Dateline NBC - The Dateline Correspondents' Year in Review. And true crime goes viral.

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Listen to this week's special episode of the Dateline: True Crime Weekly podcast. Andrea Canning is joined by Josh Mankiewicz, Keith Morrison, and Dennis Murphy to take a look back at the year in true crime. Plus, a roundup of the true-crime moments that went viral in 2024.Find out more about the cases covered each week here: www.datelinetruecrimeweekly.comTo get new episodes every Thursday, follow here on Apple and Spotify:Apple: https://apple.co/3Vx5THGSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5utP1NZyMUlyaUUv7XNq7j

Hey, Dennis. Hey, Keith. How are you? I'm good. It's nice to see your face. Nice to see you. It makes my day. It releases the endorphins. You're listening in to a morning meeting at 30 Rockefeller Center. This is True Crime Weekly, right? Only this time, it's not our usual team of producers talking about breaking crime news and what stories to jump on. It's the Dateline correspondence. There's a missing half hour and that's, I wondered if that's where somehow the body was moved. Did somebody help me?

I don't know. Welcome to Dateline True Crime Weekly. I'm Andrea Canning. It's December 26th, the end of another year covering true crime here at Dateline. We've had more than 250 morning meetings, broadcast more than 50 hours of original Dateline episodes and dropped more than 150 hours of podcasts. Boy, I'm exhausted already. We did all that?

Geez. Yes. So we thought it might be fun to look back at some of our highlights from 2024. Josh, we survived an earthquake together during one of our talking Datelines. Yes, we did. That's right. Well, I was here in New York. Yeah, you were in LA, but you know what I mean.

But it was like you were here. Plus, later on, we've got some true crime moments that didn't make it into a Dateline episode but definitely got our attention. The insurance companies realized that that wasn't really a bear. It was someone in a bear costume. Welcome to Dateline True Crime Weekly's first ever Year in Review. Okay, we're going to just dive right in. This year, it felt like we had more high profile female defendants than ever before. There was Karen Reed in Boston,

Ashley Benefield, the former ballerina in Florida who shot her husband and was convicted of manslaughter. Sarah Boone, she was the woman convicted of murdering her boyfriend by letting him suffocate in a suitcase. The Sarah Boone story is, I'm going to say, one of the most engaged stories on social media. That's my take from the year. Like, a lot of people wanted to know about that. That has had a lot of followers. I have to tell you, I didn't follow that story that closely, but it occurs to me immediately when you talk about it that everything old is new again because we have done at least one, maybe more, of victims being zipped into suitcases before.

Dennis, back in March, you covered the Michelle Troconis murder trial, and that was another case involving a female defendant that got a ton of attention. This is the case Andrea of the woman named Jennifer Dulos who lived in New Canaan, Connecticut. She came back from dropping her kids off to school and was never seen again. It was believed that her husband had murdered her in the garage. The authorities were closing in on the husband, Fotis Dulos, but before they could take him to trial, he ended up killing himself. So who was Michelle Chaconis?

Well, she was the live-in girlfriend of this guy, Fotis Doulos. And she was then charged with conspiracy to cover up, creating his alibi, helping and sort of aiding in a betting fashion. This was an intense eight-week trial, Dennis. And you interviewed a group of Jennifer's friends who really came together after her

death. Yeah, it's funny what you remember after these stories. But in this case, they all agreed to come in and sit down in a circle and tell stories about their lost friend Jennifer. That part of the story was great. That was a great element to the story. I learned something about the nature of friendship because these women who really didn't know one another outside of their common connector of Jennifer, all agreed to go to the trial to just stand watch on her behalf. Pete Slauson She's Dennis. She's still never been found

to this day, right? Dennis O'Brien That's correct. Jennifer Pfeiffer This story particularly hit close to home for me because at the time when this happened, I had five children. I have six now. Jennifer had five children, and it's only 20 minutes from my house. It's chilling. It was such an awful. Dropped five kids off and then never be seen again. Awful story.

