April 2008 - Posts
By Josh Mankiewicz, Dateline Correspondent
It's been a long road for Cindy Sommer. Her U.S. Marine husband died in February, 2002, and she just got out of jail last week after being convicted by a jury of his murder. Now here's the hitch: she's innocent. Officially.
Cops and prosecutors will tell you, somewhat derisively, that the jails and prisons are just full of innocent men and women, that everyone behind bars comes armed with a story about how they got jobbed by the system. I don't know how often that's true, but it's certainly true for Cindy Sommer.
Her husband dropped dead on the bedroom floor that awful night, and although Cindy tried to do CPR, Todd Sommer died at only 23. The official cause of death was a heart attack.
A year or so later, Naval investigators (NCIS) were about to close the case when they decided to send Todd's tissue samples to a lab for heavy-metals analysis. That lab test came back showing more than a thousand times the amount of arsenic in Todd Sommer's tissues than should have been there.
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By Chetna Purohit, Dateline NBC
One of the most interesting aspects of this case to me was that, even though there was no body, no physical evidence of a crime and, essentially, no smoking gun, detectives still had plenty to investigate. The biggest clue they had into the disappearance of Ann Racz was Ann herself.
Ann lived her life with strict organization and was exceptionally meticulous about documenting the mundane details of her life. When detectives entered Ann's condo, they found letters with Post-it notes detailing dates when they needed to be mailed. Her calendar read like a diary of everything she had done and all that she planned to do. And a Boboli pizza sat on the kitchen counter -- dinner that she had promised her children the day she disappeared.
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By Bob Gilmartin, Dateline Producer
I first met Eddie Locascio Jr. at the law office of a longtime friend of mine, Michael Band. Michael, a former top Miami prosecutor, is now a successful private attorney who was hired to help steer Eddie and his aunt, Ursula Silveira, through the maze of the criminal justice system. Eddie struck me immediately as a brilliant young man. Looking in his eyes you could almost see his brain tracking the information minutes ahead of where you were in the conversation.
I first formally met his father, Ed Locascio Sr., in court during a break in the trial. We had seen each other many times in court before, but never spoke. He knew who I was from conversations with his brother, Al, and his sister, who I had spoken with in the hall. But the opportunity had never arisen to go speak with him. With the permission of a court officer, I approached him and introduced myself. Initially, there was some unease on my part about seeming too chummy with the defendant in a first-degree murder case -- especially in front of the victim's family.
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By Hoda Kotb, NBC News
It still hurts. A year has passed and it still hurts. I keep paging through the newspapers and reading bits and pieces, stories of survivors a year later. My heart aches. I am a 1986 Virginia Tech graduate. It may have been 22 years since I graduated, but I feel so close to that campus. It’s my school.
I will never forget one year ago, those images, those frantic kids running across my campus, through my drill field, becoming my memories. I searched for people I knew—some teachers, Tri-Delta sorority sisters. I realized that even though I didn’t personally know the people who were killed, I did know them. They were brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, they wore maroon and orange and cheered for the Hokies. They were family.
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By Chris Hansen, Dateline Correspondent
We’d been hearing complaints from senior citizens and government regulators across the country about the tactics some insurance salesmen are using to sell certain investments to retired folks. I’m a long ways off from retiring, but it’s an important subject to me because my mom’s close to that age and my aunts and uncles are already there. Given the turbulence we’ve seen on Wall Street, it seems like everyone is re-evaluating or repositioning their investments and would like to have their money in a safe place. And that’s what a lot of salesmen are pitching these days.
The investments are called equity-indexed annuities. They may be appropriate for some, but not for everyone. Why are so many people trying to sell these to retired folks? Simple: that’s where the money is. Seniors control more than $15 trillion in today’s economy and for the salesmen, these annuities pay healthy commissions.
Dateline decided to use hidden cameras to find out what salesmen were really saying or not saying to seniors when peddling these investments. We attended some of those “free lunch” seminars put on for potential clients, classes where salesman are taught the tricks of the trade. We wired some houses in communities where a lot of retired people live, so we could see the one-on-one pitch play out in real time.
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By Keith Morrison, Dateline Correspondent
A strange thing has happened in recent years to some of law enforcement's signature tools, those pieces of evidence which have sent countless thousands of men and women to prisons all around the world. The agent of change is, of course, that amazingly accurate marker of individuality, DNA.
DNA is now helping police solve crimes which once would have languished in a cold case room forever. But as we have also learned, occasionally to our surprise, DNA has also undone convictions once considered absolutely solid.
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