Dateline Originals - The Seduction - Ep. 3: A Long and Twisted Road

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

The moment for murder had arrived. But could Jaime go through with it?This episode was originally published on June 21, 2022. 

There are moments in most every life, some sort of crisis point, little or big, that can redraw the map of the rest of time. Your time, certainly. Maybe somebody else's time, too. A moment that lays plain what we're made of. We're not always aware, of course, as we launch into something stupid or wise that history will be sent spinning. But Jaime knew. Oh, yes, he sure did.

In the failing light of that late June evening, Jaime knew. This was it. This was his moment, he told us. I thought of the rape. I've thought of my rape. I've thought of losing her and not wanting that feeling. And I used all that in a rage. To get yourself angry. To get myself angry, to justify myself, to blind what I felt was the truth. The whole plan was to get him outside because that way it would be easier to hide and clean up.

She told me to get him outside during the night since he's hard hearing. Tell him you're hearing the pigs, some sort of disturbance. They're oinking. So I go up to him and say, Rob, I think there's something wrong with the pigs. What? Well, I just hear them. They're making all these noises. I don't know if there's, you know, going on.

Oh, okay, I'll go. And he got up and he'd go. I was going to use a falling axe, but I was going to use the hammer side. I was walking behind him. I grabbed it. The axe? The axe. The falling axe. And I had it by my waist, ready to swing. But the adrenaline that I felt that should have surged through went in and out in a split second. And I went and I set it beside a tree on the way.

I couldn't do it. And there it was. Jaime was going to spin history his way. He simply could not kill Ron Prespa, the one man who'd ever been kind to him. And maybe he didn't have it in him to kill anybody. Jaime slipped away, left Ron to tend the pigs, and he phoned Patty,

begged her to accept what he now knew in his heart, that she was mistaken about her husband. I called her, and she called back. Is it done yet? No. Why not? I don't think I can do it. Well, what's wrong?

I don't believe you, Patty. I, I, I... Did you actually say that? Yeah. That way? That way. I said's wrong? I don't believe you, Patty. Did you actually say that? Yeah. That way? That way. I said, Patty, I don't believe this. I don't believe this, I told her. This is wrong.

This is wrong. And she said what? She would say, you're telling me you don't love me right now. No, I'm not saying that. Well, that's what you're meaning by saying that this is wrong, that you don't believe me. Then she would say, if you're going to do it, do it. And if not, just leave. Yes, momentous decisions.

Sometimes when we make them, they get unmade for us. Patty was not finished with Jaime and not with her husband, Ron, either. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Dateline's newest podcast, The Seduction. Now it was the morning after. The morning after Jaime made his big decision, he simply could not kill that lovely man, Ron Prespa, no matter how much Patty wanted him to. It was 8 a.m. or so. Ron's daughter, April, was driving to her sister Misty's house to pick up her children.

They'd spent the night with their cousins. To get there, April had to navigate that twisty hillside road to pick up her children. They'd spent the night with their cousins. To get there, April had to navigate that twisty hillside road called Chili Bar. And that's when it happened. She rounded a curve and slammed on the brakes. A line of cars had stopped in front of her. Roadblock up ahead. There was a man standing out there stopping traffic and he stopped me and said that

there's a fire down here on the road and that you'll have to turn around. So she did as she was told, but as she cranked her steering wheel, she caught sight of... Wait, wasn't that Patty? Standing along the side of the road watching the firefighters at work?

Yes, it was Patty. And about the time that penny dropped, Patty noticed April, too, and walked right over to April's truck, tapped on the window. She said to me, honey, April, Daddy didn't come home last night. And I said, yes, he did. I talked to dad. He was going to eat dinner, take a shower and go to bed. And she goes, no, honey, he left at 10 o'clock to get propane and gas for the lawnmower. And I looked at her and I said, and why didn't you call me

and tell me that dad is not home and hasn't come home? Oh, I didn't want to worry you, honey. And during this whole time, not a single emotion, no emotion, no nothing. And I started to get upset and I'm like, I need to call my sister. And at this time I immediately had this knot in my stomach of just something is not right. So I took off and I pulled over on the side of the road. And at this point I was hysterical.

