Dateline Originals - Murder & Magnolias - Ep. 1: Marked for Death

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

A hit man arrives in Charleston, South Carolina with a member of a wealthy and well-known family in his crosshairs.This episode was originally published on November 15, 2022. 

It had been a glorious vacation. For two weeks, the Latham family of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, had basked in simple summertime pleasures. Fishing, boating, water skiing, swimming in the cool, clear water of Lake Greenwood, a large man-made lake in the western part of the state. We had never in our lives taken a two-week vacation, ever. That's the voice of Nancy Latham.

And this particular year, Chris was insistent we take a two-week vacation. Chris Latham, the workaholic, finally had the time. He'd grown up nearby in the town of Greenwood. Had you had a good vacation? We'd had a great vacation. And the girls? The teenagers? Well, they spent those two weeks in July 2011 perfecting their tans and roaring around the 11,000-acre lake on jet skis.

Not a care in the world. Idyllic? Oh, yes. It lives only in haunted memory now. The last day of that splendid vacation. Its peaceful mundane moments preserved as if on an old film played back in agonized technicolor again and again. The last moments of the time before. We were at the lake house. I was working up in the house. That's the voice of Chris Latham.

She was down with the girls in the water jet skiing or whatever. The sun was setting on that last day. In the fading light, an attentive observer could have seen the Latham's pontoon boat drifting in the middle of the lake a hundred yards out or more. May have recognized the darkened silhouettes of Chris and Nancy sitting in that boat facing each other. And something in their postures, perhaps, a quick jabbing gesture, the staccato sound of a distant voice, sharp but too dim to make out the words. What were they talking about?

Only they knew. But afterward? Afterward, the rippling consequences of that twilight chat between husband and wife would damage everyone they knew, and many they didn't. It was really a tangled web. This is the story of that moment on the lake and the strange dark turn of sun bright lives. The line between good and evil sort of runs through the heart of each person. The truth be told, we were both horrible. So a question, how low will a good person go for money, for pride, for desire, for the need to win no matter what.

I think people are really capable of anything. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Murder and Magnolias, a podcast from Dateline. Wave to Daddy. Wave to Dad, Dasha. Hey. Can you tell Uncle John thank you? All the ghosts of Christmas past. Holy Michael, ho, ho, ho. Whether preserved on film or video, whether recorded last year or 50 years before,

the clips all look the same. Look on that chair. What's right in front of you that you didn't ask for that you got? Sleepy children in pajamas, twinkling lights, the season's bounty arrayed beneath the tree. Dolls, a bike, new clothes. The old videos have the feel of the final scene of a Hallmark holiday movie. Chris Latham in his sweater vest. Nancy directing the scene from behind the camera. You need to show Poppy what your favorite thing is so I can get you on tape. And fade to black.

Yes, those were the days for Chris and Nancy. The days in the mid to late 90s when their girls, Emily and Madison, were much younger. And life, if not simpler, at least seemed easier to manage. Tell everybody bye-bye. Bye! Chris was rising rapidly through the ranks of corporate banking back then. By the mid-2000s, the Lathams had reached the upper tiers of Charleston society. As head of Bank of America's U.S. Trust Division in the Southeast,

it was Chris's job to schmooze the high rollers and represent the bank at Charleston's big charity soirees. The United Way, the Spoleto Arts Festival, that kind of thing. I had the best job in the world. I loved it. And, you know, I enjoyed working for people. I really do. I'm a people person, and that part was my drive. And Nancy? Well, she was Chris's indispensable better half at those functions. With her striking auburn hair and flashing blue eyes and razor-sharp wit, Nancy was the perfect counterpoint to Chris's more reserved personality. And I loved it.

I mean, I would walk into a room and love to find the one person who feels a little bit uncomfortable uncomfortable that's sort of off at the side and make sure that they're pulled into the conversation, that they feel comfortable and included. So that was my job. You were good at it. To pep it up. Yep. That's what I did. Don't you feel enthused already? I do actually, yeah. For a couple of small town South Carolina kids, they'd come a long way in a relatively short period of time. Thanks to Chris's banking connections, Nancy got into real estate. A close friend with political pull helped Nancy get a seat on the state lottery commission.

