Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: The Footprint at the Lake

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Josh Mankiewicz and Andrea Canning give us an inside look at Andrea’s recent episode, “The Footprint at the Lake.” The story is about Manuela Allen, a beloved teacher who disappeared from her Olney, Texas, home and was later found dead at a nearby lake. In their conversation, Josh and Andrea discuss the details of the case and go behind the scenes of the making of the episode. 

Hi, everybody. This is Talking Dateline. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and I'm here with Andrea Canning. Hi, Josh Mankiewicz. Lovely to see you. You too. We're here to talk about your episode, which is called The Footprint at the Lake. Yes. Which I just saw, like much of our audience, and which I thought was great. If you didn't see it on television and you haven't heard the podcast, it's right below

this episode on the list of podcasts. So go there and listen to that, or you can watch on TV, and then come back here. Okay, so let's talk about the footprint at the lake. It is the footprint at the lake, but it's also kind of the tire track at the lake, right? That's what I was thinking. I was, I liked the title, but then I was like, wait, what about the tire track? It's the tire track. The bicycle track is very, very important to the story.

Yeah. Let me, let me just say this starting off, which is I very much hope that nothing ever happens to you, but if it does, and your husband is later quoted as saying she was built like a tank, I will personally seek him out and destroy him. Thank you. Yeah, because that's not the epitaph people want to have. Right. You know, Manu Allen, she was a German woman from Bavaria and she was a strong woman, you know, very strong woman. Yeah. In every sense. Yeah, exactly. So this episode I saw was

produced by Kim Krawitz and Justin Smith. Who was out there with you in the field? Kim was the primary producer out in the field. I've worked with Kim before. She is a great producer. And in a story like this, like that is just so essential because you had everybody that you want to talk to. I mean, very early on, you guys set up this dynamic where certainly in the first hour, like everything I'm thinking is, this is one of the people in the house. The only question is, which one? And to make that work, you want to talk to all the people in the house, or at least you want to see them in police interviews. And you had all of that, which I thought really, really worked. We did. Yeah. And that's Kim. So it really gives

you the full picture in this story of who the players are and who potential suspects are. And I mean, this is this is I haven't done a story like this in a long time that really keeps you guessing where you think, you know, who did it. Then you say, oh, no. OK, no, that didn't person didn't do it. OK, actually, maybe that person did do it. Okay. No, they didn't do it. I mean, it was just, it's like a, you know, whiplash. You're going back and forth between these people and you're trying to figure out who did it. And it really is very, like, I know we use twists and turns a lot in Dateline because we do have a lot of twists and turns, but this one really has a lot of twists and turns. Yeah, it did. And it's like a locked room mystery. Like, you know, it happened in the house and yet no one heard it. And yet there are all these people there. And yet they don't seem to have any ax to grind against the dead person. But then you to hear it for myself because, you know, it seems so implausible to me that in that tiny house, you would not hear a woman being attacked.

And I thought to myself, oh no, the, you know, they're going to be mad at me because I'm going to hear it and I'm going to, you know, ruin their tests that they did. And they're going to, you know, and then I went, oh, wow, I actually cannot hear this person screaming my name, which was really quite incredible for such a small house. Yeah, I thought that really worked. I was, and when they started talking about that, I remember thinking to myself, oh, I hope we're going to test this. And then there you are.

Yeah. And some inside baseball before we continue. Yes. We actually lost the media of Verl, the character Verl, the friend screaming my name. Something happened with the camera. We had the audio Verl, just not the camera, not the video. I remember that. You can hear him, but you see him and you're like, I don't hear anything. I don't hear anything. Right. So if anyone thinks it was maybe not perfect that's the reason is sometimes things happen out in the fields that throws us

a curveball and this was one of them where we went oh no the camera you know broke down in that very important moment uh and for uh regular viewers and listeners like that almost never happens. I mean, right. It really doesn't. Right. I mean, stuff that comes in is not usable. That's almost never occurs. Yeah, that's very true.

Thankfully. So I thought you guys got around that just fine, because in the moment when you're watching that thing, you don't think to yourself, why are they doing it this way? I was like, that's fine. You hear the voice and then you see you saying, yeah, I don't see anything. So I thought that was great. You know, one of the things that we do at Dateline, which is part of the storytelling, is we make sure that we mention all of the details of the part of the story that puts one person under suspicion. So, I mean, if police have like five reasons for suspecting it's, you know, John, and then of course it turns out not to be John,

we're going to mention all five of those reasons. We're going to make sure you, the audience, understand what it is that puts suspicion on that person. We don't make stuff up, obviously. If they were not a suspect, then they weren't a suspect. And if police didn't suspect them, then we don't say that they did. But if police had four reasons of suspecting you, we're going to name every single one of them. And in this case, Peter, because you're starting off right away, you're thinking, well, okay, it's going to be somebody in the house and it's quite possibly going to be the husband because regular viewers and listeners know it is usually the husband. He does a bunch of things that I'm writing down.

