Talking Dateline: Deadly Swagger

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On YouTube, however you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. I'm Lester Holt and welcome to Talking Date Line. Today I'm joined by Keith Morrison to talk about his episode Deadly Swagger. This is a case.

It starts with a brutal shooting inside a lake Tahoe home, and quickly becomes something much more complicated. And if you haven't watched the episode, I invite you to do so go over to the Dateline podcast feed, or on peacock and catch it streaming, and come back over with us and listen to the discussion that follows.

When you come back, we'll have much more of Keith's interview with former Major League baseball player, and now convicted killer Dan Seraphini, and later we'll be joined by the producer of this episode to answer some of your questions about social media. Keith, it's great to have you here. It's good to be here.

Thank you, Lester.

“Deadly Swagger, if I may just go along on that for a minute, that's an inspired title.”

You know, they don't tell us what the titles are going to be until just a few days before air. And we don't think of them. It's, we have a brilliant person named Susan Null who comes up with most of these things. But Deadly Swagger, I wouldn't have thought of that, but you know, it becomes relevant

in the first few minutes of this episode.

You know, that's the Deadly Swagger, got it, you know, give us, give us the load on. First of all, the setting for this grabs you right away, the gorgeous pictures of Lake Tau. You've never been there. It is one of the great beauties, beautiful natural spots in the world.

But tell us about working there and this story. Well, Lake Tauho is a place which has some really lovely, very expensive homes in some areas of the around the lake, pretty well all of them, but particularly in the area with our story occurs. And one of them was a home occupied by Gary Spore and Wendy Wood, a retired couple who

had long and interesting careers doing various things over the years. And that would actually play into our story to some degree. And they had a lot of money.

We were said to be worth something in the neighborhood of $25 million.

And Wendy and Gary were in their home decided to go out with the family. And as they go out and when true to a masked intruder comes into the house and is apparently there while they are there. Well, yes. The daughter Erin, with their two children, hers and dannies arrived to see the grandparents

in the afternoon. They went out boating and while they were out boating, dannies seraphini is a spoiler, obviously. But dannies seraphini goes inside Erin and the kids and the grandparents come back from their boating trip.

They have dinner together. Then Erin and the kids leave. There's a pause for a few minutes and then up the stairs comes the shooter. Immediately shoots Gary in the back of the head. He's dead tries to shoot Wendy but she isn't killed.

She was very badly injured wound up in a bathroom. The shooter leaves the house quickly. She's left in the bathroom calling 911. They fly her to a hospital by helicopter and they manage to save her life. And then, of course, they're wondering whether she can tell them who attacked them.

Because she had such terrible brain injuries. She wasn't able to tell them. Keith was just a case that simply had too many suspects at first. He had a lot of suspects. Yes, and they really didn't know who they were dealing with.

Wendy, in particular, was a litigious woman. She had disputes and lawsuits, something like 22 lawsuits. She had a dispute with a local neighbor who was a fisherman who put out his little nets

throw them away.

It was a situation where she was always antagonizing somebody.

Gary, the husband, had a past which isn't in any official record but the investigators who worked on this case certainly heard about a past involved in some drug business, where

“there was an investigation and remember there are two daughters.”

One of them had Danny Seraphini was her husband, the person they eventually zeroed in on. So they tracked down all of their alabies and everybody alabied out, including Danny Seraphini. And I know there was great hope that that video would have taken them right to the killer. But this gets us to the title of this program, deadly swagger, whether they don't see

the face of this intruder.

There is something about the walk and tell us about how that becomes critical as this

case was. Wow. No idea what this was, this person, they, he came out to the house, he left the house, they saw him walk alongside the lake but there was just no way to tell who it was. They began to compare the way people walk and investigators noticed that the way he was

kind of half walking half jogging from the sidewalk up toward the garage looked a lot the way, you know, a baseball player would run from the mound off the, at the end of an inning. Look, the way a baseball player would go and, you know, stand out in center field as he was waiting for play to begin, that kind of, just a kind of a gentle jog to get to the place

and it had a kind of a swagger to it. And, you know, Danny Seraphini was an ice baseball player. He was a journeyman pitcher, he'd played for several teams around the major leagues for years and it just seemed like maybe that walk was the one but there was no way to prove that he came into town to commit this act until they found Samantha.

