Dateline Originals - Murder & Magnolias - Ep. 3: Wendy #2

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

The investigation into a murder plot leads to a femme fatale with a past.This episode was originally published on November 22, 2022. 

What a pleasure it can be, how delicious the pretend terror, to sink into a dark safe place and listen to a scary story, to revel in the shivers. But to live at the center of such a story, the real thing, how different that is. And that difference is fear. You know, it's funny how emotionally you kind of vacillate in and out of, oh my God, this is real. And then there are moments where you just kind of compartmentalize it and feel like, well, it's happening to somebody else. Nancy Latham cycled through all those emotions in the hours after learning someone had paid to have her killed.

And you can almost turn it into something you're looking at like a third party. Just like it's a great story. And as long as I look at it like that, I don't have to deal with the hurt of it. Yeah, because there's a lot of hurt. A little bit. The questions danced around in her brain like so many lottery balls. Who? How? When? But mostly, why? She'd never dreamed she'd be the target of a murder plot. And that idea of wanting me to completely be obliterated off the face of the earth.

What did I do? What did I do to deserve it? In this episode, you'll hear more about the people believed to be behind the plot to kill Nancy. You'll learn about a beautiful femme fatale with a past. I think she is absolutely manipulative. I think she's a chameleon. I think she shows you what she wants you to see. You'll listen as a double life is exposed. He would introduce them to people as, oh, this is my son and this is my daughter. And that was just hard to think that your family is so disposable. And you'll discover the strange connection that brought two Kentucky ex-cons to Charleston

with orders to kill a banker's wife. It was a very unusual group of individuals involved. It sounds sort of implausible. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is episode three of Murder and Magnolias, a podcast from cold water. Pictures of her, pictures of where she lived. Detailed instructions to would-be assassins on how to get into her house, undetected. Even tips on where to park.

Ever since the day Nancy first saw that packet, she'd been replaying scenes of her life with Chris Latham over and over in her mind, wondering, how had it come to this? Inevitably, those thoughts circled back to that night on the lake in the pontoon boat. Nancy could still remember every detail. The look in her husband's eyes when he said he didn't want to be married anymore. The iron in his voice. Nancy had been puzzled then, at a loss. But the friends who'd listened to her recount that story over coffees or salad were unanimous in their opinion.

There had to be more to the story than he was telling Nancy. That's Nancy's friend, Kathy Harrell. I encouraged her to start doing a little bit of investigating and to find out just why he was, what possibly could be the reason why he had decided to do this. No clue.

No clue. Because Nancy doesn't think that way. And so when you don't think a certain way, it's hard for you to understand how others think. Sure. And your mind went there right away? My mind went there because I was suspicious, because I felt in my heart that my intuition told me that there was something more to this story than just, you know, he was tired of being married. Conversations like that had stuck with Nancy. But back then, she had no idea how to confirm suspicions that her husband might have another woman waiting in the wings. And then suddenly, it came to her. One night while rushing out to catch a ride to a business function,

Chris had left his wallet behind on his nightstand. Should she? Or shouldn't she? She did. So I opened up his wallet, and I found in it a label off of a bottle. Not a prescription, but a label that he had peeled off of a bottle. And it was for a little blue pill.

And I had no idea that he had this prescription and he did not get it filled at the pharmacy where we get all of our family stuff filled. Started digging a little bit more and went through his toiletry bag and I found the pills that he'd put in with his bottle of cholesterol pills. I also found male enhancement pills. I found androgel. That's a testosterone gel. It's a testosterone gel.

Well now, if Nancy hadn't been suspicious before, she was now. Come to think of it, the person who just picked up Chris for that business function was someone who worked closely with Chris at the bank. She was tall and blonde, the wife of another bank executive. Nancy knew this woman, considered her a friend. For reasons that will soon become obvious, we will call her Wendy number one. Was she the other woman? My husband is notorious for writing down his passwords. I knew that. And his phone was through Bank of America. And so he had written down in one of his notebooks his password to his account through the bank.

And so I pulled up his phone records and noticed that from the time that he had moved out of our bedroom and into the guest room, he was texting a phone number all night long. And when I say texting all night long, hundreds of texts. And I mean, one o'clock in the morning, 1.30 in the morning, two in the morning, three in the morning, six in the morning. They would text all night long and the text would stop during the middle of the day. So they would text up until the point that they saw each other at work and then the text would stop and then they would text up until the point that they saw each other at work, and then the text would stop, and then they would start again at that, you know, pick up once they separated again. So he had something pretty intense going on. Yeah, and I didn't know with who.

