He also used drugs: Marijuana, cocaine - and PCP that he cooked up himself.īut what occupied much of Dallas' time was Dungeons and Dragons. Egbert was a member of the gay student organization on campus. When Dear got to Michigan State, he learned some things that Dallas Egbert's parents had not mentioned. He was obsessed with science fiction and games. At 12, he programmed a computer to play games with him. Dear called the Egberts for more information and what he got was a portrait of an physically fragile boy with an extraordinary mind: He had been toying with calculators and computers since he was 10. Dear thought it sounded routine: boy gets depressed over grades runs away.īut Dallas wasn't a routine student: He graduated from high school at 13 and entered college at 14. The Egberts were unhappy about police handling of the case in East Lansing, Gross told the detective. It was Dallas Egbert's uncle, a Texas urologist named Melvin Gross, who called Bill Dear eight days after the boy's disappearance. On the back cover of his book, he's brandishing a. On his cases he sometimes sports a Walther PPK or a. Inside his tooled, black cowboy boots is a strap constructed to secure a knife. There are the rings on his fingers: Great, globby hunks of gold, one of which - the one resembling a small meteorite - he takes off and lets clunk on the table to show you how heavy it is. But the bedroom of his suburban Dallas house is a replica of 007's bedroom in the movie "Diamonds Are Forever." And the trappings of his life speak for him: "I open this glass door and I step down and I dive underneath the house and down through a cave and through a waterfall." In England, he says, "They call me the real James Bond." Ask if he likes that and he's all understatement and Texas twang. The former Florida highway patrolman, who became a private eye 21 years ago, has guns and electronic surveillance equipment, a private plane and three smooth-talking associates. His father, an optometrist, is a quiet, shy man who suffers stoically through the disappearance.Įgbert and his fellow players, like many other college students, indulged their passion for fantasy games to the point where they were acting them out in real life.ĭear, who has been involved in such cases as the exhumation of Lee Harvey Oswald, has his fantasies, too. His mother, in Dear's book, is a domineering figure. In his recent book, "The Dungeon Master," Dear paints Dallas as a troubled boy with a man's genius at computers, maneuvering his way with more sophisticated college peers, assuaging his alienation with marathon sessions of the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons. Now Dear is telling his version of Dallas Egbert's odyssey. And a year after Dallas was found, he killed himself. No one ever really knew for certain what happened, says Dear, because the boy, known as Dallas, told few people about it. ![]() ![]() William Dear, a flamboyant Texas detective, was hired to track him down. One summer day in 1979, James Dallas Egbert III, a gifted 16-year-old college sophomore, vanished from the campus of Michigan State University.
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