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Hi, everyone. It's Andrea Canning back with the latest episode of Dateline True Crime Weekly.
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Episodes drop first thing every Thursday morning, and you can also find them by searching for the
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Dateline True Crime Weekly feed. So give us a listen and follow the show wherever you get your
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podcasts and tell your friends. Hey, good morning, everybody. You're listening in to Dateline's
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morning meeting in 30 Rockefeller Center. All righty, go ahead and get started. Our editorial
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team is catching up on breaking crime news around the country. I just heard that one of the cops
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will talk to us. I do believe the defense will rest today. That perfect marriage and that perfect
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couple may not be so perfect. Welcome to Dateline True Crime Weekly. I'm Andrea Canning. It's
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November 7th and here's what's on our docket. In the spring of 2022, the state of Georgia accused
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one of the biggest names in rap music, Jeffrey Williams or Young Thug, of running a criminal
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enterprise. But last week, he left jail in a Mercedes. If you had told me that this was scripted
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in a TV show, this was like too unbelievable. In Dateline Roundup, Karen Reed is back in court.
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New videos are played for the jury in the Delphi murders trial. And we've got police body cam from
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the case of the Brazilian au pair accused of murder. He started stabbing her. I think
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from the show. Plus, have you ever wondered how detectives know when someone is lying to them?
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We've got tips from a former Secret Service agent about how to spot deceit. We kind of know when things are off. Trust it. But first, we're heading to a small town in
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Kentucky for an update on a case we talked about on the podcast over the summer. The son of a local
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dentist has been behind bars, charged with a grisly murder he denies committing. Now,
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we're finally getting a look at some of the prosecution's evidence. In June 2023, Amber Spradlin, a 38-year-old restaurant hostess in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, was found murdered in a prominent dentist's home.
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For over a year, there were no arrests. Then this July, the dentist, Michael McKinney II, his son, and a family friend were arrested and charged with multiple counts of tampering with evidence.
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And the son, Michael McKinney III, was also charged with Amber's murder. Here's our NBC affiliate station WLEX.
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The allegation? He intentionally killed Spradlin by repeatedly stabbing her inside his father's home on June 18th, 2023.
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All three men pleaded not guilty. Two of the men were released from jail, but the dentist's son, known as MK, has been behind bars ever since.
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Then, two weeks ago, there was a hearing about his unusually high bond. M.K. McKinney wants out of jail and his lawyer argued why his $5 million bond should be lowered.
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The prosecution also spoke at the hearing and revealed for the first time some of the evidence they believe proves M.K. is Amber's killer.
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Dateline producer Rachel White was inside the courtroom and is here to tell us what she learned and what the judge decided.
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Rachel, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Andrea. OK, so this is a complicated case.
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Let's start with a quick recap of what happened. What do police believe happened in that house?
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How did Amber end up at the dentist's house? So Amber had just finished her shift at the Brick House restaurant.
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She met up with a friend to grab a drink at another bar, met up with the dentist, his
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son, and this third man, Josh Mullins, and decided to go back to the dentist's house
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to continue the night and have a few more drinks. Okay, where does everything go wrong?
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I think this is where you're going to say we don't really know. Yeah. Right. So there's a lot of unknowns, a lot of details that still have not come out. For example, prosecutors haven't laid out a motive for this crime.
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Even you were at this hearing where the defense representing M.K. McKinney tried to get his five million dollar bond lowered. That's a lot of money.
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What did the defense say? I think one of the main points of the defense's argument was that M.K. could be waiting for a very long time for his trial.
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They haven't tested a lot of evidence in this case, and some of it could be exculpatory evidence.
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The prosecution has said that that was because of a backlog in the Kentucky labs.
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So the defense is saying that MK is innocent until proven guilty, and that the evidence in this case could take at least a year, if not longer, to get them to the point where they could have a trial.
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And that's a very long time for him to wait. If he's sitting in jail that entire time, that's a miscarriage of justice because it's not his responsibility to do this test.
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His attorney also said that he has no prior criminal record. The allegation of he's a danger to the community.
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He's 25 years old and has a speeding ticket for five miles per hour. That's it. Then what is the prosecution saying?
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The prosecution laid out a lot of evidence in the case because the defense's motion basically said that there was a lack of physical evidence.
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And so they went and laid out a lot of it to prove that that wasn't true. So we learned that Amber was stabbed at least 12 times in the head and neck and torso.
