Talking Dateline: If These Walls Could Talk

Hi everybody, I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and we're talking Dateline today with the grumpy, curmudgeonly Keith Morrison, which I think sets the tone for the time ahead.

How are you, Mankiewicz?

I'm fine. This episode is called If These Walls Could Talk. Now. if you have not listened to this yet, or if you haven't seen it on television, it is the podcast right below this one on the list that you just chose from. So go there, listen to it, or you want to watch it on TV, you can do that, or stream it on Peacock, and then come back here.

It's a good title, huh?

It is good, and I loved your opening lines over the drone shots of suburbia with those little identical houses. You never know what's going on inside, and it turns out, of course, it's just a cauldron of passion inside them.

Every house is a cauldron of passion, isn't yours?

I think totally, yeah. So, to me, one of the first questions I have is, how did this take so long? I sort of get the feeling that if this guy had been a truck driver, he might have been prosecuted a lot sooner.

They took more time than Elise Hatcher thought that they should have taken. It was the previous prosecutor who was in the job before her didn't move on it. But part of the problem was the forensics took a year to come back. The information that would tell them whether this was a homicide or an accidental fall down a staircase. Falls happen all the time.

I understand that, and it certainly, at least at first, blush, that was at least plausible. I guess I'm surprised that it took a year. I realize that life is not like an hour-long dramatic TV show in which DNA results come back in 10 seconds, but I sort of thought that it would take less than a year to build a case.

They wanted to be very careful, they wanted to be sure, especially when your defendant happens to be a widely admired and respected fertility doctor who is going about the business of helping couples create life and has been doing so more successfully than most other people in this field for years.

We really saw in this episode, I thought, sort of two different sides of Dr. Sills, you know? I mean, a couple of different patients. One talking about how he completely lost it and was furious at her and was yelling at her and saw, you know, you saw this side of him that she'd never seen and that most patients never see. And then the other one is the one that prosecutors, I think, were worried about, which is this, like, you know, very decent, caring guy who really wanted to give patients this gift of having a child.

Which I should say, 90, probably 99% of his patients would have portrayed him that way, as a very kind man who cared a great deal about their success. And his wife was there at the office, running the office, also doing good work with him.

I mean, he was Suzanne's IVF doctor?

Yes, indeed.

And they start dating and then they get married. That feels like some kind of ethical issue to me.

Well, it does, doesn't it? Yeah. She'd been trying to have a baby and was unable to and ran into Dr. Sills and fell for him. Although her friends would wonder, why did you fall for that guy?

Those twins, those are from the two of them. Those are not from her previous marriage.

That's correct. Their children felt the relationship was fine. It was very, very deep inside that relationship where the issues had occurred. And sometimes, when things are very deep and they're not discussed openly and they fester, the explosive reaction is stronger than it might otherwise be.

I thought the prosecutor's sort of offering up the fact that they didn't know what the motive was. I thought that's like admitting a real weakness to the case when they say, I'm not required to show motive. It could have been that he was angry about this relationship that he was having. It could have been that he wanted her out of the way so he could be with the woman. We don't really know.

No, Eric was unable to say or didn't say.

Later denied it.

He supports his father too and later denied hearing it at all.

So the 911 call, we start off with him, referring to her as a patient.

We've got a patient here who's fallen upstairs and I don't have a pulse.

And he doesn't sound frantic the way. I think pretty much anybody would. if they discover their wife having just fallen down the stairs and she's not breathing. You're like, I would not be able to form a complete sentence.

This is a classic situation, Josh, where it would be difficult for a detective or a prosecutor to know how much to make of that. For one thing, everybody reacts differently to stressful situations of that sort. And they get charged with a crime because they're too calm in the 911 call. Other people are frantic and over the top. As a doctor who had, for years and years, been treating people in difficult situations, had trained extensively, not just in IVF, but in all kinds of doctoring in order to get his advanced degree, you know, he would know to treat somebody calmly and dispassionately if he wanted to have any success.

Okay. You'd also know how to do CPR.

Right. That was the impression that the 911 operator had, that he wasn't doing CPR. That's not what his daughter says. That's not what, you know, that's not what he says.

I mean, that's one of the first things I wrote down when I was watching your episode was like, as a doctor, wouldn't he know to perform CPR like right away? Wouldn't the 911 call have come with him in the midst of the compressions?

That's what you think. Well, as long as we're talking spoilers, it clearly was a play. And the thing that told the story, of course, was the lividity. Lividity, as you know, is the blood that coagulates in the part of your body, which is lower down. after you die.

