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Hey, everybody, I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and we're talking Dateline today with Blaine Alexander.
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Hi. Hello. Hello, hello. So Blaine is here to talk about her episode called The Haunted House Confession.
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Now, if you have not seen it, you, the listeners, it's the episode right below this one on your
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Dateline podcast feed. So go there, listen to it, or you can stream it on Peacock if you want to watch it and then
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come back here. So to recap, this is about a young woman named Shantae Blankenship, and her remains
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were found in a deserted and very scary-looking farmhouse in Brownwood, Texas. And law enforcement
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worked for a long time to track down her killer because they were certain that somebody in that
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church-going community was behind the murder, and it would take a confession in church to crack that
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case. Now, for this Talking Dateline, we have some extra sound from a couple of churchgoers,
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Linda and Russell Lamond, and they're going to talk about how their proximity to this awful crime
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gave them a new perspective. So let's talk Dateline. I am delighted to be here because
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this is your first two-hour episode as a Dateline correspondent. Absolutely is. There is nobody I would rather do this Talking Dateline with than you, Josh.
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So thank you. Now, you know, you are a veteran TV reporter, but I'm guessing that you are experiencing the same thing I did when I joined, which is, you know, you go from stories that are, you know, a really long story is two and a half minutes in your old life.
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And now you're doing two hours, which means a lot more can be included. You can tell a longer story.
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There's a great deal more writing. But even so, there's stuff you have to leave out.
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You have to make some of the same choices that you do when you're doing a piece that lasts a minute and 10 seconds for the evening news.
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Absolutely. There's so much to even undertake a story that's as long as the things that we do for Dateline.
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You have to gather so much information, right? Like by the time we finish these stories, you feel like you're an expert on these cases.
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And so there are all these different facts and different pieces of sound and information that you want to cram in.
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But even in two hours, somehow you run out of time. So that's why I'm grateful for talking Dateline, because we can talk about all of these other things that never made it into the actual show.
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So let's talk about the episode. The locals referred to that farmhouse, which was off the map in a lot of ways.
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They call that the haunted house. What was that place like? You know, I'd done a ton of research for this story, read about it, all of that good stuff, read previous, you know, news clips and everything.
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I hadn't actually seen the house for myself. And so I didn't see it until I was riding with the investigator, Investigator Bird.
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We had GoPros in the car, and he was kind of driving me down the dirt roads. And then we get there, and immediately I said, oh, wow, you can immediately see why this place is called The Haunted House.
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I mean, it looks right out of central casting of what you would expect to see a haunted house look like.
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All broken down inside. It looks like a horror movie, yeah. It does. It does. It does.
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And then you kind of consider some of the other things. I mean, there is a fence around it, right, that kind of tells people to keep out.
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If you go inside, the floorboards aren't there. You can't really walk through. There are animals inside and creatures.
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And then there's this storm cellar, which I wanted to when we were putting this together, we wanted to make sure that everyone understands what a storm cellar is.
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Right. I grew up in Oklahoma. Everybody has storm cellars for the most part. Lots of people have them, but this kind of underground place where you go for tornadoes and even tornadoes.
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And so that's where Shantae was ultimately found. And so the place itself almost becomes a character in the story just because of how how creepy it was, to be honest.
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And I also thought the town was much more of a character than a lot of localities are when we do Dateline.
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You know, a lot of them are in bigger cities. This really felt like a movie. You know, I mean, the drone shots of those dirt roads and those long straightaways.
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I mean, you get a sense of how sort of isolated it must have been at the time. And just to break down that isolation a little bit more, Dallas probably is the nearest big city, Dallas-Fort Worth.
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That's a good two-and-a-half-hour, maybe three-hour drive from Brownwood. But then the place where this happened, where Shantae lived, is actually slightly to the north of Brownwood.
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And so you have this kind of small town anyway, but then an even smaller community that's kind of nestled around the lakes.
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When you talk about a small community, I mean, everyone truly knows everyone there.
