Talking Dateline: Conversations at CrimeCon Part 2

Hi, everybody. Lester Holt here. We've got a special talking dateline for you this week. It's part two of a conversation Josh Mankiewicz had at this year's CrimeCon with Ellison Barber, his NBC News colleague and host of the Netflix video podcast, Allegedly. The conversation was taped in front of a live audience at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and the audience had some questions of their own for Josh, which we'll play later. But first, Ellison, who is a lifelong dateline fan herself, asks Josh what it's like talking to families who have suffered the unimaginable. Hi, guys. I'm so happy to be here at CrimeCon. I'm so honored to be here with you. How has your CrimeCon been? It's been wonderful. I've seen a lot of familiar faces. I gather this is, if it's not the biggest CrimeCon, it's certainly not the biggest CrimeCon. It's been wonderful. It's certainly pretty close. It's a lot of people. I cannot find my way around Caesars. Yeah. No one else can either. But I bring you greetings from everybody at Dateline, particularly, what's his name? Let's talk Dateline. One of your old episodes I recently watched, I think it's called Haunted, they're investigating a pair of double murders that took place in Nebraska years apart. Oh, yeah. And police are starting to realize they think that they're dealing with a serial killer. Right. And one of the things in that that I thought a lot about after was there's a moment, one of the victims was an 11-year-old. I think his name was Tom Hunter. Yeah. And there was a moment when you're doing interviews with some of the families, and you say something about how grief presents itself in different ways. And for me, I think about that a lot when I'm covering stories, because it's hard to know how anything can happen. And I think it's a lot of times when I'm covering stories, where somebody will react in a traumatic situation. But I also think of recent cases where there have been instances where people have felt like their family has come under a microscope unfairly. There was a case recently involving a dentist where he and his wife were murdered. And there was a situation where the brother-in-law, and I've spoken to him, where he talked about people speculating when he was doing media interviews of thinking that he was behaving in a way. And he had nothing to do with this and how painful it was for him and his family. And I think it's important to think about the concept of grief presenting itself in different ways. What have you learned in that regard, and how does it impact the way you cover stories? One of the things I never say in Dateline, and that I try not to use if we get interviews on this, is the idea that settling one of these cases, figuring out who it was, maybe locking somebody up, represents something called closure. That doesn't exist. And it's a nice idea, but it is not reality. And I hate it when people talk about, well, now the family can have some closure. That's not going to happen. Your life is split in half, the part before and the part after. And I think that the ripple effect of murder is something that isn't as well understood, something I certainly didn't understand until I started covering this, which was about 20 years ago at Dateline. And the extent to which things that happen, these losses that families suffer, end up affecting people who maybe didn't even know the person who was killed. And I think that the ripple effect of murder is something that isn't as well understood, something I certainly didn't understand until I started covering this, which is about 20 years ago at Dateline. And I think that the ripple effect of murder is something that isn't as well understood, something I certainly didn't understand until I started covering this, similar kind of thing, which was spawned by the loss of someone. It's like the Smart family in California, who even though a man was convicted of killing Kristen, their daughter, they haven't stopped for a second. They want her body. They know. They know she's dead. They want her remains. And they're still putting pressure on law enforcement to find it. And I think they will at some point because they're relentless. So, I mean, you see both sides of this. You mentioned Kristen Smart. There's been a lot of activity in terms of searches related to Kristen Smart of late. What do you make of that? Look, I mean, I think a lot of it is due to a couple of things. The Smart family, as I just said, won't give up. They're going to give up. They're going to They have remained very focused on getting a result in that, even after their daughter's murderer was convicted. I think it's also a, you know, a tribute to the sheriff there, who, when he was elected, which was some years ago, made a pledge during the campaign that he like this was like the big unsolved case in that jurisdiction. And he wanted to make it a priority, and he said that he would, and then he did. So that's part of it. The other part of it, which was this great sort of X factor, was that, as a lot of you probably know, a podcast played a huge role in that case. And in some ways, that's sort of what I want to give law enforcement and the sheriff's office sort of the most credit for. Because frequently, when someone unorthodox walks through the door. Whether it's a private citizen or private eye or a podcaster or a journalist, and says, you know, I have information on your case, I think I know some things that you might want to know. Frequently, the law enforcement is not terribly interested in talking to those people, or they say, like, great, you know, fill out this form, which I might never read. But in this case, the podcaster, a guy named Chris Lambert, who has a podcast called "Your Own Backyard." That was really sort of a big part of it. That was really sort of a big part of it. That was really sort of instrumental in getting that case over the finish line. And so a huge amount of credit is due, not just to him for the sort of way he presented it, but also to the Smart family and law enforcement, which listened and was willing to take information from what was, at the time, a nontraditional source. And I think you'll probably be seeing more of that as the years pass. When we come back, Ellison and Josh discuss a theme running through several of his podcasts. broadly about some of the systemic issues