I just knew something was not right. So I called and I told her that dad is missing and there's a fire on Chili Bar. Did you think the two were connected? No, because simply dad does not drive Chili Bar. Dad does not like to drive Chili Bar and dad does not drive at night. April and Misty agreed to meet up in the nearest town, Placerville, about 15 miles away, while fire crews continued the battle of flames. Foot by foot, through the smoke and the ashes and the mud, they made their way down the steep hillside. And finally, hundreds of feet below, at the base of the river gorge, they found the source. A smoldering Chevy Suburban. Still so hot, they had to stay a few feet away.

And from that safe distance, they peered through what had once been windows. Something in there, reduced pretty much to charcoal. But there wasn't any doubt it was a human body. The license plate was melted, so they ran the vehicle identification number. The Suburban came back registered to Ron Prespa. Confirmation would take a while, but they knew. They knew right away. It was him.

Back up on Chili Bar, Highway Patrol officers were trying to figure out just how and why he went off the road. And back a bit from the suburban's launch site, just before a hairpin turn, they found a clue. Blood on the road. An aha moment for sure. Seemed pretty clear. Ron, driving a narrow winding road in the dark, hit a large animal, a deer most likely, lost control, and no guardrail to stop him, careened off the road. Most logical conclusion.

Ron's brother, Ken, was a retired firefighter. He got the news right away from a friend who just happened to be working the fire. What we had heard was that he'd come around a corner and hit a deer and that he'd gone over the bank, that his vehicle was down at the bottom of the canyon and there was a body in it and, you know, it was burned beyond recognition.

Ken passed the grim news on to April. At the time, they said they found Dad's Suburban at the bottom of Chili Bar, and there was a body in it. April called to tell Misty, who was now driving with a car full of kids, so she handed the ringing phone to her husband, Aaron. I told Aaron it was Dad's vehicle, and there was a body found in the vehicle. Aaron stared straight ahead and said not a word. No way he was going to blurt out to a car full of children the news that their beloved Grandpa Ron was dead. But of course, that meant Misty was in the dark too. When I got to Placerville to meet April, she was bawling.

And Aaron had talked to her, and he knew that it was Dad. And I just said, is my dad alive? And he said no, and just the blood drained from my entire body, and I collapsed. And I didn't really believe it. And then you kind of step out of the role of being a daughter and into a role of we've got to find out what's wrong and what happened. And I knew immediately that she had something to do with it. She, of course, being Patty. So two grieving daughters, April and Misty, steeled themselves and adopted a second role

as investigative daughters. They went right back to that now terrible site on Chili Bar where April had seen Patty, but by then, she was nowhere to be found. So they decided to go to their father's house to see if Patty was

there. We got in the car to drive off and there was huge amounts of blood on the road that I could see. And I look at my husband in the rearview mirror and he mouthed to me, did you see that? And I said, yes. And I'm thinking, okay, it's not my dad's blood. It's not my dad's blood. It's not my dad's blood. These were, I mean, puddles, you know, eight inches around. And I'm like, you know, you start playing things in your head of what happened. How could there be this much blood? To be continued... That the SUV went off the edge was no big surprise, sadly. And the blood on the road? Well, it was a deer, after all. Big animal.

But the accident investigators assigned to come up with an official answer were... Well, they were puzzled. The long blood trail didn't look like it came from a collision with some big animal. Not exactly, anyway. Nor could the accident investigators understand why there were no skid marks on the road. Surely Ron would have hit the brakes at some point before he went off the edge. Weird. At that point, the investigators realized they might be in a world beyond their expertise,

and so they asked for a couple of homicide detectives to weigh in with their opinions, just to be on the safe side. We received the call that something wasn't right with this accident. That was Detective Paul Hadges of the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office. He's a big, broad-shouldered, slow-talking guy with a poker face and a thick head of black hair. His partner, Detective Mike Lensing, is in many ways just the opposite. Thin, fast talker with a shaved head, almost fixed sardonic smile. Hedges spoke first, said he and Lensing arrived at the crash site around 9 a.m.,

just after April and Misty had left. What did you find? Approximately 150 feet from where the vehicle had gone off the edge, there was blood in the roadway. There was a pool of blood, pretty good size, and then droplets. And the drops kind of followed the path of the vehicle over the edge of the roadway. But why would there be a pool of blood? If the car was traveling along the highway, would it leave a pool of blood like that? And that's what the predicament was.

