Dateline NBC - The Breakup

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

When a nurse is gunned down in her home, detectives initially believe they have a clear suspect, but new information leads them down a completely different path. Josh Mankiewicz reports.Listen to Keith Morrison and Josh Mankiewicz as they go behind the scenes of the making of this episode in ‘Talking Dateline’: https://link.chtbl.com/tdl_thebreakup

Tonight on Dateline, you can see where she'd been dragged across the carpet into the garage. We made the assumption that whoever had done this killing knew the victim. What happened leading up to these events? Her and Lewis got into a fight Monday. She said she could never get scratched. Your girlfriend was very badly hurt the other day. Someone shot her. Oh, my God.

That's not me. That's not me. That's not me. He says, you've got to help me find the murderer. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm looking at the murderer right now. It was the dark side. He was a very jealous and controlling individual. I couldn't see that guy hurting a fly.

There's no way possible. She took on our victim's name. She kind of took over our victim's persona. Plan A was stuff the body in the trunk and then leave. Now Plan B went into effect. We saw those videotapes. That was like an aha moment. That's when a bright light goes off.

We're both shaking our heads going, there's something wrong here. The witness told one story. The evidence told another. A search for the truth and a killer. I'm Lester Holt. This is Dateline. Here's Josh Mankiewicz with The Breakup. A Wednesday morning, bright and sunny in Palmdale, California, about 60 miles north of Los Angeles. The perfect day for two girlfriends to hang out. Except this ordinary afternoon was hiding something. It really just blew my mind.

I couldn't believe it. A plot so sinister, so stunning, it took even seasoned detectives by surprise. The lights start to go on that we're heading in the wrong direction. The sun was setting as a woman rushed into the Palmdale Sheriff's Station. She was frantic, her clothes covered in blood. The woman said the horror began when she'd walked barefoot into her friend's garage. It was dark inside, and she slipped on something wet. And then I turned around. It was like plastic bags, and I like slid on the bags.

She fell, and as she sat there, a terrible scene began to come into focus. There was blood everywhere. I'm looking at the blood, and then when I looked, I saw her legs. She told deputies she recognized her friend's pedicure and took a closer look. And then when I walked around the car, she had a bow of her head, and I'm sitting there like, oh my gosh. Her friend was lying face up on the garage floor next to her car. And I ran over there and I picked her up. The woman making the report was Lorraine Austin. Police snapped these photos of her that night while the blood was still on her.

The victim, she told deputies, was her friend of 10 years, Lanelle Barsak. One hour later, the call went out to homicide detectives. I had actually taken my tie off, had dinner, and the call came in, put my tie back on, off I went. Detectives Joe Espino and Bob Kenney of the L.A. County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau were on call that June night. And the person on the other end of the phone told me to wake up, get dressed, and get pretty because I was heading out to the beautiful city of Palmdale. They made their way from L.A. to Palmdale and to Linnell's house, now an active crime scene. What can you tell early on just by your first walkthrough?

The house was a very nice house, very large. I believe it was 3,400 square feet. It was a nice area of Palmdale. Investigators discovered Lanelle and her live-in boyfriend, Louis Bonner, had just bought the house less than a year before. And they were still in the process of filling in on the house. A lot of the rooms were empty. They were still putting up window shades and things like that. As they worked their way through the home, nothing appeared to be out of place. Well, almost nothing. So you go from the living room into the family room, and the family room looks like a normal family room. The only thing that's odd about it is there's a void on the floor, and it looked like there had been an area rug there, but was gone. It wasn't until they came to the laundry room that odd turned to alarming.

