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Hi, everybody. I'm Lester Holt, and welcome to Talking Dateline. Today, I'm joined by Keith
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Morrison to talk about his episode, Deadly Swagger. This is a case, it starts with a brutal shooting
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inside a Lake Tahoe home and quickly becomes something much more complicated. If you haven't
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watched the episode, I invite you to do so. Go over to the Dateline podcast feed or on Peacock.
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You can catch it streaming, then come back over with us and listen to the discussion that follows.
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When you come back, we'll have much more of Keith's interview with former Major League Baseball player
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and now convicted killer Dan Serafini. And later, we'll be joined by the producer of this episode to answer some of your questions about social media.
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Keith, it's great to have you here. It's good to be here. Thank you, Lister. Deadly Swagger, if I may just go along on that for a minute.
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That's an inspired title. You know, they don't tell us what the titles are going to be until just a few days before air, and we don't think of them.
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We have a brilliant person named Susan Null who comes up with most of these things.
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But Deadly Swagger, I wouldn't have thought of that. Well, you know, it becomes relevant in the first few minutes of this episode.
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It does. Oh, that's the Deadly Swagger. Got it. There you go. Give us the lowdown.
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First of all, the setting for this grabs you right away, the gorgeous pictures of Lake Tahoe.
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You've never been there. It is one of the great beauties, beautiful natural spots in the world.
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But tell us about working there and this story. Well, Lake Tahoe is a place which has some really lovely and very expensive homes in some areas around the lake.
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Pretty well all of them, but particularly in the area where our story occurs. And one of them was a home occupied by Gary Spore and Wendy Wood, a retired couple who had had long and interesting careers doing various things over the years.
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And that would actually play into our story to some degree. And they had a lot of money.
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Were said to be worth something in the neighborhood of $25 million. And Wendy and Gary were in their home, decided to go out with the family.
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And as they go out, an intruder, a masked intruder comes into the house and is apparently there while they are there.
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Well, yes. The daughter, Erin, with their two children, hers and Danny's, arrived to see the grandparents in the afternoon.
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They went out boating. And while they were out boating, Danny Serafini is, you know, this is a spoiler, obviously, but Danny Serafini goes inside.
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Aaron and the kids and the grandparents come back from their boating trip. They have dinner together.
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Then Aaron and the kids leave. There's a pause for a few minutes. And then up the stairs comes the shooter.
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Immediately shoots Gary in the back of the head. He's dead. Tries to shoot Wendy, but she isn't killed.
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She was very badly injured. Wound up in a bathroom. The shooter leaves the house quickly.
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she's left in the bathroom calling 911. They fly her to a hospital by helicopter and they
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manage to save her life. And then, of course, they're wondering whether she can tell them who
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attacked them. And because she had such terrible brain injuries, she wasn't able to tell them.
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Keith, was this a case that simply had too many suspects at first? It had a lot of suspects, yes, and they really didn't know who they were dealing with.
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Wendy, in particular, was a litigious woman. She had disputes and lawsuits, something like 22 lawsuits.
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She had a dispute with a local neighbor who was a fisherman who put out his little nets to catch minnows for bait.
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And she would go out and lift the minnows out of the lake and throw them away. And it was a situation where she was always antagonizing somebody.
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Gary, the husband, had a past which isn't in any official record, but the investigators who worked on this case certainly heard about a past involved in some drug business where there was an investigation.
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And remember, there are two daughters. One of them had Danny Serafini was her husband, the person they eventually zeroed in on.
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So they tracked down all of their alibis and everybody alibied out, including Danny Serafini.
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And I know there was great hope that that video would have taken them right to the killer.
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But this gets us to the title of this program, Deadly Swagger. While they don't see the face of this intruder, there is something about the walk.
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And tell us about how that becomes critical as this case wears on. Well, at first they had no idea who this was.
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This person, he came up to the house. He left the house. They saw him walk alongside the lake.
