Dateline Originals - The Seduction - Ep. 5: Prelude to a Double Cross
Episode Date: December 19, 2023Jaime returns to California for questioning. But Patty has another plan in mind…This episode was originally published on July 5, 2022. ...
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Jaime was in a terrible state.
He'd fled from California to his uncle's place in Texas because that's what Patty told him to do.
And now she was telling him, don't come back.
And then this woman who could make his heart soar with a smile or crash to earth with a frown,
then she told him the most astonishing thing.
He should go and find another woman.
So, a torment.
That's what Jaime felt.
Still, if it was what Paddy wanted.
So Jaime, who was by this time on the road,
thought about who he knew, who he'd cared about in the pre-Patty past.
And he remembered Ramona.
They were a thing once, weren't they?
He called her.
And I said, Ramona, I know this is out of the blue, but would it be all right if I go to your house in like two days?
Oh, of course, of course, of course. She was all happy.
I can't believe, are you being serious right now?
Yeah, I'm being serious right now.
You're more than welcome to.
Ramona lived in New York City, about as far away from the police, from Patty, from California,
as Jaime could get without driving right into the Atlantic Ocean.
She had her own place. She worked at a law firm. She was a secretary, made good money.
She was 19 at the time.
Were you just staying there as a friend, a boarder?
Did you begin to realize, hey, I could have this relationship?
It started as a friendship again, and then it went into a relationship.
And?
I started to see it as livable.
It was like Jaime was finally coming out from under Paddy's spell.
Here was a new life he could step into, with a woman his own age, who wanted nothing more
from him than love and
companionship. She went as far as suggesting, why don't you just move here, find a job.
My job is more than enough, but at least that way you can get your things that you need and
then you can go to school. And she went as far as saying, I'll take care of you.
Making plans.
Making plans.
And those pesky calls from the detectives?
Not a problem.
He just ignored them.
That was easy.
But there were other phone calls, too.
From Jaime's two aunts and from his grandmother,
the woman who'd taken him in and raised him when no one else would.
Those calls could not be ignored.
So it was really like three moms telling me,
Jaime, the police are constantly calling us.
They're wondering where you are.
What's going on?
They told us somebody got hurt,
that they need to talk to you.
And they're like, you need to talk to them now.
You need to go now.
If you were innocent, you need to come to them now
because you're just making yourself look guilty.
Go talk to them. I couldn't
deny them. They're very convincing. It was enough to get Jaime to call Detective Lensing again.
He's trying to give me explanations as to what had occurred. And then, his grandmother's voice
still in his head, Jaime agreed to go back to California, for real this time, to tell Detective Lensing in
person everything he knew. Jaime said nothing to Ramona about his legal troubles. Instead,
he told her he had to go back to California to sort things out with his ex.
I think this through. I didn't tell her anything about police or nothing.
And she told me that I hope that you choose me.
We hugged and kissed and I left.
It's about a four-day drive from New York City to Placerville, California,
where Detective Lensing was waiting for Jaime.
A long time to be alone and feel things.
Jaime's attraction to Ramona was real. Yes, he was sure it was. But as he drove west on Interstate 80,
that certainty grew fuzzy and faded with each mile he put between them, replaced by a familiar longing,
the gravitational pull of Patty.
Because I had missed her so much,
I started to feel the loneliness again.
I started to feel that I needed my nourishment again.
Somewhere along that journey, from one reality to the next,
despite being told not to do so by Lensing, by his grandmother, Jaime picked up his phone and punched in those magical numbers.
He couldn't help himself. Patty answered immediately. Jaime told her he had made a decision. He was going to talk to the cops and was, right at that very moment, on his way back to California to do so.
Patty listened and then told Jaime she had a plan.
A plan that would fix everything.
A plan that would end up with the two of them spending the rest of their lives together.
She said she needed Jaime.
And she needed Jaime to keep their new plan secret.
Don't tell anyone.
And he didn't.
He was back under her spell.
I'm Keith Morrison.
And this is Dateline's newest podcast.
The Seduction.
The day before Jaime was to be questioned by Detectives Lensing and Hedges, he called them.
Just checking in, he said.
He was making his way across Nevada, and was sure to be in Placerville the following day.
Then, a few hours later, the detectives got a second call.
But it wasn't Jaime on the line this time.
Instead, it was one of Patty's daughters
telling them Patricia had gone missing.
Something was going on.
But what?
The two detectives drove right back to the same house in which Ron had been murdered,
exactly one month earlier.
Again, they walked up to the front door.
Again, crossed the threshold.
And into... a shock.
For a second time, that little house was a crime scene.
Blood was splashed all around the house, drops of it on the floor, in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bathroom, even out on the gravel driveway.
