A new Dungeons & Dragons podcast is taking on true crime
A scripted podcast starring Jon Hamm will inject notoriety to a missing persons case that is, at its core, desperately boring and deeply sad.
In 1979, a teenager named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from Michigan State University. He wrote what many consider to be a suicide note and disappeared after a Quaalude overdose, likely driven to drugs by the pressures of studying at a university at age 16 and his struggles with his burgeoning homosexuality. After surviving his possible suicide attempt, Egbert reportedly stuck around campus, sleeping on friend’s couch for a week or so. His parents, deeply concerned, hired the well known private detective William Dear to find Egbert. Dear found D&D books in Egbert's room, and, specifically, push pins on a corkboard that the investigator thought resembled the Simon Power Plant, which connected to the steam tunnels under MSU. (I'm not kidding, this was such a massive stretch, you need to see it to believe it.) Dear then told the press that Egbert had gotten lost during a D&D-based LARP in these steam tunnels.
This week, Deadline announced a scripted true crime podcast, titled Dungeon Masters, is being produced about this case. It will be written by journalist David Kushner and star Jon Hamm as PI William Dear, and Wil Wheaton as D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. All we have so far is a 3-minute trailer. Its tone is… in my opinion, questionable, seemingly capitalizing on the sensation of the Satanic Panic rather than focusing on the case itself. Probably for the best, considering how soon after Dear’s hiring Egbert was found, with very little actual detective work done.
In 1984, the real William Dear published a book about the case, titled, The Dungeon Master. It’s common for media companies to buy the rights to nonfiction books with similar premises to a true-story case in order to avoid lawsuits. It’s unclear from the press release in Deadline whether the podcast is an adaptation of the book or based on original reporting by Kushner.
But the framing of the article–and the trailer—is odd; it states that this is a true crime exploration, a mystery disappearance whodunit.“The series follows Dear on his quest to find Dallas Egbert,” says Deadline. But the truth of the case is much more boring and much more tragic. Truthfully, the whole investigation was over in less than a month. Not because William Dear found Dallas Egbert, but because within four weeks of leaving Michigan, Egbert himself allegedly called Dear to tell him where he was. Dear, in his own words, poked around the steam tunnels, went home to Texas, and "within a few days" received a phone call. Not really all that heroic, scary, or mysterious.
