August 2007 - Posts
by Dan Slepian, Dateline producer
Brash, charismatic, impulsive, clever. It’s a sure bet that if you hang out with Bill Stanton, these are among the words you would use to describe him. Spend just a few hours on the road with him and you’ll soon realize how he got his name--"Wild Bill."
(Photo: L-Bill Stanton, R-Dan Slepian)
As the producer of “Wild Bill: Breaking and Entering,” I’ve spent hundreds of hours with Stanton and while I’ve done many stories over the years for Dateline, working with him posed a set of challenges I’ve never encountered before.
An example:
Stanton and I were meeting in Las Vegas to film a segment for his special. A crew was going to videotape him as he attempted to break into homes and hotel rooms there. The day before, Stanton was in Phoenix shooting a story for the “Today” show about the dangers of drinking and driving. He showed up in Vegas with a migraine, clearly hung-over. To say he was in a bad mood would be an understatement. He told me he’d pounded a ridiculous number of Vodka shots to show how reckless a potential drunk would be behind the wheel. Stanton suffered through that shoot in Vegas. And so did I. Welcome to the world of “Wild Bill” Stanton.
As the “Today” show’s on-air security expert, Stanton has created his own form of the American fire drill. He’s snatched volunteer kids to test how unsuspecting passers-by would react, set up valet parking attendants to see if they’d steal from a car, and caught men cheating on their wives.
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By Karen Epstein, Dateline Producer
There are certain days when you’re covering a trial that you don’t want to miss. June 26, 2007 was one of those days.
At about 8:45 a.m., I bolted up the stairs of the Washoe County Courthouse in Reno, Nev., to the second floor courtroom of Judge Steven Kosach. I knew the media would be clamoring for seats, and I wanted a good one. It was supposed to be a big day in the trial of Chaz Higgs. The day before, Higgs had taken the stand in his own defense, and now it was the prosecution’s turn to cross-examine him. Little did I know that there was about to be a dramatic twist in this case no one could have expected.
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By Dennis Murphy, Dateline Correspondent
You know the painting "American Gothic." A couple -- a farmer and his wife, at least she seems to be his wife, but maybe a spinster daughter, apparently fresh from sucking lemons -- stares right at you the viewer with a pitchfork between them. To me, it's always been the American "Mona Lisa." Ambiguous. As with the lady's smile, what's going on here between this man and woman from the heartland?
I mention it only because I'm coming in from the airport in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I wasn't on the ground long before I learned that the city was home to Grant Wood, the painter of "American Gothic". A lightning refresher art course from Wikipedia tells me that Wood's sister Nan posed as the farm woman and his dentist posed as the man. (By the way, knowing that the farmer in "American Gothic" was, in fact, portrayed by Grant Wood's dentist won a contestant on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" a million bucks.)
But I digress.
It's the ambiguity of the story in the painting -- that sharp pitch fork between the Iowa pair -- that echoes a bit with the current American gothic story we're working on in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City corridor.
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By Andy Cashman,
Associate Producer
After 9/11, I had the privilege of working on a story I'll not soon forget. As part of an hour-long documentary we were shooting for Dateline, I slept with, ate with and went on runs with the firefighters of Engine 24/Ladder 5. I'd say I lived with them for the better part of 2 months and, as you can imagine, this was an emotional time in the lives of these firefighters. They had lost 11 of their members and I witnessed them cry, laugh and eventually heal a little bit.
On Saturday, Aug. 18, two firefighters from Ladder 5, Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino, were killed while battling a blaze at the Deutsche Bank building beside Ground Zero in downtown Manhattan. Though I got to know other firefighters better than Beddia and Graffagnino, I knew them a bit. As soon as I heard about their deaths, a story came to mind...
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By Fred Rothenberg, Dateline Producer
Bill Lee's friendly Kentucky accent was unmistakable -- even if I was hearing it at 3:30 in the morning.
Bill is the longtime coroner for Hardin County Kentucky, and he was calling on the Bat-Phone. That's what we jokingly called the phone that coroners and police, in and around Louisville, Kentucky, were using to alert us to death stories that we might want to cover.
