claimed that he got nervous while waiting for Bart to return and left their prearranged meeting place and drove without purpose to another location, where Bart apparently found him.  Neal never could explain exactly how Bart would find him in an unfamiliar area in the dark.

Chris testified that he had given Bart the key to the Von Stein back door but Bonnie had told authorities that the porch had been redone and the back door rekeyed with a new lock.  The key that Chris had no longer worked - and yet Lieth Von Stein's killer had managed to enter the home.

Chris always maintained that Angela knew nothing of his murder plot but when asked a year after his conviction about a conversation he had with her on Saturday, July 23, 1988, he had no answers. Chris has been on his way back to Raleigh, supposedly to write a term paper, and had stopped by a friend's house where Angela was.  He had taken her aside for a short, private conversation with her but when pressed later, he could not recall stopping off to see her or having the conversation.  

He also denied that Angela had ever known Bart Upchurch, contradicting Angela herself who said that she and Bart had met a few times when she had traveled to NC State to visit with Chris and one of Angela's girlfriends, who recalled meeting Bart as early as January of 1988 at a Def Leppard concert (notably, five months before Chris claimed to have first met Bart).  Angela presented her relationship with Bart as more acquaintances but friends of Bart had said that they two had been involved in a sexual relationship and that Bart had been in love with Angela.  While incarcerated, Neal Henderson told author Joe McGinniss that Bart had told him, "Finally, I've met a girl I'd like to marry."  

Angela always insisted that she had slept through her stepfather and mother being bludgeoned and stabbed in the bedroom next to hers.  Only hours earlier, Bonnie had knocked on Angela's door, asking her to turn her radio down because the music could be heard through the walls.  Angela not only slept through murder, she also apparently slept through the police, EMS and ambulance coming down the street, up the driveway, into the house and up the stairs.   And she elicited no panic or fear at being woken by a police officer in the wee hours and apparently did not immediately run to his mother's room - next door to hers - upon seeing the police officer or hearing from him that something had happened. 

Some investigators wondered not only how Angela could have slept through Lieth screaming (according to Bonnie more than a dozen times) but if she had unlocked the door downstairs in order to let Bart in.  They theorized that perhaps she had been told Bart was only going to burgle the house and she did not know murder was on the menu until it was happening or had already happened.   The glass of water, with the unmelted ice cubes on her nightstand, in the heat of a North Carolina July evening more than four hours after she claimed to have gone to sleep never made logical sense.  

As late as two years after her brother was incarcerated for Lieth's murder and the attack on their mother, Angela still insisted that Chris and Lieth had a loving relationship.

Lieth's final resting place (photo source) 

Sources

Bledsoe, Jerry.  Blood Games.  Penguin Group, 1992.

McGinniss, Joe.  Cruel Doubt.  Simon & Schuster, 1991.

State v. Upchurch, 421 S.E. 2d 577 (1992).   

The Crime Bus (2021).  Dungeons & Dragons Murderers.

Washington Daily News (May 26, 2007).  Pritchard To Be Paroled. 

Wiki2.  The Murder of Lieth Von Stein.  

New York Post (December 12, 2000).  "Dragon' Up Old Fears.

Two Officers Down in El Segundo: The Cold Case Murders of Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis

 

Fingerprints and a Signature Crack a 45 Year Old Case 

It was Sunday night, July 21, 1957 in Hawthorne, California.  Bob Dewar was 17 years old and had attended a summer party with three friends earlier in the evening.  It was before midnight when the quartet, consisting of two boys and two girls, decided to make a stop at the local Lover's Lane on Van Ness Avenue.  After parking, Bob rolled the window of the 1949 Ford down - and that's when the barrel of a gun poked through.  A voice told him "This is a robbery."  Bob initially thought someone was pulling a prank on them but it was all too real.   All four handed over watches, jewelry and cash.

Armed with a flashlight, the robber had also brought surgical tape which he used to cover the teenagers' eyes, before forcing them to undress and then binding them.  One of the girls, only 15 years old, was raped by the man after he moved from the driver's side of the car to the passenger side.

Bob later remembered that the man asked them to get out of the car and then said, "I think I'm going to kill you.  I want you to march out into the field."  The girls were crying and Bob figured it was the end of the line for all of them - when they heard the car door close and the Ford take off.  The four were left, bound and taped, naked and helpless but alive.  Officers Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis would not be so lucky.

