impact.How has that been for you, seeing families go through the unimaginable, being put in positions they never asked for, having their lives irreparably changed, and then choosing to use it to do something?

Sometimes, you know, th- th- what we see on Dateline, uh, shatters people, and it, uh, and it's ended marriages.

And it has, uh, it has reduced people to a, a, a, a, a, a puddle.

And sometimes it transforms people.

I did a story, um, uh, right at the beginning of sort of our, our, our focus on true crime in, uh, San Diego, um, about a woman named Tori Veneau.

She and her almost infant son, he was killed and she was killed by the baby's father, who did not wanna pay child support, but I think mostly did not want to embarrass his family.

I thought that was sort of the motivation.

For people who maybe haven't seen those episodes, and I think probably most people have, but give us an overview of those, and then I wanna ask you kind of more broadly about some of the systemic issues I think it brings up.

They say the case stalled, and like so many family members in our Dateline stories, Josh Kimberly kept the search going.

She totally did, and this, you know, sadly, this cuts across all lines.

I mean, there is almost no one I know who has a, a missing family member who believes the police are working hard enough on that case, and I understand why that is.

And sometimes police are working hard, but they don't appear to be, or they don't talk to the family about that.

In this case, Kimberly had learned a couple of things about her sister that weren't known to a lot of people.

One is that she had begun a relationship with a much older man, a man who was almost twice as old as she was.

Uh, and the other thing was that Ashley had become pregnant, not by that guy, by somebody else.

They don't have their own crime labs.

They say the case stalled, and like so many family members in our Dateline stories, Josh, Kimberly kept the search going.

She totally did.

And this, you know, sadly, this cuts across all lines.

I mean, there is almost no one I know who has a, a missing family member who believes the police are working hard enough on that case, and I understand why that is.

And sometimes police are working hard, but they don't appear to be, or they don't talk to the family about that.

In this case, Kimberly had learned a couple of things about her sister that weren't known to a lot of people.

One is that she had begun a relationship with a much older man, a man who was almost twice as old as she was.

They don't have their own crime labs.

So can you walk us through how a case even makes it on the show's radar?

Sure.

First of all, we're reading the newspapers all over the country every day.

So if something breaks, we make calls on it.

Second, but a lot of times when something breaks, you don't know what's going to happen.

When somebody's missing, you don't know whether they're going to be missing for 10 years or whether they're going to be found the next day and a suspect arrested immediately.

If the obvious suspect ends up being the guilty party, that makes it a tougher story to tell, particularly over a couple of hours.

Right.

Unbelievable.

Which is insane.

Kristil's family, her cousin, who was a domestic violence prosecutor, was instrumental in getting a law passed in Oregon.

Kristil's case happened in Colorado, but in Oregon, where the prosecutor lives, they got a law passed just recently, just within the last couple of months, that in stalking-related cases, when search warrants are served to internet, texting, phone company providers, um, those warrants, in a stalking case, have to be f- fulfilled or returned, as they say in the search warrant business, within a very short period of time, like, like, a few days to a week or something like that.

Because that information, in the case of Kristil Krug, was available.

And, uh, I think they originally asked for, for 48 hours.

I think it ended up being a little longer than that.

Yeah

What did police know in the early days of this?

She had been at a party off campus.

This was right at the end of the school year.

It was around Memorial Day weekend, and Paul Flores was there, and at the end of the party, she was either passed out or close to passed out on the lawn outside this house.

Now, a bunch of people leave.

He offers to walk her to her dorm, which is a very short distance away, and his story is, "She went to her dorm.

I went to mine.

What changed? Why so much time passing?

You talked about Paul Flores.What did police know in the early days of this?

She had been at a party off campus.

This was right at the end of the school year.

It was around Memorial Day weekend.

And Paul Flores was there, and at the end of the party, she was either passed out or close to passed out on the lawn outside this house.

Now, a bunch of people leave.

He offers to walk her to her dorm, which is a very short distance away, and his story is, "She went to her dorm, I went to mine, that was it." But she is never seen again.

What changed? Why so much time passing?

Okay, Josh, before we dive into this episode, just give us a quick summary of this episode.

Sure.

Uh, this happened back in late, uh, 2020 in, uh, in North Canton, Ohio.

