Dateline Originals - The Seduction - Ep. 4: It Wasn't Dirt

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

After discovering evidence of a horrific crime at Ron Presba’s home, detectives question a defiant suspect.This episode was originally published on June 28, 2022. 

Detective Paul Hedges leaned his big broad-shouldered frame against the back of his chair and sighed. Even though he and his partner Mike Lensing were doing their best with that woman. But it seemed to them Patty Prespa would sooner tell a lie than the truth. Even if it went against her, she just couldn't seem to help herself. Like that whole business with Jaime Ramos, it was obvious to the detectives Patty was lying about him for some reason. 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 address? No.

It was odd. They had loaned Jaime the money, according to her, to purchase this vehicle. Yet, she had no idea where he was going. No way to get a hold of him. Just no information at all on this gentleman. Even though they had given him money to buy a car. I'm sorry, I'm almost speechless. As Patty talked and emoted, Detective Lensing sat quietly and concentrated his gaze on her face,

her eyes, her body language. The crying was fake. Her emotions were just very fake. How could you tell they were fake? No tears. You get to the point where you know that somebody's putting it on? To a certain extent, yes. It was forced. She was doing all the right things, but not in a way that somebody was truly grieving what we thought. It Just seemed like it was just an act. But no law against lying. So once they finished questioning Patty,

Lensing and Hedges drove her back to her house. Well, Ron's house, actually. Walked her to the front door. Stepped across the threshold. The two detectives, Hedges and Lensing, were well acquainted with violence. walked her to the front door, stepped across the threshold. The two detectives, Hedges and Lansing, were well acquainted with violence and what that leaves in its wake. But this? As their eyes adjusted to the gloomy, shades-drawn dark in Ron Prespa's little house,

a true horror appeared before them. I look over to my left and see a small piece of brain matter sitting on the wood stove. And in between the couch and the wood stove is a spray of blood on the white walls. Who was your thought when you saw that? That he was pretty much killed right where we're at. I'm Keith Morrison,

and this is Dateline's newest podcast, The Seduction. The detectives stared at the evidence of carnage all around them. Neither one said a word, but maintained practiced poker faces and let Patty talk, which she did. Couldn't seem to help herself. Patty said there was a chair missing in the living room, a chair that Ron always sat in, which seemed odd. And you could clearly see on the floor that there was a carpet missing as well. And if you looked in the ceiling above this, you could see blood spatter. On the ceiling? On the ceiling.

Right where the chair had been? Right where the chair had been. But right where we're standing was clean. So there also had to be a cleanup involved. Weirder yet, the detective said it was obvious somebody had rearranged the furniture to make it look like the recliner had never been there to begin with. If some stranger had come into the house and had killed Ron there and removed his chair, I couldn't figure out why they arranged the furniture also and redecorated. Moved pictures, moved other pieces of carpet around, set up a nightstand. To make it look as if that chair hadn't been taken away.

Correct. Even though you could tell that it had. Correct. Neither one had to say it. Their next call was to CSI. You've seen the shows. You know what they do. Look for microscopic clues invisible to the naked eye.

But that wasn't so much the case in Ron Prespa's house. DNA evidence was splattered everywhere. The task for CSI was almost to find out where it wasn't. Ready? Mm-hmm. They started by spraying the inside of the house with that chemical that makes even the blood you can't see glow in the dark. And the entire living room, kitchen, and hallway glowed in this home. You could see swipes where the blood had been wiped up. You can

see footprints. You can see drag marks. A series what looked like the heels of somebody being drug from where Ron's chair had been to the back door. What about outside? Any evidence found out there? Yes. When we got to that portion, we started to notice that there were blood droplets and blood in a trail that left from the back door to the parking area, which was just adjacent to the house. And in that, we saw small pieces of brain matter. What did you think about the way this thing had been carried out? What assumptions could you make about how it had been done based on what you saw?

