Dateline Originals - Murder & Magnolias - Ep. 5: Deal or No Deal?

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

A hit man makes a choice, and the trial gets underway.This episode was originally published on December 6, 2022. 

It was midnight when the bells of St. Michael's Church began pealing long and loud, ringing in 2014. And all across the city of Charleston, glasses clinked and revelers smooched, everybody wishing one another a grand and glorious new year, full of hope and promise. Of course, seasonal cheer was in short supply over at the Elkanan Detention Center. It was lights out at the county jail. Where Aaron Wilkinson stared into the darkness above him and listened to the guttural sounds of the sleeping men around him

and thought about the trial to come that might keep him behind bars for a long, long time. I guess I was kind of angry at God for, I mean, just feeling sorry for myself. In the weeks after his arrest, Aaron had clammed up. Instead of being rewarded for exposing a murder plot, federal prosecutors made it clear they wanted Aaron to get serious prison time for his role in the plot. He was going to go to trial with everybody else.

If he wasn't looking at a gun found in his car, he wouldn't have said anything. Comments like that upset Aaron no end. So now the way Aaron saw it, no immunity, no testimony. He'd recant, he told them. He'd say his earlier statements to detectives had been made while he was under the influence of heroin. If he revealed everything and still got a long sentence on the gun charge, just no, thought Aaron.

He'd take his chances in front of a jury, thank you very much. What must Chris Latham and Wendy Moore have been thinking, lying in their separate wings of the big county jail, sloughing around on thin strips of foam over cold concrete benches? If not for Aaron Wilkinson, they'd be snug in their big beach house, comfy on a fine, thick mattress beneath 500-count linen sheets, drifting off to the rhythmic pounding of the distant surf. But no, here they were, a banker and his executive assistant, jailed like common criminals. Their reputations ruined ruin their future in doubt.

In six weeks, they go on trial for plotting murder. Happy New Year? Oh no, hardly. In this episode, you'll hear from the former executive assistant accused of being the plot's mastermind. It hurts my feelings sometimes, but if you know me, then you usually love me. You'll hear from prosecutors convinced the banker was behind it.

I think he felt like the laws that apply to people like Sam Yeneline and Aaron Wilkinson don't apply to, you know, rich bankers. You'll hear some argue that blame belonged to a dead man. If there was some sort of criminal plot against Nancy Latham, it had to start and stop with Sam Yenawine. And you'll hear about the heart-stopping moment. Because what happens in court isn't always what you might expect. I remember Chris kind of got this look on his face like, yeah, we're getting off.

What was going on in here, in your head? In my head, I thought, oh my gosh, this is not good. This is not good. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Episode 5 of Murder and Magnolias, a podcast from Dateline. The Elkanah Detention Center is not much to look at. It's a big, boxy, modern-looking thing with concrete slab walls and all the utilitarian grace of a Soviet-era apartment block. But then, people don't go there for the architecture. I went there to see Wendy Moore. The woman investigators claimed was at the center of a plot to kill the wife of her former lover, Chris Latham.

While waiting for the guards to check us in and inspect our equipment, I reviewed what I knew about Wendy Moore, which in a nutshell was this. Wendy, former wife of a killer, had gone on to capture the heart of a banker. She was a mother, just like the woman she was accused of plotting to kill. So many contradictions. And yet there was one thing about the woman guards brought to meet us that was consistent with everything I'd heard. At 38, Wendy Moore looked like a cover girl. Long blonde hair, big blue eyes, a toothpaste commercial smile.

Wearing a worn denim shirt and a sweater over her jail scrubs, she looked just like a soccer mom who'd popped into a Starbucks. But no, there was more to Wendy Moore than that. She was only happy to tell me. I've had a long, hard life. I say I lived 80 years in my 38, so it's been a long, long road. The road for Wendy Moore began in the Midwest, its tortured backstory familiar to all too many in this country. Teenage pregnancy, early marriage, early divorce, sexual abuse.

