Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: The Road Trip

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Josh Mankiewicz chats with Dennis Murphy about his episode, “The Road Trip.” In June 2015, renowned holistic doctor Teresa Sievers was found dead in her Florida home. Police received a tip that sent them across several states to find her killers, but they determined the mastermind was much closer to home. Dennis talks about the killers’ lengthy road trip to the scene of the crime and their intriguing stops along the way. And, Josh and Dennis discuss how one defendant ended up taking a plea deal and testifying against another defendant – his childhood best friend. Plus, Dennis plays a web-exclusive clip from his interview with defense attorney Elizabeth Parker and answers viewer questions about the episode.Listen to the full episode of “The Road Trip” here: https://link.chtbl.com/dl_theroadtripWatch the full episode on Peacock. It’s S28 E29.

Hi, everybody. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and we're talking Dateline today with Dennis Murphy. Hi, Dennis. Hey, Bud. How are you? Good to see you. It's been a while. Nice to see you. This episode of Dennis's is called The Road Trip. Now, if you have not seen it or if you haven't listened to it, watched it on TV, the link to the episode is in the description to this episode of Talking Dateline. So go there and listen to it. You can also watch it on TV or stream it on Peacock and then come back here and we'll talk about it.

Okay, just to recap, this is the story of Teresa Seavers, a holistic doctor in Florida who was found dead in her home back in 2015. She'd been murdered, blunt force trauma with a hammer. Police got a chance tip traveled from florida to missouri in search of her killer it turned out the actual mastermind was a lot closer to home theresa's husband mark had hired his childhood best friend and his childhood best friend's best friend a guy named jimmy to come to florida Florida to kill Teresa while Mark was out of town, provably out of town. That was his alibi. And there were plenty of twists and turns along the

way. We will talk about those today. Today, Dennis has a clip he's going to play for us from an interview that did not make the episode. And then we're also going to answer some of your questions about the episode that came in on social media. I do not know where to begin with this. Isn't this absolutely fiendish, Josh? It's the strangest one in my memory. It really is. And, you know, one of the great things about it in terms of storytelling is that you think like, okay, well, this is not going to be the dateline

that you're used to. This is not going to be the dateline that you're used to. This is not going to be the wife dies and it's the husband because pretty clearly the husband wasn't there. He was in another state at the time. He was way, way away. Yeah, he couldn't have driven that distance. He was not there. And he does seem appropriately crushed. But then it turns out it is the same template.

It's just in this totally circuitous, twisting way. Josh, it's so complicated. I feel like I ought to be serving all of the viewers a cup of espresso to get their brains firing up so they can follow it, because it's a very complex journey. All the whys and whats of these things, I don't think we ever get an answer. But I think people watching this episode, which I'm so glad we're playing again, they're going to get all the information they need. I guess money is sometimes enough to make people do anything. This is just breathtaking. And it just wrecked so many people's lives along the way, including the guy who planned it. As I inevitably ask somebody in the course of these things, Josh, I say,

how is this guy's life better with his wife, with her head bludgeoned in the kitchen of their home? And the victim was a wonderful person. Dr. Seavers had a very well-regarded practice down in Southwest Florida. She regarded herself as a wellness doctor, holistic healer. She talked to her patients as much about nutrition as she would about diagnostic tests and prescription medicines. She really got into the lives of her patients and helped them so much. You know, nobody deserves to be killed like this. Dr. Seavers comes into her house, and all we know is that somebody was upon her and literally bashed her head in with a common hammer, and nothing in the scene explains itself. So, of course, everybody says, where's the husband? We need to talk to him and bring him in. He comes down

and he ends up in the police interview room. And I think it's a very remarkable bit of tape to watch. It really is. You know, you can look at, is this guy really stricken or is he a graduate of the bad hammy actor academy? He is way over the top. But on the other hand, I mean, I, I, I presume, you know, he's seen Dateline before in which people are frequently accused of being, you know, too businesslike. They're applying for the life insurance the next day. They don't seem to be shedding any tears. They don't want to come in.

And this certainly wasn't that, I mean, this guy is blaming himself and he's way. I'm caught on that moment where you're just alluding to it, Josh, where the cops leave the room as they often do. And the camera continues to roll and they watch the suspect kind of talk to themselves. And this guy talks to himself like he's reading from a soliloquy. Oh my God, Jason. What could I have done if I was with you? This wouldn't have happened. If I came back, this wouldn't have happened. I think being upset in the interview is one thing.

I think talking to yourself and the dead person after the investigators have left the room, I mean, it's like Jodi Arias doing yoga after the cops left the room. Yorick, I knew himodi Arias doing yoga after the cops left the room. Yorick, I knew him well, right? Yes. There are some things you do that are going to attract attention, and Mark did them. I mean, yeah, for me, as a film critic of countless interrogation scenes, I thought to myself- What a funny specialty we got, Josh, huh?

