Dateline Originals - Deadly Engagement - Ep. 4: A Knife in the Night

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Two women. One man. And a stunning new allegation. This episode originally published on September 25, 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In a different time and place, Shannon Crawley and Denita Smith might have been friends. Like Danita, the young woman whose murder is at the center of our story, Shannon was determined, hardworking, and full of wonder. Very sensitive, very creative, very smart, very articulate. She's a writer. Poetry, short stories, that sort of thing, very creative. Just like Danita, Shannon was a very good student. English was her strongest subject.

It is undeniable if fate had dealt Shannon a different hand. She and Danita might have met in college and maybe formed a bond that would have lasted long past graduation. Well, that is not the way it went. Unlike Danita, who went to college and then on to grad school, Shannon became the mother of two while still a teenager. She didn't want to be a statistic. That's Shannon's mom, Anne.

The uncivical, you know, welfare mother, she wanted to take care of her children. And that's what she did. Instead of sorority pledge parties and fancy summer fellowships, Shannon's struggle to make ends meet. She worked a lot of odd jobs. And that's Shannon's brother, Keith Quartz. Crawley, Jr. Selling back in cleaners, worked in a factory. Then in 2000, Shannon found work at the 911 call center in Greensboro.

It was a good job, and by all accounts, Shannon was good at it. It had been a tough road, but Shannon Crawley beat the odds. She worked six months straight, 12-hour shifts to buy a house. At 27 years old, I think that's quite an accomplishment for a single. mother. This is the story of two talented young women on two entirely different life paths, two women who never met socially, but who are forever linked by one common denominator. They both fell for the same man, Jermere Stroud. It was charming. It's very nice. We got along. We had a lot in common. She thought he was absolutely gorgeous. Love Triangle seldom.

have happy endings. And this one, with one person dead and the other two accusing each other of murder, is no exception. This isn't about, did this person commit this crime? This one is about which one is it? Is it Jemir or is it Shannon? In this episode, you'll hear just how far the he said, she said, finger pointing went. We have the recordings where he admits that he killed her. She volunteered for a polygraph. The head polygraph examiner for the state administered the test. When it shows that she's lying, I would like, but some law enforcement areas, she could possibly be like. And you'll hear how the murder investigation was rocked by an explosive new accusation. He's down on top of being right. Who is this guy?

He can't. It's a greatful police officer. I'm Josh Mancoitz, and this is deadly. Engagement, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 4, A Knife in the Night. For more than a year after the shooting death of Danita Smith, Shannon Crawley, her accused killer, tried to clear her name. Shannon insisted to anyone who would listen that it was not her, but her former lover, Jermere Stroud, who had pulled the trick. It was Jermere, she said, who forced her to ride with him to Durham that day.

Jermere who insisted she drive her car. Jermere who directed her to Dina's apartment and told her to wait in the car. I don't know that his plan that day was to go there and shoot her. That's Shannon Crawley, speaking in an interview I did with her years later. If Jermere's plan is to frame you for Dena's murder... Leaving aside that I don't know what his motive would be in that, why bring you along? Why not kill De Nita and plant the gun in your car or your house? I think he acted in the spur of the moment, but I don't believe that he set out to deliberately go there and shoot her.

I believe that he was after me. I honestly believe that he was going to kill me. Why would Jermere Stroud, a police officer, want to kill anyone, much less someone he claimed to love? I don't know. She said Jermere had been emotional and erratic with her for months, stalking Shannon, intimidating her, pleading with her to come back to him. Remember, Shannon told Detective Pate, Jermere had even threatened to kill her children on the day of the murder

if she didn't take that ride with him to Durham. His exact words to me were, either you die for your kids or their kids die for you. What's your choice? So I went. As for De Nita, well, Shannon insisted she had no idea

that Dena Smith even existed. I can't sit here and tell you that everything I did was right. I can't. But one thing I can absolutely tell you is I never shot anybody. I didn't kill anyone.

I didn't. I had no reason to. I didn't know who she was. I had never seen her before. I knew nothing about her. There's no way I could have known anything about her or where she lived at all. And if you had found out that she existed, what would have happened?