From the look of it, a tremendous struggle had taken place.
Chairs were knocked over,
throw rugs bunched up as if someone or something
had been dragged across them.
A broken vase,
a bloody foot-long kitchen knife
resting on the oak TV cabinet.
The bedroom door
was battered into three pieces.
Patty's bed was smeared with blood.
The bathroom door had a big waist-high hole in it, presumably made by a foot.
The jam around the door latch was splintered.
And 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. So when you saw
it, what was your first thought? We actually chuckled a little bit. I'd never seen an actual
movie ransom note in a real case. Did it occur to either one of you that maybe
Ramos himself had kidnapped Patricia, that he was behind this from the get-go? We really didn't know.
We didn't know if Mr. Ramos had anything to do with this, because we had no indication that he'd
been back in town. By Mr. Ramos, we all meant Jaime, of course. No sign of him around.
Or Patty.
But family members were around.
Ron's daughters April and Misty waited outside the house, talking to Patty's kids.
They've got this belief that she's been kidnapped and...
Or killed.
Then what if Patty's adult daughters, who had arrived late, the one who had called police earlier, asked April and Misty a very strange question.
She said, is there a dead body in the house?
And I said, well, no, not that the detectives have said.
And she said, my mom called last night and asked us to help her get rid of a body.
And I said, what?
And she said that Jaime was coming back and she was going to kill him and asked them to help her get rid of the body.
A shocking thing to hear, certainly.
But then everything had been shocking, beginning with the murder of their dad.
By Patty, the daughters figured.
I thought she was the one that killed dad. By Patty, the daughters figured.
I thought she was the one that killed dad.
But for the life of her, she couldn't understand why Patty would want to kill Jaime.
Another thing that didn't make any sense, the violent scene at the house.
Something about it didn't look quite real.
Maybe this whole thing was staged to look like a kidnapping or murder.
So both Jaime and Patty could get away.
I knew that the two of them were involved in the scene.
But where it went from there was just, it was bizarre.
What did you think? What happened?
What was your sense of what was going on?
I was afraid that she got far enough away that she wasn't going to get caught.
Did you think that was the idea, that this was her way of escaping?
Mm-hmm. And then it was the morning after.
The morning pure chance saved a life and turned the whole crazy story on its head.
600 miles from the Prespa house in the Sierra Nevada, an officer of the Utah Department of Motor Vehicles was slowly cruising streets and alleys around the Salt Lake City airport,
looking for stolen cars.
Running plate numbers, all routine.
And he just happened to drive past a Motel 6
and just happened to turn into the parking lot.
Saw a 2003 blue Hyundai without estate plates.
He ran the number.
The officer's name was Mike Palletta.
I found that it came back
with an NCIC hit out of California.
NCIC, the National Crime Information Center.
Detective Lensing picked up the story from there.
Boom, this license plate comes up as being wanted for a missing person.
He immediately picked up the telephone and called our department.
And that telephone call went to one of our sergeants.
And the investigator is talking with our sergeant saying,
what do you want these people for?
And he had told them, well, they may be wanted for murder.
And as he was talking to him on the phone, Patricia Presbo walked out of the hotel room.
Back now to Officer Paletta.
She looked at me and she turned right around and went right back into the room.
My sergeant and I approached the room and as we got closer, she had walked back out of the room
and started walking towards me.
And I had grabbed her, and I says,
are you Patricia Presba?
And she says, yes.
And then she said something quite bizarre.
He's in the room. He's been shot.
My sergeant and I made entry into the room. As we opened the door and walked into the room,
he yelled out to us, don't shoot me, I've been shot already. It was Jaime, and just barely alive,
shot, they could plainly see, multiple times. His skin was turning the pasty color of death. The officers searched the motel room.
In there they found gauze and medicine, hair dye, a handgun, and movies.
Rambo. Die Hard.
And then, as Jaime was led across the parking lot to a waiting ambulance,
Patty was in animated conversation with a cop.
I didn't see her handcuffed.
I just saw her there talking to a police officer.
Then I started to think she gave me up,
saying that she was kidnapped.
Detectives Lansing and Hedges and Sergeant Tom Holtman
arrived in Salt Lake City a few hours later.
Patty was ready to talk and the detectives were quite ready to listen. The audio here is not great, so you'll
have to listen closely because this is the one and only time Patty gave her version of Ron Prespa's
murder. I'll jump in every now and again to make sure you get what she's saying.
Patty's story began with what happened the night before last. She said she was asleep on her bed
when she was suddenly grabbed by a man wearing coveralls and a creepy nylon stocking mask.
She broke free, she said,
but her assailant chased after her,
kicking down doors.