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She made a tremendous impression on people. and Ashante did. Watching the story, I thought you were able to get a really good sense of sort
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of what she was like. And I'm glad. I'm glad to hear that because everybody that I spoke to
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really said that exact same thing. I mean, she was feisty. She had her opinion. She had her
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thoughts. Her routine with the walking was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. She'd wave at the
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car. She'd wave at the neighbors, right? People knew her. And when she would go into church,
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Everyone was just kind of taken by just how involved she was. I mean, really, how moved she was by the music, how much she enjoyed being there.
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And that's something that drew a lot of people to her as well. So for the first hour I'm watching this, I'm thinking, OK, this is the boyfriend.
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Like, I don't even know how you guys are going to sustain this for two hours because it's so obviously him.
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I mean, you come in, you're the boyfriend, right? So you've got to be close to the top of the suspect list.
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and you delete texts from your phone. I mean, that is like, you know, wearing a sandwich board that says, I did it.
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Yeah. And, you know, when I talked with both of the, you know, Ranger Shea and investigator Scott Byrd,
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and both of them were just, you could tell they were personally impacted by this case,
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that they I mean they put a lot of just kind of their own emotion and obviously brain power into this But when they talked about John I mean they talked about the fact that yes he saw her not too long before she disappeared There were the people who said OK maybe they argued and maybe he was possessive and deleting of the text messages
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And then, you know, we talk about this. He slept outside in his car after he realized that Chante wasn't inside.
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And that was something that struck them as odd. So there were these kind of string of just odd things that made them certainly go further down that rabbit hole.
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And then, of course, it turns out he's not the guy. He doesn't have anything to do with it.
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And he ends up being like a really important interview. I'm glad that he was able to kind of tell his story.
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Right. To in his own words, because he makes the point that even though he was cleared from, you know, by investigators pretty early on, a lot of the people in the community were looking at him and saying, OK,
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okay, clearly it's John, clearly it's the boyfriend, like that's the only way to go.
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And so, you know, to have that hanging over his head until there was ultimately an arrest,
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which came more than a year later, was also something that was difficult for him as well.
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So I'm glad that he was able to talk. I'm glad he agreed to speak with us. How did you, was it hard to get him?
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You know, well, one, I want to say something about sitting down and talking to him.
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Um, John was so, it was so clear that he was just still so impacted by everything that happened to Shantae.
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He left Brownwood for a while. He moved away. He got work elsewhere. You know, he's still close with her family today, by the way.
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But he had to leave. Like, he just kind of couldn't necessarily deal with this for a while.
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And then came back to talk. I asked him how he felt after the interview. And he said he felt relieved.
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And so I think that he was glad to be able to tell his story, glad to be able to talk about his love for Shantae, because it was something that had come under question during this investigation.
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It was something that even when I talked to him, I could tell he was still upset by it, and rightfully so, right?
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But I could tell that him just talking about and being able to express that love was important to him.
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When we get back, we're going to have an extra clip of churchgoers, Linda and Russell Lamond, the couple who were there for the killer's confession in church in front of the congregation and what they learned about compassion from that.
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So the Texas Rangers, they have to wear that hat. That's not choice. That is the uniform.
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That is a requirement. And if they do an interview without it, they will get in some trouble, I think.
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So here's what's funny. I don't speaking of picking up things from your grandparents.
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Walker, Texas Ranger was my grandpa's one of his favorite shows. You guys remember that?
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Love that. And so after I finished my long interview with Ranger Shea, I said, I have to I have to say I was very excited to interview you today because I love Walker, Texas Ranger.
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And he just fell out laughing. And so, but I asked him, I said, I need to know about this hat.
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And he says, yes, it's part of the uniform. But here's the thing. They have to be a light color because in the old Westerns, dark color represents the bad guy.
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And so, yeah, the bad guy. So you have to have your light colored hat. He told me about it, gave me the specific name of it and everything.
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So I did a story with the Rangers once. The guy wore his hat like the entire time.
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Like I never saw the top of his head. And we don't do a lot of stories with people who wear hats.
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It brings so much character, though, right? Absolutely. One of the things I thought that really came out in this was the sort of zigzag nature of some of these investigations in which, you know, they looked at the boyfriend.