Yeah. As I think of it, the case against Michelle Chirconas, the girlfriend, was kind of forensic light. They had kind of interesting things, but nothing added up to the smoking gun. And yet the jury came back very quickly, found her guilty, and she was sent away for 14 and a half years. But they still don't know where the body is. So many unanswered questions in that story. We should say Michelle Troconis was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder

and not the actual murder itself. The other female defendants we mentioned, the former ballerina Ashley Benefield, the suitcase murder defendant Sarah Boone, they were charged with actually killing someone. And they shared a common defense strategy that they'd been abused by their victims. It's something that we come across in our Dateline stories a lot, the backdrop of domestic abuse or toxic relationships? Well, we do. I mean, domestic abuse is a terrible problem. It certainly plays a significant role in spousal killings.

You know, I guess when it comes to the kinds of stories that attract the public's interest, the femme fatale killer is intrinsically more interesting to the public than males killing females, simply because males killing females are way more common. Well, the famous Margaret Outwood quote that, you know, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them, that would fit into so many Dateline

stories. Indeed it would. I mean, you literally could write that into any one of a number of scripts. Keith, you reported on a high-profile case this year, which made us all think about whether abuse should or should not factor into what justice looks like. And that is, of course, the Menendez brothers, which everyone was talking about this year.

It became a huge story, and it's a testament to the power of social media. Millions and millions of people around the world commented and got involved emotionally in what would happen to the Menendez brothers. After especially after the Netflix scripted series, a scripted series is based on a true story but isn't necessarily true. When I think that was a bit of a trip up for a lot of people who made some assumptions about the case and about the amount of abuse,

which may or may not have occurred. The same questions were chewed over 30-some years ago during the course of the first trial, the jury was hung. In the second murder trial, the judge said the issue wasn't whether abuse occurred, the issue was whether the boys were in fear of their lives when they killed their parents. Therefore, he didn't allow a lot of the abuse evidence. Now 30 some years later, the abuse became the central part of it. The original prosecutors of the case maintain to this day that abuse, if it occurred, was certainly not abuse that would have led anybody to kill anybody else. And Keith, that prosecutor you interviewed,

she really was very forthcoming about- Attamant is a good word. How she felt, yeah. I mean, she had some strong words. Very strong words. But the DA in LA decided to apply for the Menendez brothers' release. God knows they've been asking for it for years. And they had been very well behaved in prison for a long time.

Then he lost his re-election bid. So there is a new prosecutor in town. The new prosecutor is elected. The new prosecutor is much more conservative. Do the Menendez brothers still even have a shot? Well the shot has diminished considerably. I don't think we know what the new prosecutor is going to do. So we're talking about old cases suddenly new again. It's not just the Menendez brothers. Josh, you covered John Benet Ramsey's murder back in the day, and that's been getting a

lot of new attention as well because of a Netflix documentary. And also, law enforcement has recently come out and said, we're not giving up on this, local law enforcement, they want to solve it. Alan McPherson Local law enforcement has said that largely in reaction to the public reaction to the documentary that's out. Many people know little about that case except they've seen that documentary, which has a point of view. Now there is a considerable groundswell of opinion that evidence in the case should be tested or retested using modern

DNA technology, and we will have to see where that goes. When people start talking about these cases again, filmmakers getting involved, the public getting involved, is that good or bad? It depends on the story. It seems to me that a compelling narration so often beats the facts or the truth. You want to impose a story on it, it is more appealing to you. Exactly. And then it moves into the streamers.

And there's an emotional element to it that really drives it that probably shouldn't be allowed to but does because it sells. This notion of being able to take modern methods and retest material, which has been tested repeatedly over the decades, sometimes it's not as easy as all that. Well, yeah, testing is not only expensive, which is a concern people don't usually think about, but it also consumes some of the sample. And that can be a problem with investigations going forward.

