Dateline NBC - Dateline@30: The Podcast

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

As Dateline launches its 30th season, Lester Holt joins correspondents Andrea Canning, Josh Mankiewicz, Natalie Morales, Keith Morrison and Dennis Murphy for a revealing, lively and thoughtful conversation about some of their most memorable stories and experiences. 

Hi everyone, I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline at 30, the podcast. As we launch our 30th season this week, I'm joining all of our correspondents to talk about the stories that have stayed with us, that made a difference, that mattered, and moved us. Some, frankly, have been stranger than fiction. We're the longest-running primetime program in NBC history, and boy, what a run it's been. Dateline premiered in 1992 with anchors Stone Phillips and Jane Pauley. It was a Tuesday night. Since then, though, we've aired on every other night of the week at one time or another. Good evening and welcome to Dateline Saturday night. I'm Stone Phillips. That's all for this edition of Dateline. We're off tomorrow, but join us again for Dateline Friday. And that's Dateline

for this Monday. We'll see you again for Dateline Tuesday. Now we'll look at one of the stories we're working on for Dateline Sunday. We covered breaking news. Good evening. Tonight, the earthquake in Southern California. Stone is on the scene where Los Angeles is starting to put itself back together. Good evening. Welcome to a special edition of Dateline. I'm Lester Holt. It is the deadliest violence in Paris since World War II,

a coordinated and devastating series of attacks across the city tonight. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Dateline. I'm Lester Holt. The winds and floodwaters may be gone, but power outages, ruined homes, and impassable roads have triggered a whole new set of problems for the East Coast. We brought viewers hard-hitting investigations. Uncovering a scam that costs consumers millions. A Dateline hidden camera investigation. Hoda Kotb with a story of lethal force and legal loopholes. And of course, we had fun with franchises.

Finally tonight, what's wrong with this picture? It's Dateline's question of the week. Now the Dateline timeline. Today, we're best known as the true crime original. This is something that you watch Dateline for, about somebody else, not about your friend, not about someone you love. We've also become something of a pop culture phenomenon with fans from Bill Hader.

No one tells a story like Dateline. Or do they? To Kelly Clarkson. Y'all were called the Rolling Stones of true crime. That's a pretty sexy title, y'all. Expanding to exciting new platforms with chart-topping podcasts. This is Dateline NBC's newest podcast. Expanding to exciting new platforms with chart-topping podcasts.

This is Dateline NBC's newest podcast, The Thing About Pam. And our own channel on Peacock. I'm Andrea Canning, and you're watching Dateline 24-7. We're launching our 30th season on NBC, and like a classic Dateline mystery, we have a reveal for you. But one of the best parts of it all is working with the best producers, editors, and storytellers in the business. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy. Here's Keith Morrison.

Here's Andrea Canning. Here's Natalie Morales. Here's Josh Mankiewicz with Stone Cold. All right. Well, it's great to see and hear you guys virtually to be all together again. If you can't see me, I'm wearing a mask. No, I'm actually not right now because I'm in my home office right now. But think back 30 years, something like 3,000 original episodes of storytelling. As you guys look back, let me ask you all, what does it mean to be part of, really, television history? Well, Lester, this is Dennis.

As the old man of the mountain here, let me take us back to where we were 30 years ago, which was a show that was on almost every night of the week. It was like the conveyor belt was going past us, and we had to throw our work in. It was like a boot camp. We had to learn very quickly how to tell stories and turn them around. And that structure, that live by your fingertips fingertips really got us where we are now. Along the way, I think what I did was sort of create the structure for the true crime storytelling. That's my claim to fame. But it was a lot of episodes and a lot of work early on. Well, you know, one of the truths of television is that, you know, nothing lasts 30 years.

Nothing's on for 30 seasons. I mean, you know, when I joined, I certainly did not expect to be here in 2021. And NBC had a poor track record of trying to get a nighttime news magazine show to stay on the air. Yeah, they tried a million of them, and they all failed. Let's go back, if we can, to the Dateline timeline. The early years, the show launches in the 90s, the format very different as we've discussed than it is today. We covered true crime from the start, but we did all kinds of stories from pop culture to news, award-winning documentaries. We covered social issues. What stands out from the era? I mean, I'm sitting here thinking that, you know, when the show was on every night, it was almost like trying to do an evening newscast, like a nightly news, but in a

long-form kind of a format. That in itself just seems like a huge challenge. You know, I think what for me stands out, I mean, as the newbie to the cast, is that, you know, the effects that Dateline has had on our viewers. I mean, we've all certainly experienced it firsthand, whether you're at, you know, some of the conventions that you all have been to before the pandemic or just traveling through an airport and you get stopped in the bathroom. Now, we've all had that moment, right? I know who did it. It was the husband. And you're like, which one? I love that, though. I love the fact that, you know, people feel like they're a part of this process. I mean, they analyze, you know, frame by frame, okay, is he wearing a prison jumper or is he free?

