Transcript of Talking Dateline: Murder & Magnolias New

Hi, everyone. I'm Blaine Alexander, and today we are talking Dateland. Today, I'm here with Keith Morissen to talk about his original podcast series, murder and Magnolias. Keith, my friend, it's so good to talk to you.

It's a delight to see you.

Now, if you have not listened to it yet, you need to go do so. We dropped the full series in the Dateland feed as a bonus while Dateland has been taking a break for these past few weeks for the Winter Olympics. So go there, listen, and then come right back here. And later, we will be joined by Dateland producer, Carol Gable to share what it was like behind the scenes reporting on this story as it unfolded. And then, as always, we're going to take some of your questions. Okay, let's talk Dateland. Keith, so this story was fascinating for a number of reasons. Can you just give us a quick primer? Just run down what the story was about.

It's about a very successful couple in Charleston, South Carolina, a banker and his wife. They're society people. They have parties all the time. They seem to have the perfect life. It wasn't perfect. It was a bitter divorce. Then we discovered that the husband was seeing a woman who happened to know somebody who spent some time in the underworld, had spent some time in prison, and secretly arranged to have this man kill the wife, Nancy Latham. But the plan went awry. The person who actually had volunteered to be the trigger man was arrested in a traffic stop, and it turned out he was trying to figure out a way not to do the killing. He was a drug addict, and he gave the whole story away. So they were able to, in the end, protect Nancy, get the proof to arrest the husband and the girlfriend, and they went to prison. It was a rich story in its details, and the characters were fascinating, and It was a rare situation where we were able to conduct interviews with everybody outside and inside prison. Nancy, of course, who turned out to be a very funny woman. In fact, she, later on, I don't know if you could say, made a living, but she became a stand-up comedian for a while after this was all over.

But Chris Latham spoke to us. Wendy spoke to us. Charleston has given us a number of really remarkable tales, and this is one of them.

Let's start with those fascinating characters. I have to say you give a great primer, but there is so much to this story that it's almost impossible to summarize it all.

You get lost in the weeds as soon as you start to describe it. You do.

But one thing that you can't really describe, even with the rundown that you just gave, I think just the Southern feel of these folks, of these characters, and the fact that it took place in South Carolina somehow just takes the story to another level for me.

Yeah, it did for me, too. I don't live there. I'm not from there. I grew up in Canada, far away from that culture, but I love it. The producer I've worked with for many years on a number of stories in Charleston, Carol Gable, would call me and say, You won't believe the latest. She had some new nugget about this story over a period of time, while we were watching developments before we actually were able to complete doing it.

Let's talk about the couple at the center of the Lathams. You mentioned you grew up far away from South Carolina. I'm right next door. I'm in Georgia. I'm not originally from here, but certainly lived in the south long enough to know it. When you talk about those two, they are like this quintessential just Southern charm success story. He's a money man. He's got the brains. She is a charmer and no society. You put those two together and you have magic.

Dynamite, yeah. He was on the board of the Spoletto Festival, which was the big thing in Charleston every year. You don't get a role like that unless you're a pillar of society. She was the hostess who could charm everybody. So they were great together.

Do you find that when there are these people who are pillars of society, and murder plot, not with We'll get to that in a second. But just when it comes to those folks who are high in society and then divorce happening, there's usually some added drama that's infused.

There usually is. The thing about people is we're all made of the same stuff. We all have feet of clay. We all lie. We all lie probably a lot more than we think we do. And we try to protect the lives we're living while living the life we fantasize about living on the side. People have been doing that since time began. This was a case, for whatever reason, Chris Latham was so drawn to this Wendy person, fascinating character in her own right, that he was prepared to engage in these terrible acts against Nazi. Of course.

Well, let's talk about the thing that sets this whole, at least the storytelling investigation in motion, which is this traffic stop that takes place.