I thought, yeah, I thought, too much, too much. You're overdoing it here. Yeah. Of course, he gets caught up. They ask him the questions. Well, how was the marriage? Everything going okay? Any infidelities? He said, no.

We were in love. Well, there were a couple of times we were in swing parties. We were swingers. So all of a sudden, the conversation tone has changed. Tell me more about being swingers. And do you have any names of women? And all of a sudden, this pure as a driven snow husband has got names and pictures on his phone and intimate videos. And it's all true.

I have to say that having seen countless people trying to get out of murders that they were, in fact, involved in him, letting them drag the swinging thing out of him as opposed to just admitting it was probably one of the smarter things. Well, it bought him time, didn't it? So now you've got this husband who's offered up names, each of whom has to be talked to. Well, and their spouses and their boyfriends. It was going to occupy a lot of investigative

hours. I think my favorite moment, Josh, is when out of the blue, the detectives who are in Florida get a call from rural Illinois. And there's a guy that runs a small airport there, runs the tower and such. And he says, I would like you to talk to a woman who came in. And these two detectives, they said, you know what? You got our interest. We're calling a travel agent now. We're booking our way up there. And we need to go now. And what a convoluted trail it was because here, this woman, she was telling a story about a friend whose daughter had just gotten married. And she has a funny thing to say about this guy

who took off for Florida, right? You know, was a newlywed and left his phone behind. And his best friend was the husband of this woman who got murdered in Florida. And she puts together the most tantalizing bits of clues for these detectives to work on. Maybe we should give a tip of the hat to Nancy Grace. Rose was watching one of the shows in the old days, and Nancy Grace was giving the rundown on this awful murder of Dr. Teresa Seavers in Florida. And that's when she started to percolate on this thing. Yeah, well, I'm going to see Nancy

at CrimeCon, so I will be sure to tell her that she figures in a Dateline story. You know, I love it when Wayne is talking to the cops, and he can't stop boasting. He's talking about how he's written all this software

and he's making all this money. Well, where's your money going? What are you spending it on? Because it's not where you live and you don't seem to be able to go outdoors with a shirt on. Yeah. And there he is before your eyes in an interview room in shorts and shirtless and is proud to brag about himself as though he is a prime grade human being. Yeah, no shoes, no shirt, no alibi. Yeah.

That's the... Yeah. And then I love the part, Josh, about the Garmin GPS. Before we all had GPS on our phone. And when the detectives went up there to find this guy who was mentioned by the woman, Rose, they find a rental car and out of it, they took a Garmin tracking device. So that's interesting, but they get it back to their shop

and they find there's no information on it. This thing has been wiped within an inch of its little plastic life. But the cops, they didn't take no for an answer and they put it through, you know, their atomic radiation detection devices and they came up with that route and, their atomic radiation detection devices. And they came up with that route and it was great to watch it. I mean, the map lights up and here they are

leaving St. Louis and they're going down around through Georgia and, and the Garmin device was registered to the email, the real name of a guy who became the Confederate in this at the road trip, buddy, Jimmy and, and, oh, Josh, I love this. So on the, at the road trip buddy jimmy and and oh josh i love this so on the on the road to fort myers floor this is an 1100 mile car trip wait it's an 1100 mile car trip that you've got to have some belief at the beginning of which one of them thought to themselves we're not going to tell anybody we're making this trip we're trying to do this in a stealthy way because we're going to commit a murder. So what does the record reflect?

They get to Georgia and stop at a Chinese restaurant. They go inside, have a meal. And then what does he do? He rates the restaurant on Yelp. You know what Yelp is? I know exactly what Yelp is. I rate every single one of Keith's Dateline episodes on Yelp. And actually, he's not doing terribly.

So you're the one. It's me. So, yeah, I have to say this is disorganized crime. This is, you know, we're taking pictures on our phone on the way down there. We're stopping and raiding a restaurant on Yelp. And we're later going to claim we didn't make this trip. I was in misery the whole time. I mean, again, talking about disorganized crime, the stuff that the two killers buy at the Walmart, they're like, yeah, some was for fun later and some was to be used like during the homicide. But they get a t-shirt, they got a Budweiser t-shirt and then sort of a

how to kill somebody kit. They got lock picks and trash bags, and it's everything you need to pull this thing off. that these two homicidal, conscienceless jerks are heading out on this mission, which is only going to end in the murder of someone innocent. Okay, after the break, we are going to come back with an extra clip from Dennis's interview with defense attorney Elizabeth Parker. So prosecutors get their case uh good for the girlfriend for uh jimmy's girlfriend for fessing up and uh you know i mean whatever you may think of him and i don't think very much he's the father of her kid and you know she's doing the right thing she gets a dramatic confession out of him just just a chit chat before they're tucking in for the night did you kill her yeah well how'd you do it do you

shoot her no i had a hammer and then she adds this bit where jimmy was always known as the hammer i have to say i i applaud her honesty and her desire to to make it clear that she's not involved this hey how'd you like the retrieval of the jumpsuit on the side of the road? The detective says to her, look, let's go out there. Maybe you can point it out. And they go out to the stretch of highway. And lo and behold, there is a massive jumpsuit. And, you know, it's another one of those things.

