Transcript of Talking Dateline: The Farmer’s Wife

Hey, everybody. It's Josh Wankowitz, and we are talking Dateland. I'm here with Andrea Canning. Hi.

Hey, Josh.

Happy birthday. It was your birthday this week.

Thank you.

This episode is called The Farmer's Wife. Here's a little bit of background. In 2021, Ryan Cooper, age 42, a farmer, found shot to death as he slept in a chair in his Iowa home. Now, as investigators dug in, they came up with a twisted love triangle, one of the most familiar shapes that you will find on deadline, and also a plan fueled by passion and by money, one that ultimately led to murder. Now, if you've not listened to this episode yet. It's the one right below this one, or you can also go to Peacock and stream it and watch it on television. And later, I will be joined by Keith Greenberg, who was the producer of this episode, to answer some of your questions from social media. So let's talk Dateland. Let's do it. So this really was a classic Dateland, I thought. I mean, this is the small town where everyone knows everybody else and people don't lock their doors.

Absolutely. This is classic farm country. I grew up in a farming area. People didn't lock their doors. It was help neighbors, and everyone knew each other. It's a cliché, but it's a cliché for a reason.

And clearly, the fact that everybody knew everybody else played into this story.

Oh, yeah. There was technology involved, but also people talking really helped fill in the narrative of what police believed happened that night.

This begins with what seems to be a chaotic scene. It turns out that although it is chaotic, it's also maybe, if you believe, prosecutors planned. I mean, she's on top of the body, and it looks like she She's horrified to find him dead, and she's in colossal grief. Then if you listen to prosecutors, they're like, No, this is about making sure his blood is on her to thwart any forensic examination. Now, that's something I haven't seen before.

Exactly. She was screaming. She was hysterical. The one question I had for them, I said, did you do a gunshot residue test on her hands since you had her immediately after the shooting? And they said no, which surprised me.

Because she's touching it. That's the thing.

I mean, true. Josh, a defense attorney could work with that. But at the same time, if she had GSR all over her hands, that wouldn't look great either.

No, but I mean, You would be able to say, Yeah, she climbed on top of it.

You could work with that for sure as a defense attorney. The thing that was so sad to me was that the children were home and that one of the boys had slipped in the blood in the living room when he went in to see what the chaos was all about. I mean, that's just heartbreaking when you bring in small children into that environment.

Those kids are never going to forget that. I mean, that is not a memory that goes away.

You know what's so sad, too, is that the boy Cade, who was the one in the living room, he apparently was tied to the hip with his dad. He slept on the couch every night next to his dad on the recliner. People have different sleeping habits. I guess Ryan would fall asleep in the recliner, and then Cade wanted to be near his dad, so he would fall asleep on the couch. That was actually a clue in this case where they said that- That she had said to him, Go sleep in your own room. You have to start sleeping in your own room, and she redid his room and everything. You could say, Oh, loving mother, or if you're the prosecution, you're saying it was all part of the plan.

It certainly does fit with being part of the plan. She gives this elaborate story, and she's pretty convincing at the beginning.

Yeah, an intruder.

They believe it's some intruder. But I mean, on the other hand, you have to believe. I mean, nobody breaks into a house to kill a guy who's sleeping in a recliner and then doesn't steal anything unless the point of the whole thing was to kill the guy in the recliner. Like, this is not burglary, robbery. There's no ulterior motive here. This is about killing him.

Josh, you know what I never understand? It seems to happen again and again and again where people stage these. They try to stage that it was a burglary. They throw things around, they empty drawers. But why does it feel like every single time this happens, they somehow fail? There's the money's left or the jewelry, the purse is there, but there's $700 on the counter. It never feels like it works.

I think there's a couple of reasons for that. First of all, one reason it doesn't feel like a real burglary is that it isn't a real burglary. They're not wasting time stealing stuff. We've seen this in a bunch of cases. Second is the number of murders that begin as residential burg and end up as murders is extremely small. I mean, burglars usually don't carry guns. If they do, it's because there's like a dog on the property or something like that, but they're usually not armed.

And they don't want you to be home.