Which this happens in so many of our stories, doesn't it? There's one little thing that happens without that thing. What might have changed? What might have been different? It might have been all different. The murder may have occurred. So Aaron Wilkinson was a drug addict. Aaron Wilkinson was with his wife and his dog driving through Charleston. He had promised to do this deadly errand for his friend Sam, but he was trying to kill time as opposed to killing the person he was supposed to kill. Nancy Latham. So that by the time... He had a deadline to do it. He just was trying to wait out the deadline. And it was the middle of the night, and he was driving down America Street, which was another fascinating thing to me that he was at the end of America Street where there's a tremendous amount of poverty, and there are drug addicts, and there are people sleeping on the street. At the other end of America Street, some of the wealthiest families in Charleston live. You know, mansions by the sea. Sure. Aaron was at the wrong end of the street. He went through a He saw a police siren behind him.

He had to stop. And then the cop discovered that he was maybe not all there. And the conversation continued. Aaron said, You got to listen to me. You got to listen to me. I got a story to tell you. And so that was the opportunity The opportunity that Aaron took to tell the police that there was a murder plot, which he had been asked to be a participant in, it didn't want to be. He had to tell the story. It took a while to persuade the cop that he should be believed, but eventually, he was.

There are There are several things there. One, just this very small thing. Like you said, in every Dateland story, there's what it is that helps investigators solve the crime. But in this case, it stopped the crime from happening, which I thought was just so fascinating. Then it was just the most unassuming character who really was the hero in this whole situation.

He was, and to the point where Nancy Latham went and thanked him at the end, and the two of them had a very nice moment together.

One of the things that was a theme through this, certainly when in dealing with Aaron was, how do we know that he is to be believed, right? How do we know police can believe him? Will he be believed there?

He was precisely the person who should not be believed in most cases. The cop recognized he should take him in, listen to his story, see if it went anywhere.

I love the juxtaposition, though, as you talk about the two ends of the street, that it was somebody like Aaron who brought down somebody like Chris Latham.

Right, exactly. Part of the A little metaphor there.

Yeah.

Let's talk about this hit packet. In all your years of datelining, have you ever heard of a hit packet?

People who set out to become tough guy criminals often aren't the brightest bulbs. The hit packet had everything that you would want to know if you were going to have to kill somebody, and they managed to write it down on a piece of paper and then put it in a bedside table where somebody could easily find it.

Well, the crazy thing, it not only had everything you needed to know if it needed to kill somebody, but it had a lot of things to know if you were trying to investigate the plot to kill somebody. Absolutely. I mean, the actual handwriting there was wild to me.

Yeah, it was the key to the whole thing.

Then, of course, you talk through this hit packet with the investigators. Take me back to that moment. When you were going through, was that the actual hit packet you were looking at, by the way?

Yes. I think that wasn't exactly the same room, but it was the same hotel in a very similar room. There was some small difference that I can't quite recall at the moment. Sure. But yeah, the The detective in there was reliving it, and you could feel he was reliving it. It was one of those fly-on-the-wall moments when you think, Okay, I'm witnessing what he was feeling as he did this. It was very cool.

Absolutely. Keith, let's talk about Nancy, because poor Nancy was, of course, the subject of this hit packet. I can't imagine being at home in the bathtub, trying to just get your mind right, get yourself together. That's right. And suddenly there is a knock at your door, and there are two officers who say, Hey, someone's kill you.

These are things that happen to other people. They never happened to them. And yet here they are happening to this woman who is just very charming. I enjoyed every conversation I had with her.

She was spicy. Nancy was spicy.

Very spicy, yeah, exactly.

She was. So, one, before we even get to the plot against her, I certainly loved how when you asked her point blank, Hey, are you having an affair?

Were you having an affair?

No, I was not.

Are you offering?

That was her way of... She's just She's bright and comes right back at you.

When you're hitting a ball like that across the net with each other, an interview is always like a tennis match or an aerobics match. Sure. When something like that comes at you, how do you respond? You're obviously very skilled in interviewing, but what is that?