Is he guilty? Is he not? You know, I think the whole idea, you know, we talk about this great storytelling. It's the fact that we take people on this journey every week. You know, we lay out the facts and kind of take them along as we discover, you know, the, the true story and what happened. I think it's, it's fun to have them as partners. It's, uh, of all the, the news broadcasts I've done, this is, this is the, probably the one with the most buy-in, I think, from the viewers as, as wanting to be part of the process. I think that's right. And I think that one reason why that works is that,

and this is something I've talked about before, we draw at Dateline a very clear line between the storytelling, which is fun and which sometimes makes you smile, and the story itself, which is not fun, which is deadly serious, and which is the absolute worst thing that ever happened to any of these families. And that is a balancing act. I mean, there are definitely things, even in these stories, that captivate people and make them smile, and they're not always the worst thing in the story. But you have to always be aware that at its bottom, these are terribly sad, terribly serious stories, and they matter a lot to the people involved in them. And maybe that's why, you know, some of the audience feels that sense of involvement and ownership. And I think a corollary, Josh, is we don't talk down to them. We don't insult their intelligence.

They're along for the ride, and they know the language of criminal investigations at this point. And I think it's a very well-written show. The storytelling is very good. And, you know, it's a great way to spend an hour. But there is that problem of it is true crime. And what we're talking about is the worst thing that has ever happened to our guests, the people that we're featuring, the worst moment in their life. And yet we're asking people to watch it with us. Well, we have people with opposing motivations. The families who want to talk to us, and we talk to them because they want to talk, they need to get a story out. They want people to understand, no matter which end of the story they are on, they want people to understand what the real story was, what their point of view actually was to be understood finally by the outside world.

Keith, I don't know whether therapeutic is a word to use of what you're talking about, but I think there's something of that in it. And the cops, back when it was a crime, they were investigating and going into their notepads. Nobody really asked them, the family members, the kinds of questions that we ask them. Who was your loved one? What's going on? What has happened to you with this? That's not the brief of the cops, but we come along and somehow we fill in a missing blank in

the void of this awful, awful experience. I think that's right. And we only talk to people, as Keith said, because they want to talk. In a lot of cases, these are stories that are not going to get covered anywhere else. Maybe they were a short article in the local paper, but they're not going to make national news anyplace else. And so this is the retelling of that person's life and of that person's death. And in many cases, families really, really want that. And the criminal justice system, as we all know, makes a pretty poor therapist. It doesn't usually leave you feeling great after you've had any kind of brush with it, no matter what your involvement was. I think that there is some peace in people telling their story sometimes.

I totally, totally agree, Josh. Cathartic is a word that I hear all the time after interviews, that people say it was a cathartic experience. And usually they thank you, you know, that you took the time to listen and tell the story of their loved one. It is such an honor to sit with someone and hear that very personal story and be allowed to come into that private place, even though they know this will be seen by a great many people. The fact that you're given that that entryway that you trusted that much that they can tell the story uh you're you're given a gift by these people we're doing stories about to tell their story and i know that you know you could tell it in a tabloid fashion uh the way those

screaming headlines do and and it would harm the family, it would hurt them. So you don't. You try to find a way to tell the story that is respectful of the people who have told you. Yeah, I think a lot about, when I'm writing the story, I think a lot about what the family's going to say when they see it. And isn't it satisfying when you hear back from them, Josh, and how often they say, you guys got it right. That was very close to my experience. That was it. I think that's the best reward I get out of these things. I do hear that, and I do love hearing it. That's true. You know, all of what we do has an impact, whether it's on families or the course of justice, but does anyone want to talk about the change that this program sometimes results in stories that, you know, that lead to follow-ups because

we have done the story? Yeah, well, last year I did Voices for Vanessa, which really tackled sexual assault in the Army. And that was in 2020. And in 2021, we did Yellowbird, which looked at missing and murdered Indigenous women. And I think that we're a part of that voice. So it starts out small with voices around the country that are trying to get attention. And then when Dateline comes into the picture, we become a part of that voice. And we give those voices a national platform, which I think only snowballs and gets it more and more attention from there. So every time I personally, and I know I'm sure everyone agrees, is when you're able to do one of those stories, it's just very rewarding because you feel like you were part of that movement. And so that's why I love doing those stories. Way back when, over 20 years ago,

I ran into a story of a guy who was on death row who claimed not only he didn't do it, but that his confession, which was repeated several times, had been false, fake confession. And I'd never heard this before. That was the first time that I was involved in doing a story about false confessions. Since then, we have all done them. And I think it's entered the public consciousness that that is something that happens and has to be guarded against. And it's resulted in changes in the way investigations are conducted and in the way interviews are recorded to ensure that that sort of thing happens less often.