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They looked at her grandfather. They looked at the pastor. They looked at that other guy who got very combative in the police interview.
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And that's how these things go. I mean, that's not that's not just Dateline storytelling.
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That is, you know, you're looking at these guys and you want to know, you know, do you have an alibi?
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And sort of, you know, what kind of read do we get off you when we ask you these tough questions?
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And I think you're absolutely right. Yes, this was kind of a roadmap of their actual investigation.
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But what was so frustrating, and this is something that Investigator Byrd kept coming back to when he talked to me.
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It was so frustrating because he had the killer's DNA right there in his hand. I mean, it's the best evidence you can use to identify someone, but I don't know who it is.
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So he said at one point they were so frustrated. They said, we're just going to set up at this kind of four-way stop sign and just ask everybody who passes for DNA.
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Let's talk a little bit about that sketch. Yes. The Hail Mary sketch done by Parabon.
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Now, phenotyping to get a portrait is extremely controversial. Andrea did it in an episode, which I think was called Facing the Music.
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And they made a sketch of her based on her DNA. And it didn't really look like Andrea.
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You certainly wouldn't have looked at that sketch and thought, oh, that's Andrea.
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So sometimes it doesn't work. And it can be incredibly misleading, is the criticism.
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But in this case, it led to the guy. It paid off. It absolutely paid off. And in talking with Investigator Byrd, there were several things that he believes really lined up.
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One of them is that with this, they choose an age of what they're going to make the sketch look like.
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And it was within a year of Ryan Riggs' actual age. And so had they chosen, I don't know, a 75-year-old man or something, but obviously wouldn't have looked like him.
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Two, though, they talk about going through pictures. And this was one of the pictures on his Facebook page, believe it or not, that actually looked almost exactly like that.
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Yeah, that was, I was struck by how much the sketch looked like him, particularly in the eyes.
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Yes, yes. You know, there's a lot of police generated video in this, which I thought really sort of helped the viewer kind of live in the moment.
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You really see a lot of things And I actually going to say that this is one of those episodes where it really is important for people to go look at it and not just listen to the audio Because you going to learn some stuff from the pictures that you not going to learn otherwise
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Absolutely. I mean, I think probably one of the strongest examples of that is when they're talking with Ryan at the end.
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After he's done this confession in church, which was stunning in and of itself, the way that he is just so casually describing what he did to Shantae.
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not seeming to flinch, not seeming upset. That's something that you have to see, I think, to get the full effect of that.
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A lot of times, you know, it's very hard for killers to recount what it is that they did.
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He just talks about it like he was having lunch. One of the other things that I thought was fascinating was there's those weird markings on her,
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which, you know, maybe makes you think like this is some kind of like devil-worshipping cult.
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She's killed on Friday the 13th. And then it turns out none of that really has anything to do with it.
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But again, it's one of those things that if you're working on this murder, like you're going to look at those possibilities because that does all seem like the stars are kind of lining up.
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They really did. I think also when you juxtapose, we talked about the haunted house being a character.
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The church in its own way was also a character, right? Because you have this house of evil, the haunted house, but then at the end, the confession happens in the house of worship, right?
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I think that especially when you talk with the Lamans, I mean, they were scarred by what happened there in church, by what happened, what was supposed to be this kind of safe sanctuary of a space.
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And so some of that evil did infiltrate the church as well. This feels like a good time to play the extra sound from the Lamans who talked about what that confession sort of did to them.
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And I can tee it up real quick. I am very glad that we talked with the Lamans, Russell and Linda, and appreciative to them for speaking with us because this is something that clearly still upsets them today.
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You know, they're both people of very deep faith, very deep Christian faith. He was a leader in the church. And so to kind of have this, we love, we forgive, but also we love Chante and you did a terrible thing to her. How do you kind of marry those two thoughts?
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So anyway, they talk about it a little bit more in this piece, in this clip here.
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You've gone through a lot from mourning the death of someone who was like a family member to months of not knowing to now these conflicted emotions.
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As you sit here today, how has this whole experience changed you? It has taught us, I would say, to look at things in a different perspective.