Very true, very true. Okay, well, we've been speaking about old being new. Question for all of our listeners, which one of us here has been at Dateline the longest? Oh, I know, I know the answer to this. When we come back, we've got the answer. Is there a prize? I know the answer to this. You have to wait until we come back, Josh. Oh, I know the answer to this. We have a break. we come back, Josh. Oh, I know the answer though.

We have a break. And we'll have some other stats when we come back. Which Dateline correspondent traveled the furthest in one day to get to a shoot? Welcome back to the show. Okay. Before the break, we threw out a question. Who is the OG of Dateline? Who's been at Dateline the longest? I'm raising my hand. I know the answer to this question. It's Dennis. Is it Dennis?

I think we compared driver's licenses once, Keith, and I think I've got you two, three months or so. Dennis, were you on from day one? No, I was sort of the second wave. Okay, and here's the other question that we teased. According to Dateline True Crime Weekly, Josh, you traveled the furthest distance in a single day. Yes.

What was that for? Yeah, this was for a story in extreme northern Ontario, Canada. This was to a town that was not on the Canadian road system. You either have to fly in or take a train or you can in the, in the colder months, you can snowmobile up the river. Um, we chose to take a train because we have all that gear. So the trip there actually took the trip up was like two and a half days and the trip back was like two and a half days and the trip back was like two days. And then I was only there like a day and a half. But it turned

out to be a pretty interesting story. It was a couple of cold case murders from the 1980s in Toronto. And the man who was found to have been the murderer left Toronto shortly after the second murder, went up there to the extreme cold small town. He was arrested a while ago. He's already been put on trial and locked up. He pled guilty. And the last time I spoke to the police, he had not revealed anything else about other crimes he committed. But that remains a sort of big question, Martin, because it's very, very unusual for these guys to just stop. Yeah. Genetic genealogy comes into play in that story, of course. And it's really something

we see all the time now. And it's become an issue in the murders of the four University of Idaho students, Keith, with your story. PhD criminology student Brian Koberger is accused of fatally stabbing the students, and we are still waiting for the trial, which has been pushed back twice. Keith Snell, Ph.D., Ph.D. The case is, you know, far from resolved. The defense is making an issue of the genetic genealogy in this case because it was kind of a new way of trying to do it. Yeah, this is so interesting.

We talked about this on the podcast before. According to court filings, investigators got DNA off a knife sheath left at the crime scene, uploaded it to various publicly available databases to build a family tree that eventually led them to Brian Coburger's father. And from there, they zeroed in on the son, on Brian.

But the defense says they have all kinds of questions about this. There's enough sort of to get the defense making an argument or two, but I'm not sure how much success they'll have with it. I get asked about that case a lot by people online and in airports, just a singular horror. Yeah, it truly was a horror. And he, of course, has pled not guilty. He has pled not guilty and he has a very good defense attorney who is making the best case possible for him.

Speaking of technology, surveillance cameras continue to play an important part in the cases we covered this year. And Josh, you always say no one can expect to be invisible these days. They are everywhere. Not if you're outdoors. Yeah. Not if you have a phone. Yeah. And Josh, the surveillance cameras really came into play in the Bob Lee case, the Cash App tech executive who was killed and it was caught on camera. Well, yeah. It was a tricky one. It was caught on camera. I mean, you know, as Keith would say, or was it? And the question is, what does that camera show? There's definitely some video.

Yeah, it's definitely blurry video, which throws a wrench in that. Right. And that's the, I mean, jurors in general, you know, who've watched TV shows believe, you know, and prosecutors will tell you this, they believe that you can take this cruddy, blurry video and make it crisper and better so that I can see exactly what's going on and we can read that license plate in the car. And that technology is unquestionably going to exist one day, but not yet. Okay. How about the biggest twist of the year? Dennis, I know jury selection had begun in the case of Donna Adelson. She's

the family matriarch accused of orchestrating the hit for higher- How much time do we have? That's one for- A first son. I can't wait for that one. That's one for Shakespeare. And she was arrested as she was about to board a plane for Vietnam. She was the most wanted in the whole dramatic piece here. And she bought a one-way ticket to Vietnam, which is a non-extraditable country.

