Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: Down the Basement Stairs

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

Josh Mankiewicz catches up with Dennis Murphy about his latest Dateline episode, “Down the Basement Stairs.” Cara Rintala has stood trial four times for the 2010 murder of her wife, Ann, each time in the same Massachusetts courtroom. Dennis tells Josh what prosecutors did differently this time and they discuss the most puzzling evidence in the case … wet paint. Plus, they answer listener questions about the episode.

Hi, everybody. This is Talking Dateline. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and I'm joined by Dennis Murphy. Hi, Dennis. Hey, bud. How are you doing? I'm good. We are here to talk about the episode from last Friday, which is called Down the Basement Stairs. Now, if you, the audience, have not seen this episode, or if you've not heard it on podcast, it is the podcast episode right below this one on the list that you just chose from to get here. So go there, listen to Down the Basement Stairs, or watch it on television, and then come back here. I don't think that I have ever covered a case at Dateline where there were four trials. I think that's the headline. You know, we've been in courts a lot, Josh, and my experience is state prosecutor goes for it. One time they lose, they had a hung jury, they come back and

they go again. But after two, if they don't get it after two, you know, everybody shakes hands and goes home. That's my experience. I've never, I can't recall one going four rounds like this. Of course, somebody's got their, you know, Guinness Book of Records looking it up and I'll be proved wrong. But it is extraordinary. Yeah, I mean, there are cases that go more times. But frequently that hinges on evidence that was admissible one time being inadmissible another time. Yeah.

This is kind of the same case and prosecutors sort of couldn't make it go. Speculation. I don't think they could play the movie as it were for the jury and tell them what happened in that house. Okay. Here are the two women at the top of the stairs. What happens? Is there a fight?

Does one fall? Is one pushed? And what happens when they get to the bottom of the stairs? Everybody wants to have a, you know know luminol or fingerprint or something that explains it but they didn't have that kind of technical uh evidence it's not a who done it to me so much as what in the world happened here in this last trial the thing that the prosecution offered sort of as a theory was the idea that there was some sort of fight between the two of them and that Anne falls down the stairs. And then Kara has to kind of make up her mind. Am I going to face a domestic violence charge, lose my job, lose the house, lose the child? Or my only option is to accelerate this fight into a murder.

As a law enforcement friend said to me, Josh, years ago, sometimes you have to finish what you started and you've got to carry through. Now, this is all happening, I think, in split seconds, but that is the difficulty. Except that there is absolutely nothing supporting that theory, except that the prosecution kind of offered it. Really, it's all speculation. You know, and there was an interesting thing that happened in the last trial, Josh, which was just September.

It's a charge of first degree murder. Now, keep in mind, the homicide is a hands around the neck strangulation. Prosecutors saying this is her wife. She's a paramedic and she's choking the life out of her for four minutes until she's dead. I mean, that's not something you do accidentally. And yet the jury came back with a lesser. They bought a conviction, a guilty on the charge of manslaughter, basically. I think they just didn't know what to do with it.

Yeah. I mean, the decision to retry, I know you asked prosecutors about that. And they said in your interview with them, they said, you know, we were sort of spurred on by the family. We said to the family, do you want to go again? And the family said, yes, we do. I don't think district attorney's office work like that. No, no. You and I both know that's not how it works. They've got the charge. They're going to go for it. Right. Prosecutors are not supposed to bring cases thinking like, let's throw the spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks they don't want to go around the kitchen table at the victim's family and and see a show of hands and tell us how many people want to go

for it again i mean of course you have to be sensitive to them because it's going to be very painful to have the right same parade of witnesses again all the awful charges all the awful charges, all the awful stories told. But no, I think this is the district attorney deciding to go for it. I thought probably the strongest parts of the prosecution's case were the phone void, you know, like you can see when she stops using the phone. What you have to understand here is that the prosecution's case is built on a timeline. And one end of the timeline bookend is a phone call that Ann makes to a relative. And it goes to voicemail, I think. It's not answered. And at 1221, the phone usage stops. So this woman who is making 30, 40, 50 calls a day and text messages is suddenly going gone radio silence right before 1 p.m.