In the meantime, Wendy's memory is starting to slowly come back, was there a aha moment when suddenly she became a star witness in this? It wasn't really an aha moment, it was when she, she eventually said, you know, now I see him, I see Danny and a hoodie, Danny and a hoodie is shooting us.

“And she told that, she told the authorities that, they had great hope, I think, that they could”

use that information, they could use her as a witness but then she took her own life. You know, he's just taking a side ramp here if we can, you've done a lot of work in his area of recovered memories. It's a tricky one, right? Very tricky.

And the fact is, I mean, all evidence suggests based on the research that I've been hearing about over the years recovered memories are not to be trusted a lot of the time. Our brain's invent things, we need to have memories and we need to have a feel that we have a grounding in our lives and in our, you know, we have to recall something very directly and intensely that may turn out not to be true at all that we have simply had a false memory.

That's much more common than I think most people realize. The black candle confession was a one that you had done, how did that figure was you

“tried to understand this story and where it was going?”

The black candle confession is probably not a bad one to compare it to the, except in this case it was, it was a memory supposedly recovered after a couple of decades by a woman who said when she was nine years old, she attended a sleep over party at a friend's house. And in the middle of the night, she got scared or hungry or something and walked down the stairs

from the second floor toward the living room and she heard something and then she saw a woman

sitting at the dining room table, lighting candles, and sobbing and apologetic for having killed a person, and a name was mentioned, at least in this woman's memory. My back up the stairs all frightened went to bed this nine year old. Well, now when she's 30-ish, she gets this memory. From when she was nine and she reports it to the police and they had left the case.

It was a coal case, obviously, but they opened up the case. They found the woman who supposedly was sitting at the table, lighting a black candle and sobbing about having killed somebody. They questioned her. She denied it, as you might expect, but she was convicted by a jury of murder.

And she still, in prison, to this day, denying shit and anything to do with it.

This was a responsible person who had a nurse, highly respected woman who had the memory.

“But we've also done stories about repressed memories of children who claimed that they”

had been abused by their parents back at this years and go around the time of the Martin preschool case. And there were other cases.

One of the first false convictions that I ever reported on was a man named John Stoll, who

was convicted of abusing his son. And the evidence that was used was his son's memory. And later on, it was shown through other investigation that the memory was completely false. So, you know, he was released from prison.

But memories are, iffy, memories can be true, memories are often not true.

“And it's very, very difficult for anybody to know for sure, which is which.”

And in the case of deadly swagger, I got the impression that prosecutors knew they couldn't necessarily hang their hat on whatever, you know, Wendy would be able to tell them that they had to have a case that would withstand any ambiguity, exactly. And so even if they were able to put her on the stand and she said, you know, I now know, I can see my son-in-law coming in the house with his hoodie on firing a shot that killed

my husband and firing shots at me, I can see him.

It would have been powerful evidence, but maybe not as powerful as if she had not talked

about those other people as well. Let me ask you about the lead detective in this case. I don't recall the top of my head a detective becoming as emotionally involved as this detective was.

“He wanted to solve this case, but he wanted to answer the questions for this family as well.”

Talk a little bit about him if you were. Well, he, yes, he was certainly invested in this story in this case. He worked on it a long time, it really took over his life, you know, if this was one of those detective novels that would be eating him alive, you'd hear that a lot. He, he teared up a number of times during the course of the interview because he got

so close to the case and because he got so close to the family and particularly Wendy. And he talked to Wendy often, he felt very close to Wendy. And the way he found out that Wendy took her life was, he got a telephone call from Adrian, the daughter who said, my mother has killed herself and it's your fault. He told me about that and he broke down, he really, really took that personally.

And eventually Adrian, you know, won the conviction to create Adrian, came back and thanked him for his work, but he, he became very, very deeply involved in this story. And it is something, you see this, Lester. Investigators, detectives are often, you know, they get a reputation for being hard-boiled and hard-nosed, et cetera, but they tend to be some of the most caring people, you know,

ever meet in your life. And they, they do become emotionally invested in their cases often, and if they, you know,

if they take a wrong turn or don't get it right, the first time they are, they're often

grief-stricken. When we come back, we are going to hear more from Keith's interview with Dan Seraphini. Let's kickstart your wellness journey with the Dark Today app, work out's meal plans, it's your fast track to a healthier you. And now, during the Expendity Member Celebration, members can get an exclusive 50% off an annual subscription, and to expinity.com/membership to learn more.