And just as they're in the boarding jetway, the plane that's going to take them overseas, here comes the FBI and a SWAT team, and they take them down and they're wrestling for the phone, and she's charged with first degree murder. Anyway, she's waiting to go on trial. And last September, the jury had been picked, and we're waiting for opening arguments. And the judge says, come in chambers here. And then it turns out that her attorney was ruled by the court to have a conflict of interest and could not represent her. So he's thrown off the case, which puts everything back months and months and months. So now we think that

grandmother Donna Adelson is going to go on trial, maybe next June. Wait and see. And we should add that Donna Adelson has pleaded not guilty. And her trip to Vietnam was just that, a vacation, she says. That trial will be very interesting. Okay, one case we haven't talked about yet, which I thought was one of the most intriguing this year was, well, any guesses? My guess is that Karen Reed. I mean, it was huge. Still is huge.

Yeah, I got to tell you, I was at for an event at the Marriott Marquis in Midtown Manhattan just last week, and a woman, I was waiting for someone, she walked up to me and she said, I'm from Massachusetts, is it okay if I talk to you? She said, we are huge Karen Reed supporters, we're team Karen, and she wanted to talk to me about this, the Karen Reed story, this stranger in the hotel. It really struck a nerve with people, that case.

And Dennis, you and I ended up teaming up for that one. I had interviewed Karen Reed on the, Yeah, you did the big one. ...in March the year before the trial. And, you know, she was poised and confident. The highlights that I remember from that interview, Andrew, is that she says she went back to her place and then woke up in the middle of the night

and lo and behold, he's not there. And she goes back to the scene and then blurts out, did I hit him? You know, that would come back to haunt her. Yeah, and there's different interpretations of what she was saying. And she goes back to the scene and then blurts out, did I hit him? You know, that would come back to haunt her. Yeah, and there's different interpretations of what she was saying. And of course, we should just mention, you know, she is accused of backing into her boyfriend,

John O'Keefe, who was a Boston police officer. The jurors had three different counts that they had to consider, and then that got kind of messy at the end when it was a hung jury. It was just, I feel like it was messy. And there's gonna be another trial, right? Yes.

And you'll be there, right, Andrea? Yes. But I was surprised by the gauntlet of people in front of the courthouse. Turtle boy. Yeah, friends of Karen. Yeah. Do we think that this is like, you know, I also did the ballerina story, Ashley Benefield, which had supporters as well show up outside of court.

Do we think that this is kind of this new thing now? In the Karen Reed story, they called themselves true crime tourists. They come from England. There are lots and lots of those around. And I have to tell you, we've been doing this a long time and people get engaged with these stories. I mean, this kind of interest goes way back. Think of something like the O.J. Simpson case,

which this year was the 30th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. O.J. Simpson also died this year in April. When that verdict in the O.J. case was announced, my assignment that day was to stand on the street when there was, because a big crowd had gathered and just to sort of do a little live shot from the street where all these people were.

And the roar that came up from the crowd was unbelievable. Okay, well that about does it for our year in review. I love working with all of you. You are the best in the business, you three. You are the best in the business and it's such an honor to be on this team. And we love working with you. Thank you. Happy holidays, everybody. Thank you, Andrea. That's it from the Dateline Correspondents. But this episode of Dateline True Crime Weekly isn't done quite yet. Next up, we've got some true

crime cases that went viral this year. Oh, boy, what could that be? In 2024, we saw something we've never really seen before at Dateline, the rise of viral true crime moments. Stories that didn't just capture our Dateline fans' attention, but widespread media attention. So for our final story this week, we thought we'd look back on those moments that got even your non-true crime fan friends talking. I am joined by Dateline producer Marianne O'Donnell. Hey, Marianne. Hey, Andrea. So this one, this first one we're going to talk about, it's this viral video of a Zoom call. A Michigan man named Corey Harris, he joins a court hearing in May to answer to charges of driving with a suspended license. He