The dedicated cell phone was on the night stand in my hotel room. Fellow producer Maia Samuel and I were alternating overnights when one of us was on call with the phone, and this was my sleepless night.
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By Maia Samuel, Senior Producer
Only one of our team of 10, which included Dateline producers, correspondent and crews, had witnessed an autopsy before. The rest of us were apprehensive, but still coolly confident we could handle what we were about to see. After all, in the course of our careers a few of us had seen dead bodies before. But at the sight of just the blood-splattered autopsy room floor, my knees threatened to buckle. It was going to be a challenging week.
The police I’d talked to suggested I use mentholated vapor rub applied to my top lip to help conceal the smell of the bodies that were being autopsied. It didn’t work. I learned to “stay in the smell” –- if I didn’t leave the autopsy corridor my senses would be overwhelmed and my nose got used to it.
After a couple of days of watching the calm professionalism of the Louisville, Kentucky medical examiners and their staff, we all became more accustomed to the sight, smell and sounds of the autopsies. And we no longer feared the dead. What we couldn’t get used to was the terrible sadness of family members who had lost their loved ones. We felt deeply for them.
'Dead Men Talking' airs on Dateline NBC Monday night, Aug. 20, at 10 p.m. ET.
Several members of the Dateline team reflected on their experience with the Louisville medical examiner's office. Read producer Fred Rothenberg's story about a late night phone call here, and assistant producer Chetna Purohit's story about a tragic fire here.
By Chetna Purohit, Assistant Producer
It was chaos in Bardstown, Kentucky, in the early morning hours of Feb. 6, 2007. Police, fire trucks, the Red Cross. A brick house burnt to its core. Panicked relatives and neighbors stood anxiously in the cold behind yellow police tape waiting for answers -- for any sign of hope.
Visible from the street was a charred bicycle. For hours, fire inspectors combed through the remains of the house. By daybreak the devastation was clear. One by one, they carried out the body bags – ten of them. Just as the last body was being placed in the truck, a man ran towards the home. Police stopped him just in time. I watched in horror as the medical examiner told him his 2-year-old twins were in the house. It was Kentucky’s deadliest fire in 30 years. An entire family wiped out. The youngest was just 17 months.
I thought I had seen the worst of it until I got to the medical examiner’s office. Walking down the halls, trying to comprehend what I had just seen, I walked past the autopsy room. On the table was the body of a child. In the chaos of the day I had managed to hold myself together. Now, I completely lost it.
The following night I attended a memorial service and was moved by the strength of this close-knit community. Amidst this tragedy, they found in each other hope for a better tomorrow.
'Dead Men Talking' airs on Dateline NBC Monday night, Aug. 20, at 10 p.m. ET.
Several members of the Dateline team reflected on their experience with the Louisville medical examiner's office. Read senior producer Maia Samuel's story on dealing with dead bodies here, and producer Fred Rothenberg's story about a late night phone call here.
By Natasha Lebedeva, Booking Producer
It was an unforgettable week in Louisville, Kentucky, in the middle of February. We were covering the work of the Louisville medical examiner's office and the death cases that occurred within that week. One of the scary things for me, frankly, was to see a dead body and to see an autopsy performed on it.
There is this public fascination with autopsies and unraveling the mysteries of death, which may have started with TV crime and hospital dramas. There is also an expectation that medical examiners may be able to perform miracles overnight, that pathologists in the mortuary may be able to give instant answers to police officers and family members about the cause of death.. As it turned out, it doesn't happen like that in real life and in real-life autopsies.
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By Vince Sturla, Dateline Producer
What would you do if a friend went missing while traveling in a foreign country? How would you find him? Who would you call? Where would you begin your search? This was the reality John Elwin's friends were in during the months following his disappearance -- caught up in a scenario that seemed scripted by Hitchcock.
Making this all the more confusing and unsettling was that the case unfolded slowly. Suspicions surfaced gradually. John Elwin had been missing for more than two weeks before his friend Luis Soltren got a call from Elwin's girlfriend, asking him to join her in an ad hoc investigation into where her boyfriend could be.
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