What happened to the Seabolt twins?

A woman who came up with a brilliant and dangerous plan. The victim was her twin sister. And to catch the killer, she pretended to be her sister —dressing like her, talking like her, taking over her very identity. It was a dangerous journey for this woman. Because soon, her life would be at risk, too. Keith Morrison writes about Dateline Saturday. This report previously aired in April 2005 and repeats Saturday, January 13, 8 p.m. Click here for the transcript.

by Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent

There is a thick line of grassy hills that forces Highway 5 to Bob and Weave at 4,000 feet on its way up to Bakersfield from Los Angeles. You are leaving Southern California, the hills tell you, physically and culturally. Then down you glide onto a flat, flat plain and often through a thick grey-brown soup those last 30 miles straight as a ruler across the bottom end of California's central valley.  Bakersfield feels like heartland, solid and hardworking, in so many ways different than LA. 

And so are its stories.

You couldn't dream up a story like the Seabolt twins, Theresa and Lisa, who were as different from each other as L.A. is from Bakersfield.  It was like that line from the movie "Capote," said Theresa:  "I walked out the front door and Lisa walked out the back."

It was when Lisa disappeared that the relationship between the sisters began to develop into something almost other-worldly. Lisa seemed to be calling her sister to places we needed to visit, too: meth labs, gang hideouts, places a reasonable person might quite sensibly avoid. 

And one of those places is stunningly strange: outside the city, cranking away in the heat of dry rolling hills, is a veritable village of oil derricks - some of the oldest in the nation.

Bakersfield was among the first oil producing cities on the West coast (Oildale is a close-in subdivision), and some of those oil wells are long since abandoned.  They're just deep holes now.  Any oil worker would know how to put something down there... a place where something lost might never be found.

Was Lisa in one of them?  Would Theresa follow her?

Sitting in a jail just outside the city, a man accused of one murder crouched on the floor beside the jail's pay phone.  He spoke with chilling precision as he proposed something truly dreadful.

Could the man he was talking to — big, burly, tough — make it happen?  

Bakersfield is where the nasty business comes to a head, and we finally learn the fate of the Seabolt Twins.