An accused killer's surprising defense. A pharmacist on trial for poisoning. And a medical examiner's strategy for cracking cold cases.
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Welcome to Dateline True Crime Weekly. I'm Andrea Canning. It's January 16th, and here's what's on our docket. In West Virginia, a small-town pharmacist who made national headlines after being convicted of masterminding a multi-million dollar scam is back in court for allegedly poisoning her husband.
The theory is that Natalie was concerned that Michael had discovered the Ponzi scheme and was going to come forward and expose her.
In Dateline Roundup, all the details from Alec Baldwin's explosive lawsuit against New Mexico prosecutors and investigators involved in the Rust trial. And Lori Vallow Daybell, a.k.a. Mommy Doomsday, is back in court, this time defending herself.
These are serious charges and these are serious consequences for these charges.
Plus, a former medical examiner tells us how hard it really is to get a cause of death from a body, especially a skeleton.
It's the same when you have a dead body one day or 100 years dead. You need to know the context.
But before all that, we're heading back to a Tennessee courtroom and a story we first told you about last week. 24-year-old Jason Chen is on trial, accused of stabbing his girlfriend to death two years ago. Only now, his defense team is saying she attacked him. This week, we heard opening statements in a Chattanooga courtroom for Jason Chen's murder trial. He's accused of killing 22-year-old Jasmine Pace. But the jury is from somewhere else. They've been bussed in from Nashville, and it's a two-hour trip. They are sequestered for this trial. All of that is because when Jasmine went missing over Thanksgiving in 2022, her face was all over TV, including on our affiliate WRCB Local 3 News.
Now take another good hard look at your screen. Jasmine is about five feet tall. She has several tattoos on her right arm and shoulder. Anyone with information on where Jasmine may be is asked to call the Chattanooga Police Department.
Jasmine's body was found about a week later in a suitcase on the side of the road. By then, her boyfriend Jason had already been arrested and his face was all over the news too. But it felt like only the prosecution's case was getting airtime.
District Attorney Cody Womb argued for no bond, calling him a flight risk.
And anywhere this defendant goes, we know based on proof presented today, the community is less safe.
Jason Chen has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse. And on Monday, the jury and Jasmine's mother, who was the first to point the finger at Jason, heard his side of the story for the first time. It was laid out during the defense's opening statement. Dateline producer Mario Garcia was there. Mario, thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having me, Andrea.
We talked on the podcast last week about this case. Remind us of the prosecution's argument.
The prosecution's argument is that Jasmine disappeared the night that she went to her boyfriend's house, was never heard from again, and her boyfriend, the person she was seeing at the time, was involved.
Yeah, so there were signs. They had gotten in a loud fight, you know, late at night at his apartment. Her neighbors heard a woman screaming, and then she drops a pin to her mom on her phone. Yeah.
Yeah, her mom didn't see it until a couple days later, and frantic family members had already gone down the road of trying to kind of self-investigate the case because they felt that police weren't helping them as much as they wanted.
Yeah, investigators weren't even the first people in Jason's apartment. Her mom, Katrina, goes to the location and starts, as you said, playing detective.
This family got into the apartment, maybe illegally, maybe not. What Katrina said on the stand is Jasmine's father, Travis Pace, used the credit card to actually, Jimmy, open the door. And then they went in.
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