He grabbed her a second time,
dragged her into the kitchen.
And that, she said, is when she realized.
It was Jaime, but a different, angry Jaime.
He was a beast, she said. What did you say?
We're going to talk about Ron's death.
He told me how Ron died.
He said that Ron was in the chair holding a puppy.
And he beat him in the head.
Did you hear that?
Patty said Jaime told her he killed Ron Prespa by hitting him in the head as Ron held a puppy.
And if he killed Ron, she must be next.
At one point, said Patty, Jaime tried to stab her with a big kitchen knife.
Jaime lunged at her with the knife, she said.
She threw up her arm in self-defense,
and he sliced into it.
So then, she said, she fled to her bedroom, grabbed her revolver,
and locked herself in the bathroom. And then Jaime kicked the door in, and that was when she
shot him. Three times, with a.44 Magnum, a gun powerful enough to kill a bear. She said she ran outside and down the driveway. After he's been shot three times with a.44 Magnum. But even after he'd been shot three times, said Patty,
Jaime caught up to her, grabbed her, and dragged her.
He said, well, he didn't get in the car.
He put me in the car, and he had me dragged.
Patty said Jaime, who now had the gun,
ordered her to get into his car and start driving.
As they headed eastbound on Interstate 80,
across the great Nevada desert,
Patty said they stopped at three different service stations,
first to fix a flat tire,
then twice later for gas.
So why, the detectives wanted to know,
why didn't Patty escape when Jaime, wounded, bleeding, limping, in shock, went inside to pay?
He'd have to be unarmed then.
He's got three bullet holes in him. He doesn't have a gun.
I mean, that would have been a good opportunity to say something or leave.
I'm too afraid.
She was too afraid to make a run for it, she said.
You know, he's unarmed. No, he's not. He's got three bullet holes in him, so that would be a run for it, she said.
Patty laid it all at Jaime's feet.
Not just her kidnapping, mind you, but Ron's murder as well.
She, on the other hand, was a heroine of sorts.
Like some old western movie.
Mountain-dwelling widow guns down the villain who ambushed her man.
That's it. The end.
Run the credits.
Now that's where this story could very well have ended.
Had Jaime died after he was shot.
But he didn't.
Oh, he came close to it.
He was just minutes away from bleeding to death when the cops raided his motel room,
but Jaime survived.
And as he lay on a hospital gurney
getting a transfusion,
he went over in his head
the story he'd tell the detectives,
which was,
it was all him. He would take the fall for Patty. That I did it, that I'm a madman.
Then Jaime thought of his family, his aunts, his uncle in Texas, his grandmother who raised him.
The shame his family would suffer. My family, what is my grandmother going to think?
So that's when I started to just say the truth, the way it really happened.
Once his transfusion was complete, Jaime was patched up, wrapped in a quilt,
and taken to the police station for questioning.
This, just hours after he came close to dying from blood loss.
But now, here he was, finally sitting across from Detective Mike Lansing,
ready to tell the truth.
What was the truth?
So much stranger than even one of Patty's convoluted lies.
The truth was more like fantasy,
like the plot from one of Jaime's movies.
There were times during the interview where we actually had to slow him down
because he was putting this information out there so quickly,
we couldn't even digest it.
That never happens. No, it doesn't.
Jaime's story, like none you've ever heard. The story Jaime told Detective Lensing, and later us,
began three days earlier,
with Jaime heading to California to meet up with Patty,
who once again was back to being his fairy godmother,
a woman who had a solution for all the problems that plagued him.
And now, here he was, pulling into her driveway, together again.
What was it like to get back with Patty again?
It felt like San Francisco again.
Just everything was just happy, nothing mattered anymore.
All those worries fell away?
All those worries fell away. All those worries fell away.
Once at Patty's place, Ron's old house that is,
Jaime called Detective Lensing to say he was still a day's drive away.
That was the first bullet point in Patty's new plan.
Telling the detectives that I was in Nevada or Wyoming, somewhere far away,
to give me some time to think.
But you were actually there.
But I was actually there.
There with Patty.
Then I got back into reality after my family called me and said,
where are you?
I couldn't lie to them, so I told them that I'm here with Patty.
Are you going to talk to the police?
Yes.
Tomorrow?
Promise us tomorrow.
Yes.
Okay.
One of my aunts was going to go as far as getting a plane ticket at that moment and flying over here to make sure. But I convinced her not to because I promised her that I'll talk to the police the next day.
That's when Patty said, if you go talk to the police, they're going to make you talk.
And I told her, look, whatever happens, just know that I'm always at your side.
So the next day, I was going to call the detective and tell him I'm on my way, I'll be there within half an hour at the most.