He and I would have broken up, and that would have been the end of it. I never would have been involved with him if I knew that he was involved with someone else. You think Jumeir killed than Ada? I absolutely believe that he did. Though Shannon's family was steadfast in their support for her, and 100% believed her version of what happened, Detective Pate and the Durham D.A. did not. So in April 2008, Shannon and her lawyers approached Detective Pate with a proposition.

Shannon was willing to have her veracity tested by the State Bureau of Investigation. Polygraph test was given to Shannon at a SBI substation. She volunteered for a polygraph. She did. We had, from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, the head polygraph examiner for the state administered the test. In a small quiet room, a polygrapher applied the electrodes that would measure Shannon's heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and perspiration.

Then he asked her 20 questions, beginning with, How do you think you'll do on this test? Shannon answered, I am going to pass. When asked if she had killed Danita, Shannon responded, no. When the test was done, the polygrapher tallied up the results. She didn't pass the test as we're not surprised. Then Detective Pate says the polygrapher pulled him aside and told him this. I can tell you without a doubt that she took something to calm herself down before this test.

Because you can take something to calm yourself down, but when you lie, no matter how low a calm you make yourself, there's still going to be a spike. So instead of being up starting up here and spiking up here, okay, you just start here and spike up here. But she made an effort to fool the test. Polygraphs are not admissible in court. Even so, the detective and the DA saw the results as confirmation of something they had long believed. Shannon Crawley was a killer. And now, out on bail with her options of avoiding trial running out, She was as dangerous as dynamite.

She puts her head on the steering wheel for a minute. She looks up, like, burning a hole through the building with her eyes. Then she just puts it in drive, insist her for a second. When she put it in drive, I just pulled off. And the other detective says, what are you doing? You're not going to follow her? I said, I'm going to be honest with you. I don't trust to be on the highway with her at the same time,

and she knows that, you know, she might think, hey, if I get rid of him. Slow things down. At least slow things down. And I didn't know if she thought this was the last-ditch effort. I don't know what's going through her head. I didn't know if she was going to try to take herself out and do something crazy on the highway. When she walked out of that building, did she know she'd fail the polygraph?

She did. They told her right then. They did. They did. And honestly, I thought that the case was so good that I didn't want to do anything to jeopardize it. No, the detective wanted to keep his distance now and let the process run its course. Shannon Crawley, on the other hand, well, she drove away from that polygraph test knowing she would need to find another way to prove her innocence. The suburban neighborhood where Jermere Stroud and Shannon Crawley lived

was not big enough for the both of them. That much was clear to Jermere the minute Shannon bonded out of jail. After all, Shannon had been charged with murdering Jermere's fiancé. Immediately after I got out, he filed for a restraining order. We went through a hearing and the restraining order was denied. Maybe a week after, he started calling me, wanting to know what I had told the police. Shannon told her lawyers. The calls made her uncomfortable.

After I told my attorneys that he was calling me, they contacted the Durham District Attorney's Office and let them know he's calling her. That's when the phone calls increased. The frequency of the phone calls increased and the nature of the phone calls. changed. What was he saying? What was Jermere saying now? He was threatening to kill me if I told him anything. When she and her attorneys met with Durham County Assistant DA David Sacks and told him about the calls, the prosecutor asked them to bring him proof. That is what the district attorney's office told us. They are the ones that asked me to record the phone calls. I did not volunteer to do that. I wanted them to make him stop. That was.

my initial thought, make him stop, make him leave me alone. They then said, record the phone calls. And try to get him to say something incriminating. Right. And I did that. Hello. Jamir. What do you want? How you've been talking to? Nobody. Oh, you're going to? What do you expect, Jimmy? You got me in the middle of your mess. Don't try to figure.

The recordings were a decidedly low-tech endeavor. Shannon's attorneys basically bought tape recording equipment from Radio Shack and showed Shannon how to push the record button. As a result, it's often hard to hear what is being said, except for Shannon Crawley and her family. Because to them, those recordings sounded like exoneration. You know I didn't do anything. You need to tell the truth.