Generally, the most danger that you're in, if you surprise a burglar, is that you get between them and the door. They might knock you down running out, but They don't kill people. So as they start looking around, pretty quickly, the cops come across Houston, who has a reputation. If you move this to a big city, I don't think his reputation is as widely known, but there it was.

There it was, yeah. It was like the more you dug into it, the more it turned into this a bit of a salacious story about what was going on with this slightly older woman, and she's in her early 40s. Then you've got Houston Danker, who's early 20s, who's all the people in town say that he's sleeping around with older women, hence the cougar term. We had some conversations about, do we use the term cougar or not? It's such a ubiquitous word now, I guess.

This is talking dateland, so I think we can actually get into that a little bit. What were the arguments for and against using that? Was the idea people won't know what it is? Because I think people do know what that is.

No, everyone knows what a cougar is for sure. That was not the issue. We have legal and standards. People watching over our shows, which is amazing because they make sure that we're getting everything right. Standards is to make sure that we're being fair to people. One of our standards people, she just brought it up that some people could see the word cougar as derogatory, but we agreed that we didn't think it was that bad. But, Josh, I will tell you, though, that more of the debate came from whether we should keep in Stacey's Mom, the song title.

Okay, I wondered about that, too. I also thought maybe you were either going to play it, which I was waiting for, or I thought maybe there was going to be more quoting from the lyrics. Yeah, Stacey's Mom has got it going on.

It's all I've wanted. I've waited for so long. I have the worst singing voice in the history of singing voices, No, no.

I definitely do.

So cover your ears. We should put a warning on that one.

That's why I kept silent, because I want you to continue to hold that title.

No, but Josh, it was funny because then people started polling their kids and everything. I was like, I said to my 10-year-old, I'm like, You know the song Stacey's Mom? She goes, Yeah, I know that song. I'm like, Okay, well, we're good on the Youngsters, I guess. But then my friend Lynn Keller, producer, she's not on this story. But I asked her and she was like, I actually don't know that song. We're like, You know what? Okay, if you If you don't know what it is, Google it.

Yeah, I would argue, and I have argued during many script conferences, that something doesn't have to be for us to make a reference like that, like when you did with Stacey's Mom. It doesn't have to be recognizable to everybody, just a lot of people.

It's an iconic song. Remember, Rachel Hunter, the Model, was she played Stacey's mom in the video, the boys mowing her lawn and lusting after his best friend's mom. In this case, Houston Danker, word was, and the police told us this as well, that he was having an affair with his best friend's mom, and he broke up. Apparently, the marriage broke up.

No, it was totally appropriate. It's worth including. Yeah. Did the housewives... Do you think they minded being compared to the real housewives? I know you're a big real housewife.

Oh, no, no. That's their thing. That was they do. They said that. They call themselves the real housewives of Tama County.

You as an expert on the Real Housewives of television, how closely do they match up? Because I think you count as an expert here.

I mean, yeah, I'm definitely an expert. Oh, my gosh. The amount of hours I have spent watching the Real Housewives, a tadry affair, lots of drinking, partying. Actually, it's really the farm version of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It got a lot of the same elements. You know what? The women were beautiful, they were fun, smart, and I just loved everybody I met.

When we come back, we will have more of Karina's testimony. One more tip for America's murderers who are trying to masquerade as burglars. One, you're going to get caught. Two, if you want to call yourself somebody's gay best friend, but you've pretty clearly proven yourself to not be gay in terms of the relationships you had, that could potentially be a big mistake.

That was so ridiculous that he was saying he was her gay best friend. You're allegedly He, according to people in town, sleeping with all these older women. And then you're calling yourself a gay best friend?

Parked outside the gym and watching women work out? Right.

I mean, what a just a weird thing to say.

Well, I mean, and that's just the reddest of flags to investigators because what he's saying, no, you don't have to worry at all about any sexual relationship between the two of us. If I'm the investigator, I'm thinking like, really, you're denying that a little too vociferously.

Right. Also, they apparently had sex at her home hair salon. That doesn't really fit with the gay best friend theory there, Houston.

It feels like she probably thought, and he probably thought, that they'd gotten away with it. I mean, for three years, nothing happens.