No, that's a skill. I have to say that's the first time it happened. But wait a minute. No, it's actually the second time. But you know it's somebody has just given you a home run, so you're going to use that piece, and they know you're going to use that bit. But it also disarmed me because here she had been presented with the possibility that she had done some bad things, that she was the cause of the breakup of this marriage, which was the allegation her husband made. She had a number of ways to respond to that. She could say, No, no, no, and jump up and down and deny, deny, deny, as most people tend to do when they're accused of such a thing. Or she could simply, as you say, bet it back into my court with something flirtatious and fun, and it worked far better.

Yes, absolutely. It definitely did. I think that gave us a look early on into just her personality and who she was.

It explains why after a traumatic event like that, she would choose to rebuild her life by making a living as a stand-up comic for a couple of years. I think Nancy's way of dealing with traumas is to make light of them. It's just another way to with stress and difficulty.

That's the way a lot of us deal with tough things, right? Yeah. When we come back, we will be joined by Dateland producer, Carol Gable, for a behind-the-scenes look at how this entire story came together. Well, Keith, you have invoked her name a number of times. I would like to bring in the fantastic producer of this episode, the one and only, Carol Gable.

We got to stop meeting like this. There you go. Always through boxes, right? That's right. Yes. Little square boxes.

Well, Carol, it's so lovely to have you join us.

Well, thank you so much. This brings back a lot of memories because this story took months and months and months to do to get everyone comfortable with talking to us. One thing about Nancy and Keith is absolutely right. The way she deals with horror is that she makes fun of it. She doesn't feel it any less. One thing to remember is that in that hit packet, the photograph that Aaron was given included their children. Yes. Like the two daughters were okay if they were collateral damaged. That didn't matter.

And that was made clear enough that I think any chance that Nancy or the daughters would have of getting past this was probably be eliminated at that point.

Well, and to move ahead, I talked to Nancy last week about a wholly different story. I was going to her hometown for a hearing, but she told me that she has two daughters, and one of them has never dealt with her father since then. The other daughter has gotten married, had a wedding that she invited the dad to.

Wow. Yeah.

It's been an interesting ending, although it's probably not an ending. It's probably just where they are right now.

Did the dad come to the wedding?

No, yeah.

Yeah, sure. He came.

They were all face-to-face. They all had to coexist in that wedding.

Wow. Yeah. Well, the person that wasn't there was Nancy. There's been fallout for years after that.

Carol, let me ask you this, because I am fascinated by the fact that you all spoke to every major player in this story. It's something that we don't often see in Dateland, but especially in a story like this. When you had to get into prisons, when you were talking to folks who had been involved in different ways, can you just talk about the process of getting comfortable? How did it go from, Hey, I'm Carol with Dateland, to getting these folks to trust you and actually open up.

It's a superpower of some sort, I'll tell you. Don't ever get too close because the same thing will happen to you.

No, I invoke Keith's name. That's what I do. I skate by on his reputation. I think I've always believed that if you're in big trouble, almost the best thing you can do is let people know your point of view. I think I guess one thing that I talked about with everyone in the story is this didn't happen out of thin air. People at home may not agree with you, but if they don't hear what you were thinking, then we don't know. We can't have a clear picture of the whole story if we don't.

So Carol and I spent quite a bit of time with these folks, even the ones in prison. They're all people, and once you meet a person in prison, they have already been torn down to a level that they've never been in before, and they have to recognize their basic qualities, pro and con, as human beings, and they're a little more realistic. It's actually very nice to meet people in a situation like that. Nice is the wrong word, but illuminating to meet them in a situation like that because while they are defending themselves and probably not telling you the truth about what they did or didn't do, you see them without the layers of protection that they would normally have that we all try to put up.

I'm curious, behind the scenes, just very quickly, what does it take to convince a correctional facility to allow such? Is it just different state laws? How were you able to do that?

