Inside Dateline : From The Field

A maximum security interview with Kevin Coe

Dateline Editor — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:24:00 GMT

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.

...(read more)

Father searches for answers

Dateline Editor — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:03:00 GMT

By Luz Villarreal, Dateline Producer

It was an early Monday morning in late August 2004. I was the first one in the office that day. I warmed up some instant oatmeal and started reading some of our local newspapers. One story jumped out at me. The headline read “Investigation into girl's disappearance leads to murder charges against mother.”

The next day, I was sitting in Dick Pulsifer’s living room. He’s a simple, quiet man with a shy smile. He worked in security at a Las Vegas casino and also ran a karate school in town. He told me he grew up in San Diego and married young. I could tell he was trying to keep his emotions in check.

...(read more)

After ordeal, kidnapper wilts and teen shines

Dateline Editor — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:19:00 GMT

By Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent

People often ask me what it's like to talk to men and women accused -- and often convicted -- of horrendous crimes. Is it frightening, they'll ask, to interview such people? Can you tell if they are innocent or guilty? Can you sense evil in the room?

And usually, to such questions, the answer is.. no. A person capable of doing something quite terrible will frequently arrive for an interview well scrubbed and thoroughly prepared, and will prove to be intelligent, funny or charming. And almost always, such a person will present a reasonably believable argument for innocence. Skepticism is an important companion during prison interviews; truth is rarely easy to pin down.

And then there is Vinson Filyaw.

...(read more)

Kidnapped kids reunite with family in Guatemala

Dateline Editor — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:47:00 GMT

A Dateline special on adoption in Guatemala airs on NBC Sunday, Jan. 20 at 7pm ET. By Benita Noel, Dateline Producer I felt like I was on a roller coaster. The car, which seemed to have no shock absorbency whatsoever, hit the bumps with a resounding thump - over and over again. I had my hand flat up against the roof to brace myself, but it wasn't much help. More than once I went sliding across the seat, as did everyone else in the car. It was March 22, 2007 and our driver was making...(read more)

Guatemalan adoption has two sides

Dateline Editor — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:43:00 GMT

A special Dateline on adoption in Guatemala airs on NBC Sunday, Jan. 20 at 7pm ET. By Victoria Corderi, Dateline NBC Correspondent I witnessed the joy of a successful foreign adoption when my sister came home with a baby boy from Guatemala more than five years ago. Today, my nephew is thriving and my sister is as thrilled as she was when she first held her son in her arms. There are many people who've had similar life-changing experiences. But there is also a dark...(read more)

‘To Catch a Predator’ goes to Kentucky

Dateline Editor — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 22:22:00 GMT

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.

A little bit of 'bene'

Dateline Editor — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:13:00 GMT

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.

A young British woman, studying at the University of Perugia, had been stabbed in the neck and left to bleed -- slowly -- to death in the bedroom of a little cottage she had shared with three others. One of those was an American student named Amanda Knox. And if Italian police were right, she had something to do with her friend's murder. My job, among others, was to try to get an interview with Knox's mom, who had just arrived from Seattle to comfort her daughter, now in an Italian jail cell.

Days later, I waited in the bone-chilling wind that swept through the medieval piazza of stone and statues, along with my colleagues from Italian, British and American media. Word was the mother was due to walk through the piazza at any moment on her way to the office of her daughter's Italian lawyer. In one moment we were a rag-tag bunch milling around, in another we were a condensed cloud of bees, swarming toward a small, coated woman rushing along with her head down: the suspect's mother. The cameramen flicked on their lights. I took an elbow from one reporter in the ribs; a soundman behind me used my shoulder to steady his boom. Cameras, microphones, wires: we became one unholy body pressing in, cornering a terrified woman who looked back aghast at our communal brazenness.

"My daughter is innocent," she quickly said, in a trembling voice. "She's sure that as the investigation continues the truth will come out and she'll be proven innocent, ummm it's gone with one tragedy with the death of Meredith to know the tragedy that my daughter's living in. It's a terrible situation."

With that her lawyer led her forward by the elbow, into and through our shield. Of course we followed, wanting more, always more. She stilled looked terrified, but she offered nothing else.

In the weeks that followed we would all keep following the investigation for every new morsel of evidence: a bloody footprint found; a knife recovered; surveillance footage of suspects. As I stood with my press brethren in front of the courthouse off the piazza one afternoon, a stooped, white-haired woman caught my eye and shuffled over.