And, uh, you know, a young woman, uh, did not show up for her shift, uh, at a, uh, FedEx warehouse sorting facility, which was, uh, unlike her.

Uh, she was, uh, 29 years old, name was Morgan Fox.

She got up in the middle of the night to, to go to work.

She worked the early shift, and she'd been shot dead a- as she was getting into her car in the driveway.

Oh, Jason.

Bye-bye.

They had this property way, way, way outside of town.

Uh, and they had been there for the weekend, and they were coming back.

And, uh, and as they were getting off the freeway, something happened.

In Tex's version of what happened, he thought he was driving into the middle of a Black Lives Matter protest, which he was not, but he did say that.

He was not driving, and Diane was not driving.

The driving was their friend, Danny Joe.

... kind of taking that next step?

What keeps you coming back to it?

This is a terrific story.

You know, every time you think you understand in this story what has happened, you're gonna be wrong.

But this is the story of a guy who died sort of inexplicably, young guy, Marine, in great shape, in good health, suddenly drops dead, and his wife ends up getting charged with his murder.

And what happens then is just this astonishing chain of events.

But the question that I want people to think about at the end is what constitutes justice? There are people who think that justice was served by this story, and there are people who think that justice was not served, and you're gonna have to make up your own mind when you listen to this.

What was it about Cindy's behavior that made them suspicious that this might have been a murder case?

First of all, this was a very healthy young Marine in very good physical condition who essentially just dropped dead after having been sick for, like, a week.

What keeps you coming back to it?

This is a terrific story.

You know, every time you think you understand in this story what has happened, you're gonna be wrong.

But this is the story of a guy who died sort of inexplicably, a young guy, Marine, in great shape, in good health, suddenly drops dead, and his wife ends up getting charged with his murder.

And what happens then is just this astonishing chain of events.

But the question that I want people to think about at the end is, what constitutes justice? There are people who think that justice was served by this story, and there are people who think that justice was not served, and you're gonna have to make up your own mind when you listen to this.

What was it about Cindy's behavior that made them suspicious that this might have been a murder case?

First of all, this was a very healthy young Marine in very good physical condition who essentially just dropped dead after having been sick for, like, a week.

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Yeah.

(laughs)

I'll tell you a, uh...

Now that we're talking about O.J., I, uh...

You may- you guys may not remember this.

In between the criminal trial where he was acquitted and the civil trial where he got that big judgment, um, he was just in LA and kind of like living his life.

And one of the things that happened then, uh, which probably nobody remembers.

He was playing golf and he's finished his round and he's...

Wow.

There was no romantic link between these guys, but there was real great depth of affection.

Cliff and Eddie clearly were very good friends, and Eddie, he was like, "No, no. Something's wrong.

If Clifford left town, I'd know about it," and he went in to the cops.

But, the fact that Bustamante was taking stuff out of the house, some of which he was putting in the U-Haul, and some of which was in his hotel room, uh, which police found, everything about that said that Cliff was being victimized in some way, and that's kind of what made the cops think, uh, "There's a crime in progress here." And what they didn't know at first was whether this was some kind of crime involving Cliff, who might, w- either was being held against his will or maybe was dead, or whether Cliff was somehow complicit in this, because that was some of their thinking in the early days.

Like, "He's disappeared, and he's gonna say, 'I'm out of town,' and he's gonna say everything's been stolen, and then it's some kind of insurance scam." But eventually, they figured out that the problem was......

uh, something has happened to Cliff.

And it was a long time before they figured out what.

But more importantly, it gets me back to this, and the thing that I was curious about this whole program was, there have to be more stories, more, you know, that, that this isn't necessarily a one-off.

(laughs)

I'm gonna have to speak to her sternly.

Um, all right, so, she was still so afraid of Dan that she wanted us to not use her name, even though he's locked up at that point and has not been out since.

But the story she told was remarkably like the story o- of what happened to Kristel.

I mean, there were, he, uh, th- the allegation was that Dan had created these fake people, uh, who were pressuring this woman to both go back to Dan after she had broken up with him, um, and also try to sabotage the relationships that she was having after that.

Now, he was never charged, as I said.

But, but, uh, that left that woman so shaken that all these years later, it's still freaking her out.