As a kid, said Wendy, she was constantly being shuffled from one relative to the next. Back and forth across state lines. Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky. You're hopping around from town to town, school to school. Different people all the time. There's no stability whatsoever. Well, the only constant is God. He's the only one that never leaves.

You tend to hear a lot of that sort of talk during jailhouse interviews. Well, the only constant is God. He's the only one that never leaves. You tend to hear a lot of that sort of talk during jailhouse interviews. But Wendy was, said she was, rather a special case. Her relationship with the Almighty, she told me, was longstanding. I always joke and say a lot of kids had imaginary friends and I had Jesus. You know, like they'd play with their imaginary friends and I would talk to Jesus or play, you know. I guess a lot of people get born again once they get inside a place like this. Yeah, no. I was in church my whole life.

I was baptized when I was little, but then I redid it when I was 16 because I felt like I really knew what it meant then. Unlike her parents, said Wendy, she finished high school. Was on her way to college, too, but then she got sidetracked. Oops, I got pregnant. And your own beliefs would prevent you from ending that pregnancy? Yeah, I would not do that. That's not something I was willing to do, but I also wasn't willing to fight with someone for 18 years. So when my boyfriend said he didn't want to be strapped with that, I said I'd do it on my own. She said she was living in a rented trailer when she met Sammy Yenawine.

He was one of the local toughs in the trailer park, and he seemed to want to protect her. It's funny because in our first couple dates, like, one of the things he said to me was, well, you're such a good girl. And I was like, well, yeah. And he says, I know I do something you don't like. And I was like, what? And he said, I smoke. And I said, yeah, I don't like that.

I had no idea he was talking about marijuana. And he didn't tell me after that either. Wendy said she didn't do drugs, didn't approve of Sammy doing drugs either. But soon she was pregnant with her second child. They got married. They moved to a slightly bigger trailer, this one mouse infested. And then Wendy got pregnant again. Number three. I said, Sam, we got to move. We got to get out of here. He said, you got to get a job. I said, we have three little kids. I have a high school education and nothing

else. What am I supposed to do? I said, I will barely make enough to pay for daycare. I'll probably owe the daycare money before I get my paycheck. A lot of young couples face that problem. But Sammy? Sammy had a solution that most husbands wouldn't consider. He said, well, you could, you could be a stripper, you could be an exotic dancer, and you'd make a lot of money. And I was like, I was crushed. I was like, how could you love me and want me to do something like that? And he was like, well, I mean, it'll get us out of here. And I said, Sam, that's a sin. You know, that's a sin. And he said, so is pride. So is pride.

Well, he's got you there. He said, it's your selfish pride that's keeping us here. And so after weeks, you know, dealing with this and hearing over and over that I was sitting on a gold mine and I refused to use it. And it was my selfish pride that was keeping my family there. You look at your kids and you say, OK, I'll swallow my pride. How'd it feel to do that stuff? Horrible. You come from an abused background anyway. All you're doing every single time is reabusing yourself.

That's awful. Mind you, it seemed to work for them. The Etowines set up their new enterprise in an old two-story house in Louisville. The family lived upstairs. The downstairs was all business. There was me and a couple other girls, and we just had high-end clientele that would pay to come in for a private showing, you know, a private strip show.

And whatever else? No, there was no sex. There was never any sex. Well, that's not what Aaron Wilkinson heard from Sammy himself. And it's not what Wendy's second husband, the one after Sammy, told Nancy Latham. A story about filming unsuspecting clients in the act. So I asked Wendy and she said, never happened. No, no, no. There's no videos. I wasn't a porn star. I didn't do videos. That's all made up stuff. Yeah, because you know what? The internet was brand new.

I mean, there was no online anything. It was like the only internet part was it was like an advertisement page. And that's it. Here's where to call. Here's a couple pictures. What isn't disputed is the fact that by the time Sammy and Wendy started their little business, he was using and dealing drugs, hard drugs. According to Aaron Wilkinson, Sammy was high one night and killed the man in his house, Then set the man's body on fire, burned the house down with Wendy and the kids inside. The dead man?