Well, in South Carolina, once someone is convicted and is put into the custody of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, you can't touch them. You can't interview. But there's this little sliver of time between conviction and when they're transported to the South Carolina Department of Corrections. So that was my job to discuss with the local detention facility.

You want to be on good terms with the Sheriff in every county in the country, if you can.

Yes, you totally do. And they were very gracious and very nice. And they allowed us, essentially, in an unused part of the prison to set up the equipment so we could do these interviews. But in South Carolina, that's the only way you can do it.

I will say, just as a little add-on about the jail where we conducted the interviews, the sheriff, I think, was justly proud of the facility, and we were able to find some good places to do it. But I was struck by the way it was set up. A lot of jails are this way. I wake up at night sometimes thinking about the relative lack of thickness in those little mattresses. They put on the concrete beds.

They were this thick. Exactly.

And the giant rooms where everybody has to share everything. If you don't want to go to prison, the best thing to do in advance is inoculate yourself by knowing what they're like.

Sure. I'm curious. When you talk about murder for higher plots, you've done several, right? This is certainly not the first. Secrets in a Small Town comes to mind. But do you find, as you talk to these people or just cover these types of stories, is there some psychological difference, perhaps, that people have when it comes to actually committing a murder themselves versus hiring someone? Do they feel removed? Is it like a psyching themselves out that maybe I'm not a killer, I just am someone with a lot of money?

It's a very good question. I don't know how I'd answer it, except that there is a pecking order in society, and the people at the top of the pecking order rather like to get other people to do the hard work for them. But you know what? It's a good question. It's a good question.

But it's so always shocking that The people who instigate murder for higher plots always seem to think that's cheaper than just getting a divorce. It's just always odd math to me that they would do that. And of course, if you don't get away with a crime, you're on dateland. Very true.

Yeah.

Carol, you mentioned the fact that you just talked to Nancy last week.

She lives in Florida. She has reinvented herself as an IT Department head in a school. She doesn't do open mic stand up much anymore, but she sounds really good.

That's wonderful. I'm curious. I mean, all three of these people involved, they were sentenced to prison. They're not out of prison and among society again. How does she feel about that? Does she have any pause about the fact that these folks are now out?

I think she was so glad, A, that she lived to tell about it, and B, that both Wendy and Chris were held accountable.

But there's not a fear. I just wonder, it would be hard were I in that situation. It seems that it would be difficult after going through everything she's gone through, even though the situation has changed, just to not be looking over your shoulder or just feeling a way that these people who tried to carry out this elaborate plot to end your life are now back out on the street.

Well, they are, and they are.

It's one of the reasons it's interesting to continue to follow the people involved in these stories, because for them, the story is never really over. It just enters a new phase. I'm sure she probably thinks about it once in a while.

We'll go to some viewer questions in a moment, but I'm curious for both of you all to weigh in on this. At the end of the episode, One of the questions that's left is, who hatched this plan? Was it Chris? Was it Wendy? Whose idea was it in the first place? Investigators never quite figured it out. I'm wondering if either of you have your own thoughts.

I'll go first. Sure. There's nothing in Chris Latham's background that we're aware of that would make you go to, as you say, door number two as opposed to a divorce. What do you think, Keith?

I don't want to surmise too much because we have no idea what happened or said what to whom. But it was certainly a reasonable idea that Chris might have said, Man, I could kill that woman. Wendy said, No, I know exactly who could do that for us.

Ironically, Sam- Yenawine. Thank you, Yenawine. Sam Yenawine died in jail under some mysterious circumstances.

As people sometimes do.

As they do.

Well, this was a fascinating story with unbelievable characters. Again, it It was a testament to you both that you made them feel so comfortable that they would share their various parts of the story with you and with the world. So it was fascinating.

Well, Carol threatened them. Give it up or else.

All five, four of me did that. Yes.

