Talking Dateline: In a Lonely Place

0:00Hi, guys. I'm Blaine Alexander, and today we are talking Dateline. I've got the pleasure of being joined by my dear friend, Keith Morrison. Hi, Keith. Hi, Blaine. How are you? I am so fantastic. I'm excited to talk with you today. Today's episode, this one was a good one. It's called In a Lonely Place, and it's the story of Chris Smith, a charismatic California entrepreneur who seemed to have it all. But when Chris suddenly vanished on a round-the-world adventure, the truth turned out to be much darker and much closer to home. The man who claimed to be his business partner and friend, Ed Shin, had murdered him.

0:37If you haven't listened to the episode yet, you can find it right below this podcast, or of course, you can go and watch it on Peacock, and then come right back here. And when you come back, we'll share more of Keith's interview with private investigator Joe DeLue, who says he kind of stumbled upon this case. Later, we'll answer some of your questions from social media. All right, Keith, let's talk Dateline. Okay. Happy to. Yes, it was a fascinating story, and it took a long time to sort it out, as many of these stories do. Well, this one had me all over the place from the beginning because it was only about, what, halfway through the episode when we kind of realized, okay, there's a crime that's been committed here, right?

1:19I mean, you're watching, and obviously we know it's a Dateline story, so something had to have gone awry. But usually it's in the first few minutes that we know, okay, someone who has been killed, now we need to figure out who it is. But there was a mystery before we even got to the crime. Well, you know, people asked us along the way, after this case was adjudicated, how could the family not know for that length of time? How could they believe that he was off on some sort of world tour having fun? Well, the fact is they were very concerned, very worried. But these emails were done so skillfully.

1:52And the play that Ed Shin made was so skillful that the family truly was, you know, as any family would be. You want your loved one to be alive, and every email that came along was one that supported that idea. And on top of that, it wasn't necessarily out of his character, right? He was already someone who kind of went against the conventional. I mean, if I emailed my family and said, hey, guys, I've taken off around the world, they'd say, no, you didn't. That's a lie. Like, you know, that's clearly not you. Clearly there's something going on, right? But when Chris sent an email like this, I said, okay, that's actually something that he would do.

2:37Something he would do. In fact, our working title for this program was Laguna Surfer. He was a surfer dude, and he loved to travel the world and, you know, surf on the best waves wherever he could possibly find them. He did that all the time. I have to say, Keith, I always enjoy hearing you write about California. Oh. It's always poetic. It's clear that you know your state. You love it very much. Were there elements of Chris that felt familiar to you, people that you know, folks that you've come across? This is a state that invites people to live a certain kind of lifestyle, and Chris embraced that.

3:13You know, you hear about all kinds of different Californias. You hear about a troubled one. You hear about a fun one. You hear about the one in the sun. You hear about the Hollywood, California. They're all true. They just blend together in a strange mix that is intoxicating, really. It's like the song. You can check out, but you can never leave. It draws people in and holds them. California does. Exactly. Exactly. There's something about the left coast. Let's talk about Chris and Ed. They certainly embody the phrase opposites attract when it comes to business partners. We've certainly talked a lot about Chris and the type of person that he was.

3:54Ed, though, seemed to be almost the polar opposite, very buttoned up businessman kind of guy. Sure. There's a certain trust that goes into just building a business with somebody, right? You'd think so. He had met Ed Shin at a previous job, and I guess they got along well. He recognized Ed's capabilities, but he didn't know him very well, clearly. Didn't know him well enough. Didn't realize that Ed had a dark side, had a whole life that was hidden from public view. There are people who can do that. They can have double lives. They live a life which is you admire, everybody admires, and then they become the Jekyll and Hyde character.

4:40And on the other side of it, they are doing terrible things. Or they're, you know, they're caught up by habits that they cannot control. Ed was a terrible gambler. He had a gambling addiction. The other personality was over the top in the other direction. But at the same time, I mean, he was an intelligent guy. He was a smart guy, right? To pull off something like this, you've got to be pretty intelligent when you talk about sending these types of emails and knowledge of digital footprint, that type of thing. And that's another puzzlement, a certain kind of character who can be very bright, but at the same time, so a slave to his habits.

5:19The prosecutor that you spoke to, I love this prosecutor, by the way. We see this guy and then suddenly we realize, okay, he too is part of the surfing community. And I think that added a richness to the story and also probably helped his prosecution because he knew certain things. Like you said, you'd never leave on a surfing trip and just not take your surfboards. Matt Murphy was a longtime prosecutor in Orange County, and he had a lot of success with a variety of cases. He's simply a good prosecutor. He doesn't prosecute anymore, but he was at the top of his game during this case. Absolutely.