She became treasurer. And to think, it all started with a blind date. Over lunch, he said to me, it all started with a blind date. Over lunch, he said to me, you are so fabulous. Why aren't you dating somebody? And I said, well, the day I've always believed that the day I meet the man I'm going to marry, I'll know. And he said, I've always thought the same thing. So when do you want to get married? And I said, well, I tell you what, let's give it a few months so our parents can meet and get to know each other, and then we'll tie the knot.

You were joking at the time, but really... No, I knew. We laughed about that, and we still did for a number of years. You know, that was a very fond memory I had. Sure. Yeah, I love Nancy. But no marriage is perfect.

As Chris Latham's career flourished, friends noticed that he seemed to have less time for them, less time for Nancy and the girls, too. Chris became very preoccupied with his job. He was away from home more often. That's Kathy Harrell, one of the Lathams' oldest and closest friends. We went from socializing together and doing things as younger couples together to maybe seeing Chris once or twice a year.

Did he seem like the same old Chris? He seemed to always be just busy, busy, busy with his work. By the time the Lathams' 22-year wedding anniversary rolled around in March 2011, Chris had taken to sleeping in a guest room, said Nancy. He told her at the time he didn't want his snoring to keep her up nights. Thoughtful? Well, maybe. But to Nancy, it felt as though her husband had, in the words of the old song, lost that loving feeling. Whether he was sleeping in my bedroom or not, we had sex every

Saturday night like clockwork. Did he tell me he loved me? Never. Did he kiss me on the mouth? Not once. But every Saturday night, he would come in to have sex. And I did. I did because it was easy. If I did that, there was no fighting the rest of the week. There was no argument the rest of the week. It had been that way for six months, and then came that last night on the lake. Nancy had been down on the dock of her in-law's lake house when she saw her husband walking toward her. He made some comment about one last boat ride, and I probably asked, do you want to have the kids join us or whatever? And he said, no, just the two of us.

And, okay, fine. The lake looked like black satin in the dying light. And for several minutes, no one spoke. Chris switched off the motor. Then, said Nancy, he turned to her with a look she hadn't seen before. Cold, like rigor mortis. And we're out in the middle of the lake, and Chris said, I want a divorce. It was so blasé. And I said, excuse me? And he said it again. And I remember just almost as if he said, could you hand me a glass of water? I said, okay. Okay. Nancy was too stunned to say more. Her two-decade marriage, unceremoniously dumped overboard like so many dead fish. But in her telling, there was no shouting, no pleading, no tears.

There is, of course, another version to that story. How can you do this to me? How can you do this to our daughters? In Chris's version, the issue was adultery, his wife's adultery. As soon as he shut the motor off, he said, he confronted Nancy with text messages and emails he found on her phone. Proof, he said, that Nancy was having an affair. She denied it at first, but then I started going through and repeating verbatim exact phrases out of those emails,

and so she admitted it. She said, we can go to counseling. We can put this behind us. I said, no, we can't. I want a divorce. I don't want to be married to you anymore. Were you having an affair? No, I was not. Are you offering? No, no. I mean, Chris accused me of a plethora of affairs. Well, he said, she said. Yes,

that's usually the way of it. Hard to know the truth, really. There were only two people on the boat. And then, a few days later, back in town, they were celebrating. How was that possible? It was Nancy's 45th birthday, and according to Latham family tradition, her birthday was always celebrated at one of her favorite restaurants,

Miyabi's Japanese Steakhouse in downtown Charleston. They had the whole show. Flames whooshing, knives slashing, sizzling meat and flying veggies. Chris and Nancy had agreed not to tell the girls about their divorce plans. Not yet. Instead, they kept up appearances. There were no icy silences. No cutting remarks. When the check came, Chris asked the waiter to take a picture to mark the moment.

The family all together. Just like Christmas. One, two, three, smile. If you see the photo, you can see that I'm practically sitting on his lap. So we're kind of very, very compact and tight. And so it was my youngest daughter, myself, Chris, and then my oldest daughter. And in that photo, we're both sitting there just happy as clams taking the picture. You know, of course, that night, he went back to the guest bedroom, and there you go. And for the next 18 months, as the mechanics of divorce ground slowly along, that photograph was forgotten.

