Dateline Originals - The Last Appeal - Ep. 1: Nikki

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

When 2-year-old Nikki is rushed to a Texas hospital and doesn’t survive, her father, Robert Roberson, is accused of causing her death. Prosecutors say he shook and beat her in a case of "shaken baby syndrome." This episode originally published on October 6, 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Your morning to you, Mr. Hope. How are you? I'm blessed, I'm blessed. I'm sitting in a plastic chair inside the notorious Polonski unit in West Livingston, Texas, Death Row. Across from me, a man named Robert Robertson. We've got a lot to talk about. Yes, sir. He's a big guy, more than six feet, wearing a white prison jumpsuit.

We're so close, I could shake his hand, if not for the pain of plexiglass between him. On October 16th, 2025, Robert is scheduled to die by lethal injection. How are you preparing for your own death, your own execution? I'm at peace if it happens, but I'm not ready because I don't think I should be executed when I'm innocent. In 2003, a jury convicted Robert of murdering his two-year-old daughter Nikki. Prosecutors say the evidence is overwhelming. Mr. Robertson took the life of his daughter.

And I just remember that cold face, and I look, and that poor little girl was just, she was dead. Some in Nikki's family believe Robert's date with death is long overdue. This is his third execution date. It's time. It's no more waiting. But a growing army is rallying behind Robert. They believe he is innocent. I almost cannot believe what I'm reading. They argue his case urgently needs another life.

Look, now, before it's too late. Let's take all this evidence, go back to the courtroom, go back to a jury, and let them decide. As the days ticked down to Robert's execution, I set off to East Texas. Oh, I've never seen a picture ever like this. Beautiful little girl. I'm on the hunt for answers about what happened to Nikki all those years ago, learning critical information the jury never got to hear. We're just fact-checking on the document that was discovered here.

finding details that have never been reported. Have you done interviews on this topic before? No, this is the very first. Is the state about to put an innocent man to death? I am terrified that that is what we are racing towards. I'm Lester Holt, and this is The Last Appeal, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 1, Nicky. It's September 2025, one month before.

Robert Robertson is scheduled to be executed. I'm in Palestine, Texas, once a busy railroad hub. Today, downtown looks more like an empty movie set. It's the town where two-year-old Nikki was taken to the hospital. On the morning of January 31, 2002, a man walked in pushing a woman in a wheelchair. Resting on her lap was Nikki. She was unconscious, barely breathing.

A nurse named Kelly Garganis was the first to see Nikki that morning. Has she talked before? Anybody? No. I'm with producer Dan Slapion. We wanted to speak with Kelly, so we stopped by her house.

Hello? Hello, hi. Are you, Kelly? Hi, I'm Lester Holt from NBC News. Yes, sir. My colleagues here. We're trying to contact you about a story we're working on

around the Robert Robertson case. Kelly is wearing pink scrubs. She invites us in and agrees to talk to me about that morning 23 years ago. So you've been working all day? Yes, sir. At the same hospital? At the same hospital, I've been there 28 years. Back when all this was happening, you were in ER nurse.

Yes, sir. Is the pediatric part of that job emotionally hard? Can be, yes. Can be very emotionally. And like Mickey, the little girl, till this day, I'll never forget that day. A gentleman walks through the door, not the ambulance bay, but the main door, and there was a lady that was in a wheelchair, and I could tell she was in a hospital gown. And there was something on her lap, and I saw that there was a jacket. So I took the jacket off, and there was a baby in her lap that was blue, literally, probably the bluest I've ever seen of a child.

We went in the trauma room. When we started the head-to-toe assessment, the back of her head was soft and kind of mushy. And we were like, something else is going on here. Kelly remembers leaving the trauma room to grab Nikki's medical chart. That's when Robert Robertson approached her, saying he was Nikki's father. And he looked at me and all he said to me, he said, she fell off the bed that far. I should point out you showed your hands now at about 12 inches. He told me, he said, she fell off the bed about that far.

Yeah. And I looked at him because that made me a little suspicious. Something else stood out to her. He had a very flat affect. I just know his behavior was not what you normally see if it was a bother, taking care of their child that fell off the bed. Kelly learned that instead of calling 911, Robert called his girlfriend Teddy Cox,

the woman in the wheelchair. Turned out, Teddy was a patient at the hospital, recovering from surgery. She told Robert to rush Nikki over. He brought that baby into the hospital, went up to the second floor, put her in her lap, not breathing, put her coat over, and they nonchalotly came down to ER. That's not normal. So many things weren't adding up about Robert's story to Kelly and the rest of the medical team.

Nikki's head injuries seemed far more serious than a fall from a bed. They suspected Nikki was the victim of abuse, possibly at the hands of her father. A nurse picked up the phone and called police. Officers from the Palestinian Police Department responded. When they saw how serious Nikki's condition was, they alerted their boss, Detective Brian Wharton. This is the emergency entrance to the hospital. The detective saw Robert in the way. waiting room, Nikki's grandparents were now there too.

