Dateline: True Crime Weekly
The Dateline Correspondents' Year in Review. And true crime goes viral.
Thu, 26 Dec 2024
Listen to this week's special episode of the Dateline: True Crime Weekly podcast. Andrea Canning is joined by Keith Morrison, Josh Mankiewicz and Dennis Murphy to talk about their highlights from covering crime in 2024. Plus, a round up of the true crime moments that went viral in 2024.Find out more about the cases covered each week here: www.datelinetruecrimeweekly.com
Chapter 1: What highlights did the Dateline Correspondents cover in 2024?
Well, the famous Margaret Atwood quote that, you know, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them, that would fit into so many Dateline stories. I mean, you literally could write that into any one of a number of scripts.
Keith, you reported on a high-profile case this year, which made us all think about whether abuse should or should not factor into what justice looks like. And that is, of course, the Menendez brothers, which everyone was talking about this year.
It became a huge story, and it's a testament to the power of social media. Millions and millions of people around the world commented and got involved emotionally in what would happen to the Menendez brothers. After, especially after the Netflix scripted series, a scripted series is based on a true story, but isn't necessarily true.
And I think that was a bit of a trip up for a lot of people who made some assumptions about the case and about the amount of abuse which may or may not have occurred. The same questions were chewed over 30-some years ago during the course of the first trial. The jury was hung. In the second murder trial, the judge said the issue wasn't whether abuse occurred.
The issue was whether the boys were in fear of their lives when they killed their parents. Therefore, he didn't allow a lot of abuse evidence. Now, 30-some years later, the abuse became the central part of it. The original prosecutors of the case maintain to this day that abuse, if it occurred... was certainly not abuse that would have led anybody to kill anybody else.
And Keith, that prosecutor you interviewed, she really was, you know, very forthcoming.
Adamant is a good word.
How she felt. Yeah. I mean, she had some strong words.
Very strong words. But the DA in L.A. decided to apply for the Menendez Brothers release. God knows they've been asking for it for years. And they had been very well behaved in prison for a long time.
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Chapter 2: What were the viral true crime moments of 2024?
Okay, and here's the other question that we teased. According to Dateline True Crime Weekly, Josh, you traveled the furthest distance in a single day to get to a shoot. What was that for?
Yeah, this was for a story in extreme northern Ontario, Canada. This was to a town that was not on the Canadian road system. You either have to fly in or take a train, or you can, in the colder months, you can snowmobile up the river. Um, we chose to take a train because we have all that gear. So the trip there actually took the trip up was like two and a half days.
And the trip back was like two days. And then I was only there like a day and a half, but it turned out to be a pretty interesting story. It was a, uh, a couple of cold case murders from the 1980s in, uh, uh, in, uh, in Toronto and the, uh, The man who was found to have been the murderer left Toronto shortly after the second murder, went up there to the extreme cold small town.
He was arrested a while ago. He's already been put on trial and locked up. He pled guilty. And the last time I spoke to the police, he had not revealed anything else about other crimes he committed. But that remains a sort of big question mark because it's very, very unusual for these guys to just stop.
Yeah, genetic genealogy comes into play in that story, of course. And it's really something we see all the time now. And it's become an issue in the murders of the four University of Idaho students. Keith, with your story, Ph.D. criminology student Brian Koberger is accused of fatally stabbing the students. And we are still waiting for the trial, which has been pushed back twice.
The case is far from resolved. The defense is making an issue of the genetic genealogy in this case because it was kind of a new way of trying to do it.
Yeah, this is so interesting. We talked about this on the podcast before. According to court filings, investigators got DNA off a knife sheath left at the crime scene. uploaded it to various publicly available databases to build a family tree that eventually led them to Brian Koberger's father. And from there, they zeroed in on the son, on Brian.
But the defense says they have all kinds of questions about this.
There's enough sort of to get the defense making an argument or two, but I'm not sure how much success they'll have with it.
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Chapter 3: What cases featured high-profile female defendants?
Right, and that's the, I mean, jurors in general, you know, who've watched TV shows believe, you know, and prosecutors will tell you this, they believe that you can take this cruddy, blurry video and make it crisper and better so that I can see exactly what's going on and we can read that license plate in the car. And that technology is unquestionably going to exist one day, but not yet.
Okay. How about the biggest twist of the year? Dennis, I know jury selection had begun in the case of Donna Adelson. She's the family matriarch accused of orchestrating the hit for hire of her son. I can't wait for Shakespeare.
And she was arrested as she was about to board a plane for Vietnam.
She was the most wanted in the whole dramatic piece here. And she bought a one-way ticket to Vietnam, which is a non-extraditable country. And just as they're in the boarding jetway of the plane that's going to take them overseas, here comes the FBI and a SWAT team. And they take them down, and they're wrestling for the phone, and she's charged with first-degree murder. Anyway, she's...
waiting to go on trial. And last September, the jury had been picked and were waiting for opening arguments. And the judge says, come in chambers here. And then it turns out that her attorney was ruled by the court to have a conflict of interest and could not represent her. So he's thrown off the case, which puts everything back months and months and months.
So now we think that grandmother, Donna Adelson, is going to go on trial maybe next June. Wait and see.
And we should add that Donna Adelson has pleaded not guilty. And her trip to Vietnam was just that, a vacation, she says. That trial will be very interesting. Okay, one case we haven't talked about yet, which I thought was one of the most intriguing this year was, well, any guesses?
My guess is that Karen Reid. I mean, it was huge. Still is huge.
Yeah. I got to tell you, I was at an event at the Marriott Marquis in Midtown Manhattan just last week. And a woman, I was waiting for someone, she walked up to me and she said, I'm from Massachusetts. Is it okay if I talk to you? She said, we are huge Karen Reed supporters. We're team Karen. And she wanted to talk to me about the Karen Reed story, this stranger in the hotel. Yeah.
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