The Crimes

El Segundo in the 1950s was a quiet, safe and well-to-do suburb of Los Angeles.  The night shift usually consisted of traffic stops of impatient or intoxicated people.  Officers Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis were working the graveyard shift, sitting in their patrol car at the intersection of Sepulveda and Rosecrans.  Phillips was 28 years old, a veteran who served in the Air Force during the Korean War and was known to be an excellent marksman.  He had been with the department for nearly three years.  He was married and had three children.  Curtis was 25 years old, a rookie who had just graduated from the academy in Riverside and had been in uniform only two months.  He was married and had two children.

It was somewhere between 1:15 a.m. and 1:20 a.m. on Monday, July 22, 1957 when the two officers, with Curtis at the wheel, noticed the 1949 Ford pull up to the intersection and stop at the red light before then proceeding through it.  Neither Phillips nor Curtis knew about the robbery, assault and rape that had taken place in the hour before when they decided to pull the car over.

Phillips had gotten out of the patrol car and pulled his citation book out, as another patrol car with Officers James Gilbert (Milton Curtis' partner until two weeks previous) and Charlie Porter drove by.  Seeing Phillips writing in his citation book and Curtis behind the wheel and phoning it in, it appeared to be a routine traffic stop with no need for any kind of backup and so Gilbert and Porter drove on.  They had no idea that other than their killer, they would be the last people to see Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis alive.

The call that Curtis made, requesting that the plates on the Ford be run came through around 1:28 or 1:29 a.m.  Only seconds later came a call over the radio from Officer Phillips requesting an ambulance and saying that he and his partner had been shot.  Porter and Gilbert raced back to the scene, where they found Phillips, mortally wounded on the ground beside the patrol car, with three gunshots in his back.  His service revolver lay next to him, emptied of bullets.  His citation book was on the hood of the police car, with only the date filled in.  Phillips died before he could get to the hospital.  Curtis, still in the driver's seat of the patrol car, was dead from three gunshot wounds: one to the upper right chest, one to the right side, and one to his right forearm.  Both men had been shot with .22 caliber short rounds.  The killer was gone.

A woman by the name of Margaret Osburn had been heading home from work on westbound Rosecrans Avenue and had stopped for the signal.  She noted the patrol car that Phillips and Curtis were sitting in and also noted a Ford pull up in the left lane next to her, briefly stop for the light and then run it.  She saw the officers take off in pursuit of the Ford and once the light had changed, she proceeded through the intersection, continuing on Rosecrans.  She saw the police car, with the Ford, pulled off the road at Rosecrans and Palm.  She recalled seeing the driver standing outside the car and one of the officers shining a flashlight into his face.  Osburn said the driver was taller than the officer, with "husky" shoulders.  She estimated him to be around 25 years old, with either curly blonde or light brown hair and wearing a red plaid shirt with the tailed pulled out of, rather than tucked into, his pants.  

Nineteen-year-old Alan King had also been traveling on Rosecrans that night and had seen the patrol car, with its lights and siren on, coming up behind him.  He had pulled off to the side and watched the car speed by him.  Having just finished his shift at a local gas station, he continued on to his home on Poinsettia, around the corner from where Phillips and Curtis pulled the Ford over at Rosecrans and Palm.  King later claimed to have seen from the back porch of his house Phillips and Curtis forcibly remove the driver from the vehicle, where there was a brief "struggle," before the driver quieted down and Curtis returned to the patrol vehicle and talked into the radio mic.  King then went inside, running back outside when he heard gunshots.  He saw the driver get into the Ford and "speed down Rosecrans." 

The police car of the fallen officers, with Officer Phillips' citation book on the hood
(photo source) 

The Investigation

An immediate BOLO went out for the Ford, starting what would be the greatest manhunt in California's history at the time.  The four teenagers from Hawthorne were discovered on the street and they, along with Alan King, Margaret Osburn, and Officers Gilbert and Porter, helped to develop a composite sketch of the killer.  