Now Nancy was like a hunting hound who caught the scent. And then I dug around a little bit more in his briefcase and got a few other passwords that he had attached to some financial documents of ours and started doing a little research on my own. A little? Armed with those passwords, Nancy was a virtual one-woman FBI. She could read her husband's emails. She knew when he and his lover, Wendy No. 1, were traveling together on business trips. One time, he left his computer up and on without being locked in password mode. And so I downloaded a program to find out everything on his computer and found an awful lot. A lot more than I would like to find. I even hate to say it because it's,

it ain't going to shine a good light on anybody. There was some risque material on there, photos and the like, a discreet dating site. I went through his listing of the things that he checked on the website, the description of himself, which I think he said that he was agnostic. He was a white male.

He wanted women between the ages of 25 and 40 within a 50-mile radius of his hometown. Yeah. So what happened at that stage for you? At that stage, I hired a private investigator. In fact, over the next few months, she hired three private eyes. And what did those gum shoes find? Well, just about what you'd expect.

And right out the gate, the PI called me and said, you know, we've seen them in the bar, sitting very close, talking and, you know, leaning into each other in a very intimate sort of way. And I hate to tell you this, but we just got video of her taking her overnight bag and going to his hotel room. And I said, was there anything else notable? And he said she was, when she went in, she was giggling and happy and very upbeat. And he just kept saying, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. And I said, it's okay. You know, being a Southern woman, we want to make it okay for everybody else. For months, Nancy stockpiled evidence of her husband's infidelities,

waiting for the moment when it might all be used to her advantage, when formal divorce proceedings finally began. But then, three months after they agreed to go slow and ease into an amicable divorce, this happened. Our New York trip was coming up. Every year we go to Spoleto. He's on the board of Spoleto, which is a big arts festival here in town. And typically, B of A hosts the very first cocktail evening gathering. I've hosted that for as long as we've sponsored it. And I said to him, so are we going to New York? And he looked at me and

said, no. Not this year. Chris told Nancy that his business colleague, Wendy number one, would be going in Nancy's place, helping him host the kickoff cocktail party. Of course, Nancy knew a good deal about that female colleague, something Chris didn't know she knew. To be replaced on the big New York trip by that woman? Well, Nancy was livid, and so she asked her private eye to keep an eye on them in New York. Didn't take long to get his report. The woman we're calling Wendy One was seen entering her husband's room that night, and she didn't emerge until the next morning. Nancy's next call was to her divorce lawyer.

An easy and amicable divorce was now off the table. I called my attorney and I said, that's it. He's got to get out of the house. I can't take it. And my attorney called his attorney. I was actually on a school field trip with my children. Chris calls me screaming at me, how dare you kick me out of my own house. You can't do this. And I just, finding out everything that I'd found out, I could not take one more thing. I couldn't. That was my limit. Battle lines. Chris cut off Nancy's credit cards. When she returned from that school trip the next day, she saw that Chris had already moved everything he wanted out of the house, but he

stuck around long enough to tell the girls that he and their mother were getting a divorce, said Nancy. And then he asked her to step into the kitchen. He said, I left a check to hold you over until Christmas. And it was mid-November. And he said, this is going to carry you through Christmas. I'll give you another check in January. I'm in a house. We've got bills to pay, gas to put in cars, clothes, Christmas presents, all of that, holidays coming up, and he left me a check for $300. And that was all he was giving me until he said the first of the year. So that's how the whole divorce business turned nasty. The uncivil war of Latham versus Latham. It was a divorce case not unlike hundreds of thousands of others that take place in this country every year. But this one was not quite like the others.

It was about six months before the murder plot came to light that Nancy discovered that the other woman she'd been tracking all these months had been replaced. Her husband had a new woman in his life. And guess what? Her name was Wendy Two. And so we'll call her that. Wendy Number Two. Her full name was Wendy Moore. They were both blonde. I think the

Wendy one was around my age, and Wendy two is about eight years, eight or nine years younger. This second Wendy, Wendy Moore, was Chris Latham's executive assistant. In addition to assisting Chris with his banking business, Wendy handled a lot of her boss's divorce paperwork, correspondence with lawyers and whatnot. Later, investigators would be very interested in hearing what Nancy had to say about Wendy Moore because there was something about her that would place her at the very center of their investigation.