It's interesting. We don't have time, obviously, in our shows to go into every detail, but the law enforcement officer, Trevor Killian, who was in the piece, he said that he was at a work function, and the State Attorney General was at this function, and they have this conversation, he says, at this work function. He tells her about this cold case. Then the next thing you know, a new prosecutor is assigned to the case. And that really changed everything. And the prosecutor who we interviewed in the piece, he was so smart to say, let's take another look at the phones, at Karina's phone. I think it was Houston's phone as well. And that's where they discovered all the what was left of the Snapchat. Because we all know you can screen grab Snapchat. It's never foolproof. But a lot But a lot of the messages do disappear.

I mean, I don't use it, but isn't that the point of Snapchat? It's the point, but- That it all vanishes?

It does technically like, vanish, right? But then if you have the tools, like they went to University of Iowa, I guess, right? And they found what they called a hacker type person, and they actually were able to get into the phone. And they found a bunch of Snapchat. Not all of the messages were there.

But enough to let them know what was going on here.

I mean, those messages, like even the defense attorneys were like, wow, that changed everything.

So now we have a little bit of extra sound that did not make the broadcast. This is more of Karina's testimony. And the defense attorney, she's going to talk about how Houston repeatedly threatened Ryan, although she did not think that he would ever act on it. Now we know that that is, in fact, not true. But here is a little bit more of Karina's explanation.

If we had the other Snapchat content, would it show these things about Well, Houston going off about Ryan?

Yes, several threats. Sorry.

What would your reaction be when he's making these threats? How did you handle it?

Laught it off, used sarcasm. Sometimes Sometimes, he replied inappropriately, like when he would say... He said, One time, Don't use your husband's truck in the morning. There's going to be a bomb planted under it. I replied, Gee, thanks for the heads up. Okay.

Does that mean, though, do those messages mean that you, or did you, want your husband dead? No. I guess we do have these Snapchats about shell casings. What's going on?

Again, it's not the first time that that had been talked about. I didn't take him seriously. He had made a comment before about walking into the shop. When Ryan was there, I was gone with the kids at the swimming pool, and he had made a comment. He said, If you get home and find your husband dead, make sure you pick up those shells for me. And I had asked him, What in the world? Like, L-O-L, what does that mean? And he said, Well, according to CSI, that's how they always catch the killer. So I took it as a joke.

And you do hear that a lot as well on Dateline. People saying, Oh, I thought it was a joke. I never took them seriously. Well, we do live in a world where these diabolical crimes happen, and you might want to think about it a little harder if someone makes a joke like that. But in this case, we know that they were, according to the prosecution, conspiring with each other, and that's all a bunch of baloney anyway. But it just shows you how they both turned on each other, right? In the end, there was no loyalty, there was no love, there was nothing there. This was some type of lusty romance that ended up in murder that was just bad all around for everybody involved.

No honor among thief or murderers.

It's such a good lesson, even for kids, for adults, for anybody. You think you're on these platforms that are just going to be gone because you're like, Oh, they vanished. And it's like, No, they don't. Not even Snapchat. And also, the other thing that's frustrating, I know for law enforcement is that a lot of times these social media companies will not play ball. So they ask for the messages, and they say no. And so then they resort to different means to try to get into the phones.

Well, I mean, this would not be the first time that we've heard of law enforcement going outside normal channels to get into somebody's phone. Because you're trying to hack somebody's phone or computer, you might be able to do it. You're forensic experts at the whatever law enforcement agency you're at might be able to do it. Or you might be able to get the phone or internet company's cooperation, but you also might not. And your people might... I mean, your people also might try to get into an iPhone or some other device so many times that it gets locked. And Sometimes your only way forward is to go the hacker route, which seems crazy, but it increasingly does happen, and it works.

I thought that was interesting that they found this expert to do it.

The downside to that is that defense attorneys, as I'm sure they did in this case, they attacked the credibility of the person you had breaking into the phone because that person sometimes has been charged with some crime in the past involving doing exactly the thing that they're at being asked for. I'm not saying in this case, but- Yeah, no, in this case, it was not.

But yes.

That can be an issue, which is like you're asking a criminal for help. It's the same thing as the jailhouse informant who is themselves in for some terrible crime.

Have you seen The Beast in Me?

No.