With hundreds of officers from El Segundo and the neighboring communities scouring the area, the Ford was found fairly quickly, roughly four blocks west of the crime scene.  It had been struck with three gunshots, thanks to Richard Phillips.  A bullet hole was noticeable in the trunk.,  Two bullet holes were easily visible in the back window.  Two rounds were recovered inside the vehicle, leading investigators to hope that the killer had been struck by one of the bullets.  Two latent lifts (fingerprints) were taken from the steering wheel; they were later determined to be left thumb prints.  The skirts belonging to the teenaged girls that had been assaulted several hours earlier were found on the back seat and floorboard.

Once again, the killer was gone.

Milton Curtis with his wife and children (photo source)

The fallen officers were buried on July 26, side by side, at Inglewood Park Cemetery (in April of 1958, Richard Phillips' remains would be moved to Spokane, Washington).  The hunt for their killer went on.   Several promising leads surfaced, as well as a multitude of tips, but led nowhere.  In 1958, the case was featured in True Detective magazine with a plea for public help to solve the murders.  Two years later, in 1960, a man pulling up weeds at his home on 33rd Street in Manhattan Beach discovered a watch and a chrome-plated revolver; the location was a mile from the crime scene.  A second watch was found after a search.  Both watches had been taken from the Hawthorne teens in July of 1957 by the killer that had since obtained the nickname of "The Lover's Lane Bandit."  It was theorized that after he dumped the bullet-riddled car, he had run through the yards off Rosecrans, dropping not only the items he had stolen, but the murder weapon as well. 

Richard Phillips' widow and children (photo source)

Having been on and in the ground for three years, no prints were able to be lifted off the nine-shot Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver.  Ballistics tests could only say that the weapon was "consistent" with the bullets that had killed Officers Phillips and Curtis; the poor condition of the gun made it impossible to be more conclusive than that.  The gun was able to be traced to a Sears store in Shreveport, Louisiana and had been purchased for $29.95 on June 18, 1957 by a man using the name of G.D. Wilson and a Miami address (the address turned out to be fictional).  Assuming the man was not from Shreveport, investigators began searching nearby motels and hit pay dirt at a YMCA, where a George D. Wilson of Miami had checked in on June 16, 1957.  Detectives would not know it then but the accompanying signature would eventually help to break the case four decades later.

The Shreveport connection also confirmed the investigators' suspicions that their killer was not from California.  The Hawthorne teens had mentioned that he had an accent, possibly southern, and that he had been almost polite in the midst of the assault.   

The police worked hard to track down every George D. Wilson in the United States but ultimately realized the name was a fake.  The case went cold once again.  Although the case moved on to the back burner as the years ticked by, Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis were not forgotten.

A Break in the Case

In September of 2002, the El Segundo Police Department received a phone call from a female claiming to have information on the case.   She said that her uncle had bragged that he was responsible for killing the two cops in El Segundo.  With a new suspect, the fingerprints lifted back in 1957 were sent to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department crime lab, along with information on the suspect.  Specialists Dale Falcon and Don Keir found that the new suspect was not a match to the 1957 fingerprints - but they decided to use modern science in an attempt to solve the case.  Following the terror attacks of 9/11, the FBI had created a nationwide database of fingerprints containing convicted criminals from every state in the country.  Falcon and Keir cleaned up the original fingerprints, digitized them and loaded them into the system.  And just like that, they got a match.

A young Gerald Mason (photo source) 

Gerald Fiton Mason had been born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1934 into a family with four other sons.  He served time in the Army in the early 1950s before being honorably discharged.  In 1954, he had spent a semester at the University of South Carolina, where he studied business.  He had his first brush with the law in April of 1956 when he was arrested for burglary and larceny.  Sentenced to three years incarceration, it was suspended to one and Mason served eight months.  

In 1960, Mason married his wife Betty and the couple went on to have two daughters and grandchildren.  He had owned and operated several service stations in the Columbia area before retiring in the 1990s.  

Investigators were stunned that the match was not to a career criminal.  In fact, his record did not have a violent offense on it.  Further searches revealed that Mason had not gotten so much as a parking ticket after April of 1956.  

The old YMCA records were pulled out and the handwriting for George F. Wilson was examined by forensic expert Paul Edholme who found the Wilson sample "identical" to samples of Gerald Mason's handwriting.  Armed with the fingerprint match and Edholme's assertion that he was "99.9% certain" that Mason and Wilson were one in the same, California detectives felt assured they had their man.  