i think it brings up okay uh christine krug um was a mom and an engineer and a wife in uh in the denver area um killed by her stalker who she thought was her uh her high school boyfriend but who turned out to be her husband uh and and his motivation apparently is that she was going to leave him and he thought that if he could make her afraid of this phantom stalker that he had created that she would come back to him and then when he realized that that wasn't going to work and that in fact he was going to be found out and then he would be on the losing side of what was going to be a lopsided divorce then he felt that he had no choice but to kill her um that story is interesting because police in broomfield colorado which is just outside denver had written search warrants for the phone and internet companies that this phantom stalker was using to contact christine so they'd written warrants for phone and internet and text companies trying to figure out where this guy was and where these texts were coming from and that information was not made available until the day that christine was murdered in her garage then the police department went back to those companies and said now we have a not just a stalker but a killer on the loose and and we need that information right away and it arrived within hours making it clear that that information could have been provided before she died and if that information had been provided she almost certainly would have you know thrown her husband out of the house changed the locks taking a she certainly would have thrown her husband out of the house and she certainly wouldn't have allowed him to stand behind her in the garage which is where he was when he murdered her so that made christine's family um through their grief uh her cousin becky who was a domestic violence prosecutor uh began lobbying the oregon state legislature where she lived to pass a law uh called christine's law and they did pass it and it's now on the books in oregon and it requires that in stalking cases there is a very short clock on companies that receive law enforcement search warrants to respond with that information uh and that is a that is a wonderful development and i look forward to it expanding to all 50 states and the fact that we played any role in that at all is wonderful but that is that is that was christine's family at work the the morgan fox episode was in uh outside the the canton ohio area she was being stalked by someone at work all these people worked at fedex in a packaging facility um and he murdered his co-worker who he was clearly obsessed with and she merely saw him as a friend so one of those is sort of workplace stalking and the other one is sort of a more traditional form of stalking i ended up doing a lot of work on stalking because of those two cases um and i didn't know this before we started down the down the christine well crew story road which is that stalking is not even a felony in about half the states in the united states it's about where domestic violence was about 30 to 40 years ago which is that frequently the response from the criminal justice system is you better stop doing that but when you think about the cases that you have covered when you look at statistics today the cdc says one in five women in the united states have experienced and this is as of 2024 have experienced some sort of stalking incident in their lifetime it amounts to like 22.8 million women in this country alone and then you think that's just the ones that are reported correct yeah a lot of people when you talk to people who've experienced this will say they feel like if i go report nothing will be done and then maybe the person who's doing it is going to get mad maybe the situation will get worse and as we know from domestic violence uh much more attention and much more severe penalties are required than just essentially saying you stop doing this don't make me come back here but you know stalking requires a concerted deliberate effort and series of efforts to do something and so much of it now has moved from parking across the street from somebody's house to online and the laws need to reflect that and they need to reflect how closely stalking is frequently followed by other crimes many of which are are significantly more violent dangerous and frightening and so like we're kind of at the infancy of things evolving with that but that is the thread that unquestionably connects both of those both of those cases and unfortunately i guarantee you uh we're going to be doing more you talk about it being kind of in the emphasis in its infancy at least legally speaking but i look back and i think 1990 in california you had one of the first anti-stalking laws passed it was considered landmark legislation it came after a series of high-profile murders that had come from a stalking situation and or attempted murders and essentially what that law did at the time in essence was it said okay there are some behaviors that maybe individually will not amount to a crime but if there is a pattern that's something that could be criminally prosecuted and the idea behind that law was saying the pattern maybe changes things when you think about the legislation that was passed in the 90s that is looked at and often framed as these landmark laws have changed the course of what's happening legally speaking do you think they've done enough to change the course of what's happening clearly not but you know and as i said it's got it i mean a lot of the laws that are on the book sort of don't reflect cyber stalking like at all uh that that's all changed with social media the fact that everybody has a phone in their hand now that that i mean that that's a whole other aspect of this but no i mean i remember when i uh when i was a had been murdered by this guy who who got her address from the DMV and came to her door and killed her and one of the laws that was changed as a result of that is you can't get that kind of information but like that's that's a that was a great start but it didn't go much beyond that so I mean you know for example on the search warrant thing phone internet and text companies will tell you we get thousands of requests from law enforcement all the time and we do not have the personnel to answer all of those search warrants and we generally rely on law enforcement to tell us which ones are urgent and which ones are not