There was several bloody towels on the floor and several clean towels on top of a washer and dryer, but they were all in disarray as if they'd been like tossed around. And there's blood on the floor, and that looks odd. Detectives made their way from the laundry room to the garage. On the floor, more bloody towels, the plastic sheeting Lorraine said she slipped on, and trash bags filled with what appeared to be bloodied bedding. The victim's car had been parked in the garage back in, and the trunk was open. We walk

around the car, and we find the body with the head towards the rear wheels and the feet are towards the front of the car. 29-year-old Linnell was pronounced dead at the scene. The cause? A gunshot wound to the head. She had a black plastic bag over her head. Yes. What does that say? It says a couple things. Whoever put this bag on her did it for two reasons, I think. Number one was to contain the amount of blood. And reason number two? Usually when somebody puts a plastic bag or any type of covering over a victim's face,

it means they don't want to see that person or they don't want to see that person or they don't want that person who is deceased watching them. So we made the assumption that whoever had done this killing knew the victim. They soon learned they might be right about that. The sergeant who'd taken down Lorraine's statement arrived at the crime scene to brief detectives. Lorraine recounted how almost immediately after discovering Linnell's body, she'd

heard a noise. And then I heard somebody walking upstairs. And in the same moment, realized she wasn't alone in the house. And he was like coming down the stairs and and I looked, and I just ran out the door. It was a man. Lorraine said she instantly recognized him. Do you know the guy's name? His name is Lewis. As in Lewis Bonner, Linnell's boyfriend of four years.

Detectives would learn Lewis was one half of a relationship that was already on life support. She said, Lewis tried to run me off the road, Mama. And she was screaming, screaming. Detectives Kenny and Espino were trying to piece together the short life and brutal death of Nurse Linnell Barsak. It was an unthinkable end for a woman devoted to helping others. Linnell grew up in South Los Angeles. Friends told detectives she had a bubbly personality and was always smiling.

She was also ambitious and worked hard through nursing school. That's where she met friend Marcel Fomatar. We're taking the pre-nursing classes. Lanelle wanted to be a registered nurse. She was actually a licensed vocational nurse, and she wanted to further her career by becoming a full nurse. Marcel had recently immigrated from Cameroon when he and Lanelle first met.

You know, when we leave Africa, when you come here, it's kind of challenging to integrate the society. And for me, she was that kind of person who was willing to help. And he wasn't the only one Lanell helped. Louis Bonheur came here from Haiti and had only been in the country about a year when he and Lanell met. He was taking English classes at the same school and was waiting for the bus one day after class when Lanell offered him a ride home. Soon, the two were inseparable.

The relationship blossomed, the love blossomed between them. You could tell they loved each other. Yeah. Philippe Louis-Jean is one of Louis' oldest friends. The two met when Louis first arrived in the U.S. back in 2005. The first time we went out to a nightclub, and I think it may have been his first time going out in America in general, and the look on his face, just the appreciation to be partaking in something like this

and to be free and safe and happy listening to music. And it was just pure, innocent joy in his face that you don't often see in an adult male. It was that innocence that made Philippe a little worried for his friend when Louis told him about the new woman in his life. She was an American woman, and I would often tell Lewis maybe a little bit too much for him to handle. It didn't matter. The couple was smitten. They dated a few years and eventually moved in together. By then, Lewis worked for the maintenance department for the city of Hawthorne, while Linnell worked at a health center in LA. In 2009, they bought that house in Palmdale together.

There were even plans for marriage on the horizon. That bliss would not last. I believe she was in love with him, but over time, you know, you could tell that it was waning, and their relationship got strained. How could you tell that? So she would talk about the fights they would have, and she eventually would talk about the fact that she doesn't want the relationship anymore. And she even went further to tell me she was no longer intimate with him.

And I think that was towards when she died. What were they fighting about? She would talk about finances. She didn't think he was managing his money well, and she was not too happy that he wasn't really serious about building a career for himself. Was there trouble in paradise? Investigators were definitely getting that old familiar feeling. There was a dark side that people didn't know about Lewis,

and that was that he was a very jealous and controlling individual. Those closest to Linnell told detectives Lewis kept close track of his girlfriend. We were told by several people that he would get Linnell's phone and he'd go through it to see who'd text her. He would call numbers he didn't recognize. He would go to her work and stake a rod at lunchtime to see who she went to lunch with. He would ask to see if she even showed up at work in case she was playing hooky.