She wore a dazzling red coat and matching hat; her lipstick and makeup applied to perfection. She must have been in her 80s, but she was the epitome of Italian sophistication. She leaned on her polished wooden cane and began questioning me in her native tongue. I used my broken Spanish to try to understand. I got that she was distressed and a little embarrassed by the murder and worried what the rest of the world would think of her sleepy, medieval city on a hilltop, where such a crime, it seems, never happens.

But I clearly couldn't sustain a conversation with her.

In frustration she looked over at the cameras and reporters conversing around the door, waiting for the latest word from the prosescutor in the case. She sighed. I felt bad. "Non bene? Scusi."

I wasn't sure that my apology was properly worded or needed. At least she seemed to forgive my lousy Italian. "Grazie" she said softly, smiling. And she was off.

That night, after hours in the cold yielded nothing new in the case, I joined my cameramen, soundmen and fellow producer in a restaurant on the piazza.

Along with its chocolates, Perugia is known for its homemade pasta and wines. I was having a simple red from a local vintner. I took a sip, immediately relaxing as the wine swirled inside my mouth. In a long day, in what had been an exhausting week, it was a moment of bliss -- a little bit of 'bene' -- in a job that sometimes seemed to be anything but.

Click here for 'Deadly Exchange,' the full Dateline story about the case, including photos, video and a 'Who's who' gallery.

The changing landscape of Patagonia

Dateline Editor — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:02:00 GMT

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.

Looking at a heartland couple divided

Dateline Editor — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 14:29:00 GMT

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.

The man was Dr. Richard Nelson, a medical college executive dean, a highly regarded pediatrician, and the woman in question is Phyllis, his wife of over 30 years. What came between them was a four-inch kitchen paring knife. Phyllis was holding it when it punctured Dr. Nelson's heart, killing him. Of course, there'd been much more between the very married couple than a paring knife. There'd been his lover. The other woman.

Was it murder, as the state of Iowa charged?

Or was it an accident, as Phyllis, the wife, explained it?

It all depended on how you looked at the couple. How you read the picture. We're left without a reliable narrator.

Grant Wood, I suspect, would have understood.

Charlie Neibergall / AP file

His classic painting became, I take it, a tug of war between his detractors and champions. There was a local school of thought in Cedar Rapids about 1930 when he painted it, that the smug artist, trained in the decadent salons of Paris as a young man, was making fun of his fellow Midwesterners, satirizing rubes with sour, pursed lips and short horizons. Wood, of course, denied that interpretation, though legend has it that a farm wife tried to bite his ear off because she was so angry with his depiction of farm people.

Then, as the Depression settled over the country, the painting was reassessed again, and now Grant Wood's farm couple seemed to be the very emblem of American pioneer resolve in times of adversity. You could see in the farmland couple what you wanted to see.

"American Gothic," by the way, is not hanging in Cedar Rapids. It's at the Art Institute of Chicago. To my middlebrow sensibility it's a great, great painting.

P.S. The courteous bailiffs at the Cedar Rapids courthouse, built intriguingly on a narrow island in the Cedar River, make an excellent pot of coffee -- but you have to be a juror or privileged guest to try it. Thank you.

A special hour-long Dateline on the case of Richard and Phyllis Nelson will air tonight, Wednesday, Aug. 22 at 10 p.m. ET/9 Central. Click here for transcript, photos and more on the case.

Friends spared nothing to solve adventurer's disappearance

Dateline Editor — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 21:34:00 GMT

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.

John Elwin

John Elwin was nothing if not well-loved by his friends. That thought kept recurring to me as I worked on this story.

Soltren, a self-employed building contractor with a business and family to look after, spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars of his own money to find out what happened to Elwin. It was a search that led all the way to the Philippines. Even for professionals, conducting an investigation in the Philippines can get to be a rather complicated affair. Mountains, jungle and rebels, spread over more than 7,000 islands, make it a difficult country for detectives with that country's National Police to traverse.

For example, a key location in the story was about 120 miles north of Manila. It took our Dateline team and me nearly 8 hours to drive there.

One of the Philippine investigators, Lt. Cresencio De Asis, kindly offered to guide us to the spot -- an area infiltrated by the New People's Army rebel group. Lt. De Asis had two bodyguards but given the area we were traveling to was told by his commander to take three more.

An hour later, De Asis's superior had second thoughts and decided to err on the side of caution by sending seven more soldiers for protection.

Nonetheless, for safety's sake, we were told it would be best if we left the area before nightfall.

It was a challenging area and an even more challenging investigation. In the end, I'm not sure if the mystery of Elwin's whereabouts would have been solved if it hadn't been for the efforts of Luis Soltren, Elwin's girlfriend, Kristen Flood, and their team of amateur sleuths.

Click here for the full story, 'Trail of Suspicion.'