Lester Holt

They've seen it in movies.

They've seen it on Dateline certainly many, many times.

And it usually doesn't go well for many of the people who end up being interrogated.

So just the idea of walking into one of these rooms and having two detectives confront you and trying to get you to

you know, trip up to say something that's contradictory.

So it's a pressure cooker.

And then you add, you know, some of the other stressors and it can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes.

It had to do with holiday programming, to be honest with you.

And now that you asked me that question, I'm racking my brain as to what program it was.

Okay, Rudolph.

So we came on at 10.16.

And I remember earlier that morning I was on the Today Show.

to promote the program and al goes to read the the tagline and he says that's you know dateline and what lesser hold 10 16 and he goes 10 16 i said that's the dateline mystery as it is to us i don't know i just to pull down pull back the curtain a little bit for the audience

In his initial conversation with police, I think he floated the idea that he might have some dementia, but that was later proven not to be the case.

Tom Sr.

They found him at Los Angeles Airport.

The time where this happened, Fontana is about, oh, maybe an hour, hour, 15 minutes east of Los Angeles.

But apparently his name was on a list of people the police wanted to talk to, in this case, as a potential victim.

So they got a call from, I believe it was TSA, but certainly some officials at LA Airport that said, we have a Tom Perez Sr.

here that we think you want to talk to.