by Dan Slepian, Dateline producer

Brash, charismatic, impulsive, clever. It's a sure bet that if you hang out with Bill Stanton, these are among the words you would use to describe him. Spend just a few hours on the road with him and you'll soon realize how he got his name--"Wild Bill."

(Photo: L-Bill Stanton, R-Dan Slepian)

As the producer of "Wild Bill: Breaking and Entering,"  I've spent hundreds of hours with Stanton and while I've done many stories over the years for Dateline, working with him posed a set of challenges I've never encountered before.

An example:
Stanton and I were meeting in Las Vegas to film a segment for his special. A crew was going to videotape him as he attempted to break into homes and hotel rooms there. The day before, Stanton was in Phoenix shooting a story for the "Today" show about the dangers of drinking and driving. He showed up in Vegas with a migraine, clearly hung-over. To say he was in a bad mood would be an understatement. He told me he'd pounded a ridiculous number of Vodka shots to show how reckless a potential drunk would be behind the wheel. Stanton suffered through that shoot in Vegas. And so did I. 

As the "Today" show's on-air security expert, Stanton has created his own form of the American fire drill. He's snatched volunteer kids to test how unsuspecting passers-by would react, set up valet parking attendants to see if they'd steal from a car, and caught men cheating on their wives.

Is he truly enlightening us about the problems of personal security or, as some critics allege, is he simply promoting himself? Whether or not you agree with his methods, Stanton makes no apologies for illustrating what he says is pervasive apathy when it comes to preventing crime. It's a message he's been touting long before he arrived at NBC.

Stanton's roots in the world of security began in 1984 when he became a beat cop for the NYPD. But just four years later, he retired because of an injury to his arm after he fell chasing a burglar on a routine call.

Stanton re-invented himself. He opened a private investigation company, became a bouncer at trendy nightclubs and hobnobbed with celebrities. Most of all, he made a career of doing what he does best: promoting Bill Stanton. He took on the nickname "Wild Bill," branding himself as a security specialist all over town. His goal: to become the Bob Villa of personal security. He told me how he worked the phones, posing as an agent to get his name in network producers' rolodexes. It worked. Soon, Stanton was popping up on ABC, NBC, FOX, and even Oprah. And then in 2001, Stanton and his larger-than-life persona ended up on the cover of New York Magazine under the banner: "Have Gun, Will Party":

The magazine (which Stanton happily hands out to those who ask for it), was a major springboard for his career.  But he says his growing fame then and now is not simply to feed his ego… he says it also helps to serve a higher cause: to keep us on our toes and aware of the dangers around us. It's a simple message he hammers home everywhere he goes.  It's our responsibility, he says, to pay attention and to be the eyes and ears for law enforcement and each other.

In shooting with Bill, I was impressed at how Stanton can talk his way into almost any situation.  I was amazed at how few people took action when they saw Stanton smashing car windows in a public parking lot. I was surprised and disappointed that he was able to talk his way into so many homes and hotel rooms in that weren't his…even with no sleep and a hangover that day in Las Vegas. I was most troubled how innocent children would be so easily lured near the trunk of Stanton's car.

Is Stanton's message getting through? The other day, I was standing on the train platform on my way to work and saw this billboard, thought about Bill Stanton, and then realized that despite any controversy, he got through to me.

(taken with my cellphone camera)

Originally posted on March 7 for the Dateline special "Wild Bill: Breaking and Entering."

By Karen Epstein, Dateline Producer

There are certain days when you're covering a trial that you don't want to miss. June 26, 2007 was one of those days. 

At about 8:45 a.m., I bolted up the stairs of the Washoe County Courthouse in Reno, Nev., to the second floor courtroom of Judge Steven Kosach.  I knew the media would be clamoring for seats, and I wanted a good one.   It was supposed to be a big day in the trial of Chaz Higgs.  The day before, Higgs had taken the stand in his own defense, and now it was the prosecution's turn to cross-examine him.  Little did I know that there was about to be a dramatic twist in this case no one could have expected.