In April, just a few months before Linnell's murder, sheriff's deputies responded to a domestic disturbance call at Linnell and Lewis's home. It hadn't gotten physical, so no charges were filed. After her murder, Linnell's mom, Bobbie, told them about another, more troubling incident that same month. She called me on the phone. She said, Lewis tried to run me off the road, Bobbie. And she was screaming, screaming. The door and out the window was shattered. Lynelle told Lewis that she was leaving him and she left in her car. And Lewis chased her in his truck and tried to run her off the road. It actually collided into a broker window and scraped the side of her car. Now Linnell was gone, and the prime suspect,

her oh-so-jealous and yikes-so-controlling boyfriend, Louis Bonheur. And one more thing. Lewis wasn't the only person investigators wanted to talk with. Because detectives discovered, although Lewis's obsessive behavior had made him a suspect, it turned out he was actually onto something. So, Lewis was clearly acting jealous, controlling, possessive. But he wasn't wrong.

There was another guy in Linnell's life. Yes, there was. 6 a.m., the morning after Lynelle Barsock's murder, detectives were speaking with their most helpful witness so far, her friend Lorraine. She'd spent all night at the sheriff's station. Does she go by Crystal or Lynelle? I just call her by her name, Crystal.

We didn't know much about Lorraine Austin at that point other than the fact that she was supposed to be a very good friend with the victim. She also knew Lewis, the boyfriend. Lorraine told detectives she and Linnell, or Crystal as she called her, met in high school in L.A. Now she lived near Linnell and Lewis, and said she saw firsthand how the couple's fighting had escalated in the days leading up to the murder. Lorraine said it was all because of one man. Lewis found out about Ike. Linnell and Ike were literally a four-month fling.

They met on a site called fling.com and they started dating. And Ike worked in Sacramento as a flight nurse and he would come down on his days off to Palmdale and he would visit Linnell whenever Lewis wasn't around. Detectives learned that a couple of months before the murder, Lewis overheard the two on the phone and became furious. Ike said he could hear Lewis screaming on the other end of the line. He's the one who put in a long-distance call to 911. Ike became very concerned about Linnell's safety, so he called the local sheriff's department to have them respond. And they resolved it without an arrest being made. That did not settle it, Lorraine said. She told detectives the couple continued to argue

right up until the week Linnell died. Her and Louis got into a fight Monday. He was in her face and he was like something. Three days ago. Yeah, that she was cheating. She said she was scratching them. And she told detectives the day before Linnell died, Lewis learned about a secret phone she was carrying. There was a cell phone that Ike had given Linnell so that they could communicate secretly. That alone takes you past the friend zone.

Yes. Lorraine said a big argument ended with Linnell promising to no longer like Ike. You got a pretty classic love triangle going on here. Am I wrong to think that at some point you would have looked at where Ike was and what he was doing at the time of the murder? Oh, we had to figure out where Ike was. And he had an alibi?

Yes, he had a very good alibi. Which was what? He was interviewing for a job at University of California at Davis. So he was there near Sacramento, and you talked to the person he was interviewing with? Correct. That cleared Ike as a suspect. So detectives turned back to Lewis. Ike, they thought, provided him with all the motive in the world.

What he believed was happening with Ike was happening. They were both competing for the same woman. Correct. Detectives wanted very much to know where Lewis was and what he was doing on that last day of Linnell's life. Lorraine told detectives Lewis was home when she arrived sometime after 9 30. She was going to weave Linnell's hair. An hour later, Lorraine said Lewis headed over to her boyfriend's house in LA to get his truck fixed. On a good day, it's an hour

and a half with no traffic. As Lorraine braided Linnell's hair, the subject of that secret cell phone resurfaced. Linnell said she couldn't find it. It turns out Lewis had taken it with him. Lewis has this phone. Lewis has it. He was told the phone was dead. And he finds out the phone is not dead. Somebody has added minutes to it.