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If it had been a stranger, you would say, hey, give him the death penalty, you know, an eye for an eye or whatever.
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But when it hits so close to home, your mindset and your perspective changes because, wow, this is right here in our lap.
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Now we have to see it maybe through God's eyes, you know, because I believe that everybody deserves a second chance.
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We can't look at somebody and say, hey, you're a murderer or you're a sex offender or whatever your problem is.
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We can't look at you and only see what you did, but we have to see you for who you are.
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Linda, I'd ask you the same question. How has this whole experience changed you?
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My eyes have been opened because before I didn't know anybody who was in jail. so I didn't have that compassion. I thought, okay, you're in jail. You're supposed to be there.
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What I feel is that God let us experience this so that I can show more compassion to those that
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do. We all sin, but do those extremely bad things, murder, assault, you know, that kind of thing on another human being.
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And we can show a little bit more compassion for them. I'm always stunned when I hear people talking about forgiveness and compassion for people like Ryan in a case like this.
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I would find that hard to conjure up, but they don't, clearly. You know, I think that it's I think that that section of interview could be very difficult for a lot of people to listen to, of course, not least of all Shante's family.
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But this notion of when you kind of look at the context of how Ryan was able to go in front of his church, confess, have people in some way show support, and then proceed on to the sheriff's office and confess there and face the consequences.
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Michelle, Shante's mother, was really upset about that. And she was certainly noting the compassion that wasn't shown to her daughter.
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But then also, this was a place that was very special to Shante, right? This was Shante's safe space.
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And, you know, obviously, Ryan, his family had a relationship with the church and the pastor as well.
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And I should mention, our team reached out to the pastor a number of times, and he never responded.
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And Ryan's parents declined interview. But she was just very upset by the fact that the place that was so important, Shante, could receive such a confession.
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I mean, I get why it made her family. It would make me crazy if that happened. But ultimately, he did get the punishment that the legal system would have doled out regardless of whether he had gone to church first or not.
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Sure. And I ask that question This is somebody that you been looking for for 18 months Right The crime is brutal And as soon as you got word why didn why weren the police immediately called
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Why was that allowed to happen? That in the end, he was kind of able to do things on his own terms to a degree.
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Being able to go home, his parents taking him to church, going to the sheriff's office,
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rather than, you know, law enforcement coming in, carting him away. And that's the end of it.
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Okay. Coming up next, your questions from social media. Okay, we are back with social media questions.
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Well, we got a lot of questions on a lot of topics. Jim Kelly from Facebook said,
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it showed how tech can use DNA to render an image of the killer and aid in their apprehension.
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Truly amazing. Now, here's the thing. There's an enormous amount of debate within the forensic scientific community
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over whether or not DNA phenotyping is legit or junk science. But Parabon does not market this as we're going to give you an image of the killer.
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They market this as we're going to provide you with a lead. You still need to do basic police work after that.
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The investigators are very clear about that, too. It was, yes, we have the sketch.
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Yes, we now have this name. But that would not be enough to take into court. That wouldn't be enough to convict someone, certainly.
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So it led them to Ryan, but it was the fact that Ryan knew the things that only the killer would know, right?
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Like, yes, obviously, the DNA match was what really, really tied it together. We have an audio question from Brandon Elkins.
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Let's listen to that. Hi, guys. Blaine, that was Dayline at its best. It was absolutely phenomenal, and thanks for the story, Blaine.
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And once again, welcome to the family. my question for this week's episode is regarding ryan and why police didn't seem to investigate him
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prior to um the phenotype the the picture being released on social media uh it just seems a lot
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of young men were interviewed and it just seems as if he's somebody that would have been talked to
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when they just kept hitting dead end after dead end so i'm just curious if there was any reason
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why he didn't pop up at all uh anyway thanks guys i appreciate it once again brandon first i'll say
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Thank you so much for the kind welcome. I really appreciate it. And this just goes to prove that our Dateline viewers are basically detectives in and of themselves. I mean, that's a fantastic question. So we never actually got a great answer to that.
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John, the boyfriend, Chante's boyfriend, said that he had mentioned Ryan's name, but it never really went anywhere. We don't know the degree to which investigators went down that road.