Exfinity, imagine that. Subscription automatically reduces each year at 6599 plus taxes and fees until canceled, offerings may 20th, 2026, prices subject to change. Visit today.com/exfinity for full offer terms and details. He was a young Marine.

She didn't care about convention, they made a life together, then one night the Marine died. And then the death investigation took a wild, unexpected, and utterly bizarre turn. I'm Josh Maykowitz and this is Trace of Suspicion, an all-new podcast from Dayline. Listen to all episodes of Trace of Suspicion Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

On this week's special episode, I get together with Hollywood Superstar and now Business Magnet, Ryan Reynolds in front of a live audience to walk through his life and career. You can get our conversation for free wherever you get down loads of podcasts. I also want to ask you about Erin, the couple's daughter.

“She obviously is a large part of this story, but was she ever assessment?”

Yes, she was never charged.

I'm not sure how close it ever came to her being charged. I just think it was the people doing the investigating found it very interesting that there was a kind of a ballet that occurred here, a sequence of events. So, you know, Danny drives in from the desert, Erin brings the kids in to see the grandparents that they go out on the boat, the house is empty, there's a way for him to get inside and

wait and then they come back and have dinner and leave and after they leave conveniently, the murderer occurs. Was Erin involved in that in some way? You know, they investigated that as much as they could and they did not come to a conclusion that she was involved, but, you know, on the face of it, they were interested.

And when you look at Erin staying loyal, what did you think about it, explains the differences?

Is it loyalty, denial, fear, love? What was it? I wanted very much to talk to both of the daughters, and we, you know, I thought we were going to have a chance to interview Erin. She was considering it, and then I, I didn't interview with Danny, and afterwards I

think he, he, he talked to Erin and felt that I was a little too rough on him, but I'd like to know more about those questions as well. Let's talk about Seraphini in that interview. Yeah, sure. I'd heard other people say that he had, there was a kind of a swagger and arrogance about

“him, and that's why deadly swagger is probably a good title for this episode.”

There was a swagger, not just in the way he walked, but in his attitude. He was an arrogant guy, and even in a jail cell way he had to go to prison, he was angry interview. He was, you know, people wouldn't believe him, or if I seemed to indicate I wasn't believing him, he was, that made him pretty mad.

He threatened to leave the interview at one point, nice to be, and I got to ask you tough questions. Otherwise, why are we here? And so he came around and he stayed, and he answered the questions, but he wasn't a happy camper when he left.

Yeah, and you made the point, we should point out here, you had a limited amount of time. A lot of times, these things are, you know, we get an hour, hour and a half. They'd given us half an hour for the interview, at the end of a half an hour of the jailer

“said, well, another couple of minutes to be okay, and I think we went at total of close to”

40 minutes, but it sounds like a lot, but it really isn't, because you want to develop, there's so many questions to ask, and you want to develop some idea of character and of attitude, the way relationships developed, and what the background is, and all kinds of things like that, there would be very helpful for us to understand the story and to be able to tell it properly, so 40 minutes is a very small amount of time.

That interview with the, with the main detector, for example, we talked for five hours. It's one of the longest interviews ever, but you want to get all the details. When you set that with Seraphini, how do you prepare for an interview like that, where you know it's likely going to be competitive, but there's serious questions that need to be answered?

You just, I never know how to do it, and I probably do it wrong all the time, but in the

case of Dan Seraphini, I figured there were some issues that really needed to be covered. We were told we had a half an hour. I wanted to be sure I got the answers to some of the questions, so I wrote them down on a piece of paper, which is probably a wise thing to do that I never usually do. Um, we started asking those questions that he got mad and then we kind of exemplized after

that. Keith Morrison, not a paper and pencil guy, okay, noted that. Everyone's got their own style. Now, we do have some extra sound key for that interview that did not make into the broadcast where you speak to Dan about his attempt to get a new trial.

Here it is. Did you think you were actually going to get a new trial when you tried to? Um, yeah, I was pretty naive about it, I thought by deserved a new trial, especially

But got in your crawl. I'm sorry.