I mean, again, this is a doctor. He's got some medical training. How is he not going to know that?

He should know that. He probably wasn't thinking very clearly.

How does he think ligature strangulation is not going to show up in an autopsy? How does he think this extremely visible blood and hair in the room is not going to be seen? I mean, like, you know.

There was a dispute over whether her blood was found as well as his blood in that child's bedroom. The defense argued it was just his blood, that, yes, they found her DNA, but she was sleeping in that room after all, so of course they would.

So the idea is that she touches the wall, thus leaving her DNA. She touches the curtain in the wall, and then he bleeds on that, and that that's the combined DNA. I don't know what DNA experts would say about that.

Yeah. Yeah.

I've been doing this for a while. Yeah. When we come back, we're going to have more from Keith's interview with Suzanne's brother, Frank.

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So, one of the things that was very cool about this story, I thought, was that you had so much video of Suzanne when she was alive. That usually does not happen. You know, her audition for Survivor, and, you know, the videos she made with her daughter. For our purposes, it's just wonderful, because it's an opportunity for the audience to see what these people are really like, and we don't have to do anything. We just let it play, which was great.

Brought her alive in a very significant way. You just need to know people.

You do. You need to know people. And you're obviously not going to get it from her husband. He's not talking. And I thought her, you know, the kids are not talking.

She was a great interview. She is smart, and she's attentive, and she cares about things. Her mother, interestingly, lives in Florida. Right. But she was in California, where we did the interview at our little studio, the two of us sitting there together.

That's actually Dateline supplied.

Yes, exactly right.

Oh, nice. That's good to know. So, you have a lot of exclusive interviews in this, people who have not spoken before.

Luckily so. The creation of the producers. we worked with, very effective people.

Let's give a shout out to the producers who worked on this.

This is Michelle Madigan's show, and I thought she did a wonderful job.

The queen of Orange County.

Yeah, you bet.

Let's hear that clip that you brought, which is from Suzanne's brother, Frank. Now, this didn't air in the episode, but in this little bit of interview, Frank is talking about why it was that he wanted to sit down and talk with us.

Since her death, there's so little footprint out there for Suzanne, for the type of person that she was, and for what she was to her family, what she meant to me and my family. And I just feel like a lot of that's been lost, and it's like, in some senses, you wouldn't even know that she lived anymore.

History folded over her and she disappeared.

Yeah, and this is important for me to do, because, even if this is concentrating on parts of her life that I would rather not think about or talk about, or have to contemplate, anything that can allow her legacy to exist in any kind of preserved format, I wanted to be involved in.

I think that's one of the reasons that people sit down and talk with Dayline, which is,

I think so, although we make it clear that it's entirely up to them. If they don't want to talk on television, we're not going to make them feel bad if they don't.

And we're not going to chase them down the street if they don't want to talk.

No, certainly not. Certainly not. And I would love to have heard from the children. I really would have.

No one wants to admit that Dad killed Mom all the time.

No, but I wouldn't have expected them to admit that anyway.

How you could kill your kid's parent, I just do not fathom how that happens. But it does happen, clearly, all the time.

My impression was the guy must have snapped, that he didn't often snap, that he rarely snapped. But when he did, it was a big storm.

It suggests that sort of the jury got it right, that this was second-degree murder. This was not something he planned out in advance. This just happened in the moment because he was unable to control whatever temper was sort of lying beneath the surface there.

This was a very thoughtful jury. I thought it was a very good jury. I've talked to a lot of juries in the past, and sometimes you walk out and shake your head. But this one was a good jury.

I remember when we first started covering crime, we used to make a big effort to get the jury. We would try to get as many of them as we could, and then we'd line them up. Sometimes we had everybody. We'd have all 12 people.

The chairs ranked in rows.

Yeah, like little bleachers. I remember that. That was usually a big part of the storytelling. Over time, I guess in part because sometimes people don't want to talk, we stopped doing that as much. The jury does not turn up in every dateline hour or two hour.

story.

When you were shooting in San Clemente, when you were out on the street with the detectives, I heard that you attracted a crowd, which does not surprise me.

Everybody wanted to know about this weird, strange gentleman Mankiewicz that I work with, and how to get in touch with him.

I don't think that's what they wanted to know. How many people came out and said, oh my gosh, it's Keith Morrison. What are you doing here?

Nobody. Nobody, Josh.

That's not what I heard.

Oh, gosh.

Every now and then, dear viewers, I'm in Keith's presence in public. That doesn't happen very often, because usually we're covering separate stories, separate parts of the country. But sometimes we're in the same place. Then people come up to Keith, to you, and they say, oh my gosh, I love you. You're so great.

