Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: The Ruse

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Keith Morrison sits down with Lester Holt and Dateline senior investigative producer Dan Slepian to talk about their episode, “The Ruse.” In August of 2018, Tom Perez Jr. called the Fontana, California, police asking for help finding his father. As police began investigating the case, they started to suspect Tom Jr. was hiding something — possibly involvement in his father’s disappearance. Over the course of 17 hours, investigators interrogated Tom and he eventually confessed to his father’s murder. But then, in an astonishing turn of events, Tom Perez Sr. turned up alive. Tom Jr. had confessed to a murder he didn't commit.  Lester and Dan talk about the evidence that led police to believe Tom was guilty of a crime that hadn’t been committed, and the interrogation techniques that led to his false confession. Later, they play a podcast-exclusive clip from interrogation expert Steve Kleinman. Then, Lester and Dan answer your questions about the episode from social media.  Have a question for Talking Dateline? DM us a video to @DatelineNBC or leave a voicemail at [phone]. Your question may be featured in an upcoming episode.Listen to the full episode “The Ruse” on Apple:https://apple.co/4pYP30TListen on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/episode/1K4SvFqpY0tXhcCjVM0rAl 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 Keith Morrison, and this is Talking Dateline. Today, I'm here with Lester Holt and Dan Slepian to talk about their episode, which is called The Ruse. If you haven't seen The Ruse, you can find it in the Dateline podcast feed. So go there, listen to it, stream it on Peacock, if you wish, and then come right back here. To recap, Tom Perez, Jr., called police in August of 2018, to report. report his father missing. And before long, police began to suspect that Tom was involved in his dad's disappearance, that they brought him in for an interrogation. It lasted 17 hours and resulted in Tom confessing to his father's murder. The big twist was that Tom Perez walked back into his life a few hours later, alive and well. And Tom had falsely confessed. For this talking Dateline, we have a podcast exclusive clip from interrogation expert Steve Kleinman, and then Lester and Dan will answer some of your questions from social media as well. So, yeah, a false confession

case. They feature in a lot of our Dateline cases. How did this one happen when actually the victim wasn't a victim at all? Yeah, I mean, that's the amazing thing. This is an amazing crime story, except for the fact that there was no crime. And that's what we ultimately get to in this hour. But this is the case. Guy, you know, picks up the phone and calls the police station in his town, Fontana, California. And says, look, my pop didn't come home last night. He went out to pick up the mail down the street.

He, you know, his keys are here, his wallet is here. But no sign of dad. So they talked to him on the phone for a while. They send out a police officer, a community resources officer, who speaks to him, goes inside the house, is a little bit shocked by his wardrobe, or maybe we should say lack of wardrobe. He says they were moving and thus, you know, things were out of order. He seemed a little confused. But as they spend more time and called more officers to this house, the more their spidey sense kind of went off to the fact that, you know, could this be a crime scene? First of all, back up for just a little minute.

How did you encounter this story in Fontana, California? How did that arise above the transom? I'll defer to Dan on this. The story had been out there for a while, but no one had pieced it all together as we were able to do to really get all the players, all the key individuals in this, and bring them together to tell this story.

Yeah, I had first learned about the case because I had seen the footage and what immediately struck me about the very, video was how raw it was. I mean, I've been doing this work like all of us for a long time. Yeah. And, you know, I've never seen this kind of extreme personal way that a person unraveled in real time. I mean, the video shocked me. He's ripping off his shirt and pulling his hair out. But then when I found out that the story was that dad was actually alive, it made me realize that all of these people that hear false confession stories all the time and say, did it really?

Yeah, I don't really know. Well, this one we now know because dad's alive. So it made me wonder, how did it all happen? So it was really the police that had never spoken before from their perspective. And given Lester's work in this space and his reputation, they spoke exclusively to him to explain the backstory of why he came to be. And I think it's fair to say, Dan, I think you'll agree. As you watch this hour unfold, the way we put it together, you can at least understand why some bells of suspicion were ringing.

