Chapter 1: What happened during the deadly detour involving Tex and Diane McIver?
I'm Craig Melvin. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. I've always been a glass half full kind of guy. And now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, their challenges. Their stories are funny and quite candid. So I hope you'll join me each week. And who knows?
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Hi, everyone. I am Blayne Alexander, and today we are talking Dateline. I'm so happy to be joined by my good friend, Josh Mankiewicz. Hi, Josh. Hello. We are here to discuss your episode, Deadly Detour, and what an episode it was. So if you haven't seen it, you can watch the episode on Peacock or listen to it in the Dateline podcast feed and then come right on back here for this conversation.
Later, we'll have an extra clip from Josh's interview with several jurors from this case. Then Josh will answer some of your social media questions about the episode. All right, Josh, my friend, let's talk Dateline. Just for our viewers who may not be as familiar, just kind of give us a quick rundown of what happened here.
Well, you know, Tex McIver was an attorney in Atlanta and a very big deal. And had been for a long time. And he was married to Diane, who was also a very big deal in business in Atlanta. And so they were sort of this power couple. And they had this property way, way, way outside of town. And they had been there for the weekend and they were coming back.
And as they were getting off the freeway, something happened. In Texas version of what happened, He thought he was driving into the middle of a Black Lives Matter protest, which he was not. But he did say that. He was not driving, and Diane was not driving. Driving was their friend, Danny Joe. Because he was afraid of what he thought was about to happen.
And I will say that that sort of strains credulity a little bit. Tex took out his gun because he thought he felt at risk. And then nothing happened, but Tex kept his gun in his hand. And then as they continued to drive, They went over a bump. Tex awoke with a start. He may have dozed off. Not really clear, but the gun went off.
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Chapter 2: How did the investigation unfold after Diane's tragic shooting?
Here's what's interesting, though. I'll tell you the interesting way that this overlapped. The property that you talk about, this beautiful property that they had where they had their ranch, it was in Eatonton, Georgia, Putnam County. I know it well because my husband and I actually used to own property. Certainly nothing like that, by the way. Nothing even close to that, let's be clear.
Not that grand. Not even almost that grand. But we had some land and it was literally less than two miles away from where their ranch is.
Wow.
I know exactly where that is.
And so you know how isolated that is. Oh, very. Absolutely. If you're going to commit a crime, if you want to get rid of your spouse and claim it was an accidental shooting, that's the place to do it. You're not going to have any witnesses.
That's the place to do it. But also because, again, there was a shooting range there. Everybody's shooting guns there. Right. So a shooting accident certainly does not stretch the limits of believability. Right. And so something like that would have been easy to cook up out there. But I want to talk about Danny Joe. I love that you were able to talk with her.
I love that she was as candid as she was. I love that we just had her voice in all of this. Because, I mean, how rare is it that we actually have the person who was right there when the crime happened? Usually these things happen in isolation or whatever it is. You don't hear from the person who was sitting right there when all of this unfolded.
And so I'm curious if there are any behind the scenes you can tell us about her conversation. I'm just curious about what her demeanor was like as she was recounting all of this to you.
So here's the thing about Danny Joe. She was completely unafraid of. what might happen in that interview. You know, a lot of people we talk with you and I, right. They are worried about how they're going to come off and they're worried about possible legal ramifications, um, that, uh, uh, that might follow, right. Are they going to get charged? Are they going to be implicated in some way?
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Chapter 3: What were the main arguments presented during Tex McIver's trial?
Absolutely. I have to say, one of the things that really struck me about Danny Joe was that we saw the moment that she learned that Diane MacGyver had died. That was what that was. That was really I just felt so bad for her in that moment. One, she's taking her friend to the hospital and I could see that she thought, OK, she shot in the back. This is wild. This is not good.
But she felt comfortable enough that she was stable, that she felt OK leaving. But then to get that news via text message, mind you, which I thought was.
really rough um and then we see her kind of break down you could just see how close they were and then i just really felt for her you could and i mean this that that's that's the thing that says to me more than any other sort of investigative thing i wasn't a part of this you know i i this is a terrible thing that i was a witness to but that i i played no role in this and i think that's right i think she she didn't play any role in this
When we come back, Josh will share an extra clip of his interview with some of the jurors at Tex MacGyver's trial.
He was a young Marine. She didn't care about convention. They made a life together. Then one night, the Marine died. And then the death investigation took a wild, unexpected, and utterly bizarre turn. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and this is Trace of Suspicion, an all-new podcast from Dateline.
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Hey guys, Willie Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with Leah Michelle, talking about her lead role in the hit Broadway musical Chess, some of the Tony talk around it, and her road from the stage to Glee, and now back again. You can get our conversation now for free, wherever you download your podcasts.
One of the big characters, we always talk about characters in our Dateline stories. Sometimes they're, of course, the people that we talk to. Sometimes it's the location, the city. In this one, I think that an unconventional character is Atlanta traffic. You start with Atlanta traffic. Atlanta traffic plays a big role in the way all of this went down.
For some of our viewers who have never had the pleasure of visiting this fair city- I mean, I want to talk about Atlanta traffic because some people could look at this and say, gosh, is it that bad that you would need to exit and take this roundabout way? Yes.
