Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: Out of the Darkness

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Andrea Canning sits down with Josh Mankiewicz to discuss his episode, “Out of the Darkness.” In 2016, Chacey Poynter called 911 in hysterics to report that her husband, Bob, a fire captain, had been fatally shot by a stranger on a Texas country road. When police arrived at the scene, they found a frantic Chacey covered in her husband’s blood. Investigators quickly surmised that her emotion and her story were far from genuine. Andrea and Josh discuss the intensity of Chacey’s reaction, captured on police body cam, as well as the role of life insurance policies can play in murders. Later, Josh shares a podcast-exclusive clip from his interview Bob’s mother. Then, in a podcast first, Josh invites Andrea to partake in a special Talking Dateline challenge.   Have a question for Talking Dateline? DM your audio or video to @DatelineNBC on social or leave a voicemail at [phone]. Your question could be featured in an upcoming episode.   Listen to the full episode of “Out of the Darkness” here: https://swap.fm/l/outofthedarkness   Listen to Josh’s episode “Poison” here: https://swap.fm/l/poison   Watch Andrea fight off sweat bees here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=324321878130485 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Canning, and we are talking Dateline. Our correspondent on this one is Josh Mancowitz, and this is for his episode called Out of the Darkness. Hello. Let's talk Dateline, Josh. Hey, how are you? I'm good. I'm ready. One housekeeping item, if you haven't seen it, you can watch the episode of Peacock or listen to it in the Dateline podcast feed and then come right back here. Also, we will have an extra clip from Josh's interview with the victim Bob Pointer's mother. And then, Josh, you have a special talking dateline challenge for me. I'm excited about this. Yes, I do. It's something we've discussed previously, although you've certainly forgotten about it.

I actually forgot about it too, but it's going to be fun. Okay. I'm ready. Before we dive into this episode, and I have a lot of thoughts, Josh, give us a very quick overview of what happened. Well, this was in 2016 in Royce City, Texas, sort of classic Texas, small town. A young woman named Chasey Pointer, married to a fire captain who was considerably older. She was 29. I think he was like 46, 47, something like that. She calls her husband because her Jeep has gotten stuck on this muddy road. So he comes out there and he gets shot.

And from the beginning, you know, we see, we on Dateline, the viewers see this story unfold almost entirely via first responder and police body cams. And she's unspooling this story of what happened. And sort of from the beginning, she can't get her own story straight. I mean, first she says, no what happened. Then she saw a shadow. She's a shadowy figure. Then it was a man. She didn't know who it was.

Then later she does know who it is. It's this guy that she was having an affair with. I mean, it is a classic case of not just spousal murder, but of a murderer kind of not thinking about the story that they were going to tell until the absolute minute they were telling it. And so you are left watching this. and just kind of shaking your head. She was convicted, and, you know, it's a terrible tragedy.

And again, there's a thing called divorce. Yes, yes, that we mention often on this program. So, Josh, I have to say she had me at first, Chacey, because the way this show opens is very terrifying, you know, the out of breath, the 911 call, the running. I mean, it's like how every lifetime movie starts out. There's a woman, you know, running through the woods. And then when the call dropped out, I thought Chacy was done. I thought somebody was after her. Then I was so surprised to see that Chacy was a live and she was then talking to investigators eventually. And that's where this, her behavior really comes in and the breathing. And I'm like, and then it would like, stop. And then it was starting. And at first she kind of had me. But the more it went on, the more I started to say, this girl needs a Razzie. Yeah, that wonderful top is courtesy of Jessica DeVira, who's a sensational producer here at Dayline.

And, you know, Jessica and I did this story. And, like, we, you know, we didn't have a couple of the things that people usually have. Like, we certainly didn't have an interview with her. You almost didn't need it, though, Josh, because we had such a sense of her. We had her telling this crazy story. And burying herself. Right. We had her telling her own story, which, you know, at the beginning sounds crazy. crazy and like the worst thing has happened to her. And then the more she tells it, the crazier

it sounds, the crazier she sounds, the more dishonest she sounds. And then you just think, okay, well, I mean, this person's a liar. And that's exactly where prosecutors came down. You know, what I love about investigators are the little things that they pick up on that, you know, me at least, I don't know about you, but I'm not a, you know, a trained investigator. So when they say to her, you know, they say to her that the blood should have dripped down. Right. And then also that they could tell that, you know, she was standing too close. Like she was standing close to Bob when the shot was fired, but she said that she wasn't.

And so they told her, quote, you're full of crap. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, by then, she'd already told these multiple stories. Right. And the whole thing was, you know, why didn't this woman ask for a lawyer? at some point, why didn't she keep her mouth shut, at least minimize what she was saying? Because then she starts going into that they're having all, they have a bad marriage. And that, um, well, she says, she says when I married him, I was young and stupid.