And then the medical examiner says 1 p.m. is his guesstimated time of death. And that, to me, is a pretty good exemplar of time of death. I mean, she's on the phone all the time, and then suddenly she's not on the phone. That would be persuasive to me as a juror. That's the start of the timeline. And then, as Kara would tell the police in her interview later, she said, well, it was about 3 o'clock. Ann says to me, look, I've got a night shift tonight. Do me a favor.

Take the child to the mall. Get out of my hair for a while. Let me get a little kip here. Which is another part of the prosecution case, which raises the question, why is Kara calling her? You said you wanted to sleep. I'm going to wake you up now. If she wants to sleep, why is Kara calling her? You said you wanted to sleep. I'm going to wake you up now. Right. If she wants to sleep, why are you calling? Creating a digital alibi with those calls that you just mentioned, and then going around the mall with her debit card and buying

this, that, and the other thing. Trinkets, things she doesn't need, but it establishes that she's at the mall store at 5.20 PM. I think that's important. Josh, join me in the weeds over that McDonald's. I don't think that's a small bit of evidence. That is exactly the thing that I thought when you presented that in the story, which is this is the first really persuasive piece of evidence I've heard. She's taken Brianna to the mall, and instead of going to Burger King, they go to McDonald's. So that doesn't really matter, except that McDonald's has a bunch of trash cans. It's pouring rain, and the surveillance video sees Kara get out of the car in the rain. She's got a few rags and puts it in the farthest can. Now, what is that about? I think a person that does that has some splainting to do. What is going on with ditching the cleanup rag?

Those are things that if I were a juror in that case, I would be listening to very carefully. And then there's the whole issue with the paint, Josh, which is part of this timeline. If she tumbled down the stairs, the paint can was not in her trajectory. There was no way that she was going to spill it. And yet there's paint on her, a lot of wet paint on the floor. Some of the paint is dry and some is not. So in one trial, they brought in a paint expert, a guy who literally watches paint dry. And he says, in my experience, what I'm seeing here, this should be wet, this part should be dry. And yet, you know, meanwhile, the body is cooling down and rigor mortis is setting in.

The body is answering the scientific question. This probably happened around one o'clock. And yet the paint seems to be wet later than it should be. So something's out of whack here. Okay. I got a couple of questions about the paint guy. First of all, I'm going to sound snarky here as if I'm on the date with Dateline podcast and not the talking Dateline podcast. So sue me. But that guy needs to spend every penny of the expert witness money that he's getting on a better suit because that one has seen better days. Well, as you know, he becomes the problem in that case because his testimony is thrown out on appeal. They said he was out over his skis. He didn't have the experience to testify to what he testified to.

And I think expert witnesses are brought in to clarify things for jury, to explain holes in the story. And this paint expert didn't do that. What you really want the paint expert to say is what it's doing there in the first place on the body. And he can't do that. He can sort of tell you how quickly it dries or doesn't dry, but it didn't clean up the story at all. That's one of the things that the prosecution sort of didn't do. If Kara is guilty, if she is involved here, what's the point of the paint? You're pouring the paint over the, because what, then you think that, I mean, you think that she, that it'll obscure evidence of strangulation?

I mean, they're a couple. DNA is not an issue because they're in each other's lives. Yeah, you're not going to hide anything with paint. So what's the, what's the idea? Dateline armchair detectives, this is for you guys to figure out because I totally didn't get why it was or when it happened on that timeline. You know, here's an interesting thing. Prosecutors often say about juries, when they start thinking about what's possible is when you get acquittals. And when you start getting them to think about what's likely, you get a conviction.

So, you know, one of the messages that prosecutors tend to put out sort of at least implicitly, if not explicitly, is, I mean, look, who else was this going to be? Who else would do it? They'd had fights before. There'd been domestic violence was in the background of this story, the way it's in so many Dateline stories. So if it's not her, then who else is it? Well, in this case, there were a couple of other, I mean, I don't know, suspect is the right word because each of them had some kind of alibi, but there were at least somebody that police could have looked at as possibly being involved in this.