No, no. This is a recurring problem. guy who's not going to be a threatening one.

No, no, no. I didn't realize this until after I saw the episode. But many years ago, also in San Clemente, same place that this story happened, I covered a story about a former Jeopardy champion, a guy named Paul Curry, who was accused and then later convicted of killing his wife, Linda, by overdosing her with nicotine.

I remember that story. The coverage of that story went on forever, didn't it?

That was only a couple of miles away. That was only a few miles away from where this happened.

Well, I recall two things about that story. One, I think I probably was annoyed with you for poaching on my territory.

You absolutely were annoyed with me. You absolutely were annoyed with me. I remember that.

The payback was. it took you a long time to do that story.

It did take me a long time to do that story, yes. Okay, now, after the break, the producer of this broadcast, Michelle Madigan, is going to be here to help us answer some of your questions from social media.

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You ready for what's coming?

Hi, Josh. Great to see you.

So our first question is from somebody named Lester. He writes in to say, Josh, please tell Keith to stop sending me tuna casserole recipes. You know what? That's a text. That's not viewer mail.

It can be super easy or it can be really difficult. When we sit through jury selection, we know very little about these jurors. The way the jury service works, it's anonymous. We don't know their names. And so it's really up to them to contact us after they're done being jurors.

So here's the same comment from three viewers, which something Keith and I talked about a little bit, from Susan Whitehill, Katie Augenbaugh, and Sylvia NYC, who's a longtime friend of ours on social. They all want to know the same thing. How would a doctor not know CPR? Wouldn't a doctor not need to be told how to do that? You know, if I were a doctor, I think I probably would know CPR.

This was always what I was listening to every time I heard that 911 call, because he starts the call saying, I've got a patient who's fallen off stairs. But he never actually says to the dispatcher, I'm a doctor. I know how to do CPR. And that, I think, was a problem for him when it came to the jury.

Jorge Jr.

Yes. I mean, I actually did speak with Eric following the verdict, and it was a really hard conversation, and I think he appreciated my empathy in wanting to hear from him and in understanding that it would be a difficult conversation to have. I'm a mother of two, and this is always the hardest part for me is when I'm meeting the kids and speaking with them and trying to understand how hard it would be to be in their shoes.

Also, you know, somebody in Eric's position is caught between two competing interests. One is his desire to see his father acquitted, and the second is to tell his story completely, and one may not help the other. So a couple other things. Keith and I talked about this earlier, but I want to get your take on it, too. Lily Bondy, who's an old friend of ours here on social, says, so weird to go with your husband to a fertility doctor and then leave your husband for the fertility doctor.

I spoke with her husband that she was married to at the time. He was very nice. He was very careful not to get into too much detail about that part of their story. He said, you know, there's some filings from the divorce that you're welcome to get. And so I got his divorce filings, and I got Dr.

That was good. Thank you. Let's go to something else. A bunch of people wrote in to talk about similarities between this case and the Michael Peterson case, in which an owl played perhaps a fateful part. Lauren Ingram said, oh, my God, the owl, I mean dog, did do it.

Yeah, I don't think anybody bought it, but it was certainly an interesting approach. Jack Early is one of my favorite defense attorneys that I've had the opportunity. This was my second case that I've covered that he's been involved with, and I respect him as an attorney. And when he felt so strongly about this theory that he wanted to take it to a jury, I thought, okay, I'm going to see where this goes.

Even if you believe that the dog grabs the scarf when it's around her neck, you've got to compress someone's neck for a very long time to kill them. That's not going to happen in two seconds.

During the course of the trial, we got a puppy, and so it was really interesting to see just how ferocious she could pull on something. And so I would come home and be like, can you pull on something for an extended amount of time? And the answer is no. They don't have that attention span. It's a shorter attention span to be pulling on a scarf.

It's interesting how this like—are you like this? with every story? You're testing out the theory with your dog, and you've got kids, you're thinking about that yourself. I mean, you definitely feel everything about these stories, which I think is actually probably a pretty good thing.

I do. I get a little invested in my stories because I want to know, and I like to sort of understand it on both sides.

All right. Michelle Madigan, you have just talked yourself into future appearances on Talking Dateline. You were very good at this. Thank you. So that's Talking Dateline for this week.

It was great to be here.

If any of you have any questions about this broadcast or any other, you can get to us on social at DatelineNBC. As always, thanks for listening. See you. Fridays on Dateline on NBC.