Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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. 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. Tonight on Dateline. He told me that she had been murdered. She was one of my best friends. So unnecessary, so senseless, so evil. They found Sue Markham deceased at the bottom of her stairs.
Professor Markham was such a big part of the community, her energy and spirit. I saw the two shot glasses on the counter. We knew this was someone Sue had a relationship with. The first person I think did this was me. They're going to say you're carrying a torch for her? You had a key to her house? Yeah. I knew my sister was involved with a yoga teacher. He taught Spanish.
He had that whole exotic yoga teacher poet thing going for him. Yes. I thought that he was kind of out of the picture. They had discovered some documents. She was sinking. She lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm thinking, what the hell? Is this a scheme? She hadn't told anybody about it. She hadn't told a soul. It rips your heart out.
A secret relationship, a stunning crime, and an international manhunt to catch a killer. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Josh Mankiewicz with The Professor and the Poet. Sometimes when people find love, they hold on tight. Even when the person they're holding on to is all wrong. Because love has a way of quieting doubts and overshadowing logic.
If she had said a single word to anybody, we would have just said, are you out of your mind? Beverly Myers was close friends with the woman at the center of our story, Sue Markham. Sue was smart, poised, and a fantastic friend. When I met her, she was the most successful, accomplished person at that time that I knew.
Sue was a professor of accounting at American University in Washington, D.C., and always generous with her time and expertise. Sunday, October 24, 2010, was no exception. It was a Sunday night, and she was given an exam on Monday. She told her students that she would be home if they had any questions preparing for their exam. That was Sue, always ready to help, always a phone call away.
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Chapter 2: What happened to Sue Markham?
I'm thinking somebody's broken in to rob the place or whatever. But where's she? I'm calling for her. I'm saying, where is she? There was no sign of Sue Markham on the first floor. On the stairs leading to the basement, Larry saw an empty vase, dried flowers, and a pair of shoes. As soon as I get to the stairs, I can see her at the bottom of the landing. It is an image burned into his memory.
His friend Sue, lying at the bottom of the stairs. So I rushed on to her. She warm or cold? She's cold. He called 911. While he waited for police, Larry called a lifelong friend of Sue's, Lisa Colton. And he's like, you need to get over here now. And I was like, what? You couldn't bring yourself to tell Lisa that Sue was dead? No. I just told her that she needed to come.
Police were outside when Lisa arrived. They told her to wait in her car. Nothing more. And so now I'm pretty much in my mind thinking, okay, something is very wrong. Lisa watched as officers cordoned off the house. Sergeant Larry Haley of the Montgomery County Police Department arrived just before noon. He'd been told it looked as if a homeowner had been killed during a burglary.
That's certainly consistent with what was happening at the time. A lot of break-ins. A lot of break-ins in this area. The houses are worth a lot of money. There's a lot of expensive property in the homes. This is Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. I have probably passed that house a thousand times. That's because starting back in the 1960s, this was my neighborhood.
I grew up around here. Now a lot of things haven't changed that much since my family and I moved here all those years ago. I definitely remember the fire station and the public library. But look, we locked our doors back then. That said, I don't remember anybody with a burglar alarm, and I don't remember anybody worried about a home invasion, let alone murder.
By the time Sue Markham moved here, the world had changed. As he surveyed the scene, Sergeant Haley noticed Sue's front door faced a busy avenue with nothing obstructing the view from street traffic. The back of the house was different. This is clearly where you would go if you wanted to break in because Massachusetts Avenue, people are gonna see you. You would not go on the front.
There's way too much traffic. And back here, as you can tell, there's a lot less. It's a lot quieter. Well, this thing's gonna shield you. That's the perfect place. And especially at night, it's very dark back here with the trees. It's a little bit offset of the road, and there's not a lot of vehicle traffic. In the yard, Haley found a broken window screen.
The window that was broken was here in the back. It is. It's the one that is right on the side of where the white shutters are. Haley went inside. He saw two shot glasses on the counter and some broken glass on the kitchen floor. Sue's TVs were unplugged and left near the front door. Were things stolen?
There were a number of items stolen to include Sue's cell phone, a couple of her laptops, a TV. One of my initial thoughts was that they got some of the property out of the house. And so either something spooked the individual where they felt like they had to leave and leave the other items behind, or perhaps the sun was starting to come up. There was more broken glass near Sue's body.