It was this. One of Wendy Moore's two ex-husbands lived in Kentucky. His name was Sammy. Sammy Yenawine. The End adultery. Fault is used to determine the division of assets, the allocation of alimony, the whole ball of wax, really. But here's the thing. In South Carolina, the breadwinner, usually the man, pays no alimony at all if he can prove his wife cheated on him. It makes no difference whether he cheated first or last or longest. In the eyes of the law, it's the wife's transgression that matters, not demands. That's the way it was in 2013, and yes,

that's the way it is now. So my husband really had nothing to lose in admitting an affair, according to the state. It's not like he was going to be penalized financially. If you were having an affair, he wouldn't have to pay it. That's correct. But there was no penalty if he was having an affair. He was the breadwinner. He was the one who made all the money. Sure.

Oh, yes, Chris made plenty of money, about $650,000 a year. Nancy was asking for substantial alimony, $7,500 a month. On paper, that might have looked manageable on Chris's salary, but a bitter pill nonetheless. But if Chris could prove in court that she cheated, he'd pay nothing. And yet, Nancy knew a thing or two about her husband's personality and how carefully he guarded his image. The way Nancy saw it, her husband was more likely to agree to her terms than risk having his reputation for rectitude sullied in open court.

There was no sense for him not to admit the affair. He could easily say, yeah, I'm having an affair, what's it to you? But he wouldn't. And it was the fact that he wouldn't that we knew we had him. I said to my attorney, he's going to settle before we walk up those steps. He may wait until we are pushing the doors open to the courtroom, but I promise you he is going to settle. It was at a routine pretrial deposition in the summer of 2012 that Nancy first laid eyes on Wendy Moore. Wendy was answering questions, questions about documents in the Latham divorce case, and Nancy noticed that her husband couldn't seem to take

his eyes off of her. Even then, it did not hit me that she was sleeping with my husband. At one point in the deposition, Wendy mentioned that she was recently divorced and said, in a roundabout way, that it was all Nancy's fault. Because, said Wendy, Nancy's PI was snooping around and talked to her now ex-husband and got him to believe she'd been having an affair with Chris Latham. Sound like middle school? To Nancy, it sounded like a lie. My attorney looked at me and said, did you go talk to her husband? Did you hire a PI to talk to her husband? And I said, God, no, I don't even know who he is. It didn't take Nancy long to find out that Wendy number two's last husband was a man named Matt Robinson.

He managed a local pet store. I called Matt, and he agreed to meet with me at Starbucks. Robinson told Nancy he'd lied to Wendy about the private eye. But he knew all about the Latham divorce case, and he did suspect that Wendy was sleeping with Chris Latham and thought telling Wendy the private eye story might elicit a confession. He told me that his wife had, in months prior, commented on how she was so tired of covering for him having an affair with a different co-worker, and it was just driving her crazy. So every day she was coming home and she was bitching about my husband. And

he said, then all of a sudden it changed. No more complaints about covering up for his other affair. And every day, instead of looking like she always did going to work. Now she's taking extra time. She's really fixing her hair. She's wearing skin-tight outfits. And she's also going in on weekends and finding excuses to stay late. And, well, I can't be home this weekend. Then, as Nancy was rising to leave the coffee shop, Matt Robinson offered this. He said, you know, there's something I

really want to tell you, but I just, I don't want to seem hateful. I don't want to seem vindictive. And I said, hold that thought. I'm going to get you another coffee. And I walked up to the barista and I ordered both of us another coffee and we sat right back down. The thing that Matt Robinson had to tell Nancy was that his ex-wife, Wendy, had once operated an adult entertainment business out of her home. That was back in Louisville, 10 or 12 years earlier, before she'd even met Matt.

At the time, she'd been married to Sammy Yenawine, a petty criminal and future hitman for hire. The story was that when she and Sammy Yenawine were first married, they were young. They had three kids. They needed money. He was a meth addict. And so she started performing at her house on the internet with men that would come in. What was the nature of those performances? Well, it depends on who you ask, but Nancy was all ears. Well, holy moly, did we just find out something important? So it was at that point I thought, wow, now if my husband really has feelings for this woman,

I've got something I can use as leverage. All's fair in love and war. That's how Nancy saw it. Wendy's ex, Matt Robinson, declined to speak with us about his meeting with Nancy. But local press reports and court documents confirm that Wendy Yenawine did in fact operate an adult entertainment business out of her home in 2000 and 2001 when she was married to Sammy.