It didn't fit the pattern of being shot by a gun. It looked as if he had been beaten to death. We didn't know with what kind of a tool or anything at that point. But we do know that it was pretty violent, whatever it was. And then he had to be physically drug from his location there in the living room out of the back door to his Suburban. And that in itself would be a very difficult feat, carrying a couple hundred pounds of person.

It's the job of crime scene investigators to be thorough and meticulous. You know that. But did you also know it's not their job to clean up a murder scene once they're done? Ron's daughters, April and Misty, found that out when they arrived at their dad's house after CSI left. The horror for them landed in stages. I first peeked through the window in the living room and I noticed that my dad's recliner was gone. And I then looked up and there was hundreds of circles on the wall, on the ceiling. And when I walked into the living room, it was blood everywhere. And I just started getting really dizzy, and I about fell down, and my girlfriend just grabbed me.

And when I felt a little bit better, we looked around, and there was, I mean, I think over 500 circles in the living room of where there was just blood everywhere. And then there was some in the kitchen, in the door jam, and then on the pantry wall. And then there was a puddle that had been cleaned on the floor in the back by the back door. And so then through my head, I'm thinking, is that dad's handprint on the pantry? Did he struggle? And to be in a home that I was two years old, my dad bought, you're raised in this home. You're made to feel safe in this home. I was a kid that had horrible nightmares.

And dad always, honey, you're safe here. This is our home, you know. This is where we're always going to be safe. And then he's murdered in the home that I always thought we were safe in. It was her worst nightmare. It was. That came true. How often do you think about that? Every day. And I think about it when my son has nightmares right now. And I think about it when I tell him, you're safe, honey. And I'm not lying to him because he is safe, but I think about what my dad told me all the time and it hurts, you know. After that, April and Misty camped out at their grandmother's house just across the road, wanted to keep an eye on things. And for two days,

they watched. No sign of Patty or her kids. And then there she was. And she was busy. She immediately started taking dad's stuff out of the house. She was remodeling the house. She put carpet in the house and repainted and linoleum and everything throughout the house. And we're seeing all this happen. And we're questioning them of, I want to go through dad's stuff. We want some of dad's stuff too. Oh, we're not taking anything of dad's out of the house and blah, blah, blah.

And we went back in there probably five days later. Everything of dad's out of the house and blah, blah, blah. And we had went back in there probably five days later and everything of dad's was gone. And it just, it was just really, really odd and weird on how somebody that had just lost their husband and didn't know why they lost their husband was remodeling. Did you have a feeling that the police would just swoop in and solve it, make arrests? We were wanting. It was frustrating because we all knew she had a part in it. And here you know things, and it seems so clear to us

that she should be arrested. There's something that she's done. But of course, it's rarely as simple in real life as it sometimes looks on TV. 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. I can honestly say I didn't meet one person or talk to one person that didn't hold him in the highest regard. Everybody said that he would have given his shirt off of his back to anybody, helped anybody out. The Beat for Homicide Detectives Mike Lensing and Paul Hedges covers a wide swath of the Sierra Nevada.

Quirky old gold rush towns, places like Rough and Ready, Rescue, Cool, mountain settlements inhabited by characters who could have walked out of a Mark Twain novel. Or maybe a book by Raymond Chandler, given how film noir-ish this case had become. We all knew, I mean, in our hearts, she killed him. That's Ron's brother, Ken. He'd busied himself sorting out his late brother's estate when the revelations landed like gut punches. We had started going through paperwork, and that's when we found that Patty had got her name put

on my brother's property three weeks prior to his murder. There was a life insurance policy that was taken out within three months of his murder. They had an accidental, which would have made it a double indemnity insurance policy if he died by accident. You know why we asked you to come, don't you? No, all I know is that your secretary made it sound very urgent.