And I think an argument could be made that nothing had changed. Uh, that was, I think, still true on the day of her husband's death. And custody issues. I mean, all the things that lead to these daylines, you know, She and her husband. Her husband seems like a great guy from everything we were able to determine. Not long after they were married, she starts stepping out on him, not with just the guy who ended up killing him, but a bunch of other guys, too. To the point where her husband installed, I think, a surveillance camera outside their front door, not to catch bad guys and not to keep the house safe, but to get a picture of one of Jayce's lovers, which I think he did. Oh, there were a bunch.

Yeah, yeah. And she said to one of the lovers, OMG, no, I wrote OMG. She didn't say OMG. I wrote OMG on my notes. I wish he'd run out of air in a fire. Yeah, yeah. She was hoping that her husband would die,

you know, in the line of duty, which prosecutors believe that this was all about the insurance money and that if he had died in the line of duty, I think maybe she would have gotten some additional payment too. But, you know, I mean, they also told different stories about like he wasn't supposed to be killed. That was originally. This was just about scaring him. This was about giving the husband a good talking to, telling him, you know, to stay away from her because there was this sort of mythology that she created that he was violent and controlling and abusive and physically and verbally. And it just wasn't

any evidence of that. I mean, we see that a lot. Nobody seemed to believe that that was true about Mr. Pointer. Like, don't you agree, though? We see that all the time

where women will get the lover on board, you know, to do harm to their husband because they're saying he's doing this to me and that to me and he's abusive. I mean, the reason that works is that it's true so much of the time.

That's the thing, right? Oh, yes. Oh, 100%. Women, very rarely commit homicide, right? They almost always find somebody else to do it for them. That's sort of how this usually goes, right? And one of the things that moves men to be the agent of somebody else, you know, in a murder, is, well, this person is hurting me.

This person is abusive. This person is beating me. And then guys want to sort of feel like the white knight here. Yeah. And I actually, it took me down memory lane a little bit with a story that I did. This was about an army soldier. His name was Army Sergeant Vincent Gosland Jr. And he was shot to death on a remote Kentucky road after stopping to help what appeared to be a stranded motorist.

At first, it looked like a random act of violence. But investigators, you know, after he was shot and covered a calculated murder for hire plot orchestrated by his wife and her lover, prosecutor said that she lured her husband to the isolated location where the lover then killed him and they both pleaded guilty. So, I mean, that's a very similar story. I mean, you change the names. That's the Chacey and Bob Pointer story. Yeah. You know?

That was the one where I had the sweatbee video. I don't know if you ever saw that. I remember that. I remember that. I remember that. I remember that. Yeah, because I was trying to do interviews. And there were like a million sweat bees.

The thing about you. that's different from, well, just for example, me, is that you looked cool and elegant swatting away the bees. Like, that's a, you know, whereas I would have looked like, you know, like a character, you know, in a cartoon, leaving an outline of their body as they go through a wall. I mean, Josh, to be fair, I think I probably look like Elaine from Seinfeld, you know, her, like, you know, that really weird dance that she does

that's, like on all the memes. I think I looked more like that, to be honest with you. But thank you. You looked better. Speaking of TV shows, I definitely was thinking a lot about Orange is the New Black, the TV show. Because of the sheer number of times, Josh, that you mentioned Orange and how people would look in Orange. I mean, can I go, wait, can I go through them first? Sure.

Just before you respond. So you had, okay, so first you had, I rock an orange jumpsuit. Orange is the New Black, the male version. And that was from Michael Garza, the lover. The killer. Then you had Chacy saying, I don't look good in orange. And then you had one more. You had Michael Garza actually in the orange, in the mug, and you said that he looked about as good as you'd think in orange.

It's not every day that you hear a killer say, I'll do it, and I rock an orange jumpsuit. right? In other words, I'm going to get caught, right? And then they do get caught, and then you do see them in an orange jumpsuit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Josh, when we come back, we will have more from your interview with Bob Pointer's mom, and her name is Candy. The other thing that was like really crazy about this was Michael Garza's alibi. I mean, we've heard a lot of alibis over the years, but he was milking a cow? Yeah. Yeah. In the middle of the night.

Yeah. What? Yeah. That was, you know, again, this is a, you know, I mean, you hear cops sometimes say, we don't catch the smart ones, right? Sometimes they do catch the smart ones. But like a lot of times who they catch are literally people who like Chasey tell like three different stories in the first three hours or actually probably less than that.

And Michael Garza, who, you know, says things like, I rock an orange jumpsuit and his alibi is I was milking a cow. Like, you want to have, you know, your cell phone at some different location at that moment. You know, you want to have somebody testify, oh, no, you know, Mike and I were having a beer at the saloon, right? But, you know, I mean, you know, when you are dumb enough to commit murder and dumb enough to immediately lie about it in a way that's going to get caught and dumb enough to hire a guy like that, you kind of deserve what you get. Yeah. I mean, the whole plan was just so filled with holes. Yeah. And sadly, though, the result is like, you know, there's kids without a dad.