Aaron Wilkinson, Sammy's partner in crime, said Sammy had told him all about it when they were in prison together. From what Sammy had told me, that's how they made money. I mean, he told me they made like $10,000 a month doing that. By the end of her meeting with Matt Robinson, Nancy was obsessed with digging up every detail she could find on Wendy Moore. In fact, for a while, she even thought about going to Kentucky

to find Sam Yenawine and see what he could tell her about his ex-wife. I asked my brother, Neil, you know, how would you feel about going out with me to Kentucky to try and meet Sammy? And he said, gosh, you know, I really don't think that's a good idea. It was only later, when the murder plot was uncovered, that Nancy realized the man she'd been so hot to find months earlier had actually been in Charleston hunting her. I feel like if I'd shown up at his door at that time, he had no idea what I looked like. I don't even know until he got the hip packet if he really would have put it together who I was or what my name was. Instead, Nancy kept digging closer to home and discovered that after moving out of the marital home,

Chris had moved into a big fancy six-bedroom beach house on Sullivan's Island. And so, one night, she and one of her girlfriends went to the island to snoop a little. They positioned themselves on the deck of an empty rental house next door, and from there they could see right into Chris's house. The lights were on inside, so they pulled up two rocking chairs and settled in to see what they could see. It was just before Christmas, and through the window they saw the twinkling lights on the tree and the presents piled high beneath it. And there was Chris, sitting with Wendy number two

and her teenage kids. The place had the disorganized look of a family, shoes scattered, schoolbooks in haphazard heaps. And that's when it hit Nancy like a two by four. Wendy Moore and the kids she had with Sam Yenawine weren't just visiting Chris. They must be living there as a family. The pain that I felt was not as much for me but for my children because it wasn't just that he had abandoned me for her. He had accepted her children into his life as if they were his own.

He took them on vacations. What I'd been told was that he would introduce them to people as, oh, this is my son and this is my daughter. And that was just hard to think that the three of us, not just me, I understand a husband and wife not getting along, but that your family is so disposable. And that was incredibly difficult and actually quite depressing. And all of that was before Nancy learned about the hit packet

and the connection between her husband's lover and the would-be trigger man, Sam Yenawine. In retrospect, Nancy could see how the pieces fit, how the whole thing came to be. You know, sometimes you just, you envision how something must have played out. An imagined scene, to be sure, but so vivid and so real that Nancy felt

it couldn't be truer if she'd actually seen it with her own eyes. I imagine Chris and Wendy in bed together, having spent the evening however they spend the evening, but being in bed one night, and I can just imagine Chris looking at her and say, you know, I'd really like to kill that bitch. I'd imagine Chris looking at her and say, you know, I'd really like to kill that bitch. I'd see Wendy looking at him going, I can help

you with that. And I think that's how it all started. I think one day he was venting and said I'd like to kill her and she said, yeah, I got an idea. To be continued... A cool breeze was coming off the ocean, and the pinkish afternoon light had a glow to it, like the inside of a shell. It had been just 12 hours since the plot to kill Nancy Latham was exposed. The ATF agents riding in the Suburban had Nancy in a secure location, and agents in Kentucky had the alleged trigger man, Sammy Yenawine, under surveillance. Now it was time to approach the woman who seemed to be at the center of it all, Yenawine's ex-wife and Chris Latham's current girlfriend, Wendy Moore. They didn't have enough to make an arrest yet, but they were hoping to get lucky.

Maybe a spontaneous confession? According to ATF agent Bobby Callahan, Wendy met them at the door. We confronted Wendy that evening in the hopes that maybe she would cooperate with us. She chose not to. What was her reaction to your question and your presence? She seemed surprised, and she indicated to us

that she would like to have a lawyer. With that, Wendy turned on her heels and vanished behind a closing door. The agents were barely back in their cars when, 10 miles away in Charleston, a cell phone buzzed. And Chris Latham answered. I got the call from Wendy. She said, I've had three or four people come here saying that they're federal agents and that they want to question me about, you know, there's a plot to harm Nancy. Well, now, what's a straight arrow type of guy to do in a situation like that? Call the soon-to-be ex-wife to see if she and the children are okay?

Or get your new girlfriend a lawyer. Chris Latham chose the latter. You know, when you really care for somebody, I would hope somebody would do the same for me. For the next 48 hours, ATF agents Joe Boykin and Bobby Callahan tried to corroborate as much of Aaron Wilkinson's story as they could. Aaron had told them about the shopping trip for burner phones and gloves.

Store video confirmed it. He'd told them that Sammy Yenawine's contact in Charleston was his ex-wife, Wendy. He said Sammy told him Wendy gave him money. Bank records confirmed that, too. She sent the money via MoneyGram. That's the voice of ATF agent Bobby Callahan. She had sent them, I believe, roughly a month prior to them leaving Kentucky, coming to South Carolina. She had sent them $3,000. And then a day or two before they arrived in South Carolina, she sent them another $2,000. By Monday, April 8th, the agents were ready to move.