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But there was just no way to tell who it was. and they began to compare the way people walk and and the investigators noticed that the way he was
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kind of half walking half jogging from the sidewalk up toward the garage looked a lot the way
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you know a baseball player would run from the mound off the uh off at the end of an inning
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looked the way a baseball player would go and you know uh stand out in center field as he was
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waiting for play to begin that kind of just a kind of a gentle jog to get to the place and it
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had a kind of a swagger to it um and you know danny serafini was an ex-baseball player he he was a
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journeyman pitcher he played for several teams around the major leagues for years uh and it just seemed like maybe that walk was the one but there was no way to prove that he came into town to commit this act until they found Samantha
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In the meantime, Wendy's memory is starting to slowly come back. Was there a aha moment when suddenly she became a star witness in this?
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It wasn't really an aha moment. But it was when she eventually said, you know, now I see him.
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I see Danny in a hoodie. Danny in a hoodie is shooting us. And she told the authorities that.
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They had great hope, I think, that they could use that information. They could use her as a witness.
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But then she took her own life. Yeah, just taking a side ramp here if we can. You've done a lot of work in this area of recovered memories.
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It's a tricky one, right? very tricky and the fact is i mean all evidence suggests based on the research that i've been
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hearing about over the years recovered memories are are not to be trusted a lot of the time
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our brains invent things we need to have memories and we need to have a feel that we have a grounding
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in our lives and in our you know we have to recall something very directly and intensely
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that may turn out not to be true at all, that we have simply had a false memory.
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That's much more common than I think most people realize. The Black Candle Confession was one that you had done.
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How did that figure as you tried to understand this story and where it was going?
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The Black Candle Confession is probably not a bad one to compare it to, except in this case it was a memory supposedly recovered after a couple of decades
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by a woman who said when she was nine years old, she attended a sleepover party at a friend's house.
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And in the middle of the night, she got scared or hungry or something and walked down the stairs from the second floor
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toward the living room. And she heard something and then she saw a woman sitting at the dining room table,
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lighting candles and sobbing and apologetic for having killed a person. and a name was mentioned and at least in this woman's memory went back up the stairs all
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frightened went to bed this nine-year-old well now when she's 30-ish she gets this memory
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from when she was nine and she reports it to the police and they had left the case it was a cold
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case obviously but they they opened up the case uh they found the woman who supposedly was sitting
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at the table lighting a black candle uh and and sobbing about having killed somebody they
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questioned her she denied it as you might expect but she was convicted by a jury of murder and she's
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still in prison to this day denying she had nothing to do with it was that a real memory this was a
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you know responsible person who had it a nurse you know a highly respected woman who had the memory
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but you know we've also done stories about repressed memories of children who claimed that
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they had been abused by their parents back at the uh this is years ago around the time of the
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mcmartin preschool case and there were other cases that one of the first false convictions that i ever
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reported on was a man named John Stoll, who was convicted of abusing his son. And the evidence
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that was used was his son's memory. And later on, it was shown through other investigation that the
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memory was completely false. And so, you know, he was released from prison. But memories are
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iffy. Memories can be true. Memories are often not true. And it's very, very difficult for anybody
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to know for sure which is which. And in the case of Deadly Swagger, I got the impression that
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prosecutors knew they couldn't necessarily hang their hat on whatever Wendy would be able to tell
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them, that they had to have a case that would withstand any ambiguity. Exactly. And so even if
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they were able to put her on the stand and she said, you know, I now know I can see my son-in-law
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coming in the house with his hoodie on, firing a shot that killed my husband and firing shots at me.
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I can see him. It would have been powerful evidence, but maybe not as powerful as if she
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had not talked about those other people as well. Let me ask you about the lead detective in this
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case um i don't recall off the top of my head a detective becoming as emotionally involved
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as this detective was um he wanted to solve this case but he wanted to answer the questions for
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this family as well talk a little bit about him if you want well he yes he he was certainly
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invested in this story um in this case uh he worked on it a long time it was it it really
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took over his life. You know, if this was one of those detective novels that would be eating him alive, you'd
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hear that a lot. He teared up a number of times during the course of the interview because he got so
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close to the case and because he got so close to the family and particularly Wendy.
