Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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?
You might just come away with your own glass half full. Search Glass Half Full with Craig Melvin from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Kate Snow, NBC News anchor, host of the podcast The Drink with Kate Snow. I sit down with all kinds of celebrities, musicians, athletes over a drink of their choice for candid conversations about how they made it there.
With actor-comedian host Joel McHale, I could barely stop laughing. You know Joel from Community or The Soup, his new show Animal Control. He asked for four bottles of Washington State wine for our interview. He has news about whether there's a Community movie coming... He tells the story of how he got one of his first big acting gigs by lying about his height.
And you have to stay through the credits. He's so funny. We have behind the scenes bloopers and outtakes from our conversation. Hope you'll listen and follow The Drink wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. I'm Lester Holt, and we're talking Dateline today in here with senior producer Allison Orr and producer Anne Priceman to talk about this week's episode, Malice.
If you haven't seen it, you can watch the episode on Peacock or listen to it at the Dateline podcast feed and then come right back here to listen to our discussion. In this episode, we'll have a podcast exclusive clip from Blaine's interview with Susan Embert about a public Facebook post she made in the days after Jake Embert's death.
And then later, we'll answer some of your questions from social media. So now let's talk Dateline. First of all, ladies, thank you for being with us. Thank you for having us. Thanks, Lester.
The reason why Blaine is not here, I'm sure she would love to be here talking to you about the episode, and instead you get me and Anne, is because Blaine is on her way as we speak and record this episode to do what is going to be her first jailhouse Dateline interview inside a facility. And you're going to see that. I'm sure it's going to be a great, really interesting case on a future Dateline.
Allison, I don't know if you want to start off and just kind of give us the big picture of this story. Watching it, I felt like I was watching a bouncing ball half the time. There were so many twists and turns. There were so many twists and turns. Things got started. They slowed down, you know, one step forward, one step back. But the story essentially begins in 2014 in Georgia.
A man named Jake Ember was found shot to death in his home. His wife on the scene died. told investigators and the coroner who arrived that she believed he'd shot himself in the head, and it was very quickly ruled a suicide. But his children, his children from a previous marriage, and his sister, his family members, didn't believe it from the get-go.
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Chapter 2: What happened to Jake Embert and why was his death ruled a suicide?
got married, had two babies. She's on her second maternity leave while we've been covering this. I believe Will Embert got married. Rachel Embert had a baby. I mean, a lot of time went by and a lot of life was lived while we were making this production.
Yeah, and typically that production would involve covering, you know, the handling of the crime scene and new evidence and scientific and physical evidence, yada, yada. But in this case, the investigation was one hour long. It really was not an investigation. It was a woman who made a 911 call saying my husband killed himself.
And they came with the understanding it was a suicide, despite the family saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that's not possible. You have to look at this again. And the coroner arrived and about 15 minutes after he arrived, he determined it was a suicide. Are you surprised he sat down for an interview? Not really. I mean, you could see it sort of in the interview. He's not apologetic.
He showed up early to the interview. He was forthright. He talked a lot. Yeah, and he told Blaine that he allowed Jake's remains to be cremated a day after his death based on what information he had at the time. I guess I was surprised that a coroner didn't do their own independent investigation. Have you come across this before?
In fact, we have come across it as an aspect of the criminal justice system. A lot of big cities and metropolitan cities, places with big budgets, have a medical examiner who is probably a forensic pathologist or at least a medical doctor, someone who's been to medical school. That's what a medical examiner does. In a lot of these rural counties, particularly in Georgia, it's an elected office.
And to be elected coroner in Georgia, in the county where this man was elected, you need to be 18 years old, have a high school diploma. And then after you're elected, you need to take a 40-hour course in coroner studies. Now, Michael Fowler, the coroner here, he did have more training than that. He had studied mortuary science and he had many, many years experience.
working with dead bodies in disaster relief. So he had a lot of experience. He had more than just a high school diploma in 40 hours. But that is the standard in some places. It was very surprising to Jake Embert's family. You know, given how a coroner's determination, they're not a law enforcement officer anymore.
That's why I think Michael Fowler says over and over in the interview, I was depending on what law enforcement does. It's law enforcement's job to investigate. He looks at the state of the body, but he does the certificate that says homicide or suicide. And that is very consequential to a lot of cases.
I mean, you know, and our viewers know that we've done a lot of stories that are the question of suicide or murder. So Yvonne looked for help. She found a private investigator on Google named Lee Wilson. What did you find out about him? Lee was a detective with one of the local police forces for years.
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Chapter 3: What evidence led to the change from suicide to homicide in Jake Embert's case?
Yes, indeed. Blaine was new to the show. Remember, we got on this story in 2018. We'd been tracking the story for a long time. And when Susan Embert was released from prison... She wanted to talk to us. And so she was the first interview that Blaine did with someone accused of murder. But really significant in the story, the interview happens before Susan Ember goes on trial for the second time.