We just weren't sure what we had. How much blood was there on the road? It was probably about a foot or less in diameter. Something sat there long enough and dripped long enough to create that pool. In other words, that wasn't an SUV that went roaring down the highway and then suddenly skidded and then zoomed off the edge and blew up. That wasn't, couldn't have happened that way. That's exactly it.

And with this trailing of blood was several hundred feet long. It had dripped. And then all of a sudden it stopped and pulled. And then it began dripping again as it went off the roadway. Which said what? That's what we were there to find out. And approximately where the larger pool of blood was, we also noticed a spot on the pavement

that looked to have had, like, gasoline or oil had spilled onto the pavement. It kind of starts eating the pavement away. Could you tell it was deposited by the same vehicle, or was it just there? It was there, but it was still moist, and we estimated that it probably had been deposited about the same time, just based on the temperature

of the day and with the evaporation and just the way the roadway was, that it was fairly fresh. In addition to that, right next to the pooling of the blood, the staining, there was also an impression. It looked like a plastic bag type of impression on the roadway next to it, and a partial footprint within that blood impression. Hang on a second.

A plastic bag kind of impression? What does that mean? Say you take a small grocery bag, plastic grocery bags, dip it in blood and then touch that to the ground. You can see the crinkle marks of the plastic within the impressions of the dried blood.

Weird. Very. That part of Chili Bar's nothing but S-turns and switchbacks as it makes its way down into the south fork of the American River Gorge. The spot where Ron Suburban left the road drops off at about a 60-degree angle. So, quite steep. The face of the hillside is covered in rugged, shrubby manzanita trees. If you tried to scale the hill with that steep slope,

the manzanitas would be about the only thing to keep you from sliding hundreds of feet to the river below. The hard twisted manzanita limbs are also good at snagging and holding on to the occasional trash bag that some misguided soul decides to toss from his car. You could see this trash where the SUV had hit the bags and tore the bags open and spread the trash around, but there was one plastic bag that just looked out of place. It looked to be a little charred.

It wasn't white, it was off-color, but it just didn't match in the same age as the rest of the debris that was there at the scene. So, of course, we kind of went down the embankment a little bit and got a closer look. And my partner opened up the bag. And I'll let you explain what you saw. As I opened up the bag wearing latex gloves, I opened the bag and I found a partial human brain.

That was the last thing I expected to find in there. What the heck? As detectives Lensing and Hedges tried to absorb that bit of horror movie revelation, April and Misty were over at their dad's place conducting their own investigation. Patty was here, and we went to the garden because that was our sacred place for dad. And she, again, still had no emotions.

It was like false emotions, like she was trying to force it out. And she just, I'm going to miss him so much. He's my whole life and she's shaking the fence and she kept saying i'm so sorry i'm just so sorry and she went over and shaking the trees and going into this hysteric but not one tear is coming out of her eyes i'm thinking why are you sorry no genuine emotion no none none and it was weird because her kids were here and her son-in-laws and stuff like that were all here. And they were out laughing and having fun and drinking and blaring music.

Like nothing was going on because she had them believe that he had hit a deer and went off the road. So they're talking and watching. And then Misty had a moment of, she just had to feel close to her dad. So she asked Patty to give her something intimate of her dad's. I just needed one of my dad's hankies. I needed to smell him. And I, you know, she went up to the house and brought him down. She goes, I just washed all of his clothes.

And I'm like. Yeah, another sign. You know, in my head, I'm like, thank you for the hanky, but why did you just wash all of his clothes? April and Misty had had all they could stand, and they left. And not very long after that, detectives Hedges and Lensing showed up and encountered Patty out in the front yard. When we arrived there, she was surrounded by her family, and she looked to be distraught. So at this point, we invited her back to our office to conduct an interview. Why invite her back to the office? She's definitely a person of interest, because at this point, this case doesn't look

like what it was portrayed to be. Right. Did she come willingly? Did she put up a fuss? Did she wonder why she was being asked to come down to your office? All the above. She tried to come up with excuses as to why she couldn't come down, and she was very distraught. She kept giving excuses as to why she was acting the way she was. She was on medication. She was. She was on medication.