I did a story in 2005 about how we in the national TV news media were spending all our time on missing white women. And we were not covering anybody who was any other color. And this was a real obsession back then with Lacey Peterson and Natalie Holloway and a lot of other people. And we were doing hour after hour on this, as was all the morning shows and all of cable. And so I did a story about that, about how that didn't square with the national statistics, how most of the missing people in the United States are men.

And a huge chunk of the missing are minority, much larger than the population at large, and sort of why that was. Lester Angola, what was the intent of going down there? What did you think you were going to get? And what was the story you came back with? Now, Angola is the largest maximum security prison in the country, confining about 5,500 men. Today, I'm heading into ground zero of mass incarceration. For the next couple of days, I'll be staying in a cell, not to play prisoner, but to better understand the purpose and experience of prison, all from the inside. Yeah, the whole idea of, you know, reporter goes to prison has all the elements of a gimmick, if you're not careful. But we had been doing a lot of stories about criminal justice reform, especially this area of incarceration.

And we decided the best way to tell that story is to go inside and hear the voices, not to play prisoner. That would have been something we could have done. But the idea to get in and be able to have long conversations with people, you know, my cellmate to the right of me, you know, we had these long conversations late into the night and it helped me understand, you know, you know, how his life turned and where he ended up. You know, we met, you know, elderly, senior citizen prisoners. And, you know, you talk to these guys and you talk to the guards and you begin to question, you know, does this make sense, the way we lock up people? Are we, you know, keeping this 87-year-old man behind bars? Are we any safer?

So, I've enjoyed doing a lot of the social justice stories we did, you know, during the height of the recession, you know, the town that jobs forgot went to this little town in Georgia. The factory had rolled up. The businesses closed. Families were affected. So it's been a—it's really been a great outlet for me. Obviously, I wear a lot of hats at NBC with nightly news and, you know, special reports and that sort of thing. But this has been, you know, something incredibly rewarding to rewarding to work on these social justice stories along the way.

One of the things I loved about your Angola story and one of the things I think that didn't make the air was you ran into a guy whose case we had covered at Dateline and who, unlike some other people, was actually quite properly locked up and very much belongs there. And I loved hearing that he hated the fact that he was behind bars, and he hated that we had played any role in covering that.

It was a bizarre moment. We were in this area that I had been locked up in. And I hear this, and I'd gotten out of the cell to go do some shooting, and I hear this, Mr. Holt, Mr. Holt, I'm looking around, where know, where is this coming from? And there was like a hatch at the bottom of the door and he's kind of leaning halfway out. And he says, it's me. And he goes on to tell how, you know, Dateline had wronged him and he's in prison unjustly. And I couldn't, for the life of me, I couldn't recall the story. And then we later figured out what it was. And you rightfully point out, Josh, that he belonged there. Yeah. Not wrongly.

Well, for the launch of this 30th anniversary season, we've asked each of you to talk and reflect on your most memorable story. Keith and Josh, you have both done stories that involve people in society who we seem to forget. Keith, your story, Good and Evil, and Josh, you did a story called Somebody's Daughter. And both of those have truly determined detectives. Tell us about those stories and the investigators at the center of them. Because sometimes these stories really wrap around the passion of these dogged investigators.

Josh, you want to start? Yeah, my story was called Somebody's Daughter. It took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Street women, most of them touched in some way by drug addiction, were disappearing off the streets. And this was between sort of 2001, 2006, it happened. And roughly around that time, 2006, 2007, a really dedicated and really charismatic Albuquerque police detective named Ida Lopez noticed that this was happening. Now, these women were sort of, you know, living, these were women living kind of on the edges of society and they were living a life that just about no one would envy. And they routinely exposed themselves to tremendous

risk by getting in cars with men who they didn't know, didn't know anything about. And these were not people who were checking in regularly with their families. And so it was very difficult to tell when some of these women had actually disappeared. Some hadn't been heard from for months, but that wasn't necessarily unusual. One woman's mom noticed that even when she didn't hear from her daughter for six months or a year, she always got that phone call on the mom's birthday. And when that didn't happen, that made the mom realize that something had happened. And Ida had figured this out sort of ahead of all of law enforcement.

And she was particularly focused on finding these women. She kept a list of these women. She started calling them her girls because they knew her because she was a police officer. And she certainly knew them. They worked in an area on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, known then probably still as the war zone. And so Ida started investigating and was kind of getting nowhere, and she was kind of doing this alone. You know, Michael Connelly's detective, Harry Bosch,

has a mantra that he's a fictional detective in books and TV. But his mantra is everybody counts or nobody counts. In other words, you have to work every case just as hard as every other case, no matter what that person's doing, because everybody is somebody's son or somebody's daughter. And Ida absolutely understood that. And she worked this case as hard as if it were, you know, the mayor's daughter who was missing. And around that time, some bones started to appear

in an area outside of town called the West Mesa. A couple of things led to that. One was a torrential storm, the kind of which we've seen recently in the South and in the Northeast. And the other was development, which is happening a lot in Albuquerque. The ground was being unearthed, and somebody's dog found a human femur. Ida Lopez began this case with the mantra that everybody counts. It took years, but in the end, Ida was able to make everybody care. I have to keep believing that we'll find an answer soon.