So he turns around and goes back to confront Linnell with this newfound information. Because now he's got proof that she's actually still continuing this relationship with this other guy. Correct. He shows up around 11.30. The argument ensues. Why is that phone turned on? You told me, you promised me that it was going to be off. Linnell snatched the phone from Lewis.

Then she and Lorraine decided to get out of the house. They drove to a nearby beauty supply store to get some hair products. At 12.05 p.m., the shop's security video caught these last images of Linnell Barsock. She's there for 12 minutes, purchases some products. She comes out at 12.17. Lewis had followed them to the store. Lorraine told detectives the two had it out until Lanelle finally handed the cell phone back to Lewis.

That seemed to be enough to calm him down. Then they got back to the house, and the fight restarted. After about an hour of them going at it, Lorraine said she'd had enough. I left so big as fuck. I told her, I said, look, y'all have some issues, and y'all need to talk, and I don't want to be here. She told them she walked to a nearby park and stayed there for a few hours before returning to the house around 6.30 p.m. and finding Linnell dead.

At which point she sees Lewis, who is at the top of the stairs. Lorraine said she ran out to her car in a panic and couldn't find her cell phone to call 911. So she drove straight to the sheriff's station. She also said Lewis wasn't done. While en route, she sees that now he's chasing her in his truck. And she says, no question this is Lewis. Absolutely, no question at all, 100%, it's Lewis.

Lorraine told detectives Lewis stopped following her as she got closer to the station. Now, he was nowhere to be found. So the search for Louis Bonheur. He turned up at Linnell's mom's home in L.A., sleeping. Louis comes out. Very agreeable, not a problem at all, walks outside. While I'm still talking to him on the phone. He's very cooperative. While a squad car drove Lewis to the sheriff's station,

Detective Kenny gave Linnell's mom the terrible news that her daughter had been murdered. How'd she take it? She didn't take it very well on the phone. She got very emotional. The questioning of Lewis Bonheur began. What's your girlfriend's name? Any of us. What happened to her? How do you know? You don't know?

I need the house. Eddie, can you go fix some macarons? Louis admitted he returned and that he did follow Lanelle and Lorraine to the beauty store. But then he said he met up with Lorraine's boyfriend 90 minutes away in LA and spent the afternoon at auto supply stores before driving to Lorraine's mother's house where he slept to avoid a long commute in the morning. Lorraine's mom mentioned her son had seen Louis that night on the computer making bank transactions and looking up flights to Miami. So we thought right away, here's Lewis.

If he catches a flight to Miami and he catches a subsequent flight from Miami to Haiti or a boat, he's gone. Now facing detectives in that little interview room, Lewis was about to dig a deeper hole for himself. Tell me about your relationship with your girlfriend. You guys happy? Yeah. Your relationship is good? Honestly, I'm okay with her. Is she okay with you?

She's okay with me. She's been telling me she's loving me all the time. And in fact, you know everything already. You already know law enforcement has been called to that house before. Right. He said that there was no issues. He loved Linnell.

Linnell loved him. She wasn't seeing anybody. Everything was perfect, hunky-dory. But I noticed that Lewis has a scratch on the side of his face. Okay, got a question for you. You got a scratch on your face. Where did you get that? This one? Yeah, the one right across your cheek. Who scratched you? Oh, that was Linnell who scratched me. And then he says, well, okay, Linnell did scratch me.