Do you remember the feeling of when you got eyes on, Nikki? I can see her still laying on the examination table in the emergency room. Intubated, long hair. I'm going to sit out in a corner and cry. It's just not right. We shouldn't be here. This child is too young for this. I guess we had been told that there was a injury on the back of her head,

but we couldn't see it because of her hair. And so Nikki's head was shaved so that we could get a picture of this injury on the back of her head. Was the injury then obvious here? It was there. Yes, it was obvious. There was a knot on the back of her head. Wharton also saw bruising on Nikki. He started asking Robert questions. When we talked to him, we found it.

very matter of fact, no emotion. And so that made us, that kind of put us on edge a little bit, I guess. There was just something off. Something's amiss. Robert was telling you that she had fallen. Yes. Robert said he'd been home alone with Nikki. A strange cry woke him up at about 5 a.m.

He found Nikki on the floor. Robert said he kept her awake for a couple of hours, tried to comfort her. Then they both went back to sleep. At about 9 a.m. he said his alarm went off. That's when he discovered Nikki was blue and didn't seem to be breathing. Detective Wharton was suspicious of Robert's story. He asked him to take him to his house to walk through what happened.

We didn't find anything that looked like violence. So there was no broken sheet rock. There was no blood anywhere. There was no broken furniture, no broken dishes. Nothing looked like violence. No struggle. No. No. And so we went to the bedroom. We documented the height of the bed. We gathered the sheeting off the bed. We took pictures of the bed. We found copies of those photos in court filings. They show a box spring and mattress propped up on cinder blocks.

A Winnie the Pooh blanket is wedged beside the bed. Robert said after Nikki fell, he saw blood around her lips and a bruise under her chin. He had told us that he had seen some blood on her mouth, and there was a wet washcloth that he had used to get the blood off her mouth, so we recovered that wet washcloth. A photo of the washcloth shows just a few specks of blood on it. That the detective said Robert did something that struck him as bizarre. He was hungry, and so he wanted to go make a ham sandwich. that added to your anxiety about his...

Yeah, it was odd. Again, it was odd to us that, yes, he wants to go make a ham sandwich. I would think as a police officer, you get a read on a case fairly quickly. Was this one where the pieces were coming together pretty quickly, that this man harmed his daughter? It sure felt like it, yeah. Wharton headed back to Palestine police headquarters with Robert. He checked Robert's criminal record and saw he had convictions, drugs, burglary, writing bad checks, nothing violent.

As Detective Wharton typed up Robert's statement, Nikki was rushed to the Children's Medical Center in Dallas, her grandparents close behind. We were about to find out what they knew about the days leading up to Nikki's death, and about a decision they made I'd find out that haunts them to this day. So I put her in the car. And she looked at me. I'll never forget. She looked at me like, what do you do it? It's one month before Robert Robertson's execution. We're driving down a two-lane country road on the edge of Palestine.

It's dotted with farms and patches of woods. We're heading to the home of Nikki's grandparents, Larry and Verna Bowman. Yes, so we're trying to meet. up with Larry Bowman. We've been unable to reach him, so we've found his address and we've driven to it, and we're about to walk and knock on the door. What are you doing? It's going to bother you. The Bowman's are home and invite us in. It's Roman. How are you?

Larry is in his late 70s. He's wearing blue jeans, a gray shirt, and suspenders. His wife, Verna, is sitting on an old leather couch watching a black and white Western. I remember you. On TV. On TV. Yeah, that's where I remember seeing you. We sit around a worn wooden kitchen table. Verna lights up when I ask her about her granddaughter.

Can you tell me about Nikki what kind of little girl she was? Oh, she's precious. She was a dog. Yeah. Yeah, she could be so funny. She hands me a framed photo of Nikki. Vern is showing me this picture of, oh, I've never seen a picture of her like this. Beautiful little girl.

It's a professional shot like you'd take in a mall. Nikki is wearing a black velvet dress. A headband sits on her short brown hair. A friend of ours had that picture made. And I think, isn't that the dress that we buried her in? When I go to talking about her, it tears me up, because I didn't do all I could to keep her from it. I don't know what else I could have done, you know.

The day before Nikki ended up in the hospital, Robert Robertson had asked the Bowman's to babysit. He wanted to be with his girlfriend, Teddy, who was in the hospital recovering from surgery. But as bedtime rolled around, they asked Robert to pick Nikki up. We called him and I said, Robert, you need to take care of the baby tonight

because Mama's got a cold. But when he come to pick her up, he picked her up right out here. She did not want to go to him. But I didn't think nothing about it. I thought, well, that's just because she don't want to leave me and Mama, you know. So I put her in the car. And she looked at me.

