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August 5, 1967, three weeks after her twenty-third birthday. The wedding took place with her big family in full attendance at Central Methodist Church. Bonnie wore an embroidered wedding gown that she designed and made herself. Her sister Ramona was her maid of honor. Bonnie’s new husband was David Stephen Pritchard, who was working that summer at Miller Tool and Plating Company. He was five years younger than Bonnie. After a brief honeymoon Bonnie went back to work at the insurance company. Her new husband returned to West Davidson High School to finish his senior year as a special student.
    With the help of Bonnie’s family, the newlyweds bought a new ranch-style brick-and-frame house on a cul-de-sac in a rural subdivision called Winchester Downs, just two miles from her parents’ house. Their first child, Christopher Wayne, was born on November 25, 1968, in Lexington, the county seat. A second child, Angela Christine, followed in 1970.
    Bonnie’s marriage had been shaky from the beginning, but children made it unworkable. Later, Bonnie complained that her husband was immature, irresponsible, and wouldn’t keep a job. They separated four days before Bonnie’s twenty-eighth birthday, four and a half months shy of their son’s fourth birthday. Bonnie later maintained that she and her children had been abandoned. With her family’s help, she remained in the house on Winchester Court and struggled to pay the bills she and her husband had accumulated. Her children often stayed with their grandparents and other nearby relatives while she worked. On November 9, 1973, Bonnie and Stephen Pritchard were divorced, the judge ordering that Stephen pay Bonnie $750 for debts they had incurred, plus $160 a month in child support.
    Although Lieth Von Stein had several close female friends, he had no girlfriends that his friends knew about, nor did he date much.
    “He was very unusual, very humorous, very bright,” recalled one of his female friends, “but he wasn’t handsome. I always thought he would have liked to have had dates, but he was uncertain about asking.”
    One of his closest male friends, with whom Lieth spent much time talking about women, thought that Lieth may have had more dates than friends realized. “He was so secretive about his relationships,” he said. “He didn’t let people know if he was seeing somebody.”
    That was brought home to him in an embarrassing fashion. Lieth spent nearly three years at Integon designing forms on computers, but he found the work boring and unchallenging. He quit in September 1975 to take a traveling job as an internal auditor for Federated Stores, a conglomeration of department store chains, with headquarters in Cincinnati. He moved into an apartment across the Ohio River in Kentucky.
    One weekend when Lieth was home for a visit, his friend who thought him secretive about his relationships got a call from Lieth’s mother, Marie.
    “Is Lieth there?” she asked.
    “Is he supposed to be?” Lieth’s friend asked warily.
    “He told me he was spending the weekend with you,” Lieth’s mother said, and his friend began trying to cover for him.
    “Okay, what are you up to?” Lieth’s friend demanded when he saw him later.
    That was when he learned about Bonnie.
    When he met her later, he was surprised. She and Lieth were so unalike and had so little in common, except for their work with computers, that he wondered what the attraction was. He was not alone. Other of Lieth’s friends, after meeting Bonnie, asked one another, “What in the world is he doing with her?”
    “She never really made any impression at all,” said one of his friends from his days at Guilford. “She could blend into the wall.”
    Lieth left Federated Stores in May 1977 and moved to South Bend, Indiana, to become a traveling auditor for The Associates, a financial services company with loan offices throughout the country. During his two years in Cincinnati, Lieth was seeing less and less of