We did get an argument. But even then, he downplays. He waters it down. He says it was over. Linnell got jealous because she saw me on Facebook and thought I was communicating with some girl. Remember, detectives heard the scratch was the result of an argument because Lewis was the jealous one. Now they asked him about Ike. Who is this guy named Ike? Who is he? Okay. Ike? Ike. I can tell you Ike is his friend. Lewis said he was unaware of any romantic involvement between his girlfriend and Ike. So detectives confronted him with a piece of evidence they'd found on their initial walkthrough of the house. Something that smelled a lot like a smoking gun. It was a breakup letter addressed to Lewis, signed Lanell. A letter that,

to Lewis, must have been as informative as it was insulting. It read in part, Dear Lewis, I am leaving you for Ike. He makes more money, so you can do whatever you want to do with the house. I am moving out of state with Ike. We're getting married, so just leave me alone. I have been sleeping with him for four months now. Good luck in life. Goodbye, Lanelle. Short and sweet.

And one more thing. Lewis said he'd never seen it before. What are they doing? They're not talking about the little letter who's telling you she's going bye-bye. I don't know. he'd never seen it before. Almost half an hour into the interview, they laid it out for him. How? Someone shot her. Oh, my God. Who's taking this? Where she is right now? She's at the coroner's office, sir. She did not survive her wounds.

Who did? Really? Oh, my God. That's not why you... We understand. That's not me. That's not me. That's not...

Why did you do that to me? Oh, my God. Lewis did sound genuinely inconsolable. At the same time, evidence against him was stacking up. And he was subsequently booked for the murder of Lynelle Barsock. The only thing missing was forensic evidence. There wasn't any. Lewis didn't even own a gun. Detectives went back

to the crime scene. Inside the garage, they found a pair of bloodied black latex gloves and a plastic container with a bloody fingerprint. And inside Linnell's car... There was a pillow in the victim's trunk that had a bullet hole in it, and it had stippling around the actual bullet hole, which is unburned gunpowder. Meaning somebody, like, held the pillow over the gun and used that like a silencer, like in the movies? Exactly. They also found this. There's a very large area rug that's stuffed into the back seat of the car.

The rug had a bloody footprint on it, and though the bulk of the evidence was concentrated in the garage, detectives theorized the murder had taken place elsewhere in the home. Remember that void in the family room? We're looking at the rug, and then we're looking at the void going, that looks like that fits over there, and come to find out it fit exactly. They performed a luminol test, searching for blood. What had looked like a spotless floor suddenly lit up, showing a clear trail of blood that started in the family room.

You could see we should have been dragged from that spot across the kitchen floor, across the hallway, across the laundry room, and into the garage. Also in the family room, a single empty shell casing. Investigators sent everything to get tested, certain it would all lead back to Lewis. At least they were certain of that before they saw this grainy security footage that was about to change everything. And that's when kind of a bright light goes on. The lights start to go on that we're heading in the wrong direction. Louis Bonheur was living in county lockup in L.A.,

accused of murdering his girlfriend. His best friend, Philippe, was on a business trip when he heard the news. No, this isn't true. Not Louis. It's not possible. Not knowing any of the facts. Yeah, not knowing any of the facts. You immediately did not believe it. No, I couldn't see that guy hurting a fly. He didn't believe it. Others did.

I thought he was likely the person who killed her because he had shown that he was jealous and probably didn't want the relationship to end. Detectives were building their case, which meant looking at the alibi Lewis had offered. He said that around the time detectives determined Lanell was killed, he was more than an hour away in L.A. buying auto parts. So detectives went to the auto parts store to see their security video. And there was Louis Bun back at Kragan. We saw those videotapes. That's when, that was like an aha moment when I said, well, maybe he's telling the truth. The videos made it clear Lewis had not lied about being in LA that afternoon, but could he have been in communication with an accomplice? Detectives really wanted to check Lewis's phone,

a process that requires a warrant and can take some time. And so Lewis sat in jail for days, which became weeks. Finally, the cell phone records came through. They showed Linnell called Lewis at 2.30 p.m. that day. It was the last time anyone heard from her. By the time her mom called her at 4 p.m., Linnell was no longer answering her phone. There's no way that he was there in Palmdale at the time that Lorraine is telling us that he was at the top of the staircase and chased her down.