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Chapter 3: Who were the key people involved in Sue's life?
She would start every class with the lights down low. She would sit on her desk and she would have all the students close their eyes and take five deep breaths. What other professor starts a class like that? I didn't have any others to do. Sue was also devoted to her family. She taught our younger son to tie his shoes. I think she taught them both to tell time.
So yeah, she did lots of teaching, but she also played. I put up tire swing for our kids, and we have a picture of her just in full swing on that, absolute enthusiasm, leaning into it with a huge, beautiful smile on her face. That was my sister. In her free time, she took Spanish classes. She even became friends with her Spanish teacher, who also got her into yoga.
Sue Markham was the opposite of boring, and her home reflected that. Each room painted a different color. And we're not talking about one room is taupe and one room is gray. No, we're talking, you know, bold, beautiful, big blues and greens and oranges and rusts and, yeah. That bright, happy home was now a crime scene. There, investigators collected evidence.
and built a timeline of the last night of Sue's life. Sue had sent an email at 1042 p.m. the night before to a colleague. They were working on a final exam together for American University. The 911 call was at 1052 the next morning, meaning there was nearly a 12-hour window in which someone got into her home and killed her. Lisa and Larry did whatever they could to help investigators.
They wanted us back at the house. They wanted us to get a sense of what was missing. What's it like to go back in that house? It was not pleasant. I think the first time I went, quite frankly, I did not go downstairs. In the beginning, Larry and I made a pact with each other that there could never be one person in the house alone. That there would always be two of us at the house. Because?
In the beginning, just from a safety and an emotional perspective. We just wanted to kind of be there for each other. One thing obviously missing was Sue's Jeep. Investigators put out an alert for her 1999 Cherokee like this one. Her car was very unusual looking. And I said, they're going to find that car because I never saw another one that looked like that.
And just 10 hours after the alert went out, there was a hit. The Jeep's plate was tagged in northeast Washington, D.C., a 30-minute drive from Sue's home. Sergeant Haley asked the D.C. Police Auto Theft Task Force to look for it. One of those officers had called us back in our office looking for some more information, and he asked us, can you tell me the tag number again?
And so we gave him the Virginia tag, and he said, I have to get off the phone. The car's right in front of me. The investigation was only a few hours old, and it was about to really start rolling. Hey guys, Willie Geist here. We're celebrating 10 years of Sunday today by hosting a very special Sunday sit-down live event, and our guest is one of the biggest stars on the planet, Ryan Reynolds.
We're taking our conversation to the stage in front of an audience of you for one night only at City Winery in New York on April 7th, an intimate in-person evening I promise you won't want to miss. Tickets are limited, so grab yours now at today.com. It was crazy good luck. Police in Washington, D.C. spotted Sue Markham's stolen Jeep just as they were getting a description of it.
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Chapter 4: What were the circumstances surrounding Sue's murder?
Killed her. Stole the car. Stole the car. And was caught. And was caught. And done. The driver's name was D'Andrew Hamlin, 18 years old, and by his own admission, a car thief. Criminal record plus being in the car plus fleeing law enforcement equals suspect. It does, and so... He was a very good suspect right from the beginning.
Police suspected he was linked to a burglary ring operating in Sue's neighborhood. More than 50 break-ins in the last four months alone. Do you think multiple crews or the same person? We know for sure that there was more than one crew because there had been arrests in some of the Chevy Chase cases and in the cases in Washington, D.C. And the burglaries continued? And they continued.
However, none of those had turned violent. Montgomery County Police thought maybe this was a first. Detective Paula Hamel worked with Sergeant Haley. The easiest thing would have been to say, oh, Mr. Hamel did it, obviously, because he's driving her car. It's less than 30 hours later. First, they had a lot of questions for their suspect. As they drove D'Andrew Hamel from D.C.
to Maryland, Sergeant Haley and Detective Hamel grilled him. Anything you say can be used against you. He did not ask for an attorney. And then, DeAndrew Hamlin told a fantastic story. One that started not at Sue Markham's home, but on a street in Northeast D.C. If I took you to that spot, would you remember? Yeah. I mean, the exact spot? The exact spot.