Okay, you need to watch it. It is excellent. But there's a scene where, and this is not a spoiler alert in any way, but the FBI agent takes a drive to a Like a criminal hacker, and they get into it, and then the hacker says, Well, you're going to owe me something in the future for this. I highly recommend it. I think you'll really like it.

I'm still on all her fault, which I think is terrific.

Oh, isn't it good?

Yeah, we're about two-thirds of the waste right now.

I saw, and you never know what to believe on the internet or on social media, but it said it broke all streaming records or something for Peacock. It's good. Maybe not sports, I don't know, but for a show anyway. I mean, it is fantastic.

You and I should do a different Talking Date Line about streaming shows that are in the crime world. Because between you and me, we've seen all of them.

Let's do a bonus Talking Date Line. Andrea and Josh talk about shows you should watch and why. Okay, yes.

This is actually a great idea.

Okay, I love it.

Okay, so we always speak with victims' families on Dateland. One of the things that I thought was really interesting about this was that you had her brother staunchly defending her through the first seven-eighths of your story. Then at the end, he flips and he's persuaded. What was that like being there?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because a lot of Sometimes family members will just ride or die, right? They just stick by. We see this happen all the time with kids of killers kids, where they just defend dad to the end. They don't want to believe that that person would capable of that. But in this case, the evidence is overwhelming.

It's so hard to do for some people. I mean, it's just so hard to do. Maybe parents don't want to admit that they raised a monster. Kids don't want to admit that mom killed dad or the reverse. I mean, I understand why people do it, but in this case, this was somebody... I really admired the fact that he believed his sister and then looked at the evidence and then believed she was guilty.

I think that's what I I would do. If I had a loved one, God forbid, in this situation, I think I would be very pragmatic about it.

In this scenario, you think you do that story or I do that story, and then I interview you. How do you think that works?

You could see through the BS with me, so I'd have to just be fully honest with you and just spill everything.

I think you as participant in the story, is better than you as a correspondent on the story when it's your family that's involved and vice versa.

Okay, let's hope that never happens to us.

Okay. My brother is absolutely heading for an interrogation room at some point, so just FYI.

Does Ben listen to this? No.

He doesn't listen to me in person or here. Oh. Yeah. He might Listen to this, but he's got his own podcast. Don't worry about.

Hello, Ben. Happy holidays.

Yeah, from all of us at Dateland. Yeah, Ben, when you hear this, Happy holidays. Andrew has to go. She's to cover a story. So see you. Bye. Thanks for coming. When we come back, I will be joined by Keith Greenberg, who produced this episode, and together we will answer some of your questions from social media.

Thanks, Josh. Have a great holiday.

We are now joined by one of the broadcast's producers, Keith Greenberg. Hi. Nice to see you.

Hey, Josh.

So let's take a couple of social media questions that came in. Bobby, G 62 says, Now the poor children will have to be without their dad. I don't care about her. I hope they went with his side of the family. This is something we talk about all the time, which is why do you think, you the prospective murderer, why do you think your kids are going to be okay if you remove their other parent from this Earth?

Well, I think that's a very warped worldview. You think that somehow... I mean, there are Snapchat messages in which Karina Cooper and Houston Danker fantasize about Houston Danker stepping in and literally raising her children, raising the children of the man who Houston Danker as a party to murder. And they think I think that somehow the kids are just going to seamlessly adjust to that. That's the difference between people who commit these types of crimes and the rest of us.

It's really just astonishing. Do Can we know who's raising the kids?

Yes. Aaron Cooper, who is the brother of Ryan Cooper, is raising the children. That's right. The family has now expanded from Aaron Cooper's three biological children to the three children who are the products of Karina and Ryan?

Very Liza writes in to say, Karina's mom saying, Where did I go wrong? Was heartbreaking.

It certainly is. I would see the mother in court. There was one day I came out of the courtroom and the mother was just sitting there all alone. There was a moment where one of the local churches gave the Cooper family a gift basket. There were some wooden crosses in there, and one of the Cooper relatives walked over to Karina's mother and handed her one. There are very positive feelings between the two families, even though they're a very negative feelings from the Coopers toward Karina, obviously.

Our friend Chuck Deesey, 76, is a friend of the broadcast, says Karina is acting like she's in a horrible community theater audition, which is, I think, referring to her arrest.