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And he talked to Wendy often. He felt very close to Wendy. And the way he found out that Wendy took her life was he got a telephone call from Adrian the daughter who said my mother has killed herself and it your fault He told me about that and he broke down He really really took that personally
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And eventually Adrian, you know, when the conviction occurred, Adrian came back and thanked him for his work.
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But he became very, very deeply involved in this story. And it is something, you see this, Lester.
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investigators detectives are are often you know they get a reputation for being hard-boiled and
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hard-nosed etc but they tend to be some of the most caring people you ever meet in your life
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and they they do become emotionally invested in their cases often and and if they you know if they
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take a wrong turn or don't get it right the first time they are uh they're often uh grief stricken
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when we come back we are going to hear more from keith's interview with dan serafini
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i also want to ask you about aaron the couple's daughter um she obviously is a large part
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of this story but was she ever a suspect yeah she was never charged i'm not sure how close it ever
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came to her being charged i just think it was uh the the uh people doing the investigating found
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it very interesting that there was a kind of a ballet that occurred here a um a sequence of
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events uh so you know danny drives in from the desert aaron brings the kids in to see the
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grandparents, they go out on the boat, the house is empty, there's a way for him to get inside and
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wait, and then they come back and have dinner and leave, and after they leave, conveniently,
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the murder occurs. Was Erin involved in that in some way? They investigated that as much as they
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could, and they did not come to a conclusion that she was involved, but on the face of it,
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they were interested. When you look at Erin staying loyal, what did you think about that
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explains the differences. Is it loyalty, denial, fear, love? What was it? I wanted very much to
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talk to both of the daughters. And we, you know, I thought we were going to have a chance to
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interview Erin. She was considering it. Then I did an interview with Danny. And afterwards,
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I think he talked to Aaron and felt that I was a little too rough on him. But I'd like to know more about those questions as well.
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Let's talk about Serafini in that interview. Yeah, sure. I'd heard other people say that there was a kind of a swagger and arrogance about him.
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That's why deadly swagger is probably a good title for this episode. There was a swagger not just in the way he walked, but in his attitude.
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He was an arrogant guy. And even in a jail cell waiting to go to prison, he was he was an angry interview.
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He was, you know, people wouldn't believe him or if I seem to indicate I wasn't believing him.
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He was it that made him pretty mad. He threatened to leave the interview at one point.
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And I said, well, you know, I got to ask you tough questions that otherwise, why are we here?
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And so he came around and he stayed and he answered the questions. but he wasn't a happy camper when he left.
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He sort of stopped. Yeah, and you made the point, and we should point out here, you had a limited amount of time.
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A lot of times these things are, you know, we get an hour, hour and a half. They'd given us a half an hour for the interview.
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At the end of a half an hour, the jailer said, well, another couple of minutes would be okay.
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And I think we went a total of close to 40 minutes. But that's, and it sounds like a lot, but it really isn't.
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Because you want to develop, there's so many questions to ask, And you want to develop some idea of character and of attitude and of the way relationships developed and what the background is and all kinds of things like that that would be very helpful for us to understand the story and to be able to tell it properly.
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So 40 minutes is a very small amount of time. That interview with the main detective, for example, we talked for five hours.
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It's one of the longest interviews ever. But you want to get all the details. When you sat down with Serafini, how do you prepare for an interview like that where you know it's likely going to be competitive, but there are serious questions that need to be answered?
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I never know how to do it, and I probably do it wrong all the time. But in the case of Dan Serafini, I figured there were some issues that really needed to be covered.
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We were told we had a half an hour. I wanted to be sure I got the answers to some of the questions.
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I wrote them down on a piece of paper, which is probably a wise thing to do that I never usually do.
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And we started asking those questions and he got mad. And then we kind of extemporized after that.
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Keith Morrison, not a paper and pencil guy. Okay, noted that. Everyone's got their own style.
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Now, we do have some extra sound, Keith, from that interview you did that did not make it into the broadcast.
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where you speak to Dan about his attempt to get a new trial. Here it is. Did you think you were actually going to get a new trial when you tried to?
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Yeah, I was pretty naive about it. I thought I deserved a new trial, especially after what the jury said on television.
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What got in your call? I'm sorry? What didn't you like about what the jury said?