Your husband had an accident policy with this company. Exactly the plotline of the old film classic double indemnity. The husband's murder is staged to look like an accident. But there are a few things we should like to know. What sort of things? Accidental death. We're not entirely satisfied. In fact, we're not satisfied at all. That's what it looked like we had,

a staged accident scene. So now detectives had two motives for that staged crash scene. Cover up the murder and double up on the life insurance payout. For Patty to get away with both murder and the money, she needed to stick to her story that her husband Ron died in a car accident. She had her friends believing it. She had this knack of getting anybody to believe a story that she was telling.

Well, not quite anybody. April and Misty rolled their eyes at most everything Patty came out with. And one of those Patty stories in particular struck them as invented bunk. She claimed that she and Ron gave their house guest, Jaime, the money to buy a car, which he bought the morning of the day Ron was killed. Nonsense, said April and Misty. That would not, could not have happened. They bought him a car, and that's when he drove off to Texas. And I'm all, they bought him a car. My dad would not have purchased an $8,000 car for himself, let alone for some, you know, young man. And so I started questioning that, but nobody had

answers. The daughters had a point. So Lensing and Hedges went to the car lot where this transaction supposedly took place, asked to see the owner. We wanted to find out who actually purchased a car if a car was actually purchased. So you're checking out the veracity of her story. Exactly. And, surprise, Patty's story checked out. Jaime did buy a car the day Ron was killed. The paperwork was all there. Then the owner asked the detectives if they wanted to see his security camera video.

What? There was video? They asked. They had the parking lot and the interior of the business videotaped. And there they were. Patty in a bright yellow gingham top and shorts, Jaime in a white T-shirt and Levi's, strolling through the lot looking at cars. And then later, inside the dealership,

sitting side by side signing papers it definitely showed them in in more than just a friendship type of relationship could you tell they were touching each other they were holding hands you could tell that they were in a relationship just by the video that there was more going on than just her trying to help him out. What were your impressions? She's lied to us, and we now have a hidden relationship. Which put finding Jaime at the top of the investigative to-do list. If he wasn't involved, then he must have a pretty good idea what happened. Question was, where was he?

Detective Lensing had Jaime's cell phone numbers. He just wasn't picking up. He knew that we were calling him, and we were trying to get a hold of him. Then, out of the blue, about a week after the murder, Jaime called back. He had contacted me personally to give me an explanation. Yes, and Jaime remembers that phone call very well. He told me if I had an affair with her, and at first I told him no. He told me, are you keeping in contact with her? I said no. The detective even went as far as asking me if I killed him, and I said no. Right after he bought that car, with a little

help from Patty, said Imey, he pointed his nose southeast and left town. So by the time Ron was killed, he was long gone, she said. He did not tell Detective Lansing where he went, which was his uncle's place in Texas, but he did agree to drive right back for an in-person talk with the detective at the sheriff's station. So then, naturally, Jaime called Patty to tell her what he'd agreed to do. And she was not happy. She told me, don't come. Stay away. Just stay away for a while because they're not after you. They're after me.

If you come here, they'll just probably arrest you. Why would they arrest me? Because, you know, she started saying how there was evidence, prints. And I told her that's impossible that there's prints. It's impossible. So she got me all paranoid. Paranoid. Frightened. Both, maybe. So Jaime did what frightened people sometimes do.

He stopped answering the phone, and he hit the road again. I had no further contact with Jaime Ramos. Just when things seemed to be going well, Jaime's decision to make himself scarce certainly threw a spanner into the investigation. The kid had to know something. What exactly wasn't at all clear, but something.

So, denied their heart-to-heart with Jaime, the detectives decided to talk to Patty again. And maybe this time they'd lean on her a bit. So they called her and she agreed to stop by. And maybe she had a strategy of her own.

She showed up on a hot July day wearing a T-shirt and shorts and a smile. Sweet as pie. Thank you for coming in. Want a cup of coffee or something? Water, maybe. Let me go get it. I'll go get it right now. That voice, offering Patty something to drink, I'm coming in. Want a cup of coffee or something? Water would be nice. Let me go get it. I'll go get it right now. That voice, offering Patty something to drink, was Sergeant Tom Holdman.