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And this was a very, very violent attack. The blade from the knife actually broke off in her neck and was found during the autopsy.
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Wow. Wow. And they even though, as we mentioned, that they're not saying exactly what they have,
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they are indicating that their evidence strongly implicates MK. They are. So when MK McKinney was brought in for questioning shortly after the murder,
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scratches were seen and photographed on his forums. They're saying that under her fingernails,
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they found DNA and the DNA was a paternal match to the McKinney DNA. But because of those marks on
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MK, that's why prosecutors are looking at him for the murder. Dr McKinney and Josh Mullins had no defensive wounds according to the prosecution Yeah it interesting because you have father and son Correct So you need that extra bit of evidence to kind of put the pieces together
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if what the prosecution is saying is correct. So there was also some video evidence that prosecutors mentioned.
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Yeah, so the prosecution says that the dentist told several people that MK left the house overnight.
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But security video taken from neighbors' homes shows that MK's truck was leaving at 8.30 a.m.
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Amber was last seen in the living room around 7 a.m. So the timeline that the prosecution is laying out here is that the murder happened sometime after 7 a.m.
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The prosecution also pointed to MK McKinney's mental condition. That's right. So this filing by the prosecution says that he had, quote, a history of violent outbursts and mental instability.
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It also says that he had, quote, heard voices telling him to kill himself and that he talked about some dark voices taking control and telling him to do bad things.
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And they also pointed to a time in which MK allegedly pulled a knife on someone while drinking at a party.
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One of the things that stood out to us was his own statements about his inability to control his anger.
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that he had instances where he was triggered and couldn't control himself, which is consistent with what we believe occurred here.
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We should note that the defense says these allegations come from one source. This whole pulling a knife, there's not a single other person who supports that story.
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So it sounds like a lot happened at this hearing. Was MK there? He was. He was there.
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I did have a view of MK, and he was pretty stoic. You know, he was interested in what was happening.
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The courtroom was full. There was a camera in there, lots of media attention. Amber's family, I'm assuming, was there?
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They were there, all of them. There were friends and family who knew Amber and knew her well,
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they're supporting. And there were also people there that never were able to meet her. They were
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just there because her case resonated so much with them that they wanted to show their support.
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Okay, so what did the judge decide as far as lowering MK's bond? And he said that the McKinney's had the ability to post his bond and, you know, that they didn't.
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And he said the bond will stay at five million. So many unanswered questions in this one.
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Rachel, we'll be keeping an eye on it. And we look forward to your updates going forward.
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Thank you. Up next, the Atlanta trial of a well-known rapper produced viral moments and controversy.
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And then all of a sudden it unraveled. How did a man facing 45 years in prison walk away with time served?
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For our next story, we're heading to an Atlanta courtroom where last week we saw the dramatic conclusion to the longest running trial in Georgia history, at least for one of the defendants.
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rap superstar Young Thug. In 2022, Fulton County prosecutor Fonnie Willis accused the rapper,
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whose real name is Jeffrey Williams, of being a gang kingpin. She charged him with racketeering,
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said the gang had been involved in murder. And the key to her case? The musician's own songs.
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I never killed anybody, but I got something to do with that body. I got this grease on my back,
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carry it like I'm moving the body. If you decide to admit your crimes over a beat,
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I'm going to use it. For two and a half years, Young Thug sat behind bars as his trial, which involved more than two dozen co-defendants dragged on.
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Then suddenly last week, in a move that surprised everyone, he took a plea deal.
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His fans on TikTok were delighted. Oh, my God. I never thought I'd see the day. Young Thug is free.
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Young Thug is free. Here to talk about what that freedom might look like and how Young Thug ended up here is journalist David Dennis Jr., who covers pop culture for ESPN and also lives in Atlanta.
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David, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Let's talk about what Young Thug was on trial for.
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If you, you know, believe the Rico case, Young Thug is sort of the head of this snake that extends throughout, you know, a large swath of criminality in Atlanta, which the DA is tied to a rise in crime in the city and has sort of put that at the feet of Young Thug and YSL.
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That's his record label. Yeah, it's the idea that he is the head of this crime syndicate, this record label YSL that has done, you know, a lot of crime and violence in the city.
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So the criminal acts the prosecution said Young Thug committed included he received stolen property, a gun, made a gang sign with his hand and photos posted on social media, rented a car that was allegedly used to commit a murder.