She was, it was just abnormal. That went back and forth for a while. And then Patty finally agreed she'd meet them at the sheriff's office in Placerville for a proper interview. We talked to her and we got her side of the story. The story Patty told Detectives Lansing and Hedges is this. That she left her husband Ron at around 4.30pm the day before to spend the evening with her daughter and grandchildren,

who lived about an hour away. Patty said she called Ron around 9 p.m. just to check in. And he said, well, I'm going to run to Placerville and get propane for the barbecue tomorrow and some gas to eat the month long tomorrow. Patty said when she returned home around midnight, Ron wasn't there. Which is not like him. What was the condition of the house when you got there?

Was the door open, lights on? No, well, the normal. So you're saying that he was home from about 4.30 on? Yeah, but he was home alone. Okay. To my knowledge. Right, he never said anybody was coming over? No, no.

Anything like that? No, he was pretty much a homebody. Home alone? Patty could have told the detectives that Jaime was there with Ron that evening. Could have told them that Jaime was living with them. But she did not. Then the detectives asked Patty that boilerplate question, the one that gets asked at some point or another

in just about every homicide investigation. This is a question that I've got to ask, but it might be uncomfortable. Do either one of you have any boyfriends or girlfriends that you're currently seeing? No. Nothing I'm aware of. I mean, no. Do either one of you have any boyfriends or girlfriends that you're currently seeing? No. Nothing I'm aware of. I mean, no. Not for me.

It was as if young Jaime did not exist at all. So as we get into this, we're not going to find out down the road that you had a boyfriend or anything? Not recently, no. Five years ago, he and I separated. Oh, okay. Maybe even six years ago. That was before we got married. But no, I do not have a boyfriend. Do you find any of this suspicious at all?

I mean, any of the... What's suspicious to me is that he would go out at this time. You know, it's not like him. Because this all sounds very suspicious to me. The whole situation. And we're trying to figure out, because

we were told that you did have a boyfriend. By whom? I can't divulge. Did I have a boyfriend? Yes. Uh-oh. There was a slight pause. And then Patty said... No. We had a young man, 21-year-old man,

that was staying with us for three weeks till he could get his stuff together to move to Texas. Gone now, of course, said Patty. When did this guy leave? Yesterday. He left yesterday? Yes. Okay. What's his name? Gone now, of course, said Patty. Patty said she gave Jaime a ride to a used car lot. And that's the last time she saw him. He left that way and I went my way. But, you know, he's... How did he buy that car?

I wrote a check for him. How much? It was $6,500. Okay. And you wrote a check for $6,500? I owed him money for working, and then we floated him a loan, and he's going to pay us back. Do you have any contact information for him as far as phone numbers or addresses? No.

You have no contact information at all? His family? No. Do you have a cell phone? Do you have a name?? Do you have a main... No. Nothing I'm aware of. Detectives Hedges and Lensing

had been around long enough to know they were being lied to. Patty was being all nicey-nice, but she certainly wasn't telling the truth, or at least not the whole story. Why? Or what to make of this woman? They weren't quite sure.

What was coming into focus for them, though, was that Ron Prespa had been murdered and that somehow, some way, his wife Patty must have been mixed up in it. At this point, we're building a case. We don't have enough to arrest her at this point. We don't know exactly how much or what involvement she has in it. After all, she was with her daughter. Correct. That seemed to be an ironclad alibi, didn't it? Correct. Until we found out that there was a young man that was staying at their residence and had left the very same day that Ronald Presba went missing. And she had no idea where this gentleman went. But if she didn't do it because she was with her daughter and yet it was so obviously staged and she was

covering something, then she must have known who did it. Was that the thought? That was our thought. And obviously our thought was this person, Jaime, who was living in their house, who disappeared the same day that Ron died. And his whereabouts were unknown. So now you've got to find him somehow. Yes. Coming up next on The Seduction. I look over to my left, and in between the couch and the wood stove is a spray of blood on the white walls. What was your thought when you saw that?

That he was pretty much killed right where we're at. The Seduction is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Matt Sullivan is Assistant Audio Editor. 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.