And after he got back with a couple of cold water bottles, he and Mike Lensing started in. Or rather, Holdman sat back and listened for a while. As Lensing asked Patty, what happened when she got home the night Ron was murdered? She said it was 1 a.m. or almost. She was with her daughter Jennifer and Jennifer's two kids, a baby and a toddler. They all got to the house, she said, and she opened the door.

And my puppy comes running out. Little Ruger comes running out, and I smell poop. Okay. So where is this poop? It's all over my white bathroom rugs. So Patty said first thing she did was clean up that mess.

Didn't want the kids to get into it. But I got the rugs and I cleaned them up as best I could. And then I put them in the washer and I poured bleach in them. Put a little bleach in it. And then I would just kind of wipe down the floor with bleach wipes. And that's when she noticed this mess was all over the place. So I look at the kitchen floor, and there's, like, muddy footprints, and I mopped up wherever it seemed wet and dirty, because the baby's crumb.

The enormity of it hit Mike Lensing like a slap. Because he knew what Patty was calling mud and dog poop was not that. It gets worse. Detective Lensing asked Patty to show him on a floor plan where exactly she cleaned. Show me where the fireplace is in reference to that and where you mobbed. I mobbed in this area here because little **** had gotten loose and he had walked in the dirt. Did you get that? The toddler was walking in what Patty was saying was dirt, but that wasn't dirt.

Meanwhile, the baby. I went to get the baby because he's really big and top heavy, and I was afraid he was going to fall. So when I went to pick him up, I realized that part of the couch was wet. I assumed it was pee. So I cleaned it up as if it were pee. As we know, that was not urine. Okay, so what did you do? So your husband's not home. Yes. Hasn't come home yet. Yes. And you start cleaning the house. Because of the babies. Because of the babies. Okay. Do you try to get a hold of him? I've called him several times on his cell phone, and at first I got, hi, this is Ron, you know,

but I kept calling. Okay. And so when you got finished cleaning this, what time was it, do you think? It took me about an hour. Okay. I would say... So it would be quarter to two then?

Yeah, I would say about an hour. So with that established, things began to get heavy. Lensing went first. So what you're telling us isn't making a lot of sense because what you do is you're putting yourself at that house during that time when it had to have happened. How is that possible when I wasn't there until after 12? But maybe you were there to clean up.

Why would I do that? Patty, you need to start thinking about this. You know, I think that you're a good person, and I don't think that you would hurt Ron. No, and I would not clean up after anyone who did either. Is there somebody that you're protecting? Alan, no. God help you, or not you, but God help whoever I find out who did this. Okay, then how could somebody be in your house at the same time

cleaning all this stuff up while you're there? Because we know exactly what time Ron ended up where he ended up and you were home at that time. How could they have gotten... That is impossible. That is impossible. I have my daughter and my grandchildren with me. I know.

I'm telling you exactly. I cleaned up poop and muddy footprints and that's all. Are you sure that was mud? About when you scrubbed the couch, are you sure that that was urine? It was wet. It wasn't red. It was wet. I mean, that's all I cleaned up was dirt and poop and what appeared to be dog pee. That's all I know. As innocent as can be, they leaned a little harder. You'll hear Sergeant Tom Holdman joining in, but first, Detective Lensing tells Patty, he just knows she had an accomplice, one she was now protecting. That's crazy, said Patty.

Why would I cover for someone? Why? I don't know. That's what we're asking. I'm an intelligent woman who knows. And we know that. Let me get this. Why would you cover for someone? I don't know. So you don't get in trouble? I mean, trouble for what? For a murder?

But I didn't commit a murder. You keep telling us that, but I don't know, so you don't get in trouble? I mean, trouble for what? For a murder? But I didn't commit a murder. You keep telling us that, but I don't know that I believe you. Save yourself. Save yourself. I'm telling you everything. You're protecting someone close to you. No, I'm really not. You're protecting your son?