Again, I don't know when I'm watching and I don't know how it's going to come out, but he says there's blood all over her bedroom. I'm thinking like, wait, that's not your bedroom. And what are you doing out on the couch? says there's blood all over her bedroom i'm thinking like wait that's not your bedroom and what are you doing out on the couch the couch usually suggests some kind of marital discord interesting observation and he says to the cops i'm a dog i look but i don't touch which is like i mean that might be something you say at a bar maybe not in a murder investigation but out it came and those are the things that caught police

attention too. I mean, they're looking for that. Yeah. And when I see him in the interview and I see him in that shirt, which is not prison wear and the background is kind of indistinct, you know, my mind immediately goes to, okay, this guy's been convicted and Andrea has figured out some way of disguising the fact that he's actually in custody at this moment. Or you interviewed him before the trial was over when he was not yet in custody. Yeah. Or it's a hung jury. Right.

And you're waiting to go to the next or it could be any number of reasons why somebody, you know, maybe is in regular clothes or whatever. And it's not what it appears. And so I'm looking at him and I'm not just looking at the way he's dressed in the background, but I'm listening to the way he talks. He does not speak. Peter does not speak as somebody who is convicted and waiting for an appeal that he is convinced is going to turn him free.

I'm listening. I'm thinking like this guy either didn't get charged or he, or he was acquitted. He doesn't speak like someone who's under a sword of Damocles. Yeah, that's true. But, you know, I would say, though, a lot of interviews with defendants and he was not a defendant. I do try to really take them there in the beginning of the interview of happier times, you know, and they they will go there with you, you know, they will go back in time and smile and remember memories. And so it's, it's not unheard of that they would be, you know, jovial or laughing or, you know, at least in the beginning of the interview, then of course it takes a very dark turn. Yeah. I mean, I've been doing this for too long,

so I'm now looking for like every single clue during an interview. The fact that you even had to like, think about it shows you that he was you know a viable suspect yeah i mean that's exactly where you'd go first which is you know who's the spouse who's the significant other that makes sense and and failing that that it was somebody else in the house and they're all in their rooms and like the i love the the darian with his headphones on on the video games he's like you know like all you know the young people that age you know the stereotype is they're blind to the rest of the world because they're listening to their own thing and you know yeah and that was you know that was great you know uh dad's on the couch uh for reasons which are never sort of fully

explained but one gets the feeling that he drinks, you know, he'll have some drinks and he snores and she doesn't want him in the bed. And then he'll, you know, fall asleep watching television on the couch or whatever. I'm sure there's a lot of relationships out there that have a similar, you know, situation where the guy falls asleep watching TV or whatever he snores. And so the, you know, the wife kicks him out of the bed. Snoring, I think is a bigger issue than people think it is sometimes yeah uh let me ask you a question was it when you're out at the scene at the lake with the uh with the cop um was it like 100 degrees out there oh it was way more

than that i can't remember if it went past 110 wow it was definitely well above a hundred. Yeah. Because I, I was shooting in Texas that same week and it was in Laredo. It was just like, I mean, it was like 122 one day when I went out and got in the car. I think it might've been over 110 that day. It was, that was like, it was like walking into an oven. It's tough enough working outdoors or shooting something outdoors when it's that temperature. It's even harder like, you know, wearing makeup and trying to not look like you're, you know, broiling when you're out there doing it, you know. And then I made the mistake of wearing like an army green colored dress. And then I realized I was surrounded by yucca plants and other foliage that was the exact same color as my dress. And I went, oops, why did I wear this?

I did not even notice that. I was in camouflage. You were. Yes. I was focused on finding her body out by the lake and it being covered up, which almost always suggests that it's someone that the dead person knew, which to me, again, pointed to all the people in the house. Now, it turned out it was someone that the victim knew, but it wasn't somebody who lived in the house.

Yeah. I know this one came out of left field, the suspect in this one, the new suspect. It really did. The ex-boyfriend. And for instance like like the sock evidence the bloody sock evidence i'm like okay well they've got him and then it turns out that's not nearly as probative as people think it is right i know that was a that was a big twist because you think with the sock that it had to be him but But it wasn't. That interview with him, with Julius, the killer, was just very dark.