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And we're talking about 27 co-defendants in this case, which is just unbelievable.
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a huge case. This is a huge, sprawling case. And there are still a few people who are still on trial.
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The lyrics in his songs, Fonnie Willis was pointing to guilt based on those lyrics.
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Yeah. I mean, rap on trial is a huge issue that has gone back many years. That is a dangerous, slippery slope in hip hop.
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There's a lot of people who make lyrics. If you based, you know, crimes on lyrics, almost every rapper, not even just rapper, a lot of musicians themselves would go to jail to base like criminality on like fictional characters is extremely dangerous.
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This trial really has been dogged with controversy Yeah, I mean, it's been a mess
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Like, there's no other way to put it There's been multiple judges There been lawyers who been tossed There have been viral testimonies from you know The guy who said he was high on the stand first and said he didn know when he was born and things like that I mean this has been as messy a court case as you can imagine If it wasn such a serious case this would be
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something like out of an episode of the TV show Atlanta. This was really around the city of Atlanta,
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the big water cooler talk, the barbershop. I mean, my barbershop had the trial on 24-7 when I was in
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Do we know what exactly happened that resulted, finally, as we said, longest trial in state history, and now we have this plea deal?
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Part of this comes out of this sort of calamitous thing that happened a couple of weeks ago, which they had a witness sort of read out an Instagram caption, and it had the hashtag.
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Free Quay. So two of Williams's co-defendants go by the name Quay, and the jury wasn't supposed to know that they or any of the defendants have been locked up in the months before and during the trial.
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That mistake possibly tainted the jury? Yeah. So the defense was trying to make an argument that this was a prejudicial factor in this, that the jury found out that somebody was in jail when they're when they're trying to keep the jury sort of out of that that information.
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And that really led to a moment where both sides sort of saw that a plea deal may be the quickest way and maybe the best way to get out of this.
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What exactly did Jeffrey Williams plead guilty to? So what he's pled guilty to was participation in a gang. He pled guilty to three drug charges, two gun charges. He also pleaded no contest to the charges of being the leader in the gang and conspiring to violate the RICO.
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And so to break it down, he he's not admitting that the state is correct about his record label being a gang with him at the top, but he's also not going to fight them in court any longer.
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Yeah, basically, it's kind of an impasse. So Young Thug put his fate in the judge's hands. Did he make a statement at all?
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Yeah, so he made about a 10 minute speech. He did apologize. He thanked the judge being fair,
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said he learned a lot in these last two and a half years that he's been locked up.
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I know the impact I got on people, period, in the community. I learned that late.
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Maybe it was because I was, you know, probably on drugs. I don't know, but I have came to my senses.
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He cracked a couple of jokes. He talked about the bailiffs and everybody getting overtime.
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And he said he would hope he never see the judge again. I hope that you allow me to go home today and just trust in me to just do the right thing
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and never see you again unless it's at a bar in the future or something. I promise you I won't ever be in this type of situation again.
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So the judge decided his sentence. What did she do? She gave him time served, which has been two and a half years,
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and then 15 years of probation on top of that. And if he violates that probation,
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there's a 20-year sentence that's sort of hanging over his head. So he gets to walk free,
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but um it's going to be a really challenging next 15 years for him he has a lot of restrictions
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on him about what he can and cannot do yeah i mean like he um can't be in atlanta where he's
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from unless there's funerals things like that he cannot quote-unquote promote gang activity in his
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music or hang around um any quote-unquote gang members um except for like his brother and gunna
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who's a collaborator and he's subjected to search and seizure at any point over the next 15 years
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And which to me, that feels like a hell in itself. Like that's it's not jail, but it does feel it feels dangerous.
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I mean, like, what are things that you say that promotes a gang activity in your music? Right.
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And it's sort of up to somebody's discretion. Is there any public outcry that he got off too easy?
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A lot of the public outcry is about the trial itself. The fact that this trial has taken so long and it's taken a lot of resources. There's really nothing to show for it. You know, there's no belief that the streets of Atlanta are any safer.
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David Dennis, Jr., thank you for your insight into this case. We appreciate it. Thank you.
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Next, we've got Dateline Roundup. The Massachusetts Supreme Court takes up the Karen Reed case.
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And in a D.C. suburb, a last-minute guilty plea raises the question, has the Brazilian au pair turned on her lover?
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Plus, can you tell if someone is deceiving you? Former Secret Service agent Evie Pompouris is back to share some tips on how to read people.