Water under the bridge. That is, until a piece of that photo turned up in a very unlikely pair of hands. Hands connected to men with murder on their minds. To be continued... and sweet magnolias, Spanish moss. But you probably won't hear many people rhapsodizing about the city's east side, the grittier section of town where residents tend to be poor and streets are named for Confederate generals. This was the part of the city that Charleston police officer Daniel Wilson knew well.

He seemed more neighborhood dad than tough-minded cop, but tough-minded he would have to be on occasion. It's a concentrated area, drug and narcotics violations, weapons violations, things of that nature. That's the voice of Officer Wilson. There's a very hot police presence, specifically because it's a very dense area. There's a very hot police presence, specifically because it's a very dense area. It's a very populated area.

It was a Thursday night, April 4th, 2013. Graveyard shift. As he cruised the east side in his black-and-white patrol car, Wilson would have seen all the usual signs of decay. Abandoned storefronts, litter, broken glass. He'd been on the job for about 90 minutes when he saw something odd up ahead. I was on Hanover Street traveling northbound and I observed a car sitting stationary in the intersection of Hanover and Lyon. I had no idea how long the car had been there. I

didn't know how long the car was planning on staying, but that time of night, it gave me a little bit of concern as to why the car is there, what its intended purpose was. It was a silver Volkswagen Passat, and as the cruiser got closer, Wilson noticed a man leaning into the passenger side window. Wilson didn't know what was going on exactly, but given the neighborhood and the time of night, he figured it was probably a drug deal. Then, standing men noticed the cop, turned and ran. Then suddenly the driver of the Passat drove away.

Wilson followed. As I basically catch up to the car on Cooper Street, the car turns westbound on Cooper Street towards Nassau. It was at that point that Officer Wilson turned on his flashing blue lights and the driver of the silver car pulled over. I step out of the car. Once the car has stopped, I approach him. The driver's side window rolls down and I see a white male in his 30s. He's got some indicators of his personality in the sense that he's got tattoos pretty much up to his neck. No, nothing expresses attitude quite like

a shaved head and an armful of skeleton tats up to the neck. The cop could see a woman in the passenger seat. There was a dog in the back. Kentucky plates. I requested his license, registration, insurance, and explained to him why I'd conducted a traffic stop on his vehicle. Pretty much immediately, he informed me that he did not have a driver's license as it had been suspended by the state of Kentucky. Not a good start. But the driver seemed congenial enough, cooperative.

He even volunteered that he was a convicted felon. He had done time for forgery. I asked him, you know, I said, well, why is your license suspended? He said, oh, you know, Kentucky suspended it. I hadn't had it in a while, but I thought I could drive with her in the car. I explained South Carolina law and said, no, you can't. You know, technically you are driving without a license right now. The driver said his name was Aaron Wilkinson. He and his wife and dog were in Charleston on vacation. They'd been out looking for a liquor store, Wilkinson said. Later, his wife said they'd been looking for a restaurant.

The officer wasn't inclined to believe either one of them. There are definitely some red flags that are coming up. Number one, it's pretty late in the evening. wasn't inclined to believe either one of them. There are definitely some red flags that are coming up. Number one, it's pretty late in the evening. It's in a part of town where there's not a whole lot of traffic at the time, especially around midnight. And then Officer Wilson booked the rental agreement for the silver car. It was in somebody else's name. It was at that time that I actually called for backup

because of the level of concern I was experiencing. Concerns? Oh yes, every cop knows traffic stops can go south fast, so he asked Aaron Wilkinson for permission to search the car. I said, listen, if there is anything in this car that's going to get you in trouble, you need to tell me now. He said, no, no, no, there's nothing in the car. I began to search the car. Under the driver's seat, I found a box of .32 caliber ammunition. And I said, okay, well, where's the pistol that goes to this ammunition? He says, back at the hotel. So I conducted a second search of the car and underneath the steering column, I found a loaded.32 caliber revolver. So now we have multiple problems going on. An ex-con driving without a license in somebody else's rental car and lying

about a concealed weapon. Yes, you could say there were multiple problems going on. I placed him under arrest. I put him in the back of my cruiser. I started to try to conduct all of my paperwork. In the meantime, Aaron is in the backseat telling me, you just want to take me to jail. You don't want to hear what I have to say. And he was adamant enough and persistent enough that I finally stopped what I was doing. And I said, okay.