He'd been a live-in bodyguard that Sammy had hired to keep Wendy's high-end clientele in line. Here's Wendy's version of what happened. While we were sleeping, Sam heard a noise coming from the kids' room. And so he got up to investigate. And when he did, he saw the man from the downstairs apartment we had shared a kitchen with coming out of the room. And the guy pulled a knife out of the block and was fighting with the knife with Sam.

And Sam grabbed the knife by the blade and wrestled the knife from the man and ended up killing the man. And then he took off all of his clothes, put them in a pile, and burned them and got back in bed with me and went to sleep. Short-sighted. The doctor said it was post-traumatic stress. So he wasn't convicted of murder or manslaughter, but he was convicted of arson. Right. It was found to be, you know, self-defense. So Sammy went to jail, where he met Erin Wilkinson. Left with three kids to raise on her own, Wendy divorced Sammy.

I sold the car I had, sold that trailer, used it as a down payment to buy my house by myself. Bought the house, continued to work from home so that I could be there with my kids. And I went to Liberty University. They have an incredible online program. Got a bachelor's of science in psychology and started in the master's program for management and leadership and actually got that degree too. So all of that from home. Wow. While I was getting my kids raised.

Along the way, Wendy married again and moved to Charleston. That was when she landed the job at U.S. Trust, a branch of Bank of America that caters to the bank's high rollers. Executive assistant to one of the wealthiest bankers in town. Was what you had studied the background for that or other work experience or what? Yeah, well, no, I had worked as an assistant for a long time when I worked from home. So I had the experience plus I had, you know, and gosh, when you work in an office, psychology sure does tie in. No, yes, it's easy to see how psychology

might come in handy when dealing with her new boss, particularly one who happened to be going through a nasty divorce. In 2012, Wendy divorced her second husband and started keeping steady company with Chris Latham. Well, you know, we started hanging out and I really got to know him as a person and how, I don't know, how sweet he was. So it was just a natural progression of, you know, two people who, you know, I was divorced. He was, we thought he would be divorced any minute.

And, you know. It got pretty ugly though, right? His divorce. His divorce did get very ugly. So it ramped up. It did. Oh, yes. Ramped up to the point where somebody

hired a team of hitmen. But in Wendy's telling, Nancy was the dangerous one. Cars belonging to her, to Wendy, and Chris were sabotaged. Tires were slashed. Lug bolts loosened. Brake lines tampered with. We were worried. We were scared. We wanted the divorce to hurry up and get over with. And then this other thing pops up. Suddenly Aaron is talking to the police. Out of the blue. But not only is he talking to the police, he showed them that hit pack.

Where would that material come from? I'm not going to discuss any of that. I'm not willing to discuss the case. What can you say about any of that stuff that would help us understand it? I can say that I would never do anyone harm. I would not want any harm to come to her at all. Nancy, of course, denies all those allegations of sabotage. So she said she said. Well, none of that really mattered now. The Latham divorce was history.

Far more serious for Wendy Moore and her lover Chris Latham was the murder-for-hire case that would be going to trial soon. To be continued... in the January breeze. Her thoughts were on Aaron Wilkinson, the man she credited with saving her life. I was at home, and I was expecting him to take a plea deal. That's what I'd been told by the U.S. attorneys. And they said, so you'll probably want to come down for that. It had been almost nine months to the day since Nancy first laid eyes on Aaron. That was at his bond hearing, shortly after

Aaron had exposed the plot to have her killed. When she closed her eyes, she could still picture him standing before the judge, shaved head and shackled, so tall he seemed to tower over his court-appointed lawyer. And as he was turning to leave, I could see him searching the faces of everyone in the audience and landed on mine, and he mouthed the words, I'm sorry. And when he mouthed the words,

I'm sorry, it was so palpable coming from him. I mean, I felt it. I felt that he was genuinely remorseful. Now Nancy got dressed for court again. This time, she hoped to watch a legal formality, Aaron taking a plea deal. He'd spend time in prison, though somewhat less than he might have,

and in exchange, he would agree to testify against Chris and Wendy. Their trial was less than a month away. But as Nancy prepared for the trip to the downtown courthouse her phone rang it was the prosecutor with bad news they said don't come down he's not going to take a deal they said we're sorry we we tried everything we could he's just not going to take a plea deal and okay I got off the phone and I was a little bit disheartened. But I kind of continued, you know, getting ready for my day, and I felt a push. Something was telling me to go downtown, to just go downtown anyway, go downtown.