And I think that was part of what we wanted to do was we were going to give a fair look at this and kind of put people to some extent in their shoes as they were investigating this in real time. What was some of the evidence that the police did have, which, you know, it made sense that they would ask such questions as they did, Does it look like a crime scene? What made it? I mean, I think they started off with his behavior, which they thought was odd, and that warranted more police officers coming to the scene.

But there were things like they said there was blood evidence that they had discovered in the home, you know, drops and smears. But there was also another thing that we haven't talked about here, and that is the cadaver dog. They called in a cadaver dog that's meant to hit on the scent of a human remains, and they say that it had a positive reaction in that house. How, you know, how that occurred, no one could explain because obviously there was no cadaver to be found.

Finally, on the blood, Tom had an answer for pretty much everything, including the blood, which he said his father was a diabetic, and sometimes he would bleed after he had pricked a finger to get a blood sample. And furthermore, there was a shower curtain that was missing. Tom says that was, you know, it was removed during the move process. But these are little pieces that, again, if you're thinking already in the direction that something nefarious happened, these could, you could see a scenario where this would reinforce the notion that this man had committed a crime.

And he said also, dad also said that they had felt fallen before that they had. fallen before that they had accidents in the house. And when you clean up blood in the bathroom with a towel or soap, you might not see it with the human eye, but later it'll show up when chemicals are put onto. It is interesting about the cadaver dog. That kind of sits with you for a little while. You expect cadaver dogs are going to be accurate,

and they aren't always. Or at least they may hit on something that is a cadaver, just not the right one, you know. Yeah, it kind of left me wondering. I mean, that was the one piece that's kind of lingered out there and when we just don't have an answer on it. I need to do the police, by the way. Yeah.

Like the, but I guess it talks about the quality or we need to question every time maybe it could, I don't know. I don't know the science of cadaver. But at the end of the day, it's irrelevant in this story because there was no cadaver to be found. Right. I get the impression, though, that this happens,

and certainly it's happened to a number of the cases, false confession cases that I've been involved in, as well, that there is that initial impression of a suspect or of the place the suspect was living or whatever, somebody who maybe doesn't seem to be responding appropriately for the circumstances. And then you, you know, you begin to develop a belief. And every fact you discover after that is fighting against the belief you've already established. Is that what they were dealing with? I think that's a fair characterization. Dan, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think think that what you're referring to is confirmation bias really in that they saw him as a suspect

and it makes sense right because always when there's a false confession there's reasonable suspicion for them that person to be in that room sure and so that's kind of what's nuanced about it from their point of view i mean this was a guy who went for walks and didn't come home before right this was not a new behavior for him that and that's what the son said yeah that was one part of it. The other part is his son actually was the one, he, Tom Jr. called the police. Right. Right. So he thinks he's something to happen to his dad. Yeah. He thinks he's not sure. That's the thing. When you go back and listen to what he said on the phone and his reporting, it seems a little vague at points, but it's just the idea that I think he's asking essentially, has anyone come upon my father? Has anyone found him? So he wasn't necessarily, I think when he was asked at one point,

I think he didn't feel like his father was in any particular danger. He just kind of wanted to know where he was and essentially when he was coming home. What you just hit on about what Tom thought he was doing with police and what police thought they were doing with Tom is kind of the issue. He was going for help. And all too often, these interrogations turn out to be, as we discussed, guilt presumptive first, that this is the theory and whatever we're doing is trying to fit into what our theory is as opposed to be a transparent, open fact-finding, truthful fact-finding

endeavor. When we come back, we have an extra clip from interrogation expert Steve Kleinman. How often do you run into this, Dan, because this is an area of interest for you. you've been looking at all kinds of cases around the United States over the years. Yeah. I mean, Lester and I did a story about a false confession 10 years ago

about a guy named Johnny Hincappier. You find that it happens quite a bit. I mean, the statistics, nobody really knows how many there are. Nobody knows how many innocent people are in prison. But what we do know is that of the people who have been exonerated strictly by DNA, that 25% of those,

roughly 25% falsely confess. The interrogation went on for, what, 17 hours? And you can't put all of that on television, but presumably you watched it. What was the nature of the entire? How intense was it? Was it intense the entire 17 hours? Did they, you know, go away for five and come back again? How did that work?