joins the Zoom call from behind the wheel of his car. Are you driving? Ashley, I'm pulling into my doctor's office actually. So, so I'll just give me one second. I'm parking right now. So while most people laughed at this viral moment, there is an update to this story that our listeners might not expect, Marian. So as it turns out, Harris's license had been previously suspended. But in this case, the suspension was ended by a judge in 2022, two years before this all took place.

So, I mean, he had every right to be driving. The court just didn't have that up-to-date information. Harris ended up spending two nights in jail after this court appearance for the misunderstanding, and he called the whole experience very embarrassing. Anna Delvey, I saw the series. She's the con woman. She went on Dancing with the Stars, because where else do you go when you get out of prison? Exactly.

Okay. So that this story really, of course, piqued the interest of true crime and reality TV fans alike. Yeah, it really, it really did. Anna Delvey or Anna Sorkin is the woman who inspired that popular Netflix series inventing Anna. And she posed as a wealthy German heiress in New York City, scam people. Anyway, in 2019, after being found guilty of eight charges, including grand larceny and theft, Delvey was sentenced to four to 12 years in state prison, but was let out in 2021 on house arrest. So that's that backstory.

And Marianne, she had an interesting piece of jewelry, if you will, that was front and center on Dancing with the Stars. Yeah. Oh, yeah, she sure did. I mean, and what would you wear if you've done some time inside of your let out? Ankle bracelet. With a little special monitor attached. There you go. A judge granted her permission to leave her house arrest to compete though she was eliminated in the first week of the show. So you might remember the viral moment after learning she was eliminated.

Yes, yes. What are you going to take away from this competition? Nothing. There you have it. I think, wow. Nothing. There you have it. Wow. Wow. Okay. So this is really bizarre. These are people trying to pin crimes on bears. Just last month, according to the California Department of Insurance, four residents of Los Angeles submitted claims to three car

insurance companies, and they sent along video footage from the San Bernardino mountains of a bear in their cars, a Rolls Royce, of course, and two Mercedes. But the insurance companies realized that that wasn't really a bear, it was someone in a bear costume. The four individuals were arrested and charged with defrauding three insurance companies of nearly, get this, 142,000. A man called 911 wanting someone to sing happy birthday to him, which is so sad.

And then officers showed up with cake. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. And it was a really sweet moment, right? Isn't that? I mean, the two officers, they go to the man's house, they sing to him. I mean, they didn't have cake actually, but they did bring a banana muffin and some candles so we could make a wish. What a heartwarming story. Marianne, thank you so much. Enjoy your holidays. Yeah, you too.

That's it for this episode of Dateline True Crime Weekly. Next week, we'll have another special for you, but instead of looking back, we'll be looking forward. We'll tell you what's on our docket for 2025. And if you want to dig deeper into the stories we've discussed this year on the show, check out our website at datelinetrueCrimeWeekly.com. Coming up on Dateline, a woman is found dead in the shower.

Her friends want to know, was it an accident or murder? You can watch my classic two-hour mystery, Return to Shalimar Way, airing this Friday at 9, 8 Central on NBC or stream it starting Saturday on Peacock. Dateline True Crime Weekly is produced by Franny Kelly and Katie Ferguson. Our associate producers are Carson Cummins and Caroline Casey. Our senior producer is Liz Brown-Kuruloff. Production and fact-checking help by Sara Kadir. Veronica Mazekka is our digital producer.

Rick Kwan is our sound designer. Original music by Jesse McGinty, Bryson Barnes is head of audio production, Paul Ryan is executive producer, and Liz Kuhl is senior executive producer of Dateline. From all of us here at Dateline, happy holidays. Merry Christmas, everyone!