Yeah. And mother, the mother with her son. You know, Bob Pointer was one of those guys who did not lose touch with his mom over the years. Like they spoke all the time. I think safe to say she was like maybe his best friend, which is why interviewing her was sort of, I thought, paramount in this. Josh, we have an extra clip that from your interview with Bob Pointer's mother, we are going to take a listen.

Just tell me a little bit more about what he was like as a dad, I guess to Addison. To Addison? Oh, my God. He adored her, I mean, from the get-go. I mean, she looked us like him. She loved, I mean, he goes. He just doaded on her. He would cook, teach her how to cook.

They were cooking, and Bobby loved to cook. Bob loved to cook. So he even said, oh, Mom, I think of a couple weeks even before he passed away, he said, I want to get Addison, even a chef's coat. She likes Washington Food Network and all that. And I want to, oh, my God, so we started researching right away to buy her one.

He'd let Addison put red nail polish on him? Oh, totally. There's pictures of him with his glasses on painting his nails or her nails, and he's painting her nails. I thought, oh, Lord, he was just like a gentle soul. He was like a gentle giant, I would call him sometimes, because he was so big.

One of the things that comes out of that, I think, is that, you know, he was a very involved dad, not just to the daughter he had with Chacey, who was, I think, six and a half when he was killed, but also to his two older daughters that he had with his first wife. He was a big part of all of their lives. And, you know, again, that's sort of an extra-travel.

out of all this. And we talk about all the time, kind of the ripple effect of murder. Here's like maybe a lesson. Why do spouses allow, you know, increases in life insurance policies or more life insurance policies when they maybe aren't in the best marriage? Or maybe they know someone's cheating in the relationship. And then you always hear these stories about just months before the murder, or like sometimes it's like days, they up their policy or added more policies. Look, you know, another case that always sort of springs to mind happened a long time ago here in California. The murderer was a, had been a jeopardy champion. And he poisoned his wife with nicotine. And she was sick for a long time. And

the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. And her friends were saying to her, I can tell you what this is. This is your husband. He's trying to kill you. He's making you sick somehow. And she said to them, oh, he wouldn't do that. He loves me. That wouldn't happen. But she took him off her life insurance. She made her sister, the beneficiary of her life insurance. Did he know? He did not know. No, you got to tell. You got to tell. You got to tell the husband. A couple of days after she died, he's on the phone with the life insurance company.

He's like, I'm sorry, what? Right? No, no, no, no. If you're going to do that, you need to say something. My point is, thinking to yourself, I need to protect myself, is one thing. Or I'm uncomfortable with this. Or I'm going to take my husband off the insurance. That's sort of easier to do.

do than to confront someone and say, I want you to know something. I've taken you off my insurance. And the reason is, I don't think you have my best interest at heart. That is so much harder than calling the insurance company and saying, switch the beneficiary to my family member. Very, very true. Very true. You know, it was interesting, Josh, that the jury said in the end that they didn't think Chacey killed Bob for money. Right. Which I didn't really get. because she stood, you know, to gain this money. And then the jury, I didn't, did you get that? I mean, that is correct that the jury did not believe that.

Prosecutors did believe that this was for financial gain. He had a, he had a, you know, insurance policy of between $500,000 and a million dollars. But, you know, I would say that it's reasonable to believe that they didn't really know why they were killing it. I mean, I'm not, to suggest that this. was just for money. Like, I, like, I never believed that this was about her and Michael Garza being together. I mean, she had a bunch of other guys that she was seen, too. Like, like, this is not like, we're going to get this money and run off together. Like, she wanted to be free. I think she thought maybe the money might make life easier, but I, like, the idea that the money

was the motive for this, I don't know. But yes, they were, she was not convicted of murder for financial gain. All right, Josh. Up next, you were going to take over. for a special Talking Dateline challenge. You do not want to miss this. Okay, welcome back to Talking Dateline. Now, instead of taking your social media questions, Andrea and I are going to play a game, and it is one that you and I talked about a year ago back on this podcast.

So let's go back in time here. Andrea was talking to me about a lawyer, an attorney that she had interviewed for her episode called Poison twist, which is about a chiropractor's poisoning death in New York. So let's listen to what Andrea and I were talking about after that on Talking Dateline. She's a fellow Canadian, and I picked up on her accent immediately during her interview. She was saying, a boat, and I said, you're, you're Canadian, aren't you? She's from Niagara Falls. Can you automatically instantly tell when somebody's Canadian? I feel like I have that radar, you know, that special

would you call it radar? I don't know if that's the right term, but absolutely. I mean, I can pick out actors, I can pick out lawyers, I can pick out anybody pretty much instantaneously. As soon as like, you know, I just need a few words, choice words, and then we're good. I know. This feels, by the way, like a social media contest that is upcoming. I can see this coming. I'm going to be the moderator. So, yes, this is a, this kind of thing is.

sort of why talking dateline exists in my view. So we have outsourced a task to some of our fabulous dateline ambassadors, the people who tell you on social media this episode or that episode is upcoming and who's going to be on. Okay. And we have had some American and Canadian dateline viewers and listeners. Oh, no. What if I get this wrong? Send us voice recordings of the same sentence.