Man, I ain't going to jail. And I'm supposed to, for something I didn't do? I didn't get you on that. Well, they did because you lied. I don't know. It's true. I was never you. The kids.

Why are you whispering? No, why. I've got somebody doing it. When Shannon was taping his phone calls, which you still were from Jermere. Did you think this is the evidence that's going to... Oh, yeah. It's going to turn.

everything I'm out. Once police and prosecutors hear this, they're going to drop the charges. Anne Crawley told me she was on the receiving end of some of those calls. I remember, I could hear someone whispering. It was very soft. Shut your, you know, and it was just a lot of expletives. You get on the phone sometimes? And yeah, yeah, stop, just stop. Leave us alone. And, you know, and they, you know, even laugh or hang up. Again, I would answer the phone. And he would think it was Shannon and he'd be talking to me. And you knew his voice by then?

Oh, by then, yeah, I knew his voice. And it was always the same person. Always the same person. Shannon says the calls were constant, creepy, and unsettling. And what really concerned Shannon was that Jermere lived close by. So after barely a year in that new house, she had scrimped and saved to buy, Shannon put it back on the market. I couldn't go back to my house.

We both owned houses in the same subdivision. I did not go back to my house after that. I moved in with my mother. Shannon's mother, Anne, had recently separated from Shannon's father. She had rented a place in Concord, so Shannon and the kids moved there. Shannon thought she would be safe from harassment there, more than 70 miles away from Jermere Stroud. She says she was wrong about that. The phone calls kept coming.

I've been at the house on the most occasions when he was called the house. That is Shannon's dad, Keith Crawley, Sr. I think there's one part of a conversation where he said, I killed her and I kill you too. Why did you kill her? You're so good. You don't, you know, you're going to kill me too? You keep talking, you know.

Much more proof do you need. As a former sheriff's deputy in another state, Mr. Crawley would take a particular interest in the police handling of his daughter's case. Sometimes I would hear her start of the conversation. At the times, if my wife picked up the phone or I picked up the phone, there would be just silence. No one would say anything.

There was always from a block number or a number that we couldn't access on a caller ID. And after a while, even though you can't probably prove it was him, you know who it is calling. is very obvious he was calling. In February 2008, Shannon's mom moved into a new house in a new subdivision on the east side of Charlotte. That house was more than 100 miles away from Jermere Stroud.

But the crawley say it was there that Jermere found Shannon. He would appear in the neighborhood. You sit there on his car and watch the house. Follow her to work. Follow her to work, Chandor. Yeah, me too. You pointed out to follow you to work. Yes. Why? I don't know. Sometimes she would have to use my car, you know, to go to see the lawyers and she would take, you know, take me to work. And I think he followed me to find out where I worked. Because he show up at my job.

You saw him. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. I chased him through the neighborhood. When I just had enough, he would even sit behind the house. The kids would run in the house because they would see him. him driving through the neighborhood, and he would sit behind the house and watch. The way the Crawley saw it, they were practically living under siege, hounded by a Greensboro police officer who lived an hour and a half away. Sometimes he would think he was talking to me, and I would just be listening, you know. And once he told her, he said, that was your mother to answer the phone. The next time I call you better answer.

Angry guy. Oh, my gosh. So, angry guy, jealous guy. Jealous guy. Shannon managed to get many of those calls on tape. Her family thought those recordings exonerated her. But after listening to them, the DA was unconvinced. He told Shannon's lawyers, he didn't believe the voice on those tapes actually belonged to Jermere Stroud.

What's your reaction? When you realize the DA is like sort of didn't believe that. That was really Jermere. I felt betrayed. According to Shannon, months of harassment and phone threats reached a climax on a hot summer night in June 2008. It was then, Shannon says,

that Jermere Stroud suddenly appeared in her mother's backyard in Charlotte. Shannon was alone, and he had a knife. No one in the neighborhood heard a single sound until the sun came up. I just saw a bunch of police cars, and I saw Anne's daughter, I don't know her name, being taken into the ambulance. Okay, would that be Shannon?