And there's no way that he could have committed the murder because as of 2.30, which is the last time we know our victim was alive, he was in L.A. Which meant Louis Bonner was not their murderer. Time to let him out. We believe he did not do this murder, and we need him out of jail. More than a month after his arrest, Lewis was set free. Despite that 911 call to his house and the stories Linnell told loved ones about his bouts of jealousy,

Lewis said he was not the angry man detectives thought he was. Who did you think was responsible? I mean, if it wasn't you, then who was it? I ask myself the same question when I'm in jail. Who did it? I would like to know who. I ask myself the same question all the time. You couldn't figure it out? I can't. I didn't see no one in the picture. Now, detectives went back to square one, starting with their first witness, Lanell's friend,

Lorraine. She says she leaves our victim's house at 1.25 in the afternoon and she goes to a park that's 1.3 miles away. Lorraine said she'd gone to the park because Louis and Linnell were fighting. And this is the middle of June. So it's how hot? I would say it's in the 90s or 100. Lorraine said she returned to Linnell's house around 6.45 p.m. That meant she would have been sitting in that park, in that desert heat, for close to five hours. And we asked her, what are you doing at the park? And she said that she sat there watching the children play. Another strange thing detectives noticed. The morning after the murder, Lorraine bumped into Linnell's mom, Bobby, in the hallway of the sheriff's office.

Lorraine went over and hugged Bobby Barsock. And then we had Lorraine escorted down the hallway, and Bobby Barsak asked us, who is that woman? And you said, that's your daughter's best friend? That's your daughter's best friend. They've known each other since high school. She said, I've never seen her. There was more. The night a bloody Lorraine rushed into the sheriff's office, deputies found two bullets in her purse.

So Detective Espino checked the state registry to see if Lorraine owned a gun, and he found nothing. Now, with Lewis cleared, they brought Lorraine in again and began to question the story she'd told. Did you kill your friend? I did not kill my friend. I had no reason to kill my friend. I love my friend. About a week after that interview, Detective Espino once again ran Lorraine's name through the same state database. Maybe it had just been updated. Because this time, he got a hint. Lorraine owned the same caliber of gun that had killed Lanell.

A 9mm bullet killed our victim and it turns out that Lorraine had purchased a nine millimeter Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol on February the 18th of 2010. That was four months before the murder. There was one piece detectives were still missing. Any possible motive? Why would she do it? Four months after the murder, they found an answer. It came from Lorraine's cell phone records. She was lying to us. Lorraine and Lanelle had not known each other for 10 years.

How long had they known each other? Just for a few weeks. What exactly happened over just a few weeks that somehow wrote the ending to Lanelle Bsock's life. In the months after Lynelle Barsock's murder, police began zeroing in on her friend Lorraine Austin. Once detectives obtained her cell phone records, Lorraine's story began to unravel. Lorraine and Lynelle had not known each other for 10 years. How long had they known each other?

Just for a few weeks. How did they meet? They met through Craigslist. Lorraine had put an ad in the personal sections, Women Seeking Women, and Linnell answered that ad, and they developed a friendship, which turned into a romantic relationship. They were involved?

Sexually, yes. Lewis had no idea? No, he did not. Then, just a few weeks after their relationship began, Linnell ended it. That was just five days before her murder. In a text, Linnell said she wanted to stay friends. Lorraine seemed to agree. I understand.

I'm just seeking friendship as well. I think you're a cool person to hang out with. Detectives came to believe that breakup set Lorraine Austin on a murderous course, and she killed the woman who'd broken up with her. She, and not Lewis, was the killer they'd been looking for. Armed with an arrest warrant, investigators got to work tracking down Lorraine. Surveillance teams worked around the clock and came up empty. Lorraine was on the run, and for months, detectives searched for her. After nearly a year, someone called in a tip to America's Most Wanted. Lorraine had been spotted in Belize.