After the break, we will answer some of your viewer and listener questions. Okay, so we have a lot of social questions. These are from some of our folks who came to Dateline Live in Nashville or asked questions. If you didn't hear your question then, you might hear it right now. Let's get this one from Jessica from Nashville. She says, Huge Dateland fan here. Whenever a mystery is solved after 10 plus years of working on it, are you ever sad to close that chapter? The second part, do you stay in close touch with those families? We already know that answer, but do you ever feel sad about closing a chapter?

I don't feel sad, but I do stay in touch with everybody.

Sure. It's hard to let go, and then you wind up going and doing them again because you find out something new because you can't let them go.

Absolutely. Here's another one from someone in Nashville. Okay, Keith, I'll pitch this one to you. What was your job as your occupation before landing with Dateland?

Well, I was in the business for... This year, it's 60 years in the television or radio business, which is hard to believe. Sixty years? So I've been doing that for a long, long time. But what I had my aspiration? I was one of those people without an aspiration. I didn't know what the heck I wanted to do. I got a job in a radio station.

There we are. Keith, well, congratulations on that milestone. What are we doing to celebrate? That's the question I want to know.

Nothing, absolutely. I don't even know. I shouldn't have even told you.

Well, too late. Something will happen. That's true.

Okay, this question is from Jessica C. In Nashville. I love you guys, she says, What is the scariest moment that you've ever experienced while either interviewing or researching. Carol, do you have a scary moment?

Oh, wow. Scary moment. Well, I did have a woman who all I really wanted to do is talk to her, and she came flying out of her front door with a shotgun. Now, I felt like I was okay because she didn't point it at me. She was only running with it. Then by the time she got to my rental car, we had agreed we might talk first.

Yeah, that was it. That's quite a moment. It was.

That's a good moment.

Also, kudos to you for being able to literally disarm somebody in that moment. That's impressive.

Yeah. Well, I was hiding behind the door of my rental car. The things we will do to bring a story together.

How about that? Okay. Keith, do you have one you want to share?

Oh, no. I mean, look, I've interviewed lots of people. I would get scared by somebody who was in Intellectually daunting and who you asked the wrong question you're going to get battered about. That would scare me a little bit. There have been situations like Tianaman Square and certain wars I went to, but that's not a deadline, that's for sure.

That's not a deadline, but it's life. It's part of your 60-year span as a journalist. Okay, last one, I'll ask you this one to you, Keith. This one is from Instagram, from @daneyday1985, who asks, How do you keep your calm when interviewing criminals? Criminals. I remember Keith with Laurie Vallo, and he was amazing. I don't think I could do it.

Well, criminals are people like you and me, and usually they're trying to put on a good impression. They want people to think that they're innocent, or if they did do a bad thing, that it was just one time, and they really don't do other bad things ever. They're trying to be Mr. Nice guy. I have found interviewing criminals is you find a more friendly reception than you do with a great many politicians, for example.

Amen.

Very interesting. Well, Carol and Keith, this has been a fascinating discussion. I have appreciated you both. Carol, I know you have to get back to court, so we'll let you go. Keith, you've got to tend to fin.

I got to tell you, we need to start planning a party because six years is not nothing. Oh, stop it now.

I shouldn't have said a word.

You're open to a party. Listen, you've let the cat out of the bag, so prepare.

Exactly.

Well, that's it for talking Dateland this week. Thank you all so much for listening. You can stream Dateland anytime on Peacock or on our Dateland 24/7 Well, and drum roll, please, we are back. This Friday, we're back with an all new Dateland episode, and it's actually my new episode. So please join me here in Georgia, my state, for a case involving the mysterious death of a husband. It was ruled as suicide, but his family believes there may be more to the story. After you watch the episode, of course, you can leave us your questions, DM us your audio or video questions on social media @datelandnbc, or you can use the good old landline. Leave us a voicemail at 212-413-5252 for a chance to be featured right here. Of course, we'll see you Friday at 9: 8 central on an all-new Dateland on NBC.