That's what we're gonna do, is create more safety for other survivors and more immediate accountability for offenders.

Yeah.

You know, one of the things that I...

One of the things I kind of wondered about was what drew Micki to him? 'Cause the thing that was missing from him was some sort of winning personality.

Like, he made a lot of money and he was a senior partner and, and so, you know, his prestige through his job probably, you know, was part of the draw, part of what made him more charismatic.

He certainly knew his way around the legal profession and a courtroom.

Um, exactly what made him so attractive to Micki, I'm not sure, but she, uh, like, really was taken with him and believed in him and thought this can, you know, this, this, this, uh, affair and, and, and marriage can sort of come back from the dead.

Mm-hmm.

And I, I think that's what motivated her, was like, "I...

There were some differences in the plot, uh, but I do think that it's interesting that even in official news reports people were saying it's the so-called Gone Girl Kidnapper, and that stuck.

Once something gets going in today's culture, particularly on the internet, it can take hold.

One of the things about journalism, which is unfortunate but true, is that certain things sort of develop a life of their own, and they kind of become true just because they've been said so many times.

And so, you know, once you've heard other people describe this as the Gone Girl Kidnapping, your boss at whatever radio or TV station or network you're working at says to you, "Well, why don't we go on this? Let's put that up on the screen, the Gone Girl Kidnapping," right? And then suddenly you've added to this snowball rolling downhill, which is in fact you're helping this- this lie be told, which is this was fake.

They were doing it-

Well, I was gonna ask, do we have any sense, does law enforcement have any sense as to why he was targeting different women?

I do not think that, that, that has ever been explained to me.

I don't know.And by the way, long after this was over, i-including very recently, new information has come forward about other crimes that he was involved in that he wasn't even charged with back when we did this story and back when this was in the news.

Mm-hmm.

... because I think the argument was made that, that R- that Jonathan would only have known where to go if Sabrina had told him.

And Sabrina's response to that was, "Yeah, I probably did tell him, but not because I wanted Rob killed, but because when Rob was working that far away, then y- my lover and I would have plenty of time to get together, because i- it's a super long commute for Rob, and he's gonna call me each way, coming and going, so, so-"

Mm.

... her story and, and Jonathan's stories.

They both are claiming that it was Rob Lamone's idea that his wife sort of partake in this sort of, uh, you know, party sex atmosphere.

That is the allegation.

Again, uh, was it true or, or was she as an active... uh, as active a player in that as he was? We don't know.

Yeah.

... was something that sort of was a hole in the, in the armor of the State's case.

We look at investigations all the time, and sometimes big, elaborate investigations by, by major departments that get a lot of homicides.

Sometimes, there, there can be a, a thing or two that they should've done differently, and that can make the difference.

I mean, in this case, like, at first, clearly, law enforcement thought this was a murder-suicide, um, again, which is something that's gonna come out at trial.

I mean, like, any defense attorney is gonna say, you know, uh, in their opening statement, "Law enforcement believed at first that this Michael's parents...

In a murder-suicide because their marriage was failing," and they were right.

Everyone starts rushing around, there's a flurry of activity, and then suddenly, the charges are dropped.

Mm

... uh, in this, um, there was some relationship between Khazar and Bob.

I mean, the, the, it, it, it appears to have not been, you know, primarily romantic or sexual.

Appears to have been social, and it certainly also connected, uh, over drugs.

But were they close? They were, because she, she sent these texts that night after Bob died, but she didn't know that Bob was dead, sort of thanking him for handling Nima's anger i, in such a classy way, which was a big part of the prosecution's motive, was these texts that, in which Khazar essentially acknowledged Nima was furious at Bob, and Bob calmed Nima down.

Why did the judge not allow the video that police took of Nima talking to the private investigator and pantomiming the stabbing? Why did he not allow the jurors to see what his mouth was doing in that video? Why did they cancel that out? Thank you in advance.

The video, the, what's called the pantomime video, which is Nima, uh, depending on who you ask, either pantomiming or not pantomiming stabbing Bob Lee in a conversation with his, his then attorney's private investigator in a parking lot.

The defense argued that that was attorney work product, that talking to an investigator is like talking to your attorney.