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Well the jurors first of all said that well if it wasn Mr Serafini who else could it be That sounds like a reasonable doubt to me And then another juror says well we don know if it Mr Serafini for sure but in case it is we want to make sure he doesn go out and do it again
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That sounds like reasonable doubt to me. Another juror says, oh, it was the shoes.
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The shoes that Mr. Serafini was wearing at the hotel matches the suspect's shoes
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that he or she was wearing on Saturday. And they weren't. They were the complete opposite, and we proved that they weren't.
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I was wearing house slippers at the hotel, and then the suspect in Tahoe is wearing Adidas running shoes, not even clothes.
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And if you take those three jurors' examples, and then you put somebody away for four life sentences for that, you've got to be effing joking me.
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That's horrible. so you get an idea of his attitude toward the jury and toward what happened to him in the trial
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sounds like he was prepared to try the case over again with with you as oh yes he would love to
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have done so and would have loved to have his own say i think his initial attorneys felt it wise to
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keep him off the sand because he could be combative as you can sort of see evidence of
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you know he was holding himself back at that point because we'd already had our little tiff
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and he was kind of calmed down. But you can see that kind of combative attitude of his.
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Did this case feel like it was on the verge of running off the rails? He simply would not accept that a jury would convict him.
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And again, that speaks to that sort of attitude that, why wouldn't you believe me?
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You must believe me. And I'm angry that you haven't believed me. And so he demanded a new trial, claimed that his lawyers, or his new lawyer at least, claimed that the lawyers he had at trial didn't serve him properly, didn't ask enough questions, didn't bring in the witnesses that might have cleared him.
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So they had their chance to make their arguments before a judge, and they even presented a witness or two.
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but then they those witnesses told stories that were knocked down by the prosecutor they
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you know one of them said she saw Dan Serafina the day of the shooting miles away
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and in fact she didn't see him that day she saw him the day after that he really wasn't helped
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uh by that effort and the judge eventually said no you don't get a new trial you're done
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And another side note, it didn't end up becoming a huge issue, but there were questions about the jury.
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The jury compared videos. They took screenshots of the person who was running up the driveway to the house, and they compared it with screenshots they took from a security camera video at the hotel the night before.
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Remember that he stayed with Samantha that night in a hotel miles away. so they really you know is a jury supposed to do that sort of thing kind of went the extra mile to
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to do some investigating of their own dan serafini and his attorney claimed no they were not supposed
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to do that and that was um that was a judicial error that that should have had the case thrown
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out you have any final thoughts about this this case you know we talked about how deeply it struck
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detective on the case uh you and the rest of the team put a lot of hours and days and weeks into
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this story uh where did it leave you well people's lives are very complicated and uh and and no matter
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how shiny and successful a person's uh um existence may appear to be uh it's quite it's quite likely
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that there's a whole story behind it, which is both fascinating and potentially something
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that that person would rather you didn't know about. I don't know if that makes any sense or not,
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but it was just, here's another story of an apparently highly successful couple with a backstory that wouldn't quit.
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After our break, we'll come back and take some of the questions we've had about this episode
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on social media. Well, Lester had to take a flight, but Jessica DeVera is here to answer some of your questions
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and comments from social media, and there is no finer person to answer those questions than Jessica,
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who knows this story inside out and backwards and forwards. Hi, Jess. Hi, Keith. How are you?
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We had a whole lot of people talking about how interesting the episode was. So, you know, well done.
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But it's just a fascinating story. Yeah, that's for sure. This one had lots, you know, lots of twists and turns.
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Lots of twists and turns, yeah. We could probably do a podcast on this one, for sure.
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You were in the Dateline producer account when the show was on the air. And you told kind of an interesting story about this episode.
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Can you tell me what you heard about listening closely and what was playing in the background?
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Yeah. So it was interesting because I first heard the 911 call played in court. It's an old courthouse.
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It's kind of hard to hear inside that courtroom. Windows are open. And where I was sitting, it was difficult to really listen to all the details.
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But I remember the prosecutor pointing out that when you to the jurors, when you listen to this 911 call, you're going to be able to hear TV playing in the background and a woman moaning and gasping for air.
