Dateline Presents: Five Miles From Home

[car door closing] [engine starting] What was she thinking as she secretly slipped into a car, wearing just her pajamas, her mind at turmoil as she rode down Interstate 80 across northern Nevada? Would she, could she reveal what she knew? She was just 18.

Tiny.

98 pounds and barely five feet tall.

But the story she took with her on that tortured drive was, she knew, going to change everything.

She came, and we talked, and we recorded the conversation with her permission, and it was dynamite.

The man she had come to talk to was a distinguished attorney.

If anyone could advise her, surely it would be he, about the story she said she had to tell.

It had been eating at me and eating at me.

I couldn't sit there and live with myself knowing what I knew.

And then out it came, the whole terrifying story.

Possibly true, and possibly a careful and cunning deceit.

I was too in shock and numb.

I didn't know what I was feeling.

It was like I was in a daze.

Still was, she said, about the thing that happened, and about who was there, and what happened after.

And what might happen next in a small town deep in the American desert.

They deserve to be in hell for doing that, and there is nothing they can say or do that will make it better.

They cannot fix this.

Some things aren't fixable.

Some things are hard to explain.

It doesn't make sense.

I still wonder to this day, why? What's the real reason? Or what even really happened?

[wind blowing] [upbeat music] There is a place, a remote, windy place tucked away in a sliver of northeast Nevada next to the Utah border.

You'd certainly see it if you cruised along Interstate 80.

Casinos, five of them, flashing away like some Vegas in miniature, a golf shot or two off the highway.