She was arrested and brought back to the U.S. in handcuffs. August 2015, more than five years after LaMelle's death, Lorraine stood trial for her murder. Prosecutor Jason Carino painted a very different picture of the woman who'd at first seemed so helpful to police. The way we went about it was to show Lorraine Austin's true character, which was someone who was extraordinarily infatuated with Lynelle Barsock. So much so, he said, Lorraine started impersonating Lynelle when she was dating other women. And that was shown by the two different women that Lorraine dated. One saying that she had assumed the name of Crystal, which is Lynelle Barsock's middle name.

Posing as Crystal, she met a woman named Tina. So she took on our victim's name, and then she also told Tina that she had just purchased a blue BMW, which is the car that our victims own. So she kind of took over our victim's persona. And who wouldn't want to be Linnell? Beautiful, professional, ambitious, successful. Lorraine, on the other hand, hadn't held a steady job in two years. She was in debt and still lived at home with her mother. She absolutely saw Linnell Barsak as someone who could take her out of that and give her a better life and was infatuated with that

and really, really wanted that. And when it was taken away from her very quickly, in an instant, she ultimately lashed out and decided to kill Linnell as punishment for it. This is what he says really happened on the afternoon of Linnell Barsock's murder. Lewis did leave Palmdale around 12.30 p.m. And Lorraine never went to that park. Instead, she stayed behind doing Linnell's hair. Linnell called Lewis at 2.30 p.m., and they spoke. Detectives believe it was shortly after that call that Lorraine grabbed that pillow,

held it to the back of Linnell's head, and executed her as she sat getting her hair done. Then, Lorraine dragged her body into the garage. Did she intend to frame Lois for it? No. I really believe that plan A was stuff the body in the trunk, drive out into the desert, dump the victim. That plan changed with that phone call at 4.44. According to detectives, that's when Lorraine's boyfriend called to say Lewis was on his way home. Lorraine had not finished cleaning up everything, so now plan B went into effect. Suddenly, in a panic, they said, Lorraine decided to pin it all on Lewis. So I'm going to frame Lewis.

Wow. And I'm going to drive to the sheriff's station and tell them I saw who did it. I saw the guy in the house. And she didn't realize that Lewis wasn't coming back to the house. Exactly. That's what foiled her plan. Remember that breakup letter that helped convince detectives Lewis had done it? At the trial, a handwriting expert testified it was in Lorraine's handwriting. Remember that breakup letter that helped convince detectives Lewis had done it? At the trial, a handwriting expert testified it was in Lorraine's handwriting.

Lorraine, they said, planted that letter at the house, before rushing to the sheriff's office. What's more, prosecutors said, all the forensic evidence pointed to Lorraine. It was her DNA on the black gloves at the crime scene, her bloody fingerprint on that plastic container, her footprint on that folded-up rug, and those bullets in her purse? The two live rounds had the exact identical extraction marks as the expended casing at the crime scene.

Which meant all three bullets had been inside the murder weapon at the same time. When it came time for the defense, Lorraine's attorneys argued detectives had it right the first time, and Lewis was the murderer. Jurors weren't buying. They found Lorraine guilty of murder in the first. She's serving two terms of 25 years to life. Lorraine tried to frame you for murder. That's what I heard. Why would Lorraine do that? Still now, I don't know. I don't know why. You're married now and you have a son. Yes. Pretty good for a guy who was looking at life in prison. Yes, that's a blessing.

I got a lot of good people around me. Lanell did too. Marcel still holds on to her memory. I'm really honored to talk about my friend. I miss her, but she's alive with my daughter. His firstborn child is a girl named after his friend Lanelle. What are you going to tell your daughter about Lanelle? That I named her after an amazing woman,

a woman who believed in helping people, a woman who was hardworking, and a woman who believed in human beings being better versions of themselves. And I hope my daughter can be that person as well. That's all for this edition of Dateline. And check out our Talking Dateline podcast. Josh Mankiewicz and Keith Morrison will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed wherever you get your podcasts. We're off on Fridays for a couple of weeks so NBC can bring you coverage of the Olympic trials. But we'll see you back here on July 5th.

I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.