It doesn't matter what they said, get in the car and go downtown. And I did. She was crossing the bridge into Charleston, she said, when a strange feeling came over her, a feeling so overwhelming, she started to cry. I was just sobbing. I just started sobbing. And I thought, oh my God, why am I sobbing?

And it wasn't a sad cry. It was just water pouring out of my eyes. And it hit me like a ton of bricks that the presence of God was in the car with me. And I know to some people that's going to sound like lunacy, but I felt the presence of God with me. Nancy Cannon had spent a lot of time at the federal courthouse over the past few months. So when she opened the front door, the guards at the metal detectors instantly knew who she was. They urged her to go home. But Nancy insisted on going to the courtroom anyway. It's where Aaron would have entered his plea.

Would have, but wasn't going to now. The judge's clerk told Nancy she wouldn't be allowed in the courtroom. So she was led to a small ante room across the hall. And there she waited. I had been there well over an hour, perhaps two, when there was a knock at the door. And the two U.S. attorneys on my case opened the door and they said, Ann, Aaron's attorney, would like to meet with you. And I said, yeah, okay, yes, I'll do it.

And they brought her in and she said, Miss Cannon, I would like to tell you what Aaron. And I said, no, no, before you say anything to me, anything, I need you to know this. The very first time I saw Aaron in the courtroom, I saw him turn around and search the courtroom until he found me. And when he did, he mouthed the words, I'm sorry. And I said, in that moment, I felt that he truly was asking for my forgiveness, and I gave it to him. And I said, I don't care what the U.S. attorneys say. At the end of the day, Aaron saved my life. So if I can speak on behalf of him to the judge when it's time for his hearing or sentencing,

even if he doesn't take the plea deal, I said, I'll do it. With that, the public defender left the room. And five minutes later, she returned with a message from Aaron. She said, Aaron's going to take the plea deal. He just wanted to know that you would forgive him. Isn't that something? It was awesome. And so Ann, myself, and the two U.S. attorneys, we're walking out into the hallway. And Ann looked at me and said, I know this is going

to sound crazy, but I've never felt the presence of God in anything like I have in this moment. And I said, I know. I picked him up on the bridge and I brought him here. He's been with us the whole time. The End As he surveyed the ornate courtroom, he would have seen the jury to his left, beyond that the prosecutor's table. In the first row, he would have seen Nancy, surrounded by her family and friends, and behind them, the assembled faces of reporters and spectators. To the judges' right sat the defendants, Chris Latham and Wendy Moore, and their attorneys. After both sides made their opening arguments, the prosecutors called a procession of witnesses, beginning with the cops and investigators who'd first heard Aaron Wilkinson's astounding revelation that a plot to kill Nancy was in the works.

For corroboration, they offered up the hit packet, chock full of photos of Nancy and her car and her house, and maps and lists of places where she might be picked up and followed, or even ambushed. When you look at those papers, they are clearly designed for finding someone. That's the voice of Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Williams. The maps aren't just maps. They're maps of wooded areas where you can park, pictures of back porches, descriptions of people's path of travels. Then they played that recorded phone call. Sammy asks if Aaron is going to be able to

finish the job as planned. Aaron says he will. I mean, they're talking about getting rid of guns, how to kill someone, where it should happen. We had this hit packet. So if you look at those documents and listen to that phone call, it's clear there was a murder for hire going on. Not only was there a murder for hire going on, but investigators testified they had clear evidence of who had paid the would-be assassins and who handed them the hit packet, and that was none other than Wendy Moore, the religiously devout mother of three. She'd rented a hotel room for Sam Yenawine. What was the best supporting evidence to show that Wendy was actually deeply involved in the problem? So she rents a hotel room.

