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Chapter 1: What happened to two-year-old Nikki in the Texas hospital?
Where was she? The disappearance of Carrie Farmer was quite unlike any other, because Carrie hadn't exactly vanished, but retreated beyond the shadows to release rage in torrents of text messages. And it just went on and on and on. Beyond diabolical, beyond the macabre, to murder, a story straight out of left field.
You're on edge as to what's going to happen next.
I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Something About Carrie, an all-new podcast from Dateline. Listen to all episodes now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Friday night on Dateline.
All hell breaks loose. Sarah was good at playing everybody. I think it takes women sometimes to realize how awful women can be.
The deeper you went into these, the more crazy things you'd find out, right?
This is a once in a lifetime case.
Dateline, Friday night at 9, 8 central. Only on NBC.
Good morning to you, Mr. Hope. How are you? I'm blessed, I'm blessed.
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Chapter 2: What evidence led to Robert Roberson's conviction?
I guess we had been told that there was an injury on the back of her head, but we couldn't see it because of her hair. And so Nikki's head was shaved so that we could get a picture of this injury on the back of her head.
Was the injury then obvious to you?
It was there. Yes, it was obvious. There was a knot on the back of her head.
Wharton also saw bruising on Nikki. He started asking Robert questions.
When we talked to him, we found him very matter-of-fact, no emotion. And so that made us, kind of put us on edge a little bit, I guess. There was just something off, something's amiss.
Robert was telling you that she had fallen, right? Yes. Robert said he'd been home alone with Nikki. A strange cry woke him up at about 5 a.m. He found Nikki on the floor. Robert said he kept her awake for a couple of hours, tried to comfort her. Then they both went back to sleep.
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Chapter 3: How did Nikki's family react to her tragic death?
At about 9 a.m., he said his alarm went off. That's when he discovered Nikki was blue and didn't seem to be breathing. Detective Wharton was suspicious of Robert's story. He asked him to take him to his house to walk through what happened.
We didn't find anything that looked like violence. So there was no broken sheetrock. There was no blood anywhere. There was no broken furniture, no broken dishes. Nothing looked like violence. No struggle. No, no. And so we went to the bedroom. We documented the height of the bed. We gathered the sheeting off the bed there. We took pictures of the bed.
We found copies of those photos in court filings. They show a box spring and mattress propped up on cinder blocks. A Winnie the Pooh blanket is wedged beside the bed. Robert said after Nikki fell, he saw blood around her lips and a bruise under her chin.
He had told us that he had seen some blood on her mouth and there was a wet washcloth that he had used to get the blood off her mouth, so we recovered that wet washcloth.
A photo of the washcloth shows just a few specks of blood on it. Then, the detective said Robert did something that struck him as bizarre.
He was hungry, and so he wanted to go make a ham sandwich.
That added to your anxiety about his... Yeah, it was odd.
Again, it was odd to us that, yes, he wants to go make a ham sandwich.
I would think as a police officer, you get a read on a case fairly quickly. Was this one where the pieces were coming together pretty quickly that this man harmed his daughter? It sure felt like it, yeah.
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Chapter 4: What inconsistencies were found in Robert's story?
Terry said Robert's attorney was right about the impact of those autopsy photos.
They could see what was all going on in her brain and how much bleeding and how much this and how much that. And they actually passed those or showed those pictures in court.
I don't know how you shake those images.
You don't.
But what stood out even more was that stuffed toy demonstration. She remembers how violently the girl shook the teddy bear. But it obviously had an effect on you.
Oh, yeah. I sat there and thought, well, yeah, now I can see where, you know, if you have a man Robert's size shaking a baby, I can see where it maybe could have done some violently brain damage.
Terry said there hadn't been much debate in the deliberation room.
I'd say everybody pretty much had their mind made up.
It took the jury only about four hours to find Robert guilty of murder. Robert was sentenced to die and transported to death row. More than a decade passed. All of Robert's appeals were denied. His guilt seemed undeniable, certain. That's when, out of nowhere, came a woman who refused to let Robert and his case die quietly.
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