Arrest and Conviction

Mason had been put under surveillance in December of 2002 as detectives waited to make their move.  On his last day of freedom (although he wouldn't have known that), Tuesday, January 28, 2003, he played golf.  On Wednesday, January 29, around 7 a.m., he was arrested at his home.  The large number of officers present for his arrest reportedly shocked Mason and he inquired where they were from.  Told they were from the El Segundo Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, Mason replied, "You're homicide detectives?  I think I need a lawyer."   He was then informed he was being arrested for the murder of two police officers in 1957, to which Mason said, "My god, you're here for that?  That happened so long ago.  I can't believe you're bothering me with that."    

Booking Mason into the local jail while awaiting a request for extradition, a decades-long question was at long last answered.  Officer Richard Phillips, after being shot three times in the back, lying on the ground and dying, had managed to pull his service revolver out and fire six shots at the Ford as it sped away.  Three of those shots hit its target.  Finding only two rounds in the car, investigators hoped against hope that Phillips had managed to wound his killer.  Detectives in 2003 noted a bullet-shaped scar on Mason's back, one he eventually admitted came from a bullet fired by Phillips.  Richard Phillips had marked him for life and nearly 46 years later, the scar remained there to prove it.   

Mason in court (photo source) 

Following a judicial hearing in South Carolina, Mason agreed to return to Los Angeles to answer for his crimes.  Officer Howard Speaks, who had lifted the fingerprint from the Ford that eventually was linked to Mason, attended the hearing, remarking, "I've been waiting for this date a long time, but the wait was worth it."   Officer Charlie Porter, who along with his partner James Gilbert, had seen not only Mason but Phillips and Curtis in their last moments alive, said "You can run, but you cannot hide.  Kill an officer and we'll get you, no matter how long it takes." 

Under a plea deal, rape, robbery and kidnapping charges were dropped against the 69-year-old Mason, who pleaded guilty to murdering Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis.  According to his attorney, he did so to spare "the victims" the pain of testifying.  He had told detectives that he had been intoxicated on the night of July 21-22, 1957 and had stumbled across the teenagers in Hawthorne by chance and didn't remember why exactly he had assaulted them and raped one of the girls.  When the police officers had pulled him over in El Segundo, just east of Hawthorne, for running the red light, he figured they would soon find out he was in a stolen car and what he had done.  So "If I don't get them, they're gonna get me."  According to Mason, when "the officer turned away from me, I shot both officers, got back in the car and drove away."  (That officer was likely Phillips, who had put his citation book on the hood of his vehicle to write the ticket.)  

Also in the courtroom were children of Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis.  Mason asked them for forgiveness for the killings, saying "Please believe I am still looking for ways to express my remorse for the horror I have caused."    Carolyn Phillips, Richard Phillips' daughter, told him "Your cowardly act shattered our lives forever . . . there is no way to describe the emptiness and anguish we have felt all our lives without Dad . . . we cannot and will not forgive you."  

Keith Curtis, Milton Curtis' son, said, "Gerald Mason, your family may be shocked but my family has been devastated."    

On March 24, 2003, a tearful Gerald Mason was sentenced to life in prison, a sentence he was allowed to serve in South Carolina so that he could be close to his family.  "At no other time in my life have I intentionally harmed anyone," he said.  "I don't know why I did this."   One of his daughters stated that even though she couldn't possibly describe the range of emotions their family had gone through as a result of his crimes, she couldn't have asked for a better father.  

Mason was turned down for parole in 2009, with a recommendation of the maximum 15-year wait before the next parole hearing.  He died on January 22, 2017, nine days before his 84th birthday.  He had served 14 years for his crimes.  

The final resting places of Officers Curtis and Phillips

Sources:

CBS (March 25, 2003). 1957 Cop Killer Asks Forgiveness.

CBS News (March 15, 2005).  The Ghosts of El Segundo.  

Criminally Intrigued (July 29, 2017).  El Segundo Cop Killing Cold Case.

GoUpstate.com (February 10, 2003).  Neighbors Wonder How Friend Could Be in Jail.

The Los Angeles Times (March 25, 2003).  Man Sentenced to Life in Two 1957 Police Murders.

The Los Angeles Times (July 22, 2007).  Death in El Segundo.  

Murderpedia (2021).  Gerald Mason.

The New York Times (January 30, 2003).  After 45 Years, an Arrest in the Killing of 2 Officers.

Wikipedia. (2021).  Gerald Mason.