She purchases a drop phone, meaning a phone that has no subscriber information to it. And then she uses that phone exclusively to talk with Sam Yenawine. So there's constant communication with Sam Yenawine. She clearly had met with him several times. The phone tower information we had showed them meeting up in Sullivan's Island. Most damning of all, perhaps, was that printer logs at Bank of America showed much of the information in the hit packet had been searched for and printed from Wendy's computer. That hit packet is clearly on its face designed for this murder for hire.

There's no way she prints that up for some other reasons. The case against Chris Latham rested in large part on his close relationship to Wendy. But in truth, the information on Nancy's movements and shopping habits, all that insider knowledge in the hit packet could only have come from Chris. The photos had been taken with his phone. We found on Latham's iPhone five pictures that he took secretly of his estranged wife Nancy at a trespass hearing. That is federal prosecutor Rhett DeHart.

She was sitting a couple of rows behind him, and he had pulled out his iPhone and over his shoulder. Unbeknownst to her, he was taking secret pictures of her. The prosecutors argued that Chris took those photos because he wanted Wendy to have a fresh picture of Nancy to send to the hit team, which he thought was in town that day. For me, that was sort of an epiphany. Once we found those photos on his iPhone of Nancy Latham where it's clear she doesn't know she's being photographed, he's doing it secretly,

for me, that removed any doubt that he was guilty. There was one other thing prosecutors wanted the jury to know. They had hours and hours There was one other thing prosecutors wanted the jury to know. They had hours and hours of Chris and Wendy's phone calls, recorded in the months after she was arrested. Can't wait to ravish you when I get here.

I can't wait either. It was through those calls that prosecutors learned Chris had arranged to pay the attorneys for both Wendy and her ex-husband Sammy, and bank records confirmed it. We had evidence that he had been not only paying for Wendy Moore's lawyer and coordinating payment for Yenawine's lawyer, but he was disguising the source of those funds. But the trial's star witness was, of course, Aaron Wilkinson, the man who revealed all to the police. We're going to Charleston to kill a woman. Weeks earlier, Wilkinson had also been a defendant in the case.

In the eyes of the prosecutors, just as guilty of conspiracy as Sammy and Wendy and Chris. He certainly was conspiring and involved in a murder for hire. Nathan Williams again. He talks about not wanting to do anything. You know, if that's true, he doesn't need to bring a gun to South Carolina. That hit packet should have been in the first dumpster he passed on his way out of Louisville.

Aaron was a flawed witness, to be sure. He was an ex-con, a drug addict, and a liar. But time and again, he insisted the core facts of his story were true. There had been a plot to kill Nancy. Wendy Moore had given Sammy Yenawine cash and a hit packet with detailed instructions. All of that had been independently corroborated by the feds. The evidence against Chris Latham and Wendy Moore and Aaron Wilkinson and Sam Yenowine is all physical evidence. I don't think we ever asked the jury to convict anyone based on Aaron Wilkinson,

but he was very good for furthering our investigation. Certainly, when he gave us that hit packet, that led us to the computer searches. Once Aaron Wilkinson finished his testimony, prosecutors called Nancy Cannon, the target of the murder plot, and her daughter Emily to the stand. Nancy was tearful as she described her disintegrating marriage and the months and months of terror after learning she'd been marked for death. Emily was stoic when she talked about her relationship with her father, both in the courtroom and later when she spoke with me. I think people are really capable of

anything. That's the voice of Emily Latham. And anyone who wants something, genuinely wants something, a lot of times they're willing to do anything to get it. And I think he really didn't want my mom around anymore, and he was willing to do anything to get that done. The defense did little to refute the physical evidence. The recorded phone call that Aaron made to Sammy clearly showed they were up to no good. The dropped phones, the hit packet, the cyber footprints that implicated Chris and Wendy. They were what they were. No, the defense would argue there was still room for doubt. If you squinted and looked at the evidence in just the right light.