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So you can hear that very faintly. But we. When we finally got the exhibits from court and were prepping to edit and write, you know, I had my noise canceling headset on and listening in.
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And as it's playing, you know, I can hear a voice that sounded very familiar. And you can hear that it's definitely a Dateline episode playing on the TV.
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Oh, darn. You know, our team did a little bit of digging around and it was an episode titled Written in Blood.
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that Dennis Murphy did, I believe it was like back in 2012. And clearly it was a rerun that was playing that night of the shooting.
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A rerun, but also an appropriate title, given what had just occurred in that lovely big house by Lake Tahoe.
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Good Lord. Yeah, pretty unbelievable. Well, we have lots of questions. First of all, let's go to one from Janet Wiseman, who said,
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didn't they say cameras inside and outside the house? Did the dogs bark? Yeah. So there were there were cameras inside and out. The only camera that we were able to listen to and watch in court and what they released to us was the camera that pointed directly into the driveway.
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um so at the point in time where where the you know mass person enters we could not hear the
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barking um from at least you know the evidence that was presented to us and that we had access to um the prosecutor pointed out to the jurors that uh one of the dogs there are two dogs inside the home and that one of the dogs at some point in time belonged to Aaron
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and Dan. I think it was, I think she testified that it was her very first dog. So at that time in 2021,
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the dog would have been 14 years old. But, you know, again, from the cameras that we were able
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to obtain, we could not hear barking at the point in time that the masked person entered.
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So there may have been some disruption, but not much. Right. Wendy took her own life.
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Sometime after she actually recovered as much as she could from the injuries she received.
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And a lot of people were curious about that. Haley Jacklin asks, did they ever question the mother Wendy's suicide?
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I guess question whether or not it was a suicide. I'm thinking this question might be.
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Yeah, I mean, I think that there were definitely allegations that perhaps there was some foul play involved, but was fully investigated.
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And it was determined that Wendy did commit suicide and there was no, you know, there was no possibility of foul play.
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Right. Oh, boy, I'm not sure how you say this name. Say so Morpheus Miller. I think it is.
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Erin's parents gave her a $90,000 check the evening of the killing. What was that
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money for That right So Erin testified that the money was for an indoor riding arena that they were building She didn elaborate where that was located I don believe but it was for an indoor riding arena
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They had given a number of gifts over the years, and I think that the prosecutors totaled it up or got a pretty good idea of how much it was altogether.
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Do you remember what that number was? I know that Adrian said that it was a total of like $2 million.
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A lot of money. Over the years, yes. A lot of money that were a combination of loans and gifts.
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And so, but yeah, that is quite a bit of money. A couple of comments from Mike Underline H1990.
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All right. Case proving that you can have a lot of money in a luxurious lifestyle,
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but it doesn't protect you from family drama which is very true this reminded me in some ways of uh
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of succession that the the drama that played on television for a long time um they're just you
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know people it doesn't matter how much money there is people some people always want more
00:28:18
um mike was also happy for the detective to get that hug in a full circle moment
00:28:23
Yeah. Yeah, it's always, I always find that so interesting, right? When you interview detectives
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who, you know, definitely have a soft spot and are, you know, tearful during an interview.
00:28:36
It amazing to me that detectives are some of the most soft people you can imagine And you run into that yourself They get so invested in these cases They believe in them so strenuously and they work so hard
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throw their whole being into trying to solve the case. And, of course, they're trying to solve for the family.
00:28:58
Right. And so they get very emotionally attached to the families as well. They do, yeah.
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It's quite remarkable. I just wouldn't have thought of it beforehand. You know, you read the novels about hard-boiled detectives
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who are working to solve a crime and nothing will faze them. Well, these are human beings and they get fazed by stuff just like all of us do.
00:29:19
No, absolutely. I agree. Well, an interesting story, a sad story. That's it for Talking Dateline for this time.
00:29:27
It's so delightful to have you here, somebody who knows this inside and out and can answer all the questions.
00:29:35
But thank you also, everybody, for listening. remember if you have questions about our stories
00:29:40
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00:29:48
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