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Another audio question. This one's from Catherine Epert about the timing of Ryan's confession.
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Hi, this is Catherine from South Carolina with my question for Blaine. I find the timing of the confession intriguing.
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Was it ever confirmed that the Parabon image scared Riggs into his church confession?
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Catherine, thank you for your question. A great question. Yes, that's what investigators believe.
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And so what happened was the Parabon image was released. Soon after that, Ryan, who had been at his parents' house, disappeared.
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After several days or so on the run, he came back and went to the church. I do love it when people call in with audio questions.
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It's nice to hear everybody's voice. Oh, that's the most fun part about this. Whether it's on social media or the new phone number we have, I love hearing people's voices and actually asking the question.
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So more of that, please. Dateline fans, as we already know, are dog lovers. Patricia N. The Mutts says, always take issues of animal cruelty seriously.
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Ryan Riggs committed animal cruelty. It escalated from there, resulting in the rape and murder of a beautiful young woman.
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And it is true that a lot of rapists begin with cruelty towards animals, specifically cats, since that's perceived as a more feminine animal.
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Yeah, and it shows how closely she's paying attention because, yes, you did mention that in his childhood he had this chihuahua that he would try and drown.
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But, you know, that is, yes, an early indicator. It starts with animals and then escalates from there.
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Patricia also said that the Good Samaritans that went out looking for her and found her in this place where no one ever goes, she says that was divine intervention, which I'm guessing people in that church might agree with.
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Well, not only the church, but that's something that investigator Scott Byrd said to me multiple times.
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Had it not been for the fact that they were able to find her as quickly as they did, they would not have been able to track down the killer without that evidence.
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So, yes, he is not shy about the fact that he believes that this was absolutely divine intervention.
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So, as you might expect, as we all might expect, Shantae's family and friends were watching.
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Linda Lamond wrote, thank you so much for telling Shantae's story. Blaine, you did a wonderful job.
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I agree. That's so kind. I don't take that lightly. I really appreciate hearing from Linda.
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Thank you for that comment. Shante's mother, Michelle, said, thank you all so much for telling my baby's story.
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She deserves this. I just, I have so much love for Michelle. My heart really, really goes out to her and to Stephen, Shante's stepfather, for both
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of them to sit down and talk with us and trust us to tell Shante's story in the right way,
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in a respectful way, really meant a lot. So thank you, Michelle, for that. My prediction is that you will still be in touch with some of these people in a few years.
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You know, I've got to say, a few hours before this episode aired on Friday, I got a text
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from the very first Dateline interview I ever did. It was Jolene, and she was a sister-in-law of Heidi Ferkus, and that was my story that
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aired in 2023. And yes, it will always stay with me. And I think all of these families will because, you know, when you do a story, to your point about the depth that we go to kind of know and understand the story, the characters,
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but also the person that kind of a connection isn't one that goes away quickly. You produced this with Marissa Mayer.
00:24:06
Yes. Who's fantastic. Who is the greatest. Congratulations. And to both of you, the very,
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very good story, good episode and a great sort of tale from start to finish. Thank you so much,
00:24:21
Josh. This was, this was one that will stay with me and an honor to do this one.
00:24:25
Thank you, my friend. Remember, if you have any questions for us about stories you think we should cover or about Dateline, you can reach us 24-7 on social media at DatelineNBC.
00:24:36
And if you have a question for us here on Talking Dateline, you can leave it for us in a voicemail at 212-413-5252 for a chance to be featured on a future episode.
00:24:48
And that phone rings on Keith's desk, just FYI. And since we're talking about Keith, be sure to check out Keith's new podcast, which is called Murder in the Moonlight.
00:24:58
It is about a double homicide and a single shiny clue that helps investigators crack the case.
00:25:04
You can binge the entire series right now, wherever you get your podcasts. And coming up this Friday, convicted murderer Lori Vallow Daybell, who some of you may know as Mommy Doomsday, speaks with Keith Morrison in her first ever television interview.
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We will see you Fridays on Dateline on NBC. Thank you.