So let's talk about them a little bit. There was a former romantic interest, a woman who was a police officer. She was in and out of Anne's life, and there were money issues and some jealousy. And, you know, put that in a shaker with ice and you could easily explain a fairly lethal story. This would not be the first time that a jilted ex ended up committing a murder, as we know from watching Dateline. I presume that there was nothing from the ex-lover to Ann saying, you know, you'll pay for this. You be sorry i mean because anything remotely threatening or you know stalking or repeated calling that would have come in i can't get that story to spool up

either i just don't see yeah i mean that's just it feels like there really wasn't anything there and she was alibied out she she said she was at the gym and there was the security and there was some video of her leaving the gym and even though gym. And even though there's that ATM receipt of her, you know, not too terribly far away. So now the other paramedic, Mark. Yeah. Are you able to tell what's going on there? I mean, was she having a relationship with him too? What was going on there?

I think there was something emotional going on, a tie with a text. I mean, it certainly was flirtatious stuff but is it uh is it is it woo woo stuff i don't think so i don't see him making a move on her especially she's with a baby in the house i don't know i i just can't see that narration working yeah and like okay let's say something is going on there he's gonna kill her. Why? But you have to get that person in the timeline again, Josh. If she says she's having lunch with the baby and then they're going to the mall, when do you get that?

The unknown person from the bus station who has walked up the hill and killed her or the paramedic or the former police officer friend. I mean, how do you get them in the house to do what they do? Kara puts herself in the house as she tells the police. And there's no eyewitness testimony anywhere that anybody else, any neighbor or any passerby or anybody saw some unknown person at the property or casing it or walking by or looking in the windows. There's just nothing like that. What I call the one-armed man in all these stories, you know, there's just not. And that gets you back to what prosecutors want juries to think, which is, well, if it's not her, then who else could it possibly be? And they'd had problems before. That's the way prosecutors want you to think. I have to commend you and your production team here, who I believe to be the wonderful

Sue Simpson, with whom I've done a couple of stories. Because getting that piece of audio from the judge saying, if you two don't stop this, essentially, I'm calling the Department of Children and Family Services. And you can tell how sort of at the end of his rope, the judge is, which gives you a little window into Anne and Kara's relationship that you otherwise wouldn't have. That's a great thing to have is that little piece of audio. That's true. And good on Sue for doing it. I've been getting a scolding from the bench. And the issue is the thing that joins them. It's the baby, Brianna. They both love the child and they both want to have her. They've actually filed for divorce and there were restraining

orders and everything else. And at the heart of all that stuff seemed to be the child. And yet you have all these character witnesses who said, I saw them come by the Sunday service and they were radiant from their vacation on the cruise ship and everything looked fine. The paramedic, the male, is not telling any stories about Ann reporting a huge fight in the previous 48 hours. There's none of that kind of stuff. Right. Was Mark the paramedic? Did he say, I can't imagine Kara doing it?

Or did she say, I was, you know. I think he got in a jam because he had a slightly not candid story about what he was doing that day. And then he untwisted that story. But once you lie to a cop, cops don't like to be lied to. You know, Josh, what happens? I mean, you're moving up that pad of people of interest very quickly at that point. So he got caught in a jam in his story. And that's how he stayed in it for a long time.

But in the end, he was not a suspect for them no he was not and neither was the uh neither was the ex you know i'm struck all these years later how little of interest there is that this is a same-sex couple marriage uh it was news in 2010 a couple goes to the courthouse and gets married the same sex aspect of this to me totally falls out of the story Yeah, this is a couple that we the kind of couple that we cover all the time and there Sometimes they're happy and sometimes they're not happy and you know, one of the things that the defense said was You know These people were together a long time and you're looking at only the brief period of time that they were estranged.

But the rest of that time, they were getting along fine. And lots of couples go through periods in which they are not getting along. Some people separate and then get back together. And it's not an indicator that one's going to murder the other. One of the things that I was struck by was the shopaholic anecdote. Oh, yeah. So she gets access or Mark gives an access to his credit. She runs up a $7,000 bill.

Who does that? Who does that on a friend's car? To me, that's not couch change. I mean, come on. I mean, I wouldn't charge $700 on a friend's car unless we'd like specifically agreed to it or something like that. And Josh, likewise, the police officer, the in and out affair that she'd had, she's also getting charges run up on her card. So I think it's part of the mix. You know, how does money fit into this thing?