It was dark. I agree. The photographer I was with said, I need a shower after that. There was something about that one that kind of just made my skin crawl a little bit. A lot of times when you're doing these interviews with people who have, who have been convicted of murder, or at least, you know, sometimes on our stories, they've been charged, not yet convicted. They are in some significant denial. Like they're, no, no, this is wrong. The jury got it wrong. Prosecutors got it wrong. The cops and my ex-wife's family or my, you know,

whoever the victim is, that family, they're all in league together. They're framing me. But you don't get as much what you got, which is, yes, I did it. No, I can't really explain it. And although I'm doing this interview, I can't even really articulate what went into my thinking as to why I did this, because as I know, as you know, a lot of people do like when burglars get interrupted, they don't kill you. Usually they run away. So like the idea that I'm going to, you know, in the middle of a burglary, I'm going to stop and stab somebody 46 times. That is a very unusual result of a burglary. I mean, generally the only danger that burglars pose to people is that they might knock you down as they're trying to get out the door.

But this was completely different. When you start talking early on, about halfway through, you're talking about the guns in the house as being a possible motive. I thought to myself, that isn't a real motive for this. That's just something they looked at for like an hour and it turned out to be nothing. But wrong again, Josh, that turned out to be a real thing. It did. You know what? Yes, because he said that a gang was after him or something and he needed a gun and he knew Peter had guns. So, you know, so he was going to go to the house to get the gun. And as her ex, as the daughter's ex, he would have seen the guns. He would have known where they were.

And also side, one more side fashion note. Oh, yes. That the viewers, the listeners, viewers might appreciate. If you're on my Instagram at all, Kim Crow, it's who you mentioned, the producer on this. She, I didn't properly read the email about the prison that you can't wear white. So, of course, I brought white jeans with me. And then I realized the day before, because the prisoners are all wearing white. Right. In Texas. Yeah. Yeah. If something goes wrong, they don't want you

to blend in with the prisoners. So Kim and I went to TJ Maxx together to get an emergency outfit. And we ended up buying the same shirt. And so if you're on my Instagram at all, you would, you would see Kim and I on set wearing the same shirt. So there's a little fun fashion side story for you involving a Texas prison and TJ Maxx. I mean, I always like it when we can get wherever the defendant is, whatever lockup it is, because you end up getting, you know, maybe not all the story, but you get a lot of it. And that's it's very, very satisfying to see the interview with Julius because like, you feel like you're at the end of the road because you sort of go

through all the people in the house. And like at different times, I was wondering whether it was each one of them. Right. And then, you know, you get introduced to Corey and I'm like, okay, we're there. Here we are. It's him. He's got a gun. He's got a gun. He's showing off, right? Oh, no, it's not him. It's the guy who owns this bike gun. He's got a gun. He's showing off, right? Oh no, it's not him. It's the guy who owns this bike, which is kept under the stairs. And it turns out he's, you know, this is the great, the great reveal, the great twist. Turns out he's the ex-boyfriend of Melanin. Okay. There we go. I also, you know, this story, notwithstanding the quote that Peter gave you, which is if you try to break up your kids kids when they're dating somebody that you think is wrong for them, it's going to be a mistake.

It's going to shove them closer together. I have to say, I think that's good advice. with that same issue where, you know, parents, they don't want their kid to be with this other kid. But yet the more you say no, the more that kid wants to be with that person. And it's really a tough thing of how to handle that. And in this case, obviously things went, you know, very wrong. Yeah. All right. Whose dog is that? That's not my dog. That's mine. I'm so sorry. What's your dog's name?

Topaz. Topaz. That's a golden doodle, a medium-sized golden doodle. The color of Topaz. That's the kind of detail we're going to get a lot of thing that Dateline is famous for, which is murder in a small town. You think you know, as the viewer or the listener, you think you know who it is. Turns out, in true Dateline fashion, you don't. It's something you didn't see coming.

And also, by the way, good job getting to the end of this story when there's not a trial, because usually at the end, we have a trial and we, you know, usually the last part or two parts of our stories involve, you know, something in a courtroom and you didn't have that this time. But I thought you guys did a really good job of telling this, surprising me again and again and again with different twists, and then kind of bringing it home. Yeah. Thank you, Josh.

What can I say? I'm talking Dateline. And Andrea, anything else we've missed? No, I think we've talked, talked, talked. Great to see you. You too. Great to hear Topaz. And this episode is The Footprint at the Lake.

And it's available on podcast right below this one. And it's available on TV, on Peacock. Definitely. Andrea. Thank you, Josh. Thank you. See you next time.