Soon could be months, soon could be years, but I just have to keep believing that today could be the day. Today could be the day. And then as they continued digging, more and more grave sites sort of came to light. It ended up being 11 women and one unborn fetus. All of them were these women that had been on the list of ideas. Girls, all of them had been missing. To this day, there are not any declared suspects by APD. There are a couple of people that they have sort of thought of as suspects, one of them dead, one of them incarcerated,

but neither of them has been charged, and neither of them may be the guy. It was a chilling story, in part because there's a great thing. The producer found these Google Earth images in which you can see the West Mesa, and you can see these little clearings and tire tracks where the guy clearly drove up to bury the bones. And as you go back, like six months or a year earlier, you see fewer grave sites.

You can see this guy at work, which was terribly chilling. Keith, tell us about good and evil. It kind of follows in a similar vein. It is very similar. And the fact of the matter is that kind of problem exists in every jurisdiction in the nation, probably many of the ones all around the world. There is a recycled depot in Orange County, California, where human beings are on an assembly line, and they watch the recycled material come along a belt, and they separate it. And one day, on this recycled belt, along comes something that looks very different it's covered mostly in plastic but it looked like flesh colored underneath and so they opened it up and it's the naked body of a young woman um the belt stops the police are called they come over

and they can't identify her at all there are no identifying marks except one little tattoo on her neck. That's all they had to go on. But it landed on the desk of a particular detective in Anaheim, California, who she was a staunch Catholic. She believed in that very mantra that Harry Bosch had that, you know, everybody counts or nobody counts. And she believed so strenuously in the sanctity of the lives of missing and murdered women that she decided she was going to follow this no matter what. She went and bought a rosary, and she named this girl who nobody knew who it was. And she followed it for months until she was able to using that one little a tattoo find her mother and so then she found the identity and she learned that this girl had gone to a place called beach boulevard in orange county a famous kind of strip like the one josh was talking about

and disappeared from there. But then she began to hear reports, did this detective, about cases in other jurisdictions. L.A. and Orange County is, what do they say, 100 suburbs in search of a city. But each one of them has its own police department. So these women would be disappearing from Beach Boulevard, but in different jurisdictions. And there was no way to know, to bring them all together into a case anybody could understand until this woman went out and bought a bunch of rosaries. And pretty soon, she was following five cases and speaking to five mothers about what happened to their daughters. And it took a long, long time, but eventually she was able to determine that two guys who were living together, both of them on parole, one of them wearing an ankle bracelet,

for heaven's sake, were capped out behind an industrial facility in Orange County, would cruise down to Beach Boulevard, pick up a young woman, rape and murder her, and then dump her into a dumpster. And the dump truck would come along, take the dumpster, put it into the trash system, and it would wind up in the landfill. And that had happened time and time again. So she was determined to figure out who all these people were who had been killed. And as she identified each one, she would present a rosary to that young woman's mother. And eventually she managed to catch these two people. Well, it's as close to anything evil as I had seen, but ignorant evil. Let's take a listen. What me and him did was beyond evil.

But then came, sure enough, the excuse. He's worked it out in his head that the parole system is somehow to blame for his crimes. After all, as sex offenders, he and Frank Cano shouldn't have been permitted to be together. That was a parole violation. And the fact that their parole officers didn't prevent that violation, he said, means the state is responsible.

We chose to be together when we were allowed. There's a difference. But, no, no, I mean, are you three? What do you mean? That's what little kids say to their parents. You let me do a bad thing. It's your fault. No, I didn't say they let us do a bad thing. I said they let us sleep and hang out at the same spot. And they did. Beside what anybody believes. You're going to parse that argument? Until the day I die,

because I know for a fact it's true. What I want to know is, because that's on you, what was going on in your head to make you want to do it? To participate in whatever way you participated. To get whatever thrill you... What was the thrill? What was it? I don't think there was a thrill. Well, if there's no thrill, why'd you do it? There's no thrill in watching women die like that.

But I'm going to go back to it again and again. It was my anger issues that I have from everything that happened while we were on parole and probation. This fellow looked me in the eye when I asked him the question and said, it's the fault of the government that I committed these crimes because they were supposed to catch me for the earlier bad things I did. And they didn't. That's some twisted logic. So, Andrea, tell me about one you did called Deadly Valentine. I'm going to describe the plot.

