Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison has interviewed plenty of suspected murderers in his 27 years with the NBC news magazine. But there’s one jailhouse interview that still sticks with him—one he conducted back in 2010 with Jaime Ramos, a California man who had an affair with his married counselor, Patty Presba, who was over 25 years Ramos’s senior. Their romance spun out of control, with Ramos and Presba eventually pleading guilty to murdering Presba’s husband, Ed, and staging his death in a fiery 2008 car accident.
The grim story was perfect Dateline material—full of twists and turns like a staged kidnapping, an attempted murder, and multiple lovers’ betrayals. But Morrison says that because the episode was filmed in standard definition, it was shelved after its NBC premiere, when the network switched to high-definition television.
So when Morrison heard that NBC wanted to start making Dateline audio podcasts, the correspondent tells Vanity Fair, “This story was uppermost in my mind.” Morrison still considers his sit-down with Ramos, after he had been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, to be one of the most gratifying conversations of his career.
Ahead, Morrison tells Vanity Fair about Dateline’s new six-part true-crime podcast devoted to this forgotten story, The Seduction, premiering June 14. The long-running correspondent also looks back on his career interviewing killers, warns us about a particular kind of man, and discusses what The New Yorker described as “the warm bath of his voice”—which makes even the grisliest killing sound soothing on a Friday night.
Vanity Fair: What do you remember about working on this story back in 2010?
Keith Morrison: This was not one of the big stories that gets a whole lot of attention. It was a strange case that occurred in the High Sierras in California back in 2008. A producing partner of mine named Vince Sturla and I went to talk to one of the people who was convicted [Ramos]. And the recorded interview itself went on for well over four hours—which is very unusual.
We usually interview people for a couple of hours, and then what you see on Dateline is a few minutes of it. But our philosophy is if you don’t have it all on tape, you can’t use it later in the edit room. So you just need to hear the whole story.
This young man, at the time we talked to him, was in his mid 20s or 30-ish. I don’t know whether he was a savant or what he was, but he told the story in such incredible detail and it all held together. People lie to you all the time in these interviews. You go in expecting that people are going to lie to you, and they generally do. And certainly it’s self-serving the way they tell a story, but not in this case. Here was a guy who simply remembered every single solitary detail of this story, chapter and verse, over the whole period of time. And he didn’t hold back. He didn’t try to avoid blaming himself. He didn’t try to push blame onto anybody else. It was extraordinary.
What do you think was happening that day of the interview? Was it a matter of trust between you and Ramos? Or was he just ready to purge himself of the story?
He was. When he heard that we wanted to talk to him, he’d already been sentenced. He was already doing his time and he wanted to tell somebody the whole story. It was like being a priest in a confessional booth, where the person is going to tell you the whole thing, beginning to end.
Throughout your career you’ve sat down with many suspects—some of whom, I imagine, you privately think are guilty of the crimes for which they’re being accused.
Sure.
How do you approach those interviews specifically?
When I talk to somebody who’s been accused of a crime, or even been convicted of a crime, I don’t like to assume automatically that they’re guilty. After conviction, even after a confession, they still have a story to tell. Their story may not be the one that has received all the attention or the publicity or become the official version. But they have their own version and they want to tell that. So I like to just give them a place to do it and to feel safe doing it. And when they’re obviously confabulating or trying to blame somebody else or avoid responsibility, I push back on them. But I want to hear the story. I want to hear what their explanation is. And it’s always fascinating, no matter how bad they may be.