Wilson took a look in his rear view mirror. The guy in the back of his cruiser looked agitated. And Aaron Wilkinson proceeded to explain to me how he and another gentleman were involved in a murder-for-hire plot and that they were going to be paid X amount of dollars to come to Charleston and conduct a hit. The cop had heard his share of cock and bull stories coming from the backseat of his cruiser, but this one, he thought, this one got high marks for originality and creative flair. My thought was, he has an exceptional amount of details for a story that he possibly could have just concocted. I called a detective that worked in our central investigations unit, and I said,

I've got a guy down here that is telling me he is part of a murder-for-hire story, and I kind of believe him. And she said, well, sure, bring him up here. Let's talk to him. Let's see what his deal is. As he waited to be interviewed by detectives, Aaron Wilkinson went through all the contortions of withdrawal. He paced, he scratched, he doubled over his lanky frame and put his bald head between his knees, and then he unfolded like a carpenter's ruler and did it all again you all right yeah i'm just gonna get sick is it uh michael charles it had been his hunt for heroin that

brought aaron to the east side that night but he told detectives it had been murder that brought him to Charleston. A contract killing. And who was the target of this plot? Well, Wilkinson wasn't sure of the pronunciation, so he spelled it out. Latham. That was a name the cops knew. The Lathams were prominent people. Chris, a high society banker. Nancy, on the lottery commission. Now it seemed one of them had been marked for death.

But which one? Aaron Wilkinson was beat, strung out, dog tired, after logging thousands of highway miles in less than a week. Is there anything I can get you? No, ma'am, just another body. Oh, yes, the body he had hurt. His head ached. His eyelids were heavy.

Aaron figured it must be two, maybe three in the morning. The Charleston cops had taken the first crack at him because that's where he'd been arrested. But then North Charleston cops took over because that's where his hotel was and detectives wanted to search his room. Talking, talking, talking. They'd been at it for hours, ever since his arrest. The same questions asked a dozen ways. Detectives digging for details of a murder plot. A plot Aaron said he wanted to stop.

It had all started six days earlier in Louisville, Kentucky, Aaron told the cops. A friend had asked him to tag along on a midnight run to Nashville to pick up some drugs. And then part of the way down here, I realized we weren't on the road to Nashville, that I was in the mountains. Somewhere outside of Louisville, Aaron said he dozed off. And when he woke up, he was at a truck stop in East Tennessee. The driver that night, the friend who talked Aaron into going to Nashville, well, that was Sam Yenawine, a guy Aaron had done time with back in Kentucky.

They'd been cellmates. They'd become friends. Though, to hear Aaron tell it, he didn't really have much choice. Nobody in prison wanted to be on Sam Yenawine's bad side. Big, loud, and funny, and violent at the same time. If he was your friend, he was a good friend. If he was not your friend, he was not a good friend. Once Sammy finished pumping gas, Aaron asked him why they were headed eastbound, away from Nashville. Sammy just gave him the corner of a smile and said,

change of plan. They were going to South Carolina. I asked him why he didn't tell me, because I would have rather told my wife where I was really going. And he said for that exact reason, because he didn't want my wife to know where I was going, that we were coming to South Carolina, because he had taken money to kill someone.

Shocking? Well, yes. But not a complete surprise. Aaron knew Sam was a killer. Knew he'd once stabbed a man to death who'd rented a room in his house, then slashed his throat. Sam always claimed it was self-defense,

but really? Sammy had set fire to the dead man's body, left it burning in the kitchen. According to Sammy, then he nonchalantly went back to bed and was sound asleep when his wife smelled smoke and called 911. The house burned to the ground, leaving his wife and three kids homeless. No, Sammy was not a deep thinker. It takes very little to set him off. He doesn't have talks. He doesn't argue. He just kind of lashes out.