Well, they weren't yelling. As you see, they weren't yelling or didn't seem to be treating him badly, but they were kind of persistent that, hey, we think something's going on here, you know, we think you know where your dad is, and they keep just peppering him with that. And it's only after a while, they reach this point of frustration where they just come out and drop it. Hey, we've got your dad. Your dad's dead. And also, I think one of the things that this points out is that whether or not the cops believe they did right or they did wrong, they believed he was guilty. And the, there's no national standard by which detectives are trained to do these interrogations. So every police officer and department pretty much

decides for themselves. There's no, you know, you, if you're an officer, most officers do not pull out their service revolver in their careers. Fewer, you know, actually shoot somebody. Yet they are required to go four times a year for training, for gun training. There is no mandatory training for interrogations, and they do it every single day. I was shocked by that, but to be honest with you. So the idea that there's these guidelines and best practices that can reduce wrong. It doesn't mean lying doesn't sometimes elicit the truth. But the reason that these guidelines are there and these best practices are there to reduce the possibility.

Over the years, innocence projects have sprung up around the country and in many cases to deal with false confessions because they do happen quite a lot. And one of the experts is Steve Kleinman. Tell me about him a little bit before we hear from him. He's a former military intelligence officer has a lot of experience in interrogations. And two things he pointed out. One is that the lie was counterproductive in this case. And the length of time that he was in the interrogation room was counterproductive. And his whole point is about trust.

You've got to earn the trust with a suspect if you want to get anywhere. And one of the reasons that I thought it was important, you know, there's a lot of experts out there that you can use. to talk about this. I specifically thought it was important for Steve Kleinman to be the guy because I didn't want to have an academic talking about this because a lot of detectives and police around the country will look at that and say, well, yeah, that guy goes to school. He's never done an interrogation. Steve Kleinman has done interrogations around the world, including Guantanamo Bay.

You know, and he trains other detectives about how to do this. So he's a peer. He wasn't, you know, an academic or so that's he came with great credibility all right well let's listen to that extra clip from then uh dan's interview was steve klyman he talks about lying during interrogation the innocence project uh has as conducted a number or completed a number of DNA exonerations that means cases where homicides where people were convicted uh and DNA evidence later demonstrated conclusively that they did not only

did they not commit the crime, but sometimes it actually pointed to the actual perpetrator. But every year, approximately 27 to 28 percent of all those convictions involved a false confession. What does that mean? That means that somebody who is demonstrably innocent for some reason, for some set of circumstances, some process actually admitted to a crime they didn't commit. And we have to ask yourselves, why would anybody do that? of the false presentation of evidence, which is legal in just about every jurisdiction in this country, slowly but surely that's being rescinded, especially with children. But the average person would never believe that a detective could lie about the information.

For example, Dan, I appreciate you talking to me, and I've heard you deny that you were anywhere near that crime scene, but help me understand something. I have your DNA on the knife. How is that possible? now think about having done this after 12 hours and think back to the central park five first of all they don't think that a detective could lie and then they start there's this whole scenario that's being presented that maybe you passed out maybe you were drunk you did admit that you were drinking right so and and the ability to actually plant false memories the research

on that is quite clear as well so it's a combination of of suggestions that at some point Some people actually believe that they committed the crime. I love the way they talked about the false memories there because I think Dan and Keith, I think we really see it. When he's in that interrogation room and he starts to offer what they call a confession, he later says they were kind of directing the action. They were kind of creating and he was filling in holes. So I looked at that and to this day, I still wonder,

was that really a confession as we think of it? Well, it doesn't take too much, apparently. It just, you know, it takes a kind of a, may sound you like a confession or it may be interpreted as a non-confession, but if it can be interpreted as a confession, isn't that how it works? I think that's right. But how many times have you had an argument with somebody you've been up for a long time, it's late at night, you had a couple of drinks, you're talking about something, you can't agree, it's an emotional conversation, and you can't remember exactly what happened. Lester, didn't that happen with us last night? There you go. I see?