“But didn't you like about what the jury said?”

Sure.

Oh, well, the jury's first call said that, well, what does Mr. Seraphini, who else could

it be? And then another jury says, well, we don't know if it's Mr. Seraphini for sure, but it means it is. We want to be sure he doesn't go out to do it again. That sounds like a reasonable doubt to me.

Another jury says, oh, with the shoes, the shoes, the Mr. Seraphini was wearing the hotel matches the suspect shoes that you, he was wearing on Saturday and they weren't. They were the complete opposite, the only proof of the work. I was wearing house lippers at the hotel, and then the suspect in Tahoe is wearing a needle's running shoes, not even close.

And if you take those free the jury's examples and they need to put somebody away for

a life sentence for that, it's got to be at the jokingly hospital. So you get an idea of his attitude toward the jury and toward what happened to him in the trial. Sounds like he wants to try the case over again with you as the jury. Oh, yes.

He would love to have done so, and would have loved to have his own say. I think his initial attorneys felt it wise to keep him off the stand because he could be combative as you couldn't sort of see evidence of, you know, he was holding himself back at that point because we'd already had our little tiff and he was kind of calm down. But you can see that kind of, that kind of combative attitude of his, did this case feel

like it was on the verge of running off the rail?

It was, he simply would not accept that a jury would convict him. And again, that speaks to that sort of attitude that you, why wouldn't you believe me?

“You must believe me, and I'm angry that you haven't believed me.”

And so, he, you know, demanded a new trial, claimed that his lawyers, or his new lawyer, at least claimed that the lawyers had a trial, didn't serve him properly, didn't ask enough questions, didn't bring in the witnesses that might have cleared him. So they had their chance to make their arguments before a judge, and they even presented a witness or two.

But then, they, those witnesses told stories that were knocked down by the prosecutor. They, you know, one of them said she sought down Seraphina the day of the shooting miles away. And in fact, she didn't see him that day, she saw him the day after that. He really wasn't helped by that effort, and the judge eventually said, "No, you don't get a new trial, you're done."

And another side notes, and he didn't end up becoming a huge issue, but there were questions about the jury. The jury compared videos. They took screenshots of the person who was running from up the driveway to the house. And they compared it with screenshots they took from a security camera video at the hotel

the night before.

“Remember that he stayed with Samantha that night and the hotel miles away.”

So they really, you know, is a jury supposed to do that sort of thing, kind of went the extra mile to do some investigating of their own. Dan Seraphini and his attorney claim, "No, they were not supposed to do that." And that was a judicial error that should have had the case thrown out. You have any final thoughts about this case?

So, you know, we talked about how deeply it's struck that it's detective on the case. You and the rest of the team put a lot of hours and days and weeks into this story. Where did it leave you? Well, people's lives are very complicated and no matter how shiny and successful a person's existence may appear to be, it's quite likely that there's a whole story behind it,

which is both fascinating and potentially something that that person would rather you didn't know about. I don't know if that makes any sense or not. But it was just, here's another story of an apparently high-licks successful couple with a backstory that wouldn't quit.

After our break will come back and take some of the questions we've had about this episode on social media. Hey there everybody, it's Yasma Vesugian, host of Here's The Scoop, The Daily News podcast from NBC News. So that Iran conflict has been a major focus of our coverage even before the war began.

Week after week I've spoken with our team of correspondent and we've heard voices from

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and wherever you get your podcasts, I'll see you soon. Remember celebration, members can get an exclusive 50% off an annual subscription, head to expinity.com/membership to learn more. Expinity. Imagine that.

Subscription automatically renews each year at 6599 plus taxes and fees until canceled. Ever ends May 20th, 2026, prices subject to change, visit mbcnews.com/exfinity for full-offer terms and details. Well, Lester had to take a flight, but Jessica DeVara is here to answer some of your questions in comments and social media and there is no finer person to answer those questions than Jessica.

“Who knows this story inside out and backwards and forwards?”

Hi, Jess. How are you? We had a whole lot of people talking about how interesting the episode was, so well done. But it's just a fascinating story. Yeah, that's for sure this one had lots of twists and turns and you could probably do

a podcast on this one for sure. You were in the deadline producer account when the show was on the air and you told me what you heard about listening closely and what was playing in the background.