And the sentence is, for the record, I have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry. Now I'm feeling the pressure, though, because of that statement that I made. So, Andrea, we're going to play some clips of people saying that line. And you, little Miss Canadian and can identify other Canadians, you're going to guess whether the person speaking is American or Canadian. Here is clip number one. For the record, I have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry.

American or Canadian? I mean, she sounds, like, that's not how they would say it in my town. So she sounds American to me. American is correct. Yay, okay, okay, thank you. Okay, that's good. All right. Okay.

Clip number two. For the record, I have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry. She's definitely Canadian. The sorry gave it away. I think both. The sorry and the about. Okay.

So that person is Canadian. Okay. Yes. So far, you're batting a thousand. Yeah. Would you like to risk it all, Andrea, and go for clip number three? I would. Here we go.

For the record, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm sorry. She definitely, she sounds American. But if she's Canadian, then she's not... saying it how Canadians say it. That's not an answer. Judges? Okay.

Sorry. Andrea did not choose. American. She's American. American is correct. Yay. Okay. Andrea, three for three.

You know what's funny, Josh, is that I was when I was in Taiwan recently on my other story, I was at the National Park, and this man came up to me and started talking me, and I said, you're Canadian. And he said, yes, I am. How did you know that? And I said, because I'm Canadian, and I can pick a Canadian, even out of a Taiwanese National Park. There you go. So, so you are three for three. Now, in baseball, you know, three for three gets you in the Hall of Fame if you can do that, you know, your entire career.

So, here's clip number four. For the record, I have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry. She's definitely Canadian. That person is American. What? That, how is that possible? She said, she didn't, is she like from Minnesota? Oh, yeah. A see? Josh, that was a red herringer because she's too close to Canada and they talk so much like Canadians. That's the one fly in the ointment. Judges, they don't care. Also, there's no one over here that I'm looking at. See, I can't, I don't know enough people from Minnesota, I guess, to be able to separate the Canadian Minnesota accent. I'll give you a little grace. Here's clip number five.

For the record, I have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry. Definitely sounds Canadian unless they're from a northern state. But I'm going to go with Canadian. Canadian is correct. Okay. Okay. All right. At least I got four out of five.

Right. And now, finally, for all the money in the world, plus an RV and a chaperoned trip to Porta, Viarda. How about to Minnesota? Okay, sure. And a gift certificate from the Spiegel catalog. Spiegel featuring value selection and economy. Spiegel, Chicago, Illinois, 60609. Can you tell that I watched a lot of game shows growing up?

You probably can. Yes, yes, roll it. Number six. For the record, I have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry. That one's kind of in between. I'm going to go with American, but it could go either way. I hate to see you go out on a losing note, Andrea.

Oh, no. That person was Canadian. But I wish I knew where these people were from. But I have to say, you backed up your claim, I think. For the most part. I think you're able to say that you've got a fail-safe or pretty close to it, sense of who's from Canada and who isn't. Yeah, I got to study the dialect a little more, you know, the northern states.

We want to thank you for playing. We have a home version of our game. Could you imagine? Josh, well, thank you so much for this. It was very fun, as always fun, and also interesting and fascinating because we are dealing, of course, with very heavy subject matter. So it's nice to have a little moment where we can smile, right? Yes, it is. Also, Keith, you would have crushed Keith in that competition, by the way.

That, you know, that would have been interesting to have Keith and I go head to head. wonder what he would have, how he would have done. Actually, this, well, this is not airing while we're taping this right now, but it is Keith's birthday. It is Keith's birthday. Everybody wish Keith a happy birthday. It'll be a little belated when this comes out, but happy birthday to Keith. Happy birthday. Well, that is it, Josh, for talking Dateline. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you all for listening. And thank you to the Dateline ambassadors who shared their voices for this challenge. Thanks, Jessica McCourt Hughes, the slickest Rick, Jojo Montana, Caitlin Clark, Anna Falkowski, and Erica Grimaldi. And remember, if you have any questions about our stories, you can DM us your audio or video on our socials at Dateline NBC, or leave us a voicemail at 212-413-5252 for a chance to be featured right here.

And you can watch the video version of Talking Dateline on Peacock or YouTube or subscribe to the NBC News app. We will see you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.