Dueling movie versions of a crime
Posted: Friday, May 11, 2007 2:40 PM by Dateline Editor
Filed Under:
Crime
by Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent
It's an uncommonly attractive mobile home park - the one across the highway from the Florence, South Carolina, airport. The whole place is shaded by tall evergreens, the atmosphere beneath is more akin to a state park campground than low income rental housing.
We caused quite a stir when we came with our cameras and lights to interview public officials about an event almost nobody in the whole park had ever heard of, certainly not the swarms of little girls who gathered in the street to practice their dance moves. Of course, they weren’t born then. Weren’t even imagined.
The event, as our story describes, happened back in 1994: Jennifer Morgan, 23 years old, funny, pretty, full of life, was murdered in trailer number 9. Whoever killed her tried to hide the crime by torching the place, having sloshed gasoline around the bed where she lay smothered (or strangled, or hit on the head..nobody knows for sure).
It was a terrible thing, an obscene waste of a wonderful young life.
But it was the effect of Jennifer’s death -- the investigation of it -- which is still tearing through private and public lives in the Carolinas and now as far away as Detroit, Michigan.
Watch the show and you’ll see that the question of what happened to Jennifer Morgan has become enmeshed in suspicion, betrayal, professional jealousy, and a remarkable feature of 21st century life: the public airing of once private behaviors. In this case, they even made their own movies! Dueling versions of history.
So who was right about what happened? Was it the county sheriff, Kenny Boone, still working after all these years toward a solution? Was it Tom Morgan, the devoted brother, who labored for more than a decade to finger the perpetrator? Or was it Pat Moag, the Michigan cop, who put his reputation on the line with an allegation so shocking you’ll have to see it to believe?
I must also confess to a real regret. A central figure in the story of Jennifer Morgan’s death was a young man who once offered her (far too frequently, by most accounts) his undying love. That young man became a suspect, and the subject of one of the movies. In fact, he still has not been removed from the list of suspects. I very much wanted to talk to him, to ask for his view of the whole business (surely as useful and legitimate as anyone else’s opinion), but he has, again and again, declined.
With that piece unhappily missing, we’ve laid out the puzzle in as much detail as time has allowed. Perhaps Sheriff Kenny Boone will finally get his man. Or maybe you will figure it out...
'Scenes from a Murder' airs Dateline Friday, 8 p.m. on NBC