Let's face it, a lot of defense attorneys would not let their client do that. I mean, she clearly had a lot to lose, you would think. Well, she testified in her first trial. And her attorney at the time of our interview, her appeals attorney was the one behind it. And I think there was a lot of belief in her. And in fact, this attorney was also one of her trial attorneys. And they got very close.
You could see that she was truly attached to Susan. She would rub her back during the trial and hug her and comfort her. I think there was a true belief that Susan had nothing to hide. How did you guys prepare for this interview? Well, you know, you prepare for an interview like this the way you prepare for any big interview, right, Lester?
Like, you've interviewed world leaders and despots and politicians. You get a binder full of information from your fastidious producer, right? You get this massive binder. You read it. In this case, they also had the benefit of the first trial. So Blaine was able to review all the testimony. And Blaine's not here. Can we gossip about her behind her back a little bit? Okay.
So Blaine, beautiful, beautiful person inside and out. She's got a really, really big brain. And she really studied this case from beginning to end before she sat down with Susan. And Susan was fascinating to listen to the kind of strange, weird contradictions, the way she
speaks or misspeaks, and Blaine was able to just really listen and then speak for the viewer when something is like, huh, that doesn't sound right. Yeah, I know that, you know, one of my techniques with an interview is you don't have to beat them up, but just ask them enough challenging questions to allow them to reveal themselves. So Susan used the word ecstatic.
She used it several times to describe finding Jake dead. Let's take a listen to that. Take me back to that moment when you first saw Jake. I was ecstatic. I was... I thought I was going to lose my mind. I didn't know what to do. So I called 911 like I was supposed to do. I didn't know what to do. That's what I did. I called 911. Was it a slip of the tongue? What was your read on that?
I don't think it was a slip of the tongue. I think she doesn't understand, in all honesty, what ecstatic means. It seems to me rather strange to keep repeating it, particularly with the theory that she's faking her staging. You would sort of check your vocabulary. I think she thinks... I don't know what word we could guess at, but she just didn't understand what ecstatic meant.
There were some other parts of the interview that didn't make it in the show where Susan just had details that were wrong. Like, you know, she told Blaine that she and Jake had been together for four years, which was just sort of patently not true. And it made for a strange little bit of back and forth of it. Like, wait, is she lying or is she just truly mistaken? And it was...
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Chapter 4: How did Jake's family fight for justice after his death?
I would call the law. I'd call the law legally. I'd do it legally. Call the law. If they messed with me, I would call the law. His family? Yes. If anybody did. And when you say messed with you? Like tried to jump on me or start trouble with me and stuff like that. Argue with me. At that point, Susan, did you know that Jake's family was accusing you of murder? No. You had no idea? No, no.
Her Facebook post was, I don't know, it feels like subtly a declaration, defiant, obviously, but almost like the family reads it as she did it. She's saying, I did it and leave me alone. But there's another way to look at it, which is just leave me alone, stop harassing me. She felt harassed by the family. The family felt lied to by her. You know, it's an emotional time.
Everybody's tensions are certainly really, really high. You know, we talked about Jake's children, but Susan's daughter agreed to an interview, and then she wholeheartedly believes that her mother is innocent. Tell me about that. How has she handled everything? She's close with her mother and does not, just as other people can never see her as evil, as a conniving, plotting, terrible human.
She's dedicated to her mother, as is her son and her granddaughter. They love, they see a different side to this woman than many other people. And... That's a really important voice to include, that there's a different dimension as far as her family sees. So Blaine's interview with Susan Ebert wasn't the last time you all saw Susan. Your interview with her was before her second and third trial.
What was the atmosphere like in the courtroom? It was tense. I guess we always say that. One of the things... There were at least a dozen members of Jake's family in there. And one person on Susan's side, it was an aunt, Jake's family. They were... determined. They just wanted this taken care of, this done and done right. And it was interesting to be around.
The judge in the third trial really wanted the media present. Did you get that sense? Oh, she said it. We were on a remote hearing, and she started out by saying, I was a teacher. And one day I watched a trial, gavel to gavel, and And I was so impressed with it that I became a lawyer.
And now that I'm a judge, I very, very much believe in transparency, that the public, the American public benefits from seeing how the justice system works. We also get kind of a heartwarming window into the effect this would happen on all players here. It ends, the episode ends with Jake's son, Will, revealing that he's pursuing a career in law enforcement. That was a special moment. Yeah.
I think we say this, but really do want to emphasize, he's in law enforcement. So what happened to his father and what happened with law enforcement's response does not happen on his watch. And we've talked about his training. He said it's on suicides, on geriatric deaths, on homicides. We do the same thing. We go on the scene. We document it. We count pills. We...
take photographs we call forensics. He's a very good guy. Apparently, he's a lot like his dad, rather stoic, but he throws out hysterical jokes every once in a while. So anyway, more importantly, he really sees this as a correction, an improvement. Okay, well, after the break, Anne and I will answer your questions from social media.
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