You know, one of the things that episodes like this really illustrate is, you know, how it is getting harder and harder and harder to get away with murder in a way that it wasn't before. I mean, like today, like there probably would be doorbell video of the two killers arriving at the house, either from the Seavers house or from the house down the block. I mean, it's just harder and harder to hide. We've had a bunch of those stories on Dateline recently. You know, getting information off the Garmin or now your phone. And then it turned out that the FBI lab or the police lab or the state lab was able to retrieve digital information off a device that it wasn't before.

No, it's say goodnight evidence when it comes into court, too. Yeah. In part because of all those TV shows in which forensics sort of play a lead role. Like, juries are completely ready for that. They want it, and they convict on the basis of it. And I don't have trouble. I think it's good evidence. Right.

But, I mean, it was only, what, 30 years ago when prosecutors were having to explain what DNA was and why it was better than fingerprints. Today, juries take a lot of that forensic technical information sort of on faith, which makes it easier to convict and easier to build a case. When I started out as a young guy with an 11 o'clock curfew going to trials in Houston, Texas in my first job, you'd see Racehorse Haynes, the great defense lawyer in court, and he could talk about blood, the great defense lawyer in court. And he could talk about blood, but he could say blood type. You know, it's type O, it's type A.

It had none of the refinements that the jurors absolutely use now to convict and send away. Every year on Racehorse Haynes' birthday, I publish my favorite quote of his from Twitter, which is, what's money when you're looking at 25 to life in the crossbar hotel. Just give me your whole account. I'm glad you're, I'm glad you know who he is. Guys like that shouldn't be forgotten in the annals of criminal history. So that gets us to court. We got three guys and two of them are going to go to trial. And Jimmy, the guy who hasn't said much about what he was doing on his road trip is up first.

And what's happened meanwhile, and we should probably talk about this, is they got in a plea deal, which is very important from the best friend, this guy, Wayne. Yeah, it turns out he's not your ride-or-die best friend. He folds. He takes 25, and he's going to testify. First squeal gets the deal. And another important lawyer here is Liz Parker. They worked a couple of trials with

her, and now she's in private practice, and she had this guy, and she's his defense lawyer. This feels like exactly the right place to play our extra sound, which is from your interview with Elizabeth Parker. So let's listen to that now. This is part of the interview that did not make your story. I saw the state attorney's office in the future filing first-degree murder charges against Mr. Wright. They had laid out a very compelling story that Mr. Wright had premeditated, had planned, had traveled from Missouri to Florida to kill Teresa Seavers. So maybe there's a gurney and needle in your future here. Absolutely. I certainly had to give the realistic approach to my client

that you're looking at the death penalty if they convict you. How did he react to that? It took a while, I think, accepting what he had done, even, and accepting that he's going to have to testify against his best friend, someone that he'd grown up with, someone that he truly cared about. So to save his life, he has to give up his friend. Is that the calculus? Yes, he had to give up his friend. And we kind of had to go in blind to this because they wanted to hear what he had to say before they would even consider offering a plea deal. I think law enforcement and the prosecutor

were still very skeptical of Mr. Wright, and his testimony alone was not going to do it. We had to provide something more. What do you got? We had the phones. We had what the phone numbers were, the burner phones that they used, where they were purchased. That was the evidence that linked Curtis Wayne Wright to Mark Seavers. Uncontradicted, unrebutted, overwhelming evidence. Liz, thanks again for taking us behind the curtain and showing us how many, many cases are made, the deal, the plea. And, you know, it's funny because in TV shows and movies, it's the prosecutor frequently saying to the defendant, look, you know, this is what's waiting for you.