It could be her arrest A lot of people felt Karina was overacting in those early hours. And one of the detectives said he'd never seen an interview subject who had a loved one killed, acts so hysterical that they could barely deliver any information. So among law enforcement, there was immediately a sense that she was putting on this act because she didn't want to help. But they weren't ready to declare that she was guilty at that point. They wanted to see where else the evidence would bring them.

Well, that gets us to our next question, which is from Bobby G-62, who says, Six months, and they call this a cold case. She said, I've heard of that happening. I mean, look, law enforcement will tell you there aren't really any cold cases because they're always working to some extent on all cases, including ones which haven't changed in years. But six months is not a shocking amount of time to investigate a crime and then make it an arrest. I'm wondering whether they said it was a cold case to allay any concerns by the perpetrators.

I'm not sure about that. I mean, I can tell you, having spent time with the investigators, this was never regarded as a cold case. They did tell the family it was a cold case, which perhaps it was indelicate to frame it that way. But I will say this is a small town, a small county, and people know each other, and the investigators I spoke to never gave up.

Connie Utile-Barnett said, I watched it, but who actually pulled the trigger? Did I miss that part?

Well, that's actually a That's a really good question because the prosecution insists that Karina pulled the trigger. The defense, they insist to this day that Houston Danker pulled the trigger. It doesn't matter because according to the law, first-degree murder in Iowa means you either pulled the trigger or you aided and abetted in the crime, and both of them are guilty of that.

Interesting comment here from a guy Michael Eric, who says, I knew Ryan pretty well. Karina, I knew a little. She cut my hair a couple of times. They live five miles or so south of me. I go by there a lot and keep thinking a great guy like Coup would never deserve anything like this. I mean, this really was a small town I told you, everybody knows everybody.

Everyone knows everybody, and we say it in the show. If you lived in that town, you probably had your hair cut by Karina Cooper. You knew Ryan Cooper, and you knew the entire Cooper family. They're fourth-generation farmers. It's a large business in the town. A lot of people have worked at Cooper Farms, too, over the years. There's a lot of intimacy there. The Sheriff, Casey Smith, told me that when he was running for office, he discovered that more than 35% of the people in Tama County are literally his relatives. They might be distant relatives, but they're all descended from the same group of families.

Wow. That'll make that'll make Igg difficult when they try and do it there.

I would say so. Yeah.

I will say that that is the comment from social media that we don't hear very often. You don't get a lot of people saying, Yeah, I lived around there and I know them. I know this person. I know that person involved in the story. Usually, these are the people are not writing in who are friends of either the deceased or the the accused.

Yeah, but everybody from that area was quite intrigued by the story. I'm not surprised that people are coming forward and saying that they knew the parties involved, particularly because both families are quite well-regarded in that area.

Janet Fischer-Bradur on Instagram. Also, were the children ever questioned about what they saw or heard?

Not only that, the oldest son, testified. So certainly they were.

Janet also writes, Thank you for continuing to bring us fascinating stories, which is what I'm going to say to you and Andrea. Thank you.

This was a fascinating story. I mean, we want to do fascinating stories that also honor the victims and maybe teach people a little bit about investigation.

Keith, thank you. And Andrea, thank you.

Thank you, Josh.

That is it for talking Dateland for this week. Thanks for listening. If there's a case that you want us to cover, or if you have a question for the team, you can reach out anytime on social at @datelandnbc. And you can leave us a voicemail at 212-413-5252. Now, before we go, Keith Morison is, as you know, taking over the podcast world. So check out his brand new series, which is called Something About Kerry. Keith cannot do a podcast unless the words something about are in Just FYI. This story is about a single mother named Kerry Farber. After she went missing, her boyfriend and his ex began receiving threatening messages that seemed to come from Carrie herself. As investigators soon learned, nothing about that case was what it appeared to be. The first five episodes are available right now wherever you get your podcasts. The final episode drops tomorrow. Then on Friday, the Return of Morison mysteries. That's just in time for the official start of winter. Winter. Keith will take on the Hans Christian Andersen classic, The Snow Queen. And in case that's not enough, Keith Morison, you can also see him this Friday on Dateland on NBC.