It involves a husband convicted of killing his wife, but we're going to have to, unfortunately, narrow that down a little bit because we've heard that far too many times. But Deadly Valentine was the story, and I know you spent time with the killer. You want to share that with us? Yeah, that was a story in Peoria, Illinois. And what I remember most about that story is, well, of course, there was a murder, and sadly, the wife died, and the husband did end up being the killer. But it was one of those situations where you show up at the prison ready to interview the killer. And so much was riding on him because we didn't have a lot of interviews. And of course, we get there and he's changed his mind,

which everyone has dealt with on the show where you're all ready to go. And so they brought him down anyway, and they gave me three chances with them. So I tried to convince him. He left. He went into this room. I said, could you bring him back in? They brought him with them. So I tried to convince him. He left. He went into this room. I said, could you bring him back in? They brought him back in. And I tried to convince him again. Almost there. He says no.

Leaves again. And finally, they're like, OK, we're going to have to just call it. He's not doing it. So I go out in the hallway. And he's standing there. And he's getting transferred back to his cell. And I just went after him one more time in the hallway. And they let me.

And I just, I said, three questions. Just give me three questions. That's all I want. And then you can go and it'll just show, like, talk about your relationship with your wife because he was proclaiming his innocence. And he's like, you got three strikes and then you're out. And so that's what he said to me. I don't know why. Anyway, we went in.

He sat down. And then three and a half hours later, we were still talking. Let's what he said to me. I don't know why. Anyway, we went in, he sat down, and then three and a half hours later, we were still talking. Let's listen to some of that. One of the harshest accusations that has come out of all of this is that you killed your wife and it was a Valentine's Day gift for Ina. The harshest statement has been that I killed my wife. It doesn't matter what day it was. I intentionally did it on Valentine's Day as a gift. I'm not sure what takes a sicker person, the person to actually do that or the person to suggest that. That was kind of interesting.

And then we turned it from a one hour into a two hour because of that interview. Why did he want to talk? He wanted me to believe him, like all the killers do. They want you to believe them. And sometimes they even say, I feel like you don't believe me. It's why they do the interview. They're trying to believe them, and sometimes they even say, I feel like you don't believe me. You know, it's just, it's why they do the interview. You know, they're trying to profess their innocence. Yeah, and the answer is, dude, no one believes you. I think Andrea of the group of us is our district attorney. If you want to sit somebody down in a chair with a bunch of really

probing questions and get to the creepazoid and what's going on. Andrea, is your report? Get to the creepazoid. I think everyone is good at that, but thank you. So, Dennis, your story, Death Trap, it was ripped from the headlines, but you did a really deep dive and revealed some surprises along the way. You want to tell us about that? That was absolutely bizarre, that one, Lester. And these are not the people next door.

This was a scheme put together by aberrant human beings. The setting is Erie, PA. It's the summer of 2003. And all of a sudden, there is an afternoon live shot on local TV. And lo and behold, there's a guy sitting on the ground at a strip mall. And he's got around his neck this awful-looking metal collar, fiendish-looking thing. And it's got a countdown clock right out of James Bond. And what's happened is that he's a pizza delivery guy.

He delivered his order, and the guys, his assailants, slapped this thing on him. And they told him this thing would countdown and explode unless he robbed a bank for them and gave them all the money. If he did what they told him, they they give him the code to disable this thing. So this is in the category I think of, can you imagine if this thing happened to you or if you came across it? It's like a movie. The power of TV. So he's sitting there and the clock is going down and the bomb squad is trying to get to him and it ends badly. It's, you know, the guy is killed on live TV. So then it's up to the FBI primarily to figure out what's going on. And they talked about the broken toy people of Erie, PA that were trying to make one big score and have their money day. And it took the FBI a

long time to put this thing in a sensible fashion. We were working, by the way, with a documentarian who'd worked on this thing for years, so it was a collaboration story. But in the end, they started killing one another. There's more deaths. And the pizza guy, it turned out, according to the FBI, was in on it. He was a guy who thought he'd get a few bucks for getting away with this. He was going to move to Arizona the following week and be home with his mother watching Christmas specials on TV. I was watching specials on TV. It didn't happen. But the family always objected to any allegation that he was in on it. I remember that story vividly and thinking that it would play as a movie. And it was one of those, I know the more you kind of stripped away at it, the more that story revealed.

Natalie, I have to ask you about the phone call. You've talked about this, one of the most emotional Datelines that you have done. And we should point out, it's become one of Dateline's most downloaded podcasts. So tell me about the story and what that means to you that there's such high interest in this. Yeah, well, it is extraordinary that so many people have listened to it or watched it. And it is such a powerful story. It's so important for people to hear this story that I'm glad that it has had that kind of outreach. convicted, not once, but twice, two separate juries and the Kansas Supreme Court upheld those convictions in a double homicide, what appeared to be a double homicide. And there were a lot of reasons that he seemed to be the obvious suspect, but the single greatest piece of evidence was a reported phone call and not actually heard or even transcribed to a jury.