I'll never forget. She looked at me like, Daddy, what are you doing? So when did you learn that she had been taken to the hospital? The next morning. We went to the hospital. He told us she fell off the bed and hurt her head. The moment I saw my baby laying there and went, gurney, I knew she was gone.

I knew he had done something. We sat in the waiting room. The doctors was working on the baby trying to get her revived. And we had a word of prayer with a family, and Robert got up and left. The Bowmans tell me they were the ones who raised Nikki for the first two years of her life. She was born on like Wednesday or Thursday, and we got her the next day. Larry's daughter, Michelle, is Nikki's mother.

Michelle struggled with addiction. Nikki was taken from her the day she was born. She lived with the Bowman's along with another one of Michelle's children. I mean, they were just typical babies, you know. Me and Mama was their mom and daddy. So what about Nikki's father, Robert Robertson? How did you know about Robert? Michelle told us who the daddy was.

Robert and Michelle were only together for a short time before he ended up in prison on a parole violation. He found out Michelle was pregnant. After he was released from prison, he said he wanted custody and got Nikki shortly after her second birthday. She had never been with anybody but us up until Robert got her, and we really had no choice on that matter. State of Texas, as long as one of the parents is able to take care of them, grandparents don't have a say.

Do you think Robert was capable? Well, he seemed like a nice fellow. But now he was suspected of abusing. Nicky. Robert was told he couldn't go to Dallas to be with his daughter. It was the Bowman's who were at her bedside. Dr. Janet Squires, a pediatrician who specialized in child abuse investigations, examined Nikki and confirmed she'd suffered a massive brain injury. She noted bleeding behind Nicky's eyes and on her brain, which was also swollen. Those three symptoms, known as the triad, were the classic signs of shaken baby.

baby syndrome. Dr. Squires called the Palestine Police Department with her findings. She said Nikki was a victim of physical abuse and was unlikely to survive. Larry Bowman told us a judge in Palestine called the hospital, informing the staff that Robert was no longer allowed to make decisions about Nikki. Matter of fact, Judge Bentley told them that we were the parents. Did you have to make the decision to take her off support? Yeah. Yeah. We did.

They, before they took her off the life machine, they let Mama hold her. Before they shut her off. But they said there was no hope. Yeah. As soon as they took the machine, she was gone. We've never forgotten it.

It was a song that every time I sing it I'd get, I still Oh, I want to see him smile, look upon his face there to sing forever of his saving grace.

On the streets of glory let me lift my voice cares are past home at last ever to rejoice on Friday February 1st 2002 at 7.04 p.m., two-year-old Nikki was declared dead. That same night, a judge signed an arrest warrant. Palestine police took Robert Robertson into custody. Prosecutors charged him with capital murder.

They were seeking the death penalty. The trial was about to begin, and Robert's attorney knew he had his work cut out for him. The evidence is going to come and bulldoge. Robert Robertson was locked up in the Anderson County Jail accused of killing his two-year-old daughter, Nikki. Almost a year to the day after her death, opening statements in his trial began.

I mean, let's be honest, the crime that he was convicted of is horrifying. You know, the death of a child is a horrible. horrible thing and a difficult thing to really reckon. The prosecutor at Robert's trial, Doug Lowe, declined to speak with me, but I was able to track down Robert's lead defense attorney who'd been appointed by the court. His name is Steve Evans. I met up with him near downtown Palestine.

Hey, Lester. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. Have you done interviews on this topic before? No, this is the very first. Evans has practiced law in Palestine for most of his life. Robert was no stranger to him. He defended him before.

It was a drug issue, and he did a short period of time on that. So when you look down at your piece of paper and saw Robert Robertson was your defendant, what did you think? I was surprised because Robert really didn't have. the personality that was aggressive, were violent. Still, after Evans read the medical reports, even he didn't buy his client's story about Nikki falling from the bed. Something happened to that child. You know, that child didn't just have one or two very remote injuries.

That child had a number of injuries, and he was the only one there. This happened at a night where this is the only one. only time he had that child alone. When the prosecutor offered a plea deal, Evans urged Robert to accept it. How many offers, plea offers, came Robert's way? About five or six. And they were all for life without parole? No, not up but more.

They were all for years. The highest number of years that we had was 50. And when you get the pleas, that would have been a victory for you. Oh, hell yes. But Robert refused again and again, insisting he was innocent. When its trial began in February 2003, the state came out swinging. The prosecution's first witness, the ER nurse with the pink scrubs, Kelly Gorgannis. She remembered telling the jury that she'd been so disgusted by Robert's behavior she wanted to spit on it.

I was very angry. I just remember that cold face. and I looked, and that poor little girl was just, she was dead. Detective Brian Wharton testified too. Did you make eye contact with Robert? At some point in the trial, I had to point him out. Did you have any particular feeling toward him at that moment? I always tried really hard not to be an angry man.