He had never done so with me, but I'd witnessed it numerous times. A volatile and violent man, to be sure. One who could quickly turn on a friend, too. But, Aaron said he told Sammy he wanted no part of a murder scheme. I got out of the car and started walking. He came and just asked me to get in the car so he could talk to me. And he asked me if I would just ride with him, that he would give me 2,500 hours if I would just ride with him, that he would give me $2,500 if I would just ride along.

Of course, Aaron should have said no. Could have kept on walking. But $2,500? Aaron had a serious heroin habit. And so he got back into the car. Once they got to Somerville, a small town about 25 miles north of Charleston, Aaron said Sammy stopped at a Walmart and bought a drop phone so he could call his contact.

And as they rolled on toward Charleston, said Aaron, he began to pick up bits of those conversations. Chief among them, Sammy's contact was a woman. She had called him from her drop phone. And as they were talking on the way into Charleston, they agreed to meet at a hotel on, I think, West Montague.

He had parked at a Waffle House and had her park at the hotel. And whenever he got out of the car to go meet her, I saw her coming out of the hotel. And I saw him get in the truck and start talking. And probably two minutes later, he came back to the car and got in. And he had the money. Ah, yes, the money. Five grand in cash, on top of the 5,000 Sammy had already been paid.

And Aaron understood there would be at least another 20,000 coming once the job was done. Aaron told the cops that Sammy's contact drove a white Durango SUV and checked them into a cheap roadside motel, a gaudy lemon-yellow place that had a red roof and one of those long balconies on the second floor that offers expansive views of the parking lot. When we went to the hotel, Sammy went in and went to sleep. And when I went to the bank to deposit money he asked me to. And when I called my wife, she told me the whole plot and what was really going on. Aaron's wife, Bethany, back in Louisville, had gotten the full story from Sammy's girlfriend, Rachel, after the boys had left on their little road trip.

The hit had to happen within a week, Bethany told him. There was a deadline. The Latham divorce trial started Monday, April 8th. Sammy's mission was to make sure that one of the Lathams did not show up for that trial. After a few hours of shut-eye, said Aaron, he and Sam Yenawine drove out to Sullivan's Island, a barrier island off the Charleston coast. Sammy's contact had something she wanted to give them. They drove in silence, mostly, taking in the sights as they crossed the big iron swing bridge

that connects the island to Mount Pleasant. They could smell the salt air now, hear the slow swells thump and hiss along the beach. It sounded like the ocean was somehow breathing. The house that we'd stopped at, the back of it was on the beach. There was like a beach access, I think, in between that house and the house next door. Sammy got out and walked around the back of the house.

And in between the lattice, you could see the pylons that the house was sitting on. And she handed him the packet, the vanilla envelope. And then he just came back and got in the car. Inside the envelope was a trove of information. Call it a hit packet. Everything a couple of out-of-town assassins might need. It had some Google map images, I guess, of the location of the house. It had some pictures of the house that were taken off of a realty website.

And it had another picture of the front of the house. And there was one picture that looked like it was a family picture. The photo was clearly a family picture that had been cut in half. Snapped in a restaurant, perhaps? Some festive, happy occasion long past? As Aaron Wilkinson leafed through the packet, Some festive, happy occasion long past? As Aaron Wilkinson leafed through the packet, he must have felt the prickling sensation of panic rising.

In a later interview with Dateline, Aaron told us it hadn't seemed real before, and then he saw the photos. I mean, it just kind of hit home, I guess, whenever, even like when my wife had told me who was supposed to be murdered. It just seemed so, it seemed so surreal. I was, it was almost looking at it from just like a detached way. I didn't, it just seemed unreal. And in the condition I was in, it didn't, it didn't help any. Aaron told the detectives he'd wanted to derail the murder plot right then and there, but he didn't know how.

Hothead Sammy was committed. Money had changed hands. The slightest flinch by Aaron, he knew, could be fatal. Sammy wouldn't tolerate doubt or hesitation now. And the worst of it was, he wasn't just a threat to Aaron. No, Aaron's wife, Bethany. What would Sammy do to her?

