Talking Dateline: Deadly Swagger

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0:47Hi everybody, I'm Lester Holt and welcome to Talking Dateline. Today I'm joined by Keith Morrison to talk about his episode, Deadly Swagger. This is a case, it starts with a brutal shooting inside a Lake Tahoe home and quickly becomes something much more complicated. If you haven't watched the episode, I invite you to do so. Go over to the Dateline podcast feed or on Peacock. You can catch it streaming. Then come back over with us and listen to the discussion that follows. When you come back, we'll have much more of Keith's interview with former Major League Baseball player and now convicted killer Dan Serafini.

1:23and later we'll be joined by the producer of this episode to answer some of your questions about social media. 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, 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. We have a brilliant person named Susan Null who comes up with most of these things. But deadly swagger. I wouldn't have thought of that. Well, you know, it becomes relevant in the first few minutes of this episode.

1:59It does. Oh, that's the deadly swagger. Got it. There you go. Give us the lowdown. First of all, the setting for this grabs you right away, the gorgeous pictures of Lake Tahoe. You've never been there. It is one of the great beauties, beautiful natural spots in the world. 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. 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 now retired couple who had had long and interesting careers doing various things over the years.

2:45and that would actually play into our story to some degree. And they had a lot of money. We're 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, and as they go out, an intruder, a masked intruder, comes into the house and is apparently there while they are there. Well, yes. The daughter Erin with their two children, hers and Danny's, arrived to see the grandparents in the afternoon. 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.

3:30Erin and the kids and the grandparents come back from their boating trip. They have dinner together. Then Erin and the kids leave. There's a pause for a few minutes. And then up the stairs comes the shooter. Immediately shoots Gary in the back of the head. He's dead. Tries to shoot Wendy, but she isn't killed. She was very badly injured. Wound up in a bathroom. The shooter leaves the house quickly. She's left in the bathroom calling 911. They fly her to a hospital by helicopter, and they manage to save her life. And then, of course, they're wondering whether she can tell them who attacked them.

4:11And because she had such terrible brain injuries, she wasn't able to tell them. 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. Wendy, in particular, was a litigious woman. She had disputes and lawsuits, something like 22 lawsuits. She had a dispute with a local neighbor who was a fisherman who put out his little nets to catch minnows for bait. 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. Gary, the husband, had a past which isn't in any official record.

4:56But the investigators who worked on this case certainly heard about a past involved in some drug business where there was an investigation. And remember, there are two daughters. One of them had—Danny Serafini was her husband, the person they eventually zeroed in on. So they tracked down all of their alibis, and everybody alibied out, including Danny Serafini. And I know there was great hope that that video would have taken them right to the killer. But this gets us to the title of this program, Deadly Swagger. Why they don't see the face of this intruder. There is something about the walk. And tell us about how that becomes critical as this case wears on.

5:36Well, at first they had no idea who this was. This person, he came up to the house. He left the house. They saw him walk alongside the lake. But there was just no way to tell who it was. And they began to compare the way people walk. And the investigators noticed that the way he was kind of half walking, half jogging from the sidewalk up toward the garage looked a lot the way, you know, a baseball player would run from the mound off the off at the end of an inning. Look, the way a baseball player would go and, you know, stand out in center field as he was waiting for play to begin, that kind of, just a kind of a gentle jog to get to the place.

6:21And it had a kind of a swagger to it. And, you know, Danny Serafini was an ex-baseball player. He was a journeyman pitcher. He'd played for several teams around the major leagues for years. 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. In the meantime, Wendy's memory is starting to slowly come back. Was there an aha moment when suddenly she became a star witness in this? It wasn't really an aha moment. But it was when she eventually said, you know, now I see him. I see Danny in a hoodie. Danny in a hoodie is shooting us.

7:13And she told the authorities that. They had great hope, I think, that they could use that information. They could use her as a witness. 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. 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 hearing about over the years, recovered memories are not to be trusted a lot of the time. Our brains invent things. We need to have memories, and we need to have a feel that we have a grounding in our lives, and we have to recall something very directly and intensely that may turn out not to be true at all, that we have simply had a false memory.

8:09That's much more common than I think most people realize. The Black Candle Confession was one that you had done. How did that figure as you tried to understand this story and where it was going? 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 by a woman who said when she was nine years old, she attended a sleepover party at a friend's house. And in the middle of the night, she got scared or hungry or something and walked down the stairs from the second floor toward the living room. And she heard something, and then she saw a woman sitting at the dining room table lighting candles and sobbing and apologetic for having killed a person.

9:00And a name was mentioned, at least in this woman's memory. went back up the stairs all frightened, went to bed, this nine-year-old. Well, now when she's 30-ish, she gets this memory from when she was nine, and she reports it to the police, and they had left the case. It was a cold case, obviously, but they opened up the case. They found the woman who supposedly was sitting at the table lighting a black candle and sobbing about having killed somebody. They questioned her. She denied it, as you might expect. but she was convicted by a jury of murder, and she's still in prison to this day, denying she had nothing to do with it.