Before I get to make that phone call, she tells me about this kidnapping plan, this false kidnapping plan.
The false kidnapping plan, Patty's new big scheme.
The one she concocted while being questioned by
detectives Lensing and Holdman two weeks earlier. Remember what she told them then?
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.
He, of course, being
Jaime. What was supposed to happen?
What was supposed to happen was
the detectives still think I'm
in Reno. Yes.
She gets
apprehended by a party
that nobody knows about, which would supposedly be the killer of her husband.
And she is spirited away.
Nobody can find her.
I get there.
You know, I'm supposed to act surprised and be devastated that these guys weren't doing their job properly, that, you know, instead of looking at her as the criminal, you should have looked to somebody else.
To make it all seem more realistic, Patty told Jaime there needed to be some sort of letter or note from the would-be abductor.
She told Jaime to craft one using words and phrases cut from newspapers and magazines.
They got that idea from where else?
Just from the movies of seeing ransom letters from people, how...
They always do it that way.
They always do it that way, that way no penmanship can be traced.
The note was nonsensical, except for a patchwork of phrases Patty insisted on,
like, she is mine, too jealous, and real pain.
It was giving me the chills, because when I looked at it, I felt that it was real.
I was like, wow, this is crazy. This is something a crazy person would write.
Something about, now that he's gone, I can have her to myself.
It'll be all over soon. We'll be together forever. A 44 in the mouth and it's over.
Weird things like that.
Jaime, who had been played a fool for so long, was still so blinded by his obsession,
he had no idea that once again Patty was setting him up.
But this time, he was to play both the role of stooge and victim.
Patty told Jaime they'd have to maintain a high level of realism in the fake kidnapping scheme. So Jaime would have to get into character
to actually dress like some sort of deranged abductor. I got dressed up in overalls. I put on
gloves, like surgical gloves. Then I put on leather gloves on top of that. She gave me a stocking to
put over my head. But wait a minute, who's going to be seeing you me a stocking to put over my head.
But wait a minute.
Who's going to be seeing you with the stocking over your head except her?
She was telling me it was so that no sweat or hair can come off.
Or more likely make Jaime look very, very guilty as his corpse was outlined in white chalk.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. One time he was in his kidnapper costume,
the curtain on Patty's production was raised. The plan was put the envelope side somewhere.
Supposedly she's sleeping. I come in from the door because they never locked their doors. Yeah. I come in, I grab her from
her legs, and I
grab her down, and I drag her all
the way down to the hallway, to
the living room.
Jaime says, supposedly, throughout this
account, but he and Patty
really did act out this entire
performance. Supposedly,
to Jaime, just meant this was
all pretend, all part of Patty's script.
Supposedly, she kicks free. She gets up, gets to the kitchen, which is right there,
grabs a knife, and supposedly we're fighting with a knife. I'm trying to have her not attack me.
I supposedly grab it from her.
She puts out her arm.
And I told her one last time, I said,
Patty, this is a point of no return.
Once I cut you, you know, that's it.
We have to go through with this. Are you sure?
Because I could go talk to them tomorrow.
Just do it.
I'm hesitating.
So she slaps my arm down, and then I just end up slicing her.
Deep cut?
It's pretty deep cut.
She started moving her arm around, making sure there was blood splatters.
Somehow, when she gets away, she tries to get to the phone from the living room.
Supposedly, I'm pushing her against the the walls so she's smearing her arms everywhere. I end up cutting the phone cords while she's on the floor when I pushed her.
So she gets up again. She runs to her bedroom. I put the knife down on top of the stereo.
As I walk down, I start slamming stuff, breaking more things, and I kicked the door down the way it was planned.
That was enough play acting for Jaime. He told Patty they had to beat it.
We gotta go now. It's over, right? Go get the car. Go get the car. Hurry up.
I go, I get the car, I back it up. I can't find her, but I see that her bathroom door for the master bedroom is closed.
So in my head, I thought she wanted to take it a little bit further.
And this I did not know about.
This was not part of the plan.
This was just something that I thought she just improvised.
And I'm yelling for her, Patty, let's go, but I don't hear her.
So when I try to open the door,
it's locked.
I'm like, okay,
that's when I realized,
okay, she just wants another door kicked down.
When I kick that door down,
I see her silhouette with a gun.
Coming up next on The Seduction.
Ike was looking her in the eyes and it just didn't look like the Patty I knew anymore.
She cocked the gun and told me to get on my knees.
I told her, why do you want to execute me right now?
She said, just get on your knees. Thank you. Bryson Barnes as Technical Director, Sound Mixing by Bob Mallory. Nina Bisbano is Associate Producer.