I forgot. Maybe. So, you know, the fact of your own life become a little uncertain, and you're talking to somebody who's very skilled at getting you to say, you know, who's in a little eye into you for one thing, planting information in your head, and maybe you were wrong in the first place, maybe that person is right. I mean, anybody can see how that can happen. And you were in an interrogation room with something.

something that it's a picture that's indelible on many a person's brain. They've seen it in movies. They've seen it on dateline, certainly many, many times. And it usually doesn't go well for many of the people who end up, you know, being interrogated. So just the idea of walking into one of these rooms and having two detectives confront you and trying to get you to, you know, trip up to say something that's contradictory. So it's a, it's a pressure cooker. And then you add, you know, some of the other stressors, and it can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes. I thought this was really just about a perfect example to use to show that how false confessions happen and that they do happen, and that this is not, you know, people often ask the question,

how could you possibly confess to something you didn't do? Here, here you see it where the payoff is immediate. You can see that there aren't decades of uncertainty. about whether or not it was a false confession, this is obvious. And the techniques used to get there were obvious. And the tape was available, and the police were prepared to talk about it. I thought that was a real class in how these things occur and worth watching. You just articulated exactly the reason that we thought it was worth doing. We're going to take a short break, and then Lester and Dan will be back to answer your questions about the show

from social media. We are moving on to social media questions now, and I want to ask you the first one, which was why a 45-minute show this time? It had to do with holiday programming, to be honest with you. And now that you asked me a question, I'm racking my brain as to what program it was.

It was Rudolph. It was Rudolph. Okay, Rudolph. So we came on at 1016. And I remember earlier that morning I was on the Today Show to promote the program and Al goes to read the tagline

and he says that's the deadline and what Lester Hall, 1016 and he goes 1016 and I said, that's the date line mystery. As it is to us. I don't know. Just to pull back the curtain a little bit for the audience,

you know, we're not obviously live TV. We're not like the Today Show. These are very carefully scripted and planned segments to make up certain hit times to full out an hour. Of course. So when we hear, we did that for an hour, and there is an hour-long version of this that will be in syndication. But when we heard we needed to fit that time slot, that meant we needed to cut out 12 minutes of material. It's like cutting off an arm or something. Exactly right.

So the questions that the audience has make sense, and the answer is we had to take out 12 minutes of material to fill that time spot. Well, that was from Mag Z on Facebook. This one is at Sandy Castle, underline R.B. Does his father have dementia? It wasn't explained why he takes off like this. In his initial conversation with police, I think he floated the idea that he might have some dementia, but that was later proven not to be the case. I guess he's kind of like his son.

He's quirky. You know, it's like Lester was like, Tom, where were you? And he was like, oh, you know, I just decided to go for a walk. And it was a nice day. And there was the train. And I decided to get on the train. And, you know, it's just like, where's Waldo? You know, he was just kind of going, you know.

And so he clearly didn't think his son would be concerned. it's odd behavior for sure but it happened barbara a couch on facebook asks where did the police find him find tom senior they found him at los angeles airport um the town where this happened fontana is about oh maybe an hour hour 15 minutes east of los angeles but apparently his name was on a list of you know people who you know police wanted to talk to um in this case as a potential victim so uh They got a call from, I believe it was TSA, but certainly some officials at L.A. Airport that's, you know, said we have a Tom Perez senior here that we think you want to talk to. Yeah. So this is the part that I had read some comments and heard some people will make. They thought that Tom and his father planned this, like that they were in on it together to falsely confess for a settlement or something.