Jealousy, anger, resentment, money. A very bad moment at the top of the stairs. You know, you can make your own script, I guess. So here's a new thing that we're trying on talking dateline um i'm not supposed to call it viewer mail but my feeling is if it was good enough for david letterman it's good enough for me go to the mail sack josh you know we always say don't watch alone and we're gonna prove that uh we are watching with you and sometimes you have questions, and so we're going to try and bring you answers. The first one is from someone named Ben in Los Angeles, and he writes,

the gift card you gave me doesn't have any money on it, you son of a... Oh, that's a text. That's not viewer mail. Sorry. I got it wrong. Anne seems like a lot of work and was very emotional, says Tammy Minoski, who writes to us a lot on Twitter. I wonder if Kara planned this or it was a crime of passion. If you believe that Kara is, in fact, guilty, what do you think? Unplanned or planned? Well, I think Ann was certainly the firecracker of the two. She loved to have the Mr. Mike in her hand, and she had a playlist for her own karaoke. She loved the attention, and she was a sparkler. Kara was not, by all accounts. Does that mean that she is more

likely to put on Spock ears and come up with a devious plan to get rid of her wife? I don't think so. I don't think that works out. This thing seems, I don't think anybody woke up that morning and said, this is the day that Anne is going to die. And if this is something in my mind, speculation, something happened that was triggered at the top of the stairs there. And I don't know what it was.

And neither does the prosecution. Here's a question from Seth. Are the jurors allowed to know about the previous hung juries? And I think the answer to that is that they're not. No, not in my experience. I can't be aware of any of the facts. It's only what's presented to them in the courtroom. Here is one from Terry.

And she says, did I miss something? Maybe she just fell down the stairs. I mean, is that possible? She says, I did that. I fell down the stairs. Yes, Terry, you did fall down the stairs, but you didn't have strangulation marks on your throat. And they plotted that out. They theorized, well, let's see if somebody's up at the top of the landing here and they take a misstep, what happens? Bumpity, bumpity, bump. They learned that they would not hit the paint can. So it doesn't account for the paint can. The paint is a confusing factor. The paint being a confusing factor is perfect for this next question. It's from Paula Roby, who is a friend of mine and a big Dateline

viewer and I think doesn't miss an episode. And her question is a pretty good one. Is paint drying junk science? I mean, paint does dry. So what is, you know, does that qualify as junk science? I'm thinking the prosecution would argue no, others might argue differently. Well, are there scholarly journals that you can point to? And I think the problem here was the credentials of the particular paint expert they had. He was a very well qualified engineer, but they decided that he could not have a legal opinion for this jury about what happened with the paint and how quickly it dried. Here's a question that I think we can both answer from I am Mirage,

M-Y-R-A-G. I can't wait to see a Dateline show that starts with, they were evil, mean people that no one liked who could have killed them and then expose all the dirt. Okay. So I'm going to refer you to a show that you can, a Dateline episode that you can watch on Peacock and it's called Stone Cold. I did that story in Tucson a few years ago. Here's the thing about that. That was a guy who did not light up a room, the victim in that case. His girlfriend certainly liked him and his brother really liked him.

We interviewed the two of them. But many other people had a problem with this guy. So sometimes we do stories like that. You've probably done stories like that in which the person wasn't popular. No, they're not all the man or woman of the year. But if you want to see an episode of Dateline that's only three minutes long, I suppose that would be the ingredients. All right, before we go, I want to say that if you or someone you know

is experiencing domestic violence, you should call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or you can text START, S-T-A-R-T, to 88788, or you can visit www.thehotline.org. Dennis Murphy, thank you for joining us. The episode is Down the Basement Stairs. Josh, thanks to you. And good holidays to you, my friend. A couple of things before we go. We found another case that had four trials. That was a Keith episode called The House on the Lake. And it was coincidentally also produced by Sue Simpson.

You can find that on Peacock, season 25, episode 12. And my episode that I mentioned, Stone Cold, that can also be found on Peacock, season 27, episode 13. And if you ever have a question you want answered, you can reach us on social

at DatelineNBC or hashtag Dateline. Meanwhile, we'll see you Fridays on NBC.