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Chapter 4: How did the jurors come to their final decision regarding Tex's guilt?
You have to put quite a bit of pressure on that trigger to get that gun to go off when you go over a bump on the road. It's not that kind of hair trigger. You have to pull that trigger. Sure.
Absolutely. Let's talk about the trial. Initially, he was charged with involuntary manslaughter. But prosecutors gathered more evidence. They charged him with murder. Did they run the risk of overcharging him here?
I mean, that's always a risk, you know, and that's always that's always a risk the prosecutors have when they have a case that's very high profile. And, you know, there is some significant part of the case. of the population and wherever it is that you live and wherever you're trying this case that, you know, sort of wants the book thrown at this person.
And that's when people do get overcharged because you have, you know, I'm not saying this happened in this case, but in a lot of cases you have like an elected DA who wants to appear tough on crime and is asking for the maximum penalty on everything. And the evidence doesn't always support the maximum penalty on everything.
Before we get to the jurors, I want to – there was one piece that stood out to me during – I mean, several things about the trial stood out to me. But let's talk about the use of the prop, the prosecutor's use of the prop. He came out.
He had that jar of muddy water. This was a thing that Clint is – Clint Rucker, no longer a prosecutor in Atlanta. I think he's in private practice now. He – this is a thing Clint was famous for, was he would take this jar of water – I'm not sure from where. Maybe out of the Chattahoochee. I'm actually not sure where it came from.
But he would put this jar of muddy water on the wall that separates the well from the jurors. And he would say... This water is muddy. By the time I finish my closing argument, it will be clear. You will be able to see it. Then he talks for a while, and he gives his closing argument. And then, of course, the silt has settled in this jar, this mason jar, and you can see through it.
And so it's kind of a metaphor for what he's trying to achieve. You know... Texas attorney, Bruce Harvey, who has a long ponytail, despite the fact that he's a grown man. Sorry. He has, I mean, come on. He has on his shirts. He has a monogram on his shirts, Bruce Harvey does. And the monogram is, let me just make sure I have this right. I believe this is it.
It says 13 and a half, 13 and one half. And that's his sort of mantra as a criminal attorney, which is 12 jurors, one judge, half a chance.
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Chapter 5: What role did Danny Jo play during the incident and trial?
Let's talk about the jurors. We have an extra clip of you talking to some of them about their choice to convict Tex MacGyver, not of malice murder, but of the lesser charge, killing someone in the process of committing a felony.
All right, so you go in, and how quickly do you take a vote after deliberations begin? Pretty much right away. What was the first vote?
Five guilty, and then seven lesser charge or count wanting to.
And I felt like when we walked into the deliberation room that he was guilty. And we all thought he was guilty of something. We had a difficult time agreeing on what that was. When you add all of the things up in this case, too many things happen right next to each other to just say, well, he's not guilty. Did tempers fray?
Absolutely. Voices raised? There was some crying on some days. Crying, there was yelling, there was temper tantrums, people storming out. We weren't making progress. And then the air in the jury room was a defeat of, you know, we're 12 grown people. It was respect for each other. How come we couldn't come to a decision? And we came back in.
We agreed as a group that we were going to give it one more shot. We went back to our notebooks and found the evidence. And that was, I think, the pivotal moment, actually, where we said, look, Tex himself is the only person that said, I woke up, had the gun, and just went off. And his own attorney, the only testimony we had was it wasn't cocked. So he had to have pulled the trigger.
And I think that's what did it.
Not guilty of malice murder. Not guilty of trying to kill his wife. But guilty of trying to shoot her? What, Tex was trying to shoot Diane but not kill her?
I don't get it. One of the things that we had to do with the murder charges, you know, we had to determine, particularly for those of us who were in the guilty camp, can we truly find the intent? And we couldn't. Yeah, I mean, for aggravated assault, there's an intent to cause bodily harm, right?
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Chapter 6: How did Atlanta traffic influence the events of the case?
MarchinMadness says on X, Texas trying to be smooth, too smooth.
Well, you know, as you heard the jurors, I mean, like they did not believe Texas story.
OK, good. Let's hear from this genuine. Lori on X says, I'm sure I've said this before, but I will never pass judgment on anyone because of how they grieve or respond to a tragedy. Well, that's always something that comes up in our episodes.
Laura, you have not seen enough datelines because what America does is pass judgment on anybody who grieves outside the norm. I mean, we all say that we say, you know. Well, you know people grieve differently. Right.
But if you grieve by selling off your dead wife's possessions in a very short period of time, you're going to get judged for that, not just by your friends and neighbors, not just by people watching on TV, but by people whose job it is to lock you up. So, yeah, get ready. We do all grieve differently. I got a podcast out right now called Trace of Suspicion in which how someone grieves is
is a huge part of the story. So yeah, I would urge you to listen to that.
Here's one from Rara18751937 who writes on X, let's just say I don't think that you can shoot your wife on accident.
Yeah, well, many Dateline viewers would argue exactly that.
Interesting question from Misty Hargrave, who writes on Facebook, I'm wondering why the jury was able to completely discount the medical testimony regarding the defendant's sleep disturbances. It seems much more likely that the gun was discharged after Tex jolted himself awake.
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