Dateline Presents: Five Miles From Home
00:00 Hello, I'm Keith Morrison of Dateline, with a special preview of my new podcast called Five Miles from Home. What was she thinking? As she secretly slipped into a car, wearing just her pajamas, her mind to turmoil as she rode down Interstate 80 across northern Nevada. Would she? Could she? Reveal what she knew? She was just 18, tiny, 98 pounds and barely five. five feet tall. But the story she took with her on that torture drive was she knew going to change everything. She came and we talked and we recorded the conversation with her permission and it was dynamite.
00:59 The man she had come to talk to was a distinguished attorney. If anyone could advise her, surely it would be he about the story she said she had to tell. It had been eating at me and eating at me. I couldn't sit there and live with myself knowing what I knew. And then out it came. The whole terrifying story. Possibly true. And possibly a careful and cunning deceit.
01:28 I was too in shock and numb. I didn't know what I was feeling. It was like I was in a daze. Still was, she said, about the thing that happened and about who was there and what happened after and what might happen next in a small town deep in the American desert. They deserve to be in hell for doing that. And there is nothing they can say or do that will make it better.
01:59 They cannot fix this. Some things aren't fixable. Some things are hard to explain. It doesn't make sense. I still wonder to this day why. What's the real reason? Or what even really happened? There is a place.
02:29 A remote, windy place tucked away in a sliver of northeast Nevada next to the Utah border. You'd certainly see it if you cruised along Interstate 80. Casinos, five of them, flashing away like some Vegas in miniature, a golf shot or two off the highway, the town of 4,000 or so spilling out onto the surrounding desert. And if tempted by a meal or a rest or a roll of the dice, if you pulled off that highway,
03:00 you'd be welcomed by a great gritting cowboy, or the improbable towering image of one, 63 feet high, garish and weirdly charming, as it waves a welcome. A giant concoction in neon and steel they call Wendover Will for West Wendover, name of the town. And a reminder of more innocent days. It's pretty much the only thing Wendover was known for.
03:28 Her name is Christina. She knows what happened to innocence, knows all too well. Now, you know, everybody's like, oh, Wendover, oh, do you know that girl? It's a question, unfortunately, that gets asked because we have a lot of tourists that come into the casino towns from all over. And that's what Windover is known for now. Yes, even now, all these years later. And how did it begin? That memory is as clear as the morning sun on the high desert and cold. Like the desert wind that Thursday morning in March 2011. I'm Keith Morrison. Thanks for listening. Search for five miles from home.
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