9:43Was that a real memory? This was a responsible person who had it, a nurse, a highly respected woman who had the memory. But we've also done stories about repressed memories of children who claimed that they had been abused by their parents back at This is years ago, around the time of the McMartin preschool case. And there were other cases. One of the first false convictions that I ever reported on was a man named John Stoll, who was convicted of abusing his son. And the evidence that was used was his son's memory. And later on, it was shown through other investigation that the memory was completely false.

10:33And so, you know, he was released from prison. But memories are iffy. Memories can be true. Memories are often not true. And it's very, very difficult for anybody to know for sure which is which. And in the case of Deadly Swagger, I got the impression that prosecutors knew they couldn't necessarily hang their hat on whatever, you know, Wendy would be able to tell them, that they had to have a case that would withstand any ambiguity. Exactly. And so even if they were able to put her on the stand and she said, you know, I now know I can see my son-in-law coming in the house with his hoodie on, firing a shot that killed my husband and firing shots at me, I can see him.

11:18It would have been powerful evidence, but maybe not as powerful as if she had not talked about those other people as well. Let me ask you about the lead detective in this case. I don't recall off the top of my head a detective becoming as emotionally involved as this detective was. He wanted to solve this case, but he wanted to answer the questions for this family as well. Talk a little bit about him if you would. Well, yes, he was certainly invested in this story, in this case. He worked on it a long time. It really took over his life. You know, if this was one of those detective novels that would be eating him alive, you'd hear that a lot.

12:09But he teared up a number of times during the course of the interview because he got so close to the case and because he got so close to the family and particularly Wendy. 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's your fault. He told me about that and he broke down. He really, really took that personally. And eventually Adrian, you know, when the conviction occurred, Adrian came back and thanked him for his work. But he became very, very deeply involved in this story.

13:01And it is something, you see this, Lester.

13:07Investigators, detectives, are often, you know, they get a reputation for being hard-boiled and hard-nosed, etc. But they tend to be some of the most caring people you ever meet in your life. And they do become emotionally invested in their cases often. And if they take a wrong turn or don't get it right the first time, they're often grief-stricken. When we come back, we are going to hear more from Keith's interview with Dan Serafini.

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14:13Since he got out, bad things keep happening. Cape Fear, a new series, is streaming June 5th on Apple TV. Why would I want to hurt you? Starring Academy Award winner Javier Bardem. And Academy Award nominee Amy Adams. He's coming after my family. Cape Fear, streaming June 5th on Apple TV. To realize the future America needs, we understand what's needed from us. To face each threat head on. we've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this.

15:04I also want to ask you about Erin, the couple's daughter. She obviously is a large part of this story, but was she ever a suspect? Yeah, she was never charged. I'm not sure how close it ever came to her being charged. I just think it was the people doing the investigating found it very interesting that there was a kind of a ballet that occurred here, a sequence of events. So, you know, Danny drives in from the desert. Aaron brings the kids in to see the grandparents. They go out on the boat. The house is empty. There's a way for him to get inside and wait. and then they come back and have dinner and leave.

15:47And after they leave, conveniently, the murder occurs. Was Erin involved in that in some way? You know, they investigated that as much as they could, and they did not come to a conclusion that she was involved. But, you know, on the face of it, they were interested. And when you look at Erin staying loyal, what did you think about that explains the differences? Is it loyalty, denial, fear, love? What was it? I wanted very much to talk to both of the daughters. And we, you know, I thought we were going to have a chance to interview Erin. She was considering it. Then I did an interview with Danny.

16:32And afterwards, I think he talked to Erin and felt that I was a little too rough on him. But I'd like to know more about those questions as well. Let's talk about Serafini in that interview. Yeah, sure. I'd heard other people say that there was kind of a swagger and arrogance about him. 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.

17:01He was an arrogant guy. And even in a jail cell waiting to go to prison, he was an angry interview. He was, you know, people wouldn't believe him or if I seemed to indicate I wasn't believing him. He was, that made him pretty mad. He threatened to leave the interview at one point. And I said, well, you know, I got to ask you tough questions. Otherwise, why are we here? And so he came around and he stayed. And he answered the questions. But he wasn't a happy camper when he left. And he sort of stopped. Yeah, and you made the point, we should point out here, you had a limited amount of time. A lot of times these things are, you know, we get an hour, hour and a half.

17:40They'd given us a half an hour for the interview. At the end of a half an hour, the jailer said, well, another couple of minutes would be okay. 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. 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. So 40 minutes is a very small amount of time.

18:16That interview with the main detective, for example, we talked for five hours. 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. 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. We were told we had a half an hour. I wanted to be sure I got the answers to some of the questions.

18:52I wrote them down on a piece of paper, which is probably a wise thing to do that I never usually do.

