June 2008 - Posts
By Josh Mankiewicz, Dateline Correspondent
The guy reminded me of my grandfather. Same western shirt, same cowboy boots, same Brylcreem in his hair. Except that I never saw my grandfather cry.
Now, this fellow wasn't blubbering, but he'd choke up every so often and a tear would form, which he'd dab away with some Kleenex wadded up in his fist. And I just sat there and did nothing. Normally, when someone starts crying in the middle of a conversation, your urge is to get out of your chair and put your arm around them, or at least tell them how sorry you are. But this was television, so I just soldiered on.
He was talking about his daughter, who'd been killed by her husband. And sadly, he was one of six straight interviews I'd done for Dateline in which the person sitting across from me was crying. We cover a lot of murder cases at Dateline, and in each case, the person I was interviewing was telling me about the worst thing that had ever happened to them; the sister, the best friend, the wife taken from them suddenly and through violence.
Television is pretty good at showcasing emotion, and there was a time when getting someone to cry on-camera was hugely desirable. "Did she squirt?" one high-profile TV doctor used to ask his producers after they returned from an interview. I suppose there are still people who seek out the tears, but I'm not one of them.
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By Ellen Sherman, Dateline Producer
Understanding the people in our stories is always a challenge, especially when they are deceased, which is unfortunately the case more often than not when you deal with crime stories.
In the case of Fla. v. Keller, we had our two principal characters, a husband and wife, who were both deceased. It was not as difficult to get a handle on the wife, Rose Keil, since she had several surviving sisters and parents, one of whom agreed to share memories of her sister with us.
Rose was an interesting study in contrasts, an innocent girl who left school at 15 and married an older man. Yet as naïve as she might have been, she learned from him and eventually was so saavy that she was able to best him in a multi-million dollar divorce settlement. Some felt she was in the relationship for the money, but she stayed with her husband for almost a decade and, by the accounts of her family, she really tried to make the relationship work. What could have drawn a beautiful young girl to a man more than three decades her senior? That was the part that didn’t compute to many, but her sister told us that difficulties with Rose’s own father, were, she felt, the “X factor” that pulled Rose to look for a “father figure” in her love life.
As for Fred Keller, it seems few had a kind word to say about him. Sure, he was a successful businessman, but he was reportedly so litigious that he had sued his own children. That, coupled with the fact that he had, among other things, strong feelings about not dating women who were, in his eyes, racially pure, made him a difficult character to portray. CONTINUED >>
By Sara James, Dateline Correspondent
Being a network reporter means having the opportunity to travel to some places which are, to say the least, out of the ordinary -- such as the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
I made the trek there on a bright, sunny day, and as I waited in the prison yard for the interview subject to show up, I leaned back against a 30-foot wall festooned with concertina wire. A guard beckoned me over. "Hey, ma'am, that's a No Go Zone," he informed me.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Move away from the wall, please. It's a shoot-to-kill zone."
I didn't waste any time following instructions.
If such precautions seem extreme, it's worth remembering that this prison is home to some notorious prisoners, and I was there to interview one of them.
When I met Kevin Coe, it was easy to see the handsome man he would have been in his 30s. He has blond hair, blue eyes, and a chiseled jaw. He seemed like the last person anyone in Spokane would have suspected as the terrifying figure from a nightmare which lasted for years.
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