Take the hit packet, for instance. They were able to connect it to a printer and a computer that she used. I don't think there was ever a way that they could technically directly connect it to her. That's the voice of David Ehler, Wendy's lawyer. I mean, is there another meaning or is there another way that they're connected to something else? Because you never did see anything that came out through any of the testimony beyond, of course, Aaron Wilkinson's testimony that there was ever an actual murder plan. Possible? Perhaps. But about as probable as having both Chris and Wendy's printers somehow vanish days after ATF agents knocked on her door. As for the $5,000 Wendy gave to Sammy Yenawine before the plot was exposed, vanish days after ATF agents knocked on her door.

As for the $5,000 Wendy gave to Sammy Yenawine before the plot was exposed, well, according to Ehler, that was just another one of those things, open to interpretation. Perhaps, he suggested, that Sammy was going to buy a car for one of the Yenawine kids with that money. They had children together. They, of course, had exchanged monies several times over the years. And that hotel room Wendy rented for Sammy? Well.

Renting a room for a family member in a lot of situations is fairly normal, particularly if it's an ex-family member that you don't want at your home. When it came to Chris Latham's defense, his attorney argued Chris had no motive to harm his ex-wife and had no connection with anyone who did. There was zero evidence that he even knew Sammy Yenawine or ever communicated with him. In my opinion, the evidence that they had against Chris was weak. That's the voice of Stephen Schmutz, Chris Latham's attorney.

Chris Latham had every idea that not only was he not going to be damaged in the divorce, that he was going to vindicate himself in the divorce. Might the prospect of losing half his assets and paying his ex-wife nearly $8,000 a month for life be motive for murder? No, said Schmutz. No, no, no. What does that add up to out of his $650,000? And also, it's not really $8,000. When you do the taxes, it comes to about $4,000. The property settlement, splitting it 50-50, that was already gone. He had absolutely no motive. And according to Schmutz, Chris Latham had no need to fear damage to his professional reputation. So what if the divorce trial exposed his affair with his executive assistant? Remember, this was well before the Me Too reckoning that brought down so many rich and powerful men.

We put witnesses on the stand, Bank of America witnesses, that just said that Chris Latham being fired because of an affair with Wendy Moore was absurd. There was even an employee that stated there'd be a lot of people fired here if that were the case. That was just not going to be the case. Chris Latham was not going to be fired because of his relationship with Wendy Moore. The defense argued that the only true criminals in this case were Sam Yenawine and Aaron Wilkinson. They were the ex-cons who plotted the murder. And why would they do that? Now, who knew the workings of the criminal mind? Sammy was dead. Couldn't ask him. And Aaron Wilkinson? Well, he was a liar. He was a man who lied to the police from the get-go about the gun, about why he was even at Charleston. It somewhat surprises me that Aaron Wilkinson got on that stand after telling the government four or five different stories. That somewhat surprised me.

It took the better part of three weeks to hear all the witnesses and present all the evidence. And then the attorneys summed up their cases and told the jurors what they thought a just verdict would be. And everyone in the courtroom, including Nancy Cannon, settled in for a long wait. Well, when it went to the jury, I felt quite confident. And the jury came back early on and asked the question, does the conspiracy have to meet every single criteria. And when they asked the judge, does a conspiracy have to meet every single criteria to be found guilty, I watched as Wendy turned around and smirked to her family like, yeah, we're going to get off.

They're not meeting all the criteria. And I remember Chris kind of got this look on his face like, you know, it was kind of a little nod of his head and a little, yeah, we're getting off. What was going on in here in your head? I thought, oh my gosh, this is not good. This is not good. And we went back to the room, which was one floor below where we were huddling. And I just started sobbing profusely. I couldn't stop. I could not stop. Next, on Murder and Magnolias, the jury decides.

I think I would just worry, gosh, is there a chance that there could just be one hole out and we have to try this case over again? We couldn't understand why some of them didn't feel the same way as the others felt. Murder and Magnolias is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Tim Beecham is the producer.

Brian Drew is the audio editor. Thomas Kemmon 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.