and of course the other thing is that law enforcement has figured out that if you say it's urgent you're going to get the results back quicker so that that that you know like it's not always as urgent as maybe they make it sound so the idea of which which would be great if it were expanded nationally is that in stalking cases it requires a much more immediate response by the tech companies than has previously existed again you're working a a 30-year cold case homicide might not matter as much if you get the phone records back today as opposed to getting them tomorrow but it does matter in a stalking case when we come back Josh answers some questions from the audience including one about his good friend Keith Morrison we have mic stands if people want to start lining up to ask any sort of question could you tell Keith how much how much we miss him here at crime con i will i mean you mean here at crime con yes i will miss him a lot yes i'll tell him he's he's definitely going to be on plenty of stories in the next few months but i will tell him that he needs to come to crime con um a quick question for you i have a friend whose daughter was murdered and could you um some direction from an advocate to advocate for his own daughter's um case how would i get in touch with or he get in touch with tori's mom tori vanos well um yeah um dana eros is her name h-e-r-r-o-z yeah dana dana read like 50 books about how to survive uh like about recovering from grief but uh none of them were about dealing with violent loss they were all about like you know what if you know a family member of yours dies in a you know from illness or a car accident or something uh and uh and so she she contributed to one there's a book on amazon called the murder survivor's handbook i'm sure you can find it elsewhere but it is on amazon and uh and that's been useful for a lot of people okay great thanks i'm gonna go over here yeah oh hello hey josh i'm i'm keith sharon the host of the murder on music oh yes yes uh you and i worked on a k uh the same a similar case in uh southern california about the death of kathy torres and i thought it might be good for you to illustrate the lengths that of advocacy that her mother mary bennett went yeah i mean that's a perfect example is what mary torres went through uh she was pretty sure i think she knew what had happened um i mean she wasn't just um she wasn't just advocating the or work harder, she was like no, no, this is who it is. focus on that and got a job at the police department right and they had to stare at her every day uh yeah at the desk next to the chief of police right yeah and then literally like came inside the building which is just an amazing thing good to see you nice to see you thank you yeah go ahead hello i'm stacy with women in horror.com and i have a question that i think the answer is yes but i have to ask josh have you seen the bill hater impersonation of you there's an impersonation of me uh yeah i saw it um so the uh the day that it happened we heard sort of through like back channels that like you know uh you guys should watch kimmel tonight right um and we i guess kimmel's staff must have must have called um or somebody at abc did at abc entertainment entertainment so I was told you have to watch but I didn't know why so then I saw it the night it aired and I was like it was incredible also I would have told you that you couldn't imitate Dennis but his imitation of Dennis was so great so so yeah now people have sent that to me like a thousand times because every time it reruns people think it's the first time right they say like I have yeah so so yeah it's amazing yes I've seen it I've seen it a lot of times um I've never met Bill Hader um and you know there's this kind of like sort of uh unspoken rule in Los Angeles which is where I live and I think where he lives that you know you don't sort of go bother people like that like if they're you know you see him in a restaurant or something like that but if I do I I do ever see him I'm gonna have to like interrupt his dinner oh you've got to yeah I'm gonna be like I can't not thank him for that thank you thank you um you yeah just really quick I was just wondering I know you do some cases where there's like law changes because of something that happened to somebody um but do you ever go back many years later as investigative reporters and follow up to see like what what did change because I'm thinking a particular case that from my neighborhood that was covered that nothing did change and I don't know like I would like to see like many 10 maybe 10 15 years later go back and like okay we've done that what was missed here we've done that we've done that on podcasts and if you're a premium subscriber on podcast uh you can listen to a thing called after the verdict which is updates on stories that we've done or not just what people are doing but exactly things like that like what came of this the this issue that we that we brought up in a story okay thank you very much thank you this feels like a good place to talk about uh Ellison's podcast uh video podcast which is on Netflix uh which uh uh which is uh something you should all be checking out I I've already watched it and found it kind of hypnotic um so yeah that's another it's already like appointment viewing um in my house um and it's called allegedly and so I'm sort of looking forward to uh seeing where that goes and I'm also looking forward to finding the right case where I can I know I really want to yeah I want that too I've asked repeatedly yes so now that I have you saying in front of people everybody help me remember this no no we gotta we're gonna find the case but I'm gonna be on there with her thank you guys well that's it for talking dateline for this week but get ready for my new podcast series before and after with Lester Holt that drops later this month starting on September 14th I'll be talking to Jeremy Renner Colin Kaepernick Gabby Giffords and more about the moments that change their lives forever and their resilience in the face of the unimaginable for early access subscribe to dateline premium thanks everybody for listening and remember if you have any questions about our stories or about anything else you can write to us on social media at at dateline nbc you can also leave us a voicemail at 312-413-5252 for a chance to be 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