The heart of the prosecution's case was expert medical testimony. Dr. Janet Squires, the pediatric specialist in Dallas, told the jury, Nikki suffered bleeding behind her eyes and on her brain, which was swollen. Three symptoms that were classic signs of shaken baby syndrome. Then came the medical examiner, Dr. Jill Urban. She testified that she'd observed multiple impacts on Nikki and that her injuries were consistent with blows to the head or shaking. And prosecutors had a surprising witness, Teddy Cox, Robert's girlfriend at the time,

the woman in the wheelchair with Nikki. on her lap. She testified that she'd seen Robert lose his temper with Nikki before. She'd seen him spank her and once even saw him shake Nicky. Teddy's 10-year-old daughter said she'd seen Robert shake Nikki about

10 different times. The prosecutors asked her to shake a teddy bear the same way she'd seen Robert shake Nicky. Robert's lawyer knew it wasn't looking good. Were you keeping a close eye on the jurors? Yeah, we knew it was

bad right from the get-go. The time it was, to me, that it was over, was the autopsy photos. Those were the most revealing, horrid photos I've ever seen. But that was the least of his worries. On top of murder, Robert was facing another charge. One of the nurses who examined Nikki in the hospital told the jury she believed Nikki had been the victim of a sexual assault. But midway through the trial, prosecutors ended up dropping the charge. Robert's lawyer thought the explosive allegation was prejudicial, and the trial should have ended right there. Why was that not grounds for a mistrial? I'm moved for it. It's a pretty emotional topic, obviously. And there was no evidence

of any sexual abuse. None. Absolutely none. This was pure. inflammatory. The judge denied Evans' motion for a mistrial. After three days, the prosecution rested. Now Evans had to present a defense. He told us he didn't argue Robert was innocent because he thought the evidence against him was overwhelming. His strategy, he says,

was to try to save Robert's life by conceding he did something, but he didn't mean to kill his daughter. The evidence is going to come and bulldoze you. Either you go in and say, I had nothing to do with this at all, which not many people are going to buy or believe. Or you accept a degree of responsibility. At least it may give you a basis upon which the jury to believe you. His argument was that Robert was an overwhelmed parent. This was beyond his ability to deal with it.

either mentally or emotionally, to be able to deal with a young child. Evans called a witness to the stand to try to counter what Robert's girlfriend Teddy Cox had said about seeing Robert shaking Nikki in the past. Patricia Conklin, Teddy's sister, said Teddy had a reputation for being a liar. She testified she'd seen Robert with Nikki many times

and said he was gentle and that she'd never seen him be violent, with Nikki or anyone. Robert's fate was now in the hands of the jury. Hi, Terry. Hi, it's so nice to meet you. Hi, Lester. Nice to meet you.

Thank you, Terry Compton, was one of the jurors. How much were you paying attention to Robert and his reaction? I would glance over, and mainly when I would glance, you would see him just sitting there in the chair with his hands on top of the table. He basically just sat there. Terry said Robert's attorney was right about the impact of those autopsy photos.

They could see what was all going on in her brain and how much bleeding and how much this and how much that. And they actually passed those or show those pictures in court. I don't know how you shake those images. Mm-mm. You don't. But what stood out even more was that stuffed toy demonstration. She remembers how violently the girl shook the teddy bear. But it obviously had an effect on it. Oh, yeah.

I sit there and thought, well, yeah, now I can see where, you know, if you have a man, Robert's size, shaking a baby. I could see where it maybe could have done some violently brain damage. Terry said there hadn't been much debate in the deliberation room. I'd say everybody pretty much had their mind made up. It took the jury only about four hours to find Robert guilty of murder. Robert was sentenced to die and transported to death row. More than a decade passed, all of Robert's appeals were denied. His guilt seemed undeniable, certain.

That's when, out of nowhere, came a woman who refused to let Robert and his case die quietly. Every time I turn around, there was something new. I'm reading the medical records and I'm about to fall out of my chair. Next time, in the last appeal. When people read that he murdered his daughter, they're not reading the host of. We made mistakes because we didn't have all the information. We were both threatened if we didn't get on board with accusing robbers. If they go through with it, they're killing an innocent man.

The Last Appeal is a production of Dateline and NBC News. It is written and produced by Dan Slepian, Liz Brown Curloff, and Lynn Keller. Our field producers are Nick McElroy and Rachel Young. Our associate producer is Sam Springer. It's edited by Colin Dowell. by Colin Dow and Greg Smith, Deb Brown, and David Varga. From NBC News Audio,

sound mixing by Rob Byers, Joe Ploord, Rick Kwan, with help from Rich Cutler, head of audio production is Bryson Barnes, Paul Ryan is executive producer, and Liz Cole is Senior Executive Producer of Dateline.