So they just heard what was believed to have been said in this phone call. And that was what had convicted this man. And, you know, it's a story really about a miscarriage of justice. It had everyone asking not just who was the killer, but who was the real victim here, because there were two people on the other end of the gun that had been shot. And it's also a story about the lengths that some will go to pursue true justice, the attorneys in this case who fought for this wrongly convicted man. Pete got to spend this past Christmas together with his family.

He told us he was looking forward, not back. Down the road, 5, 10, 20 years, I like to say it's nothing but a speed bump in the rearview mirror, and if you don't dwell on it, you win. And I just want to spend the rest of my life being happy with what I have, not sad about what I lost. So it's a story that makes you think. It's a story that makes you really, really mad. I mean, my kids, when they heard this one, we were on a long drive

and I played the podcast version for them. And my oldest son said, how does this happen? How can this happen in the criminal justice system? And I'm like, well, believe it or not, it happens all the time. And this is one of those stories that in the end, the truth did come out. Keith, let me turn to you.

You know, a lot of the stories you do, I think the viewers at home are kind of reacting with their own, oh, my moment. There's one that kind of took on a life of its own. It was called The Women and Dirty John. You want to tell us about that? He was a special case who had gone undetected or managed to escape the results of his behavior for year after year after year. And he landed in on a very well-off interior designer in Orange County, California, who was kind of looking for love. And there he was, handsome doctor, apparently, who had swept her off her feet. And within a matter of a few weeks, she was committed to him. They'd moved in together. She had rented a fancy house on the seashore for them to live in together. And she had two daughters, both of whom thought this guy was bogus, that there's something wrong

with him. They couldn't figure out quite what it was. One of the daughters in particular, you know, saw what she couldn't see, which was here was somebody taking advantage of her who was probably lying about all kinds of things, and sure enough, he was. He wasn't a doctor. He didn't have any money at all. He was scraping by only because he was taking money from her. When he said he was going to the hospital to work, he was actually taking her car and parking it on a back street and sleeping all day in the car. But gradually, he became dangerous when he recognized that his position was in jeopardy. And the end result of the story is he attempted to kill one of the daughters.

And there's a moment at the end of that story, which if you hadn't seen it, is about as dramatic as they come. So, Josh, you know, I know one that really impacted you was Unraveled. It was kind of a unique set of circumstances, mainly because you had a specific personal connection to that story. You want to tell us about it? Yeah, I was, this was pretty recent. Someone texted me an article from the Arizona Republic. And a friend of mine had been murdered, a guy that I had just seen about 10 days earlier in Los Angeles. His name was Steve Pitt. He was a forensic psychiatrist who worked with police departments all over the West and was a guy who was a big, big aid in a lot of important investigations. And I had just seen him just a little while earlier in Los Angeles,

and he was happy and he was having a great time. And I was thinking about the fact that while I was seeing him, while we were hanging out, this killer, the man who killed him, was planning his death as well as that of others. This was a guy that Steve had evaluated many years earlier, but I think eight or nine years earlier, Steve had recommended that this guy get further psychiatric treatment of a very serious nature and that if he didn't get that treatment, he was going to be at significant risk to himself and to society. And something

happened over those years. The guy clearly didn't get the treatment he needed. And then something happened to tip him over. And we still don't know exactly what that was. But he lost his son in a custody fight as a result of his own criminal acts. He clearly held that grudge against a number of people. And he eventually went back to Steve's office and waited for Steve to come out at the end of the day. And then after a brief discussion, shot and killed Steve, then went to the office of the attorney who had represented his wife in the divorce. The attorney wasn't there. He shot and killed a couple of paralegals who had the bad luck to be there, who had nothing to do with his case.

Fortunately, the guy's ex-wife, who was kind of at the center of this story, was in hiding, or else she absolutely would have been on that list. But he couldn't find her. He found all those other people and as police closed in, uh, this guy killed himself. Now that story, I mean, in addition to being horrific was also exposed all kinds of issues. And there were a lot of issues. Um, how do you get guns out of the hands of people like that? Who'd been, been I think ordered by

the court not to have a gun and how can you you know what do you do when somebody is is strongly recommended to get psychiatric treatment or the alternative is going to be horrific violence in this case there wasn't anything anybody could do so it was a it was a memorable story in a lot of ways but you know if change does come out of that, and I think some small changes have come, I know that that would make Steve Pitt pretty happy. Thanks for sharing that story. It's an amazing one.