No. You're protecting your daughter? No. You're protecting somebody close to you. We have a staged vehicle accident. We have a house that's cleaned up. They went at Patty for more than four hours. All the while, she remained calm and consistent,

even after being accused many times of killing her husband. A couple of times, Patty offered them an interesting alternative. My friends heard it was the Mexican Mafia. As if the Mexican Mafia had ever heard of Ron Prespa. But then Patty doubled down. Sort of. Said she was the intended target, not Ron. It was the Mexican Mafia.

It was supposed to be me. It wasn't supposed to be him. Of course, they didn't even pretend to bite at that one. So then Patty said, well, maybe Ron was killed by a disgruntled former son-in-law. He started to run him over with his truck. He started to hit him over the head. The cops didn't buy that either.

Not for a minute. Now, there was really only one person they were interested in. Jaime. So they poked away at that for a bit. Did they have a relationship? That sort of thing. And finally, Patty said, Okay, once.

They had an encounter. I'll try to make it less embarrassing for you, but I need to know the details of this encounter, as you put it. We had sex. We had sex, she said. Was that the only time you were with Jaime? Yes.

That was the only time. Just one spontaneous, sordid encounter in the backseat of her car, she said, after which she felt so guilty. The detectives went with that line of questioning for half an hour or so. And then they asked Patty if she had sex with Jaime while she was living with Ron. Patty tried hard to act offended. I may screw him in a car, but I'm not going to screw him in Ron's house. But Ron goes to act offended. Five months ago. Well, five months ago you were in the backseat of your car having sex.

And we went to a motel after that. See, you didn't tell me that a few minutes ago. Well, I'm telling you now. So now you've had sex with him twice. Twice. Let me ask you. Let me ask you. Is there more to your relationship with Jaime than what you're telling us? Not on my end of it.

What he thinks in his mind, I have no idea. Well, what would you think he may think? I thought he thought of me as a mom, and he never had one. No emotional relationship, sexual relationship, boyfriend-girlfriend type of thing? No. Why would I bring home my boyfriend to live with my husband? To shake Patty up, the detectives let it be known they'd been in touch with Jaime. And that he might be on his way, right at that very moment, to meet them.

I talked to Jaime today. Yes. Jaime gave me a lot of information. What? I can't discuss that with you. But you know something? What are you going to do when he gets back here and says, you know what? She put me up to it.

Prove it, asshole. Slowly, you can tell by Patty's responses to questions, she's reassessing her situation. Is this when Patty realized that Jaime was more than just a patsy? He was now a problem and a dangerous one. For he was the only witness who could connect her to Ron's murder. And if he was coming back, did it mean his once obsessive loyalty to her had finally been broken? Maybe the time had come to throw Jaime under the bus. That's someone, of course, being Jaime. me. Jaime? Yes. Why? Why is it your fault? Because he never had a mother figure.

I should have never got close to him. You were a little more than a mother figure. After a while, yes. Because he confused the two and I was lonely. Patty's voice fell to a dramatic, breathless, Marilyn Monroe-type whisper. Hymie, she said, had a very dark side. He scared me. He scared you. I can see why. I can see why he would scare you. This is what I'm talking about. I can see why you're frightened of him. And you cut it off.

And now he's out in the cold. He's still alive. You're alive. And your husband is gone. I don't think I'll be alive for long. I'm telling you, he'll come for me. He'll tell you he's coming here. But he'll kill me first.

I don't think I'll be alive for long, she said. I'm telling you, he'll come for me. He'll tell you he's coming here, but he will kill me first. As those words left Patty's mouth, you could almost hear the light bulb going bing over her head. She had a new plan now. A plan for Jaime. Coming up next on The Seduction.

There was a kidnapped note found at the house. What did the note say? It was a white piece of paper, printer paper, eight and a half by 11, with cut-out pieces or cut-out letters from a magazine glued to it, stating that I have taken her. The Seduction is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Vince Sterla is the producer. Jonathan Moser is the audio editor. Rachel Ligon is associate producer.

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. Thank you.