5:53So he referred to Ed Shin as a con man. And I think what was so fascinating about this story, I have to say, I was following along. I was right in it all the way until the end. But then when you teased right before the last block that you actually sat down and talked to Ed, that's when I was leaning all the way in. I said, oh, okay, now we're going to ramp this up about 10 degrees. So I'm curious. We talk about a lot of these folks in our stories. It's very rare that we actually get to sit down across from them. I'm curious what sense you got from Ed when you were sitting down with him. Well, I think it's a very good question.

6:34we sat around outside waiting to be allowed to go in to talk to ed i was surprised that he had agreed to speak to us and and then it looked like maybe we wouldn't be able to and then maybe we would maybe we wouldn't and finally he decided to do it so he was undecided himself i think but we trooped and we set up a a very elaborate system where we could have a camera on one side of the glass and a camera on the other side of the glass and be able to record something like a normal conversation. And Ed was brought in, and he was very polite, and he was clearly a bright man. We talked about his religion a little bit.

7:14We talked about his family. We talked about things like that before we got down to the case at hand. And that's when it became apparent to me that he had done this in order to present the good ed to the public and try to snow them as he had tried to snow his victim, that he tried to snow the trial, try to persuade everybody that he is that, you know, God-fearing, lovely father of four who, you know, wouldn't harm a fly. Or if he did, it was merely in self-defense. And there's a, you know, there was a tactical reason for that, I guess, because, you know, there's a possibility, remote though it may seem, that he could somehow, you know, win an appeal someday or have his case dismissed.

8:07As unlikely as that may seem, he, like a great many people in prison, just won't go that extra mile to confess what they have done because they hope that they get exonerated someday. But he was so adamant about—it just made me kind of cross because he wouldn't do that thing for the family, which would give them a little bit of peace knowing that they have their son's body. And he just wouldn't go there. Well, I think that this exchange yielded maybe one of your most famous dateline lines. I don't give a sweet flying F. I don't know if I can say this on a podcast. I don't give a sweet flying F about that.

8:57I don't. I don't care. I kind of care. Which you do care. That the family has a chance to get some closure. You know, I was just trying to make a point, and I was fed up. And I was just trying to tell them how important this was. Your frustration came through in that moment. Yeah, well. When we come back, you'll hear more of Keith's interview with Joe DeLue, the private investigator who really helped crack this case.

9:26You know, there are several things about this that were interesting to me. One, about Joe DeLue kind of coming into the picture. One, how long, there was about a year or so between when Chris, you know, disappeared, sent that email saying, hey, I'm heading off around the world. And when he went in and looked, I was surprised that I guess nobody had rented this place, but that so much of this evidence was still there. Yes. Well, it happened at a time when office spaces were not being rented immediately like that, when the economy was in a bit of a dip in that area. And so the place sat empty for a year.

10:02And Joe just happened to be interested enough to go in and have a look. If he hadn't done that, we wouldn't be sitting here. We have an extra clip of your interview with Joe. I was fascinated by just his presence in this story. So let's take a little listen to that bit of the conversation. So we went in there and we investigated. I remember looking in the break room area. And on the light switch, there was what appeared to be blood to me. Just a small speck of blood. And you could see it through the contrast of it because it was on white. Sure. So then we looked and we noticed another small size, about the same size, smudge on the door jam of Chris's office.

10:48So at this point, we backed out. We thought we had something serious, especially with the blood that we suspected was blood. And I contacted Orange County Sheriff's Department, talked to Don Vogt, investigator Don Vogt. And Don and I went to high school together. We grew up together. We're neighbors. And I remember telling him, I said, Don, call me. I found blood in the office. I will tell you that I actually believe there's something higher that brought us on this case. Everything just came together. It's almost like this was just meant to be. You know, I think that many of us have done stories where someone in the story says something along those lines.

11:44There was a higher power or everything came together or had it not been for just almost the victim themselves or crying out in a sense, wanting to be found, wanting to solve this case, that it wouldn't have come together. But that really was the linchpin in all of this, him going into that office. It was, and the fact that he would look at a little bit of blood on the light switch, not much, just a little tiny smear on the back of a door. And that would be enough for him to say, you know, this wasn't just somebody who cut himself shaving and he's walking out of the office to fix it. This was something more serious.

12:21An experienced investigator who's been around for a while and has seen a lot of blood spatter and knows what they look like and what the ones look like that you have to worry about. So, yeah, there was some luck involved, but also Joe DeLue was a pretty capable guy. Certainly was. Let's talk about the family because this story is the perfect example of how often it's the family, the family's determination, the family saying, yeah, something's not right, or you've got to look into this disappearance, or just really advocating for their loved one that gets a case moving. You know, there's so many elements of this story, Keith, that remind me of a story that I did out of Tennessee where a family really did push for this investigation.