That's not what happened. He went to go visit his brother. And then he decided to. to see his daughter and was going to go fly to see his daughter. And this was just a day, a day and a half after he left. Yeah, she was his daughter was in Northern California. Right. So he had a plane ticket. He was boarding the plane. And that's where they, as Lester said, TSA, it came up that there was a missing Tom Perez

Sr. And they notified L.A. police notified Fontana authorities. And they came to pick him up. And he had no idea. His son was in an interrogation room. He had no idea that he was to. they're missing. I'd love to have been in the room when they got the call saying that there was a guy in the airport in L.A. Can you imagine? Tom was still there that night. He had just confessed. He was,

he was still, it was, either they had just taken him to the hospital or he was still in the room. Wow. Yeah. Lorry and David Cook on Facebook, why did he ask at the pond, don't bodies float? you know i only take from that as he was you know i don't know actually it's a good question i'm trying to i've been trying to piece that one together i think that was again in that area of where he was trying to be helpful and and they're thinking it's a you know in the lake perhaps but he's like well no it would it would it would be floating if that was the case um but again really ill-advised kind of a conversation to have with police if you didn't do it Weird.

I think Lester's description out is exactly right, knowing this guy, the way we met him, it's just kind of like, well, he can't be here, right? Because somebody's float. But he was just like kind of thinking of it academically, I think. Yeah. Huh. But it was weird, for sure. Yeah.

At Iowa, me, Alaska asks if they can legally lie to suspects, can they also lie to victims and their families. Wow. I don't know why they would want to. but I don't have an answer to that question. I mean, I think they can lie to anybody. I don't either. Why would you lie to a victim? Yeah.

I don't know. I'll let you think that, you know, the victim is inauded somehow, but, yeah, I can't think of a circumstance. Just a comment from Anita Wamsley on Facebook who says, first dateline I've ever seen where no one died. Yeah. Well, that's, I remember when Dan and I were planning this and I said, I had to wrap my hand.

or my head around the idea that there's no crime. That, you know, what the police did, whether you like it or not, was legal. That clearly there was no murder since the alleged victim was alive and well. It was you're right, that's a good way to look at it, though.

Very unusual. Melinda Ali McNutt on Facebook says that was so disturbing. And it was. But once an interrogation becomes accusatory if she asks, it's time to ask for an attorney, but can anyone keep their wits about them under such circumstances? Do you see cases where people go through these long, long interrogations and they, you know, walk out of there and are never charged with anything because they did keep their wits about them? It's a long interrogation. That is. I mean, I'm sure some people do, but I'm sure it would be hard to. I mean, if you're in an interrogation room for 17 hours, I don't know if you walk out skipping.

like everything's okay I don't know and finally to be selfish about things there's an audio question about a different story altogether which is my latest podcast it's something about Carrie

and this is from Mindy Begley on Instagram let's take a listen Keith Morrison as a long time listener I had to reach out I'm listening to the Something About Carrie podcast

and I have to call you out on the Pottawatomi Police Department. As true Nebraskaans and Iowans know that it's Potawatomi County Police Department. Hey, keep up the good work and we'll keep listening. Thank you for all you do. I am known for mispronouncing names all over the country, and that's one of them, Potawatomi.

It's always the accent to get to you. If you haven't yet downloaded something about Carrie, do it now. And thanks to Mindy, that pesky pronunciation will be magically corrected. Well, thank you so much for talking about this. This is an issue which has been certainly close to my heart for a long time because when you do run into these kind of cases, and I remember the first story I got involved in

where we were doing a heartbreaking false confession was 25 years ago. And ever since then, they just pop up all the time and every one of them is difficult to hear about. knowing that people spend so much time behind bars for something they didn't do is just a heartbreaking thing. Yeah, absolutely. So thank you, both of you, for taking part.

Good question. Thank you. Thank you. That's it for Talking Dateline this week. Remember, if you have a question about Dateline, DM us video on social media at Dateline NBC, for a chance to be featured in a future episode of Talking Dateline. Or you can leave your question in a voicemail at area code 212-413-5252.

Thanks for being with us. What a dorky thing for me to say. Oh, well.