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Welcome back. Joining me for this week's Dateline Roundup is Dateline producer Sue Simpson. Hey,
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Sue. Hey. So we are off to Massachusetts with some news in the Karen Reed case, who listeners will, of course, remember as the woman accused of killing her Boston police
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officer boyfriend, John O'Keefe, in 2022 by drunkenly backing her car into him. Reed went on trial this spring, but the jury was hung and a mistrial was declared on July 1st.
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Both teams are gearing up for a second trial. So tell us, what is new, Sue? Well, this week, actually, on Wednesday, Karen Reed's attorney and the prosecutors
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appeared before Massachusetts Highest Court for a hearing. Hear you, hear you. SJC 13663, Commonwealth v. Karen Reed.
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And this is because after the mistrial was declared, The defense team said they heard from multiple jurors who told them that the jury unanimously agreed that Karen Reed was not guilty.
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Two of the counts against her The defense team argued that she should be acquitted on these two charges They should be dismissed Today appeal goes to the core issues regarding double jeopardy protections that safeguard defendants in this case Ms Reed
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Prosecutors got up and said, no, no, wait a minute. You should have spoken up in open court when the mistrial was declared.
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And those were the arguments made on Wednesday. The Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts has 120 days to make a decision after hearing these oral arguments.
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So the prosecution is trying to keep things as they are when we go to trial a second time in January.
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That's exactly right. What I would say, though, is it's not necessarily clear they're going to go have that retrial in January because both sides actually filed a joint motion on Monday saying to the judge, could we please have an extension?
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They're asking both the defense and the prosecution for the trial not to start until April 1st.
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Okay, thank you for that update, Sue. For our next story, we are off to Northern Virginia.
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We have been following closely the case of the Brazilian au pair who was charged with murder.
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Right. The victims in the case were the mom the Brazilian au pair was working for and another man, a total stranger.
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Most of them were found dead in the family home. and the dad of the family brendan banfield has been charged with killing the mom his wife christine
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and that other man named joseph ryan and prosecutors say that banfield plotted to kill his
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wife and the au pair was in on it last week the big news was that the au pair juliana perez
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magalays pleaded guilty to manslaughter and now we have some new information our daydron team got
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their hands on body cam footage from the officers who first responded to the scene. The au pair,
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you may remember, was the one to call 911. On the body cam, you can see her gasping. She seems
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distraught. She's telling the officers. Take a minute, okay? Okay. Do you just want to tell me
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quickly what happened? I don't know what happened. Everything happened so fast. She tells them that
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she saw Joseph Bryan stabbing Christine and that Brendan shot him to defend his wife.
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he started stabbing her i think when they shot him and he asked me help to try them too
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prosecutors say that story is not true they say that the au pair was covering for brendan
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who they say lord joseph ryan that stranger to the home through a fetish website and they say
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tried to frame this stranger for his wife's murder that's right and we haven't heard of
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course, Brendan's side of things yet, but the au pair says she's going to testify against him
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as part of a plea agreement that she made last week. Okay, finally, we're headed to Delphi,
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Indiana for the trial of Richard Allen. He is the man accused of fatally stabbing two middle school
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girls in 2017. Yeah, it's been another intense week at that trial. The jury got to see over a
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dozen videos of Alan in prison from the time when he gave more than 60 confessions. And when the
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defense says that he was in great mental distress, we know they included footage of Alan being tased,
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eating feces, and being transported for medical treatment. The defense was pushing their point
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that the confessions were a product of some kind of psychotic break. They weren't real.
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Any other big witnesses? There was also a toolmark expert who took the stand and raised concerns about the analysis of the stakes examiner who had said that the bullet found at the crime scene had cycled through Allen's gun.
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And that's a big one because the bullet is really the only physical evidence that the prosecution has to tie Allen to the scene.
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Yeah, really big point in this case. The defense rested Wednesday morning, so we'll keep you updated as this trial comes to a close.
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Sue, thank you for coming back on Roundup. Thanks, Andrea. It's always great to do it.
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service agent Evie Pompouris, who conducted her fair share of polygraph exams for some tips.
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Hey, Evie, thanks for coming back. Thanks for having me. People lie. Sometimes they're harmless.
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Sometimes they're white lies. Sometimes they're big lies that can really impact your life in a negative way.
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How can you read people in a way to know if they're lying to you or not? First, there are three primary ways people lie.