Sammy Yenawine was picked up that morning while walking to his car. But Wendy Moore was given a chance to turn herself in. Were you afraid that she might flee? No, I don't think we were afraid she was going to flee. That's Agent Joe Boykin. She was not a person that had a criminal background. I don't believe she'd ever been arrested before. She had an attorney of record. We had dialogue with that attorney. We had every belief that she was going to surrender herself without any kind of incident.

But she did, in fact, show up with her lawyer at the jail at five o'clock on that Monday afternoon, and we booked her into the Charleston County Detention Center. Wendy showed up at the jail wearing a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt. Her long blonde hair swept back and tucked behind her ears. And then something quite odd happened, said Boykin. Callahan went off to do the paperwork, leaving Boykin alone with Wendy. Whereupon, she sidled up to him and flashed her baby blues. She leaned over to me and she said, I know you guys probably don't like me very much,

but I could sure use a hug. A hug? No, not from Joe Boykin. And I thought how outrageous a comment to make that here's this woman who's being charged and in jail for a cold and callous plot to murder a mother of two, wanting sympathy. All that weekend, Nancy and her two girls had been living under virtual lockdown in the home of her friends Kathy and Bobby Harrell. We had heavy security here. You nervous? Oh, of course. Yes. That's the voice of Kathy Harrell.

It was nervous, but we were also in shock. And Nancy and I just got busy and started just trying to wrap our brains around what had happened or what was going on and put the puzzle pieces together and waited. Every time her phone would ring, it was hopefully a new piece of information, and we were waiting for the arrest to be made. We wanted something to happen right away. They were anxious, skittish. Were there other assassins involved?

Was someone lurking in the woods nearby? Investigators couldn't be sure. Though the girls were comfortable in the Herald home, they'd practically grown up there, so it was almost like an extended sleepover. But the presence of so many armed guards in and around the house felt, well, it felt strange. They were like Rottweilers guarding the gates against all comers, unsettling, yet reassuring.

Well, when we were at Bobby and Kathy's, Emily actually did a lot of going into her bedroom, closing the door. But the one thing that she found great solace in were the security guards. And so it got to the point when we had these guards with us 24 hours a day and then they went to just a night shift. Emily stopped sleeping in her bedroom and she would actually sleep in the den where the guards were. I feel that if the police were not with us,

the fear factor of it would have been raised exponentially. That's the voice of Nancy's youngest daughter, Madison. I was grateful that they were looking after us. It was a weird transition, but I'm glad we had them. After the arrests of Wendy Moore and Sam Yenowine, Nancy and Kathy felt sure Chris would be next any day now. But the days in seclusion just went on and on. As long as Chris was free, nobody felt safe.

The first two weeks, you could almost tell yourself it was a vacation as opposed to being a security risk. But we knew we couldn't live with them forever, and we had to find some accommodation where we could go. And then you're just terrified because is it going to be just the three of us? Are we still going to have security? And if it's just the three of us, where are we going to go and what are we going to do? Eventually, Nancy found a new safe house, a small two-bedroom furnished apartment for her and the girls and the security detail.

And they all crowded in to wait for the all clear. The reality of it is sinking in because we're not in a familiar place. We're very limited in the clothing that we have and the things that we have to kind of entertain us. It was almost as if we were in a prison. Though Emily was not allowed to return to college, Madison still had to finish her junior year of high school. For Maddie to go to school in the morning, an officer would come pick her up, drive her to school,

pick her up from school, drive her back, using defensive driving techniques to make sure they're not followed. If we had to go get groceries, I couldn't leave my children behind. So we all went to get groceries. No man left behind. I mean, nobody stayed by themselves ever. The security people installed cameras inside and outside of the apartment so that they could monitor everything that moved. And crowded into

that little place, they all began to feel like family. Nancy and the girls gave their minders nicknames. A female officer who always wore the cost baseball hat became known as Gator. A male officer who reminded Nancy of the actor Russell Crowe was dubbed Maximus. I have to say, while the people that were with us and guarded us made us feel very protected. Because they were so on point, it was quite terrifying because you did feel like, you know, your life was in peril. Though Nancy and the girls were in hiding, Nancy's husband, Chris, was free to live his life as if nothing had changed. He continued to work at the bank. He acted as custodial parent for Wendy's kids.

For the life of her, Nancy couldn't understand why he had not been arrested. But federal agents have their own way of doing things. Those long, hot summer months when Chris Latham was allowed to roam free were extremely valuable. Next, on Murder and Magnolias. There's only one side of this story that's been out there and the media, in my opinion,

has taken this and I've been tried and convicted in the media long before this ever started. Murder and Magnolias is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Tim Beecham is the producer. Brian 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.