He told the cops the Jeep was just sitting there at the curb. His brother spotted it first, saw the keys, and called DeAndrew. When you talk to Mr. Hamlin, he doesn't know how the car got here. He does not. All he knows is that he got a phone call from his brother who alerted him to the fact that there was a car here potentially to steal. He got on the bus and came here and stole the car.
And his intention was to what, just drive it around? That's it. And it's, in fact, what we know he did. He went joyriding. The joyride ended abruptly. with the cops on his tail and the jeep spinning out into a pole. He told Sergeant Haley and Detective Hamill, he barely remembered the wreck. That's when he tried to get away on foot.
DeAndrew Hamlin insisted he knew nothing about Sue Markham's murder, had never been to her house, and had no idea how her car got to the street where he found it. I'm stuck at, like, if I knew, I would have said it with no hesitation.
To police, the whole story felt a little too convenient, a way to explain getting caught in the driver's seat of a dead woman's car and still deny ever having met her. But as Sergeant Haley assessed his prime suspect, a cop's instinct gave him pause. I've encountered a lot of people who have killed people, right?
And they always have something in their character, something in their demeanor that leads you to believe they could have committed murder. He was lacking that. He's just kind of a hapless thief. That was our initial impression. Now, that doesn't mean that he wasn't part of a group that did this and somebody else in his group. At that point, we don't know.
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Chapter 5: How did investigators approach the crime scene?
In addition to him having all these interesting, creative ideas, you know, he spoke, you know, in these very philosophical, esoteric, using big words. And you could tell, though, that she really liked him. Yes. He was quite a bit younger, but she, I don't know what it was, but she just wanted him in her life. Over time, Sue and Jorge developed a close friendship and maybe something more.
Did she ever tell you she was in love with him? She was over the moon. I never saw her talk about a man in the way she talked about him. That she just was beside herself. She did put him on a pedestal. Like he was a genius. He was a stockbroker and a yoga teacher, poet. Yes, poet and published poet. I get the feeling Sue was more impressed with all of that than you were. Yeah, yeah.
She brought him to a class, and in some ways maybe he was her spiritual advisor or something. But I remember him coming to class and sitting cross-legged on the desk, and I remember thinking, wow, this is odd. Jorge told people he was the son of a diplomat, that he'd studied yoga in India, worked on Wall Street. And Sue told her friends Jorge had his future all mapped out.
And she started telling me about him and that he was going to sell all of his worldly possessions and live in a cave with a yogi. When she says to you, you know, Jorge's going to divest himself of all his worldly possessions and live in a cave. Were you able to keep a straight face? No. I said, Sue, that's crazy. And she threw her head back and laughed. I know, right?
And she's laughing about it. But it's like, no, no, it's crazy. Nobody said this is a guy with some issues? Maybe take it easy? Oh, there were more issues. And she knew about them. He ran hot and cold. His moods, he went very, very low. And one day, for one of her themed birthday parties, I walked in and there was this angry painting on the wall. Blue and red and black, harsh, dark lines.
It didn't go with anything in her life. It wasn't her. It wasn't her, but it was Jorge, Beverly thought. As he began spending more and more of his time in Mexico... Sue registered for an online PhD program to study Spanish. She was hoping the bilingual Jorge would help her. And I think he basically said, I can't commit to helping you perhaps as much as you want.
And so that was very upsetting to her. That's him pulling back. Correct. Time passed, and as it did, Sue rarely brought up the name Jorge Landeros. You're thinking, she's moved on. Yes, she was. I believe that she was. And we learned that Mr. Landeros had moved back to Juarez, Mexico, to that area roughly about a year before, and that as far as anyone knew, he and Sue weren't involved anymore.
Well, how much can any of us really know about the people we love? She didn't tell you I'm in a very bad place here. No. Or about a suspect who became a phantom and he vanishes. And he did. Could she be his next victim? Did he ever mention the name Sue Markham to you?
Sue Markham's parents asked her good friend Lisa to help organize Sue's estate in order to pay the bills like the mortgage on the house in Bethesda. Lisa needed to log into Sue's email. There was just one problem. No one knew Sue's password. Someone's got a laptop up and we're trying to figure it out. Someone suggested they try her cat's name, Scooter.
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