December 2007 - Posts
By Chris Hansen, Dateline Correspondent
It’s our twelfth “To Catch A Predator” investigation and this time we’re set up in a 6,000- square foot home in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It’s a town of about 50,000 people an hour north of Nashville, Tennessee.
Each one of these investigations has its own rhythm and Kentucky is no different. Within hours I am struck by the fact that fewer men are showing up at our hidden camera house than in past investigations.
Looking back I think this at least partially because the Kentucky Attorney General’s office and the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation, along with local law enforcement, have been actively pursuing online predators in the past year.
Before Dateline’s investigation in Bowling Green, the Attorney General’s office with the help of the online watchdog group Perverted Justice had conducted two previous sting operations without us, making 20 arrests.
One of them was a 59-year old criminal justice instructor at an Ohio college who used to be an elementary school teacher. He had been chatting online about having sex with a decoy posing as a13-year-old girl before showing up to meet her at the undercover house.
Even after this earlier high-profile case, though, we still saw men in our investigation eager to meet a young teen home alone for sex. As you will see, seven men show up over three and a half days and all seven are arrested after I talk to them and they leave the house.
You’ll see in Kentucky that we employ the same online decoy, Casey, who we used in New Jersey. She is just as effective in this latest investigation as she was before talking to the men in person.
You’ll see the grooming process in real time.
Also in Kentucky we see a range of men show up, from a factory worker to a man who says he’s a police detective and carries a gun.
Watch the heart-pounding moments when, as he leaves our hidden camera house, he refuses to follow orders from the arresting officers.
'To Catch a Predator' Kentucky airs Friday, Dec. 28.
Click here for more about the series.
By Marianne O'Donnell, Dateline Producer
I saw a young man holding a sign with my name on it as I left the baggage claim area of Florence's main airport.
"Hello" I said, forgetting that English was not the lingua franca here.
"Buongiorno!" he smiled hesitatingly. "Ms. O'Donnell?"
"Oh, right, buongiorno," I corrected myself.
The driver said his name was Mauritzio, and for a moment I wondered whether the dispatcher of a car service or the editors of Vogue had sent him here. He had a perfect right angle for a nose -- what they call a classic Roman nose, I guess -- a defined jaw and dark hair gelled back. A lock of it had managed to escape the rest of the black slick; it curled seductively above his brow like an upside-down question mark. He wore a tailored blue pinstripe with a black leather coat and caramel colored loafers. He wasn't a driver. He was Adonis. As I seated myself in the back of his spacious Mercedes, he climbed behind the wheel, slipped on his black sunglasses and grinned into his rearview mirror.
"We go?" he asked.
"Uh, sure." I stammered. "I mean, good ... uh," since the breadth of my Italian started with 'bongiorno' and ended with 'arrivederci', with nothing in between, it was obvious I was going to need more than his driving skills.
"Bene?" he helped me.
"Right. Right. BEHH-nay," I parrotted. Saying it was a little like taking a rollercoaster ride. Up on the 'beh', down suddenly on the 'nay'. Italian was fun. "The Brufani Hotel in Perugia, please."
Ten hours earlier I had been sitting inside my senior producer's office in New York when I realized I was going to have to hotfoot it to the nearest airport and get myself to Italy. My assignment was to work the ground in a small city in the central part of the country. Perugia. I knew famous chocolates came from there, succulent Perugina Bacci's, but Dateline doesn't cover candy festivals. It does cover murders, though, and a particularly ghoulish one days earlier had left the town still shaken.
CONTINUED >>
by Hoda Kotb, Dateline correspondent
You never know quite what to expect when you sit down to do an interview. So when Drew Peterson took a chair opposite me, I'll be honest: I wasn't sure what was coming.
I knew his backstory well. My producer Sue Simpson had provided me with information, news articles, police reports, autopsy reports.
His life did seem complicated -- when it came to women. This was a police officer with almost 30 years on the Bolingbrook Police Force. He'd been married four times. His first three marriages ended in divorce; after he split from his third wife, she was found dead in her bathtub and his fourth wife, Stacy, was now missing.
I wondered if he was the unluckiest man on earth, with two of his four wives either missing or dead, or if there was more to the story. What would he tell me?
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By Dan Slepian, Dateline Producer
Imagine your loved one -- your brother, your son, your father -- is arrested, convicted and locked up for life for a murder he didn't commit. Now imagine he serves 15 years for this crime, and after all this time in prison, nearly everyone within the system agrees that he is, in fact, innocent. Then, when a Supreme Court Judge overturns his conviction and he finally gets out, the worst possible scenario happens: he is prosecuted on the same charges all over again. It couldn't happen, right? Wrong. It is happening right now, in New York City.
In nearly 15 years as a television producer, I haven't seen a story like this -- until now.
CONTINUED >>
By Leonor Ayala, NBC News
From its dry arid deserts in the north to the frigid, icy landscapes of the south, Chile is one of the most geographically diverse countries in South America. And according to environmental scientists it is also bearing the brunt of the damaging effects of global warming.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Latin America recently to see firsthand the effects of climate change. He spent two days in southern Chile, touring Patagonia.
"The change is now progressing much faster than I had thought," said Ban. "It's alarming."
Ban Ki-moon's visit came just before the release of a much anticipated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the impact of global warming. The IPCC , which shared the Nobel peace prize with Al Gore, called for international treaties to limit the emission of greenhouse gases.
Click here for a slide show of Leonor Ayala's visit to Chile and Argentina.
