Local murders draw national spotlight
Published 6:45 pm Monday, July 21, 2014
Two eastern North Carolina murder cases will featured on national programming this week, as producers for Discovery’s “Dark Temptations” and CNN’s “The Hunt with John Walsh” revisit the past.
Wednesday, Investigation Discovery’s new series “Dark Temptations” will feature the 1988 murder of National Spinning executive Lieth Von Stein in Smallwood. Investigation Discovery’s new show focuses on odd obsessions that turn deadly — in this case, “Dungeon of Death” delves into the Von Stein murderers’ fascination with the game Dungeons and Dragons. Three conspirators—Chris Pritchard (Von Stein’s stepson), and his N.C. State University classmates James Upchurch III and Gerald Henderson—plotted to kill Von Stein so that Pritchard could inherit his stepfather’s estate, valued at nearly $2 million. The scenario for murder, in this case, plays out as written in a Dungeons and Dragons playbook taken into evidence by police investigating the murder, according to Mike Voss, a former reporter for the Washington Daily News.
Voss recounted his coverage of the July 1988 murder, 1989 arrests and subsequent trial of Upchurch in 1990 for producers earlier this year.
“Basically, there were probably two things they asked me about,” Voss said. “One was the Dungeons and Dragons angle — how much influence in these guys’ involvement in Dungeons and Dragons had with the crime. And the Pritchard guy — they wanted to know if he’s sincere.”
Pritchard was sentenced to life in prison in 1990 and served 17 years before being released in 2007. Since, he has become involved in ministry, according to Voss.
Pritchard is interviewed in the upcoming segment on “Dark Temptations.”
While then SBI investigator Lewis Young worked hand in hand with Washington police to solve the Von Stein murder, it was another case — this one much older and even more notorious — that had “The Hunt with John Walsh” producers asking for his recollections about the Bradford Bishop case. On Sunday, CNN will dedicate the entire show to the case in which a mid-level State Department employee murdered his wife, his mother and three sons, ages 14, 10 and 5, then drove the bodies from the scene of the crime in Maryland to Tyrrell County, where he dug a shallow hole and set the bodies on fire using gasoline as an accelerant.