19:02and started asking those questions and he got mad and then we kind of extemporized after that. Keith Morrison, not a paper and pencil guy. Okay, noted that. Everyone's got their own style. Yeah. Now we do have some extra sound, Keith, from that interview you did that did not make it into the broadcast 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? Yeah, I was pretty naive about it. I thought I deserved a new trial, especially after what the jury said on television. Put that in your call. I'm sorry?

19:45What didn't you like about what the jury said? Well, the jurors, first of all, said that, well, if it wasn't Mr. Serafini, who else could it be? That sounds like reasonable doubt to me. And then another juror says, well, we don't know if it's Mr. Serafini for sure, but in case it is, we want to make sure he doesn't go out and do it again. That sounds like reasonable doubt to me. Another juror says, oh, it was the shoes. The shoes that Mr. Serafini was wearing at the hotel matches the suspect's shoes that he or she was wearing on Saturday. And they weren't. They were the complete opposite. and we proved that they weren't.

20:24I was wearing house slippers at the hotel, and then the suspect in Tahoe is wearing Adidas running shoes, not even clothes. 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. That's horrible. So you get an idea of his attitude toward the jury and toward what happened to him in the trial. Sounds like he was prepared to try the case over again with you as the juror. Oh, yes. He would love to have done so and would have loved to have his own say. I think his initial attorneys felt it wise to keep him off the stand because he could be combative, as you can sort of see evidence of.

21:09You know, he was holding himself back at that point because we'd already had our little tiff and he was kind of calmed down. But you can see that kind of combative attitude of his. Did this case feel like it was on the verge of running off the rails? It was – he simply would not accept that a jury would convict him. And again, that speaks to that sort of attitude that you – why wouldn't you believe me? 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 so they had their chance to make their arguments before a judge and they even presented a witness or two but then those witnesses told stories that were knocked down by the prosecutor.

22:14One of them said she saw Dan Serafina the day of the shooting miles away. And in fact, she didn't see him that day. She saw him the day after that. He really wasn't helped by that effort. And the judge eventually said, no, you don't get a new trial. You're done. And another side note, it didn't end up becoming a huge issue, but there were questions about the jury. The jury compared videos. they took screenshots of the person who was running from the car 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 remember that he stayed with um with samantha that night in a hotel miles away so So they really, you know, is a jury supposed to do that sort of thing?

23:08Kind of went the extra mile to do some investigating of their own? Dan Serafini and his attorney claimed, no, they were not supposed to do that. And that was a judicial error that should have had the case thrown out. Do you have any final thoughts about this case? We talked about how deeply it struck the detective on the case. you and the rest of the team put a lot of hours and days and weeks into this story. Where did it leave you? Well, people's lives are very complicated, and no matter how shiny and successful a person's existence may appear to be, it's quite likely that there's a whole story behind it, which is both fascinating and potentially something that that person would rather you didn't know about.

24:01I don't know if that makes any sense or not. But it was just, here's another story of an apparently highly successful couple with a backstory that wouldn't quit. After our break, we'll come back and take some of the questions we've had about this episode on social media.

24:51We'll see you next time. Since he got out, bad things keep happening. Cape Fear, a new series, is streaming June 5th on Apple TV. Why would I want to hurt you? Starring Academy Award winner Javier Bardem. And Academy Award nominee Amy Adams. He is coming after my family. Why? Cape Fear, streaming June 5th on Apple TV. The wrongs we must right. The fights we must win. The future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this.

26:02Well, Lester had to take a flight, but Jessica DeVera is here to answer some of your questions and comments from social media. And there is no finer person to answer those questions than Jessica, who knows this story inside out and backwards and forwards. Hi, Jess. Hi, Keith. How are you? We had a whole lot of people talking about how interesting the episode was. So, you know, well done. But it's just a fascinating story. Yeah, that's for sure. This one had lots, you know, lots of twists and turns. Lots of twists and turns, yeah. We could probably do a podcast on this one for sure. You were in the Dateline producer account when the show was on the air.

26:42And you told kind of an interesting story about this episode. Can you tell me what you heard about listening closely and what was playing in the background? Yeah. So it was interesting because I first heard the 911 call played in court. It's an old courthouse. 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. 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.

27:24So you can hear that very faintly. But we when we finally got the exhibits from court and we're prepping to edit and write, you know, I had my noise canceling headset and and listening in. 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. Oh, darn. You know, our team did a little bit of digging around. And it was an episode titled Written in Blood 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. A rerun, but also an appropriate title, given what had just occurred in that lovely big house by Lake Tahoe.

28:14Good Lord. Yeah, pretty unbelievable. Well, we have lots of questions. First of all, let's go to one from Janet Wiseman, who said, didn't they say cameras inside and outside the house? Did the dogs bark? Yeah, so 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. So at the point in time where the masked person enters, we could not hear the barking from at least the evidence that was presented to us and that we had access to. The prosecutor pointed out to the jurors that 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 and Dan.