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One way is they'll tell you a full-on lie. The second way they tell you a lie is they will tell you a lie, sprinkle in a little truth,
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then a little lie, little, little truth. The third way people lie, the most common way people lie is they lie by omission.
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I'll tell you this part here, but I'm going to leave this part out. So how can you catch this behavior with people?
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The first thing I'm going to say is we have to know people's baselines. Who are they normally when they're not threatened, when they're in a relaxed mode?
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Now, when you start asking people uncomfortable questions or questions where you start thinking,
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I want to know, you know, what did my significant other do last night? Am I looking at my significant other's baseline?
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Sure, because I'm going to see deviations. We all kind of the people that are close to our orbit, we kind of know when things are
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off. Trust it. Just pay attention and then start asking follow-up questions. What type of follow-up questions would you ask?
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Tell me more about that. Be curious. And so if you see them struggling to answer your question or they consistently don't want to answer it, now you know there's a problem with this question.
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When you interview people and teenagers are king and queen when they do this, they make you feel stupid.
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That's a dumb question. I already told you. I can't believe you're asking me this.
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Those are red flags. Now, look, does it mean that person's lying? No. But you should ask yourself
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why. Why is your response so strong to something simple that I ask? Often people do this to get
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you to back down. Another super common thing is answering a question with the question. Who me?
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Stalling tactic. So that's verbal. What about body language? The problem with body language is
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the narrative is, oh, they looked up and to the right. They're making up the lie. It is
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absolutely not true. Think of it this way. We are so uniquely different. How can you actually put
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somebody in the box as what they're going to physically do in a lying scenario? Now, can some
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people give you cues? Yes. So if you ask me a question and the whole time we're talking, my
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hands are down. I'm not putting them up to my face. And then all of a sudden, my hand goes up
00:24:50
to my mouth before I answer. You should in that moment say, hmm, that is super weird. Does that
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mean I'm lying? No. It could mean, though, that's an uncomfortable question for me.
00:25:00
Eye contact, too, for some people, not all. I've interviewed so many people, and I've had many people look me in the eye all day long and lie, lie, lie.
00:25:12
That's the big one that you hear about, is that someone will look down or they won't look you in
00:25:17
the eye if they're lying. Some can. Again, just because somebody does it, it doesn't mean
00:25:21
everybody's a liar, pay attention. And, you know, I also think people should just trust their
00:25:27
instincts. If it feels off to you, it probably is. Just listen to it. Yes. All right. What I love
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about these tips is that you can use it in your everyday life. So thank you, Abby. Absolutely.
00:25:40
That it for this episode of Dateline True Crime Weekly Next week the conclusion of a trial that riveted Minnesota Did the man who admitted to law enforcement that he was infatuated with the Gabby Petito case murder the mother of his children
00:25:55
To find out more about the cases covered on the show, head to our website, DatelineTrueCrimeWeekly.com.
00:26:02
And coming up this Friday on Dateline, almost 30 years after Eric and Lyle Menendez were sentenced to life in prison for murdering their parents,
00:26:11
amidst a surge of public attention and a DA's recommendation, could they be released?
00:26:17
We're viewing everything that happened back then through a different lens. A different lens, yes.
00:26:24
But is it making our vision any clearer? Watch Keith's new two-hour mystery, the Menendez brothers, Chance at Freedom,
00:26:34
airing this Friday at 9, 8 central on NBC or stream it starting Saturday on Peacock.
00:26:39
To get ad-free listening for all our podcasts, subscribe to Dateline Premium, where you can also find exclusive bonus content, including our latest episode of After the Verdict, which drops today.
00:26:52
I'll be talking with Lissa Yellowbird, who tracked down one of the men involved in the disappearance of her niece and now crosses the country with her search dogs looking for other missing people.
00:27:02
Thanks for listening. Dateline True Crime Weekly is produced by Frannie Kelly and Katie Ferguson.
00:27:07
Our associate producers are Carson Cummins and Caroline Casey. Our senior producer is Liz Brown-Kurloff.
00:27:15
Production and fact-checking help by Sara Kadir. Veronica Mazzaka is our digital producer.
00:27:20
Rick Kwan is our sound designer. Original music by Jesse McGinty. Bryson Barnes is head of audio production.
00:27:27
Paul Ryan is executive producer. And Liz Cole is senior executive producer of Dateline.
00:27:37
Thank you.