Yeah, so it was interesting because I first heard the 911 call played in court.

It's an old courthouse. It's kind of hard to hear inside that court room. Windows are open and where I was sitting, it was difficult to really listen to all the details. But I remember the prosecutor pointing out that when you to the jurors, when you listen to this 911 call, you're going to be able to hear TV playing in the background and a woman

moaning and gasping for air. So, you can hear that very faintly, but when we finally got the exhibits from court and we're prepping to edit and write, you know, I had my noise, chancelene, hedgehog and listening in. It's playing, you know, I can hear a voice that sounded very familiar and you can hear that

it's definitely a date line episode playing on the TV. Yeah. Yeah. Our team did a little bit of digging around and it was an episode titled written in blood that Dennis Murphy did.

“I believe it was like back in 2012 and clearly it was a rerun that was playing that night”

of the shooting. But a rerun but also an appropriate title given what had just occurred in that lovely big house by Lake Tahoe. Good Lord. Yeah.

Pretty unbelievable. Well, we have lots of questions.

First of all, let's go to one from Janet Wiseman.

We said, didn't they say cameras inside and outside the house did the dogs bark? Yeah. So, there were cameras inside and out. The only camera that we were able to listen to and watch in court and what they released to us was the camera that pointed directly into the driveway.

So at the point in time where the, you know, mass person enters, we could not hear the barking from at least the evidence that was presented to us and that we had access to. And the prosecutor pointed out to the jurors that one of the dogs, there are two dogs inside the home and that one of the dogs at some point in time belong to Erin and Dan.

“I think it was, I think she testified that it was her very first dog.”

So at that time in 2012 when the dog would have been 14 years old. But, you know, again, from the cameras that we were able to obtain, we could not hear barking at the point in time that the mass person entered. So there may have been some disruption but not much. All right.

Wendy took her own life. Sometime after she actually recovered from her, you know, recovered as much as she could from the injury she received and a lot of people were curious about that. Haley Jacqueline asks, "Do they ever question the mother Wendy suicide?"

Yeah, I mean, I think that there were definitely allegations that perhaps there was some

foul play involved but was fully investigated and it was determined that Wendy did commit suicide and there was no, you know, there was no possibility of foul play. Right. Right.

“Oh, boy, I'm not sure how you say this name, say so, Morpheus Miller, I think it is.”

Aaron's parents gave her a $90,000 check the evening of the killing, what was that money for? That's right. So Aaron testified that the money was for an indoor writing arena that they were building.

She didn't elaborate where that was located, I don't believe, but it was for an indoor

writing arena. All right, they had given a number of gifts over the years and I think that the prosecutors told it up or got a pretty good idea of how much it was altogether. Yeah, that's good. Do you remember what that number was?

I know that Adrian said that it was a total of like $2 million. A lot of money.

“Over the years, yes, a lot of money that were a combination of loans and gifts and so, but yeah,”

that is quite a bit of money. A couple of comments from Mike, underlined H1990, all right. Case proving that you can have a lot of money in our luxurious lifestyle, but it doesn't protect you from family drama, which is very true. This reminded me in some ways of succession, that the drama that played on television

for a long time, there was just, you know, people, it doesn't matter how much money there

is, people, some people will always want more.

Mike was also happy for the detective to get that hug in a full circle moment. Yeah. Yeah, it's always so, I always find that so interesting, right, when you interview detectives who, you know, definitely have a soft spot and are, you know, tearful during an interview. It's amazing to me that detectives, or some of the most soft-hearted people you can imagine.

And you've run into that yourself. They get so invested in these cases. They believe in them so strenuously, and they were so hard through their whole being and to try to solve the case, and of course to try to solve for the family. Right.

And so they get very emotionally attached to the families as well. What do you do? It's quite remarkable. I just wouldn't have thought of it beforehand. And you know, you read that novels about hard-boiled detectives who are working to solve

a crime, and nothing will phase them. Right. Well, these are human beings, and they get phased by stuff, just like all of us, too. No, absolutely. I agree.

Well, an interesting story, a sad story that's it for talking day-line for this time. It's so delightful to have you here, somebody who knows this inside and can answer all the questions. Thank you. Also, everybody for listening.

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