Then, as if by divine intervention, Sammy's phone rang. It was his girlfriend, Rachel, back in Louisville. And she was livid. Sammy and Rachel began arguing and just like crazy, screaming at each other all the way into North Charleston. What were they fighting about? Well, let's say for now that Rachel thought Sammy was cheating on her. and in retaliation, she threatened to have sex with her ex-husband and take the money Sammy had already collected for the hit. We went back to the hotel, and Sammy and Rachel were still arguing and screaming. At one point, said Aaron, Sammy wanted to go to the Walmart to pick up some essential hitman supplies,

like rubber gloves. And he brought the phone and his running argument with Rachel with him. While we were in Walmart walking around trying to find gloves, him and Rachel were arguing on the phone, still just screaming back and forth at each other. It was ridiculous. People were looking at us in the store.

I mean, screaming at the top of his lungs, and he don't care who's listening, who's looking at him. Just saying that when he gets back there, he's going to kill her husband, he's going to break her jaw, he's going to, I mean, just making threats and threats and threats. Sammy was so torqued up, he trashed the hotel room when they got back. It was then, Aaron said, he saw an opportunity to sidetrack Sammy and maybe put an end to all this murder-for-hire business.

We just kind of sat on opposing beds, and I told him it might be a good idea to just go back to Louisville and get whatever him and Rachel has got going on settled. Because he couldn't do anything. He was probably going to make mistakes if he was so agitated. And he said that it might be a good idea. So, less than 24 hours after arriving at Charleston, Aaron and Sammy were on the road again, headed home to Louisville.

Aaron said he briefly thought the whole murder plot idea might have died on the highway that night. But no. When they rolled into Louisville at six o'clock the next morning, Sammy said that after he dealt with Rachel, he was going back to Charleston to finish the job. I didn't really know what to do. Now, many people in a moment like that might choose to walk away. A solid citizen might even alert the police, tell them someone was about to be murdered. But Aaron? No, Aaron didn't do that. I've done quite a bit of time in prison. I know you don't talk to the police. It's kind of like a rule of thumb. The bad things happen to people that do talk to the police

and do cooperate with them. So I was just hesitant to do that. Then in a flash of drug-addled genius, Aaron got an idea. He would volunteer to do the hit all by himself. The only thing I could think of was just tell him that I would do it instead, that I would go in his place. And it didn't take just 10 or 15 seconds.

He consented to doing it. He consented to let me do that. I think he just was relieved that he wasn't going to have to deal with the hassle of doing it or figuring out a way to do it. But here's the thing. Aaron's plan was a ruse. He said he never intended to carry out the hit. No, he told the cops he was just playing for time. The new plan was just to wait it out, to stay in a hotel and act like that I was going to carry it out. The way Aaron said he figured it, if the hit didn't happen before the divorce trial began,

then the motive for murder would be moot. I figured if I could just make it five days and it would kind of by default fix my problem, I just figured I could just wait it out in a hotel. But I didn't have enough money to stay the full six days. So, okay, the money thing would have to be worked out on the fly. But the important thing was Aaron had a plan. He packed up his wife and dog to keep them safe in case Sammy got wise. And he hit the highway. Charleston's 600 miles. That was the plan.

The problem was Aaron and Bethany didn't plan on running out of heroin. I'm addicted to heroin. I Googled on my phone where to buy heroin in Charleston, South Carolina, and it told me to go to American Street. And then that cop intervened, and now here was Aaron spilling the whole sordid story. The detectives were impressed with Aaron's command of the details, but still, was any of it really true? They only had the word of a squirming junkie and his strung-out wife. So, they asked Aaron, what did he have in the way of, I don't know, proof?

Could he give them any tangible evidence that someone hit packet, which just happened to be back in his hotel room. Next on Murder and Magnolias. In 26 years in law enforcement, it's the first one I've ever gotten like that. About a murder for hire. About a murder for hire. About a murder for hire that was in play. I was feeling a lot of emotions. I was scared because I didn't know if our lives were still in any danger. My school told me that I was a danger by being on campus, so they made me leave. Thank you. Drew is the audio editor. Thomas Kemen is assistant audio editor.

Keone Reed and Reese Washington are associate producers. Susan Nall is senior producer. Adam Gorfain is co-executive producer. Liz Cole is executive producer. And David Corvo is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, Bryson Barnes is Technical Director, sound mixing by Bob Mallory. Nina Bisbano is Associate Producer.