Yes, deal up, her daughter. Okay. Being taken into the ambulance. Whatever it was. Whatever it was that happened in Charlotte. on Downey Birch Road in the pre-dawn hours of June 20th, 2007, remains, to this day, a mystery. No one saw anything.

No one heard anything. Except when Anne Crawley woke up that morning, she saw her daughter Shannon, half-naked, crawling across the bedroom floor. She's hysterical, and she's shaking, and I'm like, what's, you know, what's the matter? and she's telling me, she said, Jamir, he was here. You know, he hurt me.

And she kept saying, he hurt me. So I ran down the stairs, and the back door was open. And I didn't see anybody. Again, there was no houses in our backyard, you know, behind us at all. And the doorbell rang, and it was the police. Apparently, she hit the alarm, and she didn't remember, you know, hitting the alarm. But she didn't want to talk to the police. No, that morning the very sight of police uniforms seemed to freak out Shannon.

So Ann Crawley says she got her daughter to her feet, calmed her down, and walked her downstairs to where the EMTs had a gurney that would take her out to a waiting ambulance. I just put my robe around her because she was naked from the, I believe, from the waist down, and she went to the hospital. and I had the kids. Did Shannon tell you she'd been raped? Yeah.

At the hospital, while Shannon was waiting to be photographed, examined, and swabbed, all part of the standard rape kit, she spoke with Detective Pam Zencon from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Sex Crimes Unit. Shannon told Detective Zencon the whole ordeal began at around 2.30 a.m. That's when the family's new puppy started whining, signaling he needed to go out. I walked out into the grass and the dog was using the bathroom and he kind of stopped and started to turn around

which made me turn around and before I could turn he grabbed me around my waist and had the knife up to my throat and just helped me not to say anything. Shannon told the detective Jermere was dressed all in black. Black cargo pants, black shirt, black boots, and black gloves. She said that as Jermere was pulling her away from the house and deeper into a neighbor's backyard, she slipped on the wet grass and fell to the ground. That's when she says he got on top of her and started cutting

her shorts and underwear off with the knife. And he got on top of the end right? Repeated me, you're doing, you're doing so good to take time. Sorry, he started getting the second, he lost his direction, and so he used the knife to penetrate me. One can imagine the look on the detective's face when she heard that. Shannon's medical chart did note a few superficial wounds to her genital area. However, there was no mention of the kind of injuries one might expect from the knife attack Shannon described. And then when he got in the direction back, he raped me against.

Shannon told the detective she could not remember if Jermere used a condom or condoms during the assault. She did recall that it went on for hours. We would fight. I kept struggling to get you away from him and I would end up on my stomach and try to crawl away from him and he just kept pulling me back down

and just laying on me. And then finally he put the knife down and I kind of pushed myself up and back and started kicking and hitting out of and I got up and ran And he started to chase after me. And then I remember looking back and seeing he just stopped running. And he just kind of laughed at me.

Just kept laughing. And I ran inside. By then the sun was up. And the neighbors who were stirring at that hour noticed police activity at the Crawley House. You're all the place. I was walking through my backyard and I came some of women's underwear for rich shorts. So I'm not too sure if it was a sexual assault client that took place. By Shannon's reckoning, her struggle with Jermere lasted for hours.

And yet, none of the neighbors reported hearing anything. But if you're wondering about the dog that apparently did not bark, a Yorkie Chihuahua mix, well, Shannon's mom said she found him later that morning. The dog did come upstairs and he'd hear him in the big. under my bed. Hours after Shannon reported she had been sexually assaulted, Charlotte Police went looking

for the man she had named as her attacker, Jermere Stroud. Jermere was not hard to find. He was at home. By 1.30 that afternoon, two officers were in Greensboro to interview him. Here's how that interview sounded.