13:05But the person who was ultimately convicted of killing this young woman was doing the exact same thing. I mean, posting to social media, trying to throw people off the scent, sending Snapchat messages and messages to her family to make it appear as though she was alive. And the family looked at those messages and said, no, this isn't her. This isn't Jazzy. It was her name. I'm curious, as we as a society start leaning more and more on technology, social media, other things like that, do you think that we're going to continue to see more cases like this, a higher level of cases? Sure. Where people try and cover up deaths with digital footprints?

13:45You know, if you're skillful enough, you could almost now or soon in a matter of just a few years be able to, you know, have somebody make a phone call. And it sounds exactly like them. And so you assume it is. And, you know, AI is going to make a big difference for good and for ill. And you can be sure that people who want to do bad things are going to be just as eager, maybe more so, to use AI for their purposes than people who want to do good things. because the people who have done bad things are more desperate, and therefore they'll use anything to try to cover up their guilt. And I can see technology being used for nefarious purposes a lot in the coming years.

14:29It's a scary thing. It is a scary thing. And coming up, we'll answer some of your questions from social media.

14:38so keith as you can imagine this uh episode certainly sparked a lot of social media comments and questions so let's go to some of those at southern beach girl writes i wonder what the girlfriend felt when she found out that he didn't really dump her after she said all those things about him it's a good point she felt pretty bad and she of course recognized that all those things she said about him were said in haste and she wished she hadn't this this next one is a fantastic question. It's one that I actually had while watching this. If you look at the email's system details, you can tell where the email comes from.

15:11Why didn't a detective do that? Well, that was one of the ways that the investigation finally turned, is that they were able to do some of those things. That was one of the investigative tools that led to a bit of a breakthrough. Well, as you could expect, we have several comments about your interview at the end with Ed Shin, specifically your line. So at E. Maura A. writes, this is my favorite Keith Jail interview. So certainly a high bar, but we have some favorites there. My, my, my. And then another one we have at Southern Beach Girl writes, Keith just cursed. Whoa. Whoa, yeah. Well, I allegedly cursed.

15:59It seems to me they beeped it, so maybe nobody heard it because there was a beep, right? Yeah. So perhaps they didn't say that word after. We don't know what was said. Right, there you go. We don't know what word was said neath the beep, do we? Can you think of any other interviews, Keith, where something like this has happened? Frustration, profanity. Lori Vallow pops to mind immediately. That was one of the stranger interviews ever. I'm in trial coming up, as you know. Do you know that, Keith? Oh, I know that. Are you keeping track? I'm keeping track. There have been several, quite a few. I remember from long, long ago doing an interview with a preacher, ex-preacher, in a prison in Southern California, having decided during his career as a minister that he had to have plural wives.

16:55This was a theological point that he thought he had discovered. So he got himself a young wife and tired of her. This is shortening of the story considerably. He retired of her eventually and chopped her into pieces and hid her under a carron out in the desert. And it took them years to figure it out. Long, long time. He was finally apprehended. He was put into prison. And when I interviewed him, he did the same thing. He just simply was infuriating in his refusal to answer any questions at all, even those that wouldn't harm him. But when I, in answer to one of the questions, he said, I'm not so worried about this.

17:35And I know that my, you know, the young wife, wife number two will forgive me, that when I die and go to heaven, we will be together again. and resume our relationship just as it was before. So people have strange ideas a lot of the time. That's why they're in prison, I suppose. Strange ideas is an understatement, certainly. Yeah. Well, this one was a fascinating episode, Keith. It was incredibly well told. It was just a great one to watch. So thank you so much for bringing it to us and for talking Dateline with me today. Thank you, Blaine. And that is it for talking Dateline this week. Thanks so much for joining us as always.

18:20If you've got a case or a question for the team, remember you can reach out to us at any time on social at Dateline NBC. We've also got a handy phone line that you can call. You can leave a voicemail at 212-413-5252. Keith, I'm told that that number actually rings directly to your cell phone. Is that true? Endlessly. Yeah, you're right. I pick up every call.

18:46I think Josh personally forwarded those phone calls to you. That's right. Exactly right. You can call that hotline or you can send a voice memo in a DM or even send us a video question. And if you haven't heard, we are taking our show on the road on Sunday, September 28. Please join us in Nashville for Dateline Live, an evening of stories, behind-the-scenes moments, audience Q &As, and a special VIP reception with the team. It's all happening at the pinnacle right in the heart of Music City. Tickets are available now at datelinenbc.com slash event. And we certainly hope to see you there. And as always, we hope to see you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.