I did want to ask all of you, at some point we've all sat across from convicted killers, and people sometimes are curious what that's like. Andrew, you mentioned you're going after a convicted killer three times to get that key interview, but any of you want to share that experience, what that's like to sit across from someone who in many cases, personifies evil. I was in Montana a couple of years ago, and some guy started shouting at me. Now, of course, what the audience doesn't see is that there's usually corrections officers sitting there just out of camera view. The way this interview was configured, it was in a pretty small room. And so there wasn't actually room for the officers in that room. And the guy couldn't

get out of the room except to go through the door, and they were out in the hallway. But in the middle of the interview, I guess I insulted him by suggesting that maybe he should tell everybody where his girlfriend's body actually was. To this day, it's never been found. And he started yelling at me. I'm done. We're done. We're done. I'm not doing this. Done. You're not going to make me look like an a**hole anymore. I'm done. We're done. We're done. I'm not doing this.

Done. You're not going to make me look like an anymore. I've had enough of that. Yeah. Okay. you. you, you arrogant. you.

How's that? I'm done. Thank you. He was clearly, like, seconds away from kicking my ass. And there was not any way that these guys in the hallway were going to be able to get in between the two of us in time. But fortunately for me, and probably for him in terms of what privileges he later did not lose

in that correctional institution, he thought better of it. And after sort of getting up and saying, you don't want to do the interview anymore, he actually came back and finished the interview, which didn't go the way he wanted, but it wasn't as bad for yours truly as it maybe could have turned out. And I will say also, I mean, and I think I'm probably speaking for everybody, like, the tough part of this job is not interviewing the killers, because they're all trying to convince you sort of like a politician that like their story is the correct one uh the tough part of this is talking to those families because

they're not going to get over this the mothers and fathers of murdered children and they are and they are telling you uh the thing that changed their lives yeah it's really hard to yeah it's hard so hard to fight back the tears sometimes i I find myself, my face is getting red. I'm like doing everything I can not to cry because it's not about me. And sometimes it's so hard. Like different people move you in different ways and just invoke so much emotion in you while you're trying to hold it together. And you're just like, I'm not supposed to be doing this right now. But it's hard. Well, listen, I know our loyal viewers are listening to all these stories and go, yeah, I remember that one.

I remember that one. But we should point out that you are listening to all these stories and go, yeah, I remember that one. I remember that one. But we should point out that you can watch all of these stories and many others. There are correspondents of chosen on Peacock, where our Dateline 24-7 streaming channel is running them as a marathon. You can listen to them in podcast form with special introductions in the Dateline podcast feed. Well, speaking of podcasts, Dateline is a fixture in the top 10. Every week, hundreds of millions of people have listened to Dateline programs after they air, and millions more have downloaded our original podcast series, maybe most famously, The Thing About Pam.

Keith, what's the difference for you between broadcast and podcast? The podcast is a remarkable invention for people like us who are in the business of telling the sorts of stories we tell. Because as all of the correspondents here can tell us, and producers and others who work on these stories, there is never enough room. It doesn't matter whether you have one hour or two hours or three hours to tell a story. You always have to leave a great deal of it sitting on the cutting room floor.

With a podcast, you at least get the freedom to live in the material a little more than you otherwise would. You don't have to worry about how you're going to cover something with a video or a picture. You don't have to put things in the sort of order you would have to put it in in order to make it an attractive television show. You can tell the story any way that makes sense to you to the human ear. And you are just speaking to one person like old-fashioned radio. I find it enormously fun. Yeah.

Let me expand that out to the group. I mean, we're in the communications business. And listen, this is a wide-open new avenue that we're exploring. I'm interested in hearing all your thoughts about podcasting as another option. It's fun. Really great, intimate way of talking to the audience. And for people like me who never want to shut up, it's a wonderful forum. I've been a true crime junkie forever now, as long as true crime has been podcasting. And so,

when Dateline started streaming, I think it made my commutes better. It certainly made my workouts a whole lot better. And during the pandemic, I think that's the number one thing I kept hearing over and over again, that people said they worked out a little bit harder, that they had to finish that extra mile just so they could finish the episode of The Dateline that they were listening to. So I think, you know, what I love about podcasts is, in a way, it allows you to imagine a lot more and to be able to, you know, picture the characters in your mind. We've all been together as a group before, and this question always comes up as to why people connect so firmly to these programs and these stories. And,

you know, always interested in hearing your thoughts on that. I'll start. I'll say I think it's the classic good versus evil, you know, and people like, you know, I think we like to know that the bad guys or gals get caught. And I think true crime is such a powerful genre because we're fascinated by what makes people do bad things. And it's also an adrenaline rush for those on the other side who are, you know, even as viewers or listeners trying to figure out and trying to solve the case. It's that little bit of, you know, that thrill in thinking you solved it. I'm fascinated by all the clues and the investigating that goes into solving these cases. Every time I just can't believe it.