The first time that you knew about the allegations, Gator from this morning was wet. How did you find that out? I was called, and by lieutenant, we went and go up through the clock and pulled me a two Charlotte type of way up. That is the voice of Jermere Stroud. As long as I got here, I thought you got out, just when I found out. That's the first time you knew of the nature of that was. Jermere gave the Charlotte cops a quick four or five sentence synopsis of his relationship

with Shannon. Those sentences included her arrest for the murder of his fiancée. and her subsequent release on Bond. Then, unprompted, Jermere launched into a lengthy discourse about her behavior towards him. Since she's been released, there's just to be asked her strange phone calls and hanged up phone calls

and things that are nature to check the record of and turn it into the gun police department. In Jermere's telling, it was Shanna. who'd been acting erratically. He'd never stalked her. He'd never threatened her. And he didn't even know where she lived now.

Dom T.D. told me that she was going with her mother for a while. Do you ever have any information that she was living in Charlotte down? No. According to Jermere, the last time he stopped in Charlotte for anything other than gas was two weeks earlier on June 7, 2008. Jermere told the officers the date was significant to him, and he marked it by visiting Danita's grave. James of 2005 was supposed to be a wedding day.

And I stopped there and ran my job back home in 85 and he straight to a line. When asked about the last time he'd actually spoken with Shannon, Jermere said it was in late January when she called him. She called me from an untraceable re-delect service number that doesn't know you trace the original source of the call and told me that she had some things that belonged to my fiancé for a woman to get them back. I needed to meet her at Concord Mills Mall the next day.

I do not read with her, notified the gun, the principal's attorney's office, David Shack from the dumb police, the type of investigative Sean Pate, and later tried to investigate the situation from there. Jermere told the cops Shannon's latest allegation against him

was part of a pattern. She was telling him that I was contacting her, and she was blaming me for the murder. I wonder. I wonder there was going to try to make me look at the public, you come to trial time. Is that what this was? An elaborate ruse related to an 18-month-old murder investigation in Durham? The Charlotte cops didn't know.

They were there to investigate an alleged rape. So they started with the basics. Come me a little bit about your job description and what your hours were last night. I'm a what's called PNRC officer. It stands for a police neighborhood. Resource Center. Jermere told Charlotte Police he'd worked the late shift the night before.

It was well after midnight, he said, when he clocked out. The last thing I was here, last night when I left, what was around. I flight my police ID to the can in the office. And that is a police system, to the log system. According to Jermere, he had a brief conversation with another officer on his way out the door. Then, as he left town, Jermere said he had a 20-minute phone conversation with a friend, then hit the drive-thru at McDonald's. He paid cash.

Then he said he went straight home. Watch a little TV. You got any idea what time it was when you're calling. What you're asleep? Martin was on TV one. I fell asleep watching Martin on TV one, but I was probably about... I believe I read. That was the time Shannon Crawley had said she was being assaulted, 85 miles away.

Clearly, one of them was lying. The Charlotte cops knew of only one way to find out which one. We'd like to get a DNA sample from you. And we understand that in the past that you have had sexual relations with Earth, We obviously take it into account. Then you said that you're fine with that, you're okay with that? Yes. By 2 o'clock that afternoon, Charlotte Cops had their DNA sample

and were on their way out the door. They'd only spent a half hour with Jermere. But by the time they left, it was clear to them Jermere Stroud was a frustrated man at the end of his rope. Before I shut off our reporters, there anything you want to add or... When it shows that she's right, I would like for some law enforcement agents

because this is blatantly a lot. I mean, I just want to be left alone. Next time. They took it to the hospital, and my area in Texas, they had the doctor. The doctor, uh, the doctor, uh, face. didn't look good. I lift off my trash can the end again, boom, I looked down, and I see this big A knife. I'm like, okay, that's just odd and weird.

No one wants to be that officer that says, you know what, lady, you're lying. No one wants to be that person. I mean, you're just supposed to start, you know, start by believing. This podcast is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Tim Beecham is the producer. Marshall Housefeld, Brian Drew, and Deb Brown are audio editors. Kimberly Flores Gainer is associate producer. Adam Gorfane is co-executive producer.

Paul Ryan is executive producer. And Liz Cole is Senior Executive Producer. From NBC News Audio, sound mixing by Rich Cutler. Bryson Barnes is head of audio production. Thank you.