Here's your opportunity to flip on your friend and do yourself some good. But in a lot of cases, in real life, it is the defense attorney. It is the person you hired who says to you, this is the time to say what you know and do yourself some good. And that's what she did. And I don't think there's any question that probably did her client some good. And he's going to be in there for a good long time anyway. So they're back in court, and this guy who has flipped, courtesy of Liz's working on him, is going to testify against Jimmy, the carmate. Jimmy is acquitted of first-degree murder, despite bragging about it to his girlfriend and clearly going down there with the idea that that's what he was going to do. But he is still behind bars for a long, long time. He's in there the rest of his life, literally. Guilty of second degree. But yeah. This guy, Wayne, is going to come back for

the other trial, which is of his former best friend. The conspiracy was made at a wedding party. I need to have my wife killed. Will you help me? It's a hundred thousand bucks in it for you. And as we both know, Josh, the prosecution has no burden of proving motive. They can suggest it. They can make inferences, but they just have to lay out the custody of physical evidence that leads to a conviction. But jurors are eager to hear why something happened. In this case, we get offered a life insurance payout, which is pretty handsome. He keeps custody of his kids because she was going to take a hike on him, allegedly. So, you know, the stuff is there to be found, the motives. So it then becomes a death penalty case.

And in Florida, the jury gets to vote on recommendations to the judge. Should this guy be put to death by the state or not? The jury says, do him. And it's up to the judge. He says, I order you to be put to death. Yeah, that was a really chilling moment when the judge pronounced the death sentence. So their two daughters, at the sentencing hearing, they gave a very poignant kind of letter to the judge saying, we've lost our mom. And now you're about to take our father. Will you please spare him? Give him life. They're certainly not in his corner in this thing at all. But they're making a plea that they have one living parent.

So now we don't know a whole lot about that family now, right? Who's raising those daughters? Well, in a court appearance, they were awarded to Teresa's mother as the permanent guardian. And then they sort of drift out of the public record. We're told they were doing well, that he has no really access to them, Mark the father. And as we speak, he's still on death row because it takes a long time to process death cases. All right, we're going to take a break now, and then we will be back to answer your questions from social media. Here's some social media questions that came in on this episode this is about mark's interview

um harmony keen writes that was riveting you'd think by now spouse murderers would realize no matter what lengths they go to to cover their tracks the spouse is going to be the obvious culprit 95 of the time i think he did realize, which is why he made sure he was in another state when this happened and thought, nobody's going to know if I get my ninth grade friend to do this. And that's why I am conveniently at a family event, her family event. And for all purposes, he's been the loving, supportive husband. But he's playing to that because he knows that once he commissions her killing, it's going to come down on him, and he's got to be ready to fight it. Felicious1908, who is a friend of mine in real life as well as on social media, says,

it probably didn't sit well with the jury seeing him just taking notes while his bestie described killing his wife. I think that's probably true. But I mean, the whole thing was, I mean, Mark's whole, I mean, one of his many issues in this case was not being aware how his behavior would be perceived by others who were watching him. As I always say, these guys are not Lex Luthor, master criminal, you know. It's their first bite of the apple, and they all screw up. And in this case, their last. Bit of Heaven 1968 writes to us that that she was able to come to that conclusion so quick she's talking about rose she definitely watches dateline um do we know if that's true it does make sense you know we're we're seen in the greater st louis area i

believe we have a lot of people out there that like watching us. So I, I'd bet big care. I'm done now. I'm tickled. I want to know if Rose was one of our armchairs flutes. Book reader TN, maybe Tennessee says, uh, talking about Wayne's interview. Why is this man in shorts with no shirt during his interview? Well, one of them, he got pulled out of bed and clearly did not put a shirt on before they dragged him down to the to the who's cow. But there's a second interview in which he's similarly clad. I guess he just likes being shirtless. Josh, I'm guessing he does not have any pocket hankies.

That's probably true. That's a good point. Barry Wine says, just think if Mark had only skipped Curtis W wainwright's wedding none of them would have been caught well um might have happened he probably wasn't thinking about it when he rsvp'd the moment the moment would have passed yeah but here they are passing around canopies and you know they're going to have the the dj play music and it's a wedding and he's talking to this guy about killing his wife uh presley bill says i've never seen so many bald dudes involved in a trial. I couldn't tell any one of them apart,

including the lawyer. There's a, there's a club of, of sort of beefy bald guys in here. And yeah, they, that was a birds of a feather. Not me yet,

but we're all going that way. Right. Love for cards says I could not handle them repeatedly calling Jimmy Mr. Rogers. Because Mr. Rogers, the one we all know, Fred Rogers, he didn't hammer anybody. It was not a lovely day in his neighborhood. No, it was not. That is Talking Dateline for this week. Dennis, thank you, as always.

My pleasure, Josh. See you again soon. If anybody has any questions for us about stories or about Dateline, you can reach out to us on social at at Dateline NBC. One more thing. If you want to check out more true crime from Dateline, we have a brand new podcast for you called Dateline True Crime Weekly with Andrea Canning. And that's every

Thursday. Andrea and her guests are digging into the biggest true crime stories of the week and bringing you the latest on trials and investigations around the country. Dateline True Crime Weekly. So check that out wherever you get your podcasts. See you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.