I can't believe the detectives and that somebody thought of that or that someone noticed something that, you know, just is remarkable that they noticed that eventually leads to an arrest. So hats off to all those dedicated detectives out there. And armchair detectives too, by the way, and families who do their own investigating. I mean, it's really a group effort in a lot of ways because it's not just the detectives, even though they're amazing. It's so many different people that can go into solving a case. Yeah. I think there's something in the evolution of all creatures, and certainly including human beings, you have to know what the sort of parameters of acceptable behavior

in a society of any kind are. And you have to know the sort of any kind are. And you have to know the sort of people who are likely to betray those definitions and get outside them and do bad things. So who are the kind of people we are looking for? How do they behave? What do we do about it?

Are really foundational questions for human beings. And thus, I think— And you can go all the way back to the Garden of Eden and find the first Dateline story. I'll tell you what I love, and this happened just two nights ago. My wife and I were on whatever our latest binge TV watching is, and there was the Dateline reference. And it happens more and more. You'll be watching something and you perk up because, you know, we have become this pop culture icon. We're part of the cultural landscape.

I know. I certainly didn't see that coming when I joined Dateline back in 1995. So what do we think Dateline-esque means when you just come across that in a novel or somebody says it on a TV show? They certainly don't say it of our honorable competition. That's a 60 minutes moment or that's a 2020 moment, but that's a Dateline moment. It's got a knock-on effect that the author of the material is using for extra spin, you know? Yeah, it's because of, you know, of your, Dennis, like your memorable quote all those

years ago, you know, it's not the murder, it's the marriage. I mean, Dateline's not, we could find bloodier crimes. We could find more frightening crimes, you know, but these are stories about relationships. And that's what people recognize in Dateline are the choices people make, the really strange choices people make sometimes about involving someone that maybe they once loved, someone that maybe was the— We might as well be true romance as we are true crime. Yeah. At least in the beginning.

I mean, the crime itself is almost never the biggest part of the story. It's always the relationships involved and the investigation. And I think that's why it works. Sure. Well, we've got the season premiere coming up. And Keith, it's your story. Tell us about it. This is a story about military people

who moved to a very small town in Kentucky, an old town, grand old homes, an old town that never really grew. And, well, a series of events occurred. What began with a farmer seeing a car smoldering in a field, he smelled something that didn't smell like a regular fire, like maybe there was some accelerant involved. And inside the car, they found a couple of, well, skeletal remains of human beings, each with a small round hole in the skull. No idea who it was. The car was burned so sufficiently and the bodies burned so much, they had no idea who it was.

But eventually, it was able to lead back to these two houses in the middle of this little town in Kentucky. And the relationship between the people who lived in those houses is the core of the story. That was good. Yeah, I'm riveted already. How does it end, Keith? Come on. That was good. That's why people imitate you, too.

That was great. I want to ask you, as we start to draw to a conclusion, any final thoughts to our listeners out there? We couldn't be doing what we're doing without the audience that we have and without the dedicated professionals in law enforcement and without the families who are so willing to sort of trust us and let us into their homes. So we really have to thank sort of all three of those entities. But when I'm traveling across the country and people come up to me in the airport

and they ask me about a particular case, which they saw a couple of nights earlier, and which they fell asleep during, because apparently I've put like half the country to sleep at one time or another, it's always really gratifying. Because my contact with the audience out there in the real world is like 100% positive. People appreciate us.

And I guess they just all need to know we appreciate them too. Yeah. Did you guys see the reporter in Chicago who gave his farewell goodbye on the air? And he said, now I can finally stay up and watch Dateline. I can finish Dateline.

I would just say thanks to all of those who watch or who listen or who tweet along with us. And thanks for being as obsessed with true crime as we all are. Yeah. Our viewers are the best ever. It's truly a privilege to be able to tell these stories. It has been and it continues to be, and I hope it will be for years to come. I want people to know how much care goes into the storytelling that we do. And we really mean storytelling. And that, you know, it takes a lot of patience sometimes to let these stories play out, to find, you know, the key participants in the story who are willing to talk. But we've got a team you don't see every week investing long hours to make sure that we

continue to keep the bar high as we tell these very human stories, human and often relatable stories. And the people you don't see are really the people that make Dateline go, the behind-the-scenes people and the camera crews and the editors and the producers and the researchers and the associate producers and the Day of Air team. That's really what has made this, what has gotten us to our 30th season. Best in the business. Amen to that. Our 30th season of Dateline kicks off with our season premiere, Friday, September 24th, 9 p.m., 8 central.

I know you all will be watching. Dateline at 30, the podcast, is a production of Dateline NBC and NBC News Audio. This episode was produced and edited by Mario Garcia and Ursula Summer with technical direction from Bryson Barnes. Thank you.