The sudden death of Nevada State Controller Kathy Augustine caught the eye of Dateline NBC producers as soon as it hit the papers.  Had it been a heart attack, as was initially reported, or could it be something more sinister?  Rumors flew throughout the state.

Kathy Augustine had certainly made her share of enemies during her political career.  She was accused of violating state ethics rules by forcing employees to work on her 2002 election campaign on state time, and had been the first official in Nevada history to be impeached. Soon enough, though, those rumors hit closer to home and police started investigating Kathy's fourth husband, a Registered Nurse named Chaz Higgs (couple pictured in photo).

Higgs was charged with killing his wife by injecting her with a paralytic drug called succinylcholine.  I learned a lot about this drug by covering this case, and it's absolutely horrifying.  Used properly, it is an important medical tool that aids in intubation.  Used improperly, the drug paralyzes your internal organs, essentially suffocating you.  From what we learned during the trial, you can still hear and even smell but can't move or breathe.  Terrifying.

On direct examination, Chaz Higgs insisted he did not, and would not, kill his wife.  Which brings me back to June 26 -– the day he was supposed to face cross-examination by the prosecutor.  When I approached the courtroom, everyone was buzzing and whispering. I knew something was not right.   A local reporter ran up to me with the scoop:  it turns out, in the middle of the night, Chaz Higgs had slit his wrists. 

Chaz Higgs survived, but, was it a true suicide attempt?  A ploy for sympathy?  No one knew for sure.  Higgs' Attorney David Houston told reporters that his client had told his story, cleared his name, and now he wanted to die.  Kathy's brother, Phil Alfano, called it all an act.  The judge revoked Higgs' bail and put the trial on hold.  Ironically, July 26 was the day Dateline was supposed to interview Chaz Higgs, but now we had lost our chance.

Would there be a mistrial?  Or, if the trial continued, would the alleged suicide attempt help, or hurt, Chaz Higgs' case?

We'd have to wait and see.

Click here for the full story.

 

By Dennis Murphy, Dateline Correspondent

You know the painting "American Gothic." A couple -- a farmer and his wife, at least she seems to be his wife, but maybe a spinster daughter, apparently fresh from sucking lemons -- stares right at you the viewer with a pitchfork between them. To me, it's always been the American "Mona Lisa." Ambiguous. As with the lady's smile, what's going on here between this man and woman from the heartland?

I mention it only because I'm coming in from the airport in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I wasn't on the ground long before I learned that the city was home to Grant Wood, the painter of "American Gothic". A lightning refresher art course from Wikipedia tells me that Wood's sister Nan posed as the farm woman and his dentist posed as the man. (By the way, knowing that the farmer in "American Gothic" was, in fact, portrayed by Grant Wood's dentist won a contestant on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" a million bucks.)

But I digress.

It's the ambiguity of the story in the painting -- that sharp pitch fork between the Iowa pair -- that echoes a bit with the current American gothic story we're working on in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City corridor.

The man was Dr. Richard Nelson, a medical college executive dean, a highly regarded pediatrician, and the woman in question is Phyllis, his wife of over 30 years. What came between them was a four-inch kitchen paring knife. Phyllis was holding it when it punctured Dr. Nelson's heart, killing him. Of course, there'd been much more between the very married couple than a paring knife. There'd been his lover. The other woman.

Was it murder, as the state of Iowa charged?

Or was it an accident, as Phyllis, the wife, explained it?

It all depended on how you looked at the couple. How you read the picture. We're left without a reliable narrator.

Grant Wood, I suspect, would have understood.

Charlie Neibergall / AP file

His classic painting became, I take it, a tug of war between his detractors and champions. There was a local school of thought in Cedar Rapids about 1930 when he painted it, that the smug artist, trained in the decadent salons of Paris as a young man, was making fun of his fellow Midwesterners, satirizing rubes with sour, pursed lips and short horizons. Wood, of course, denied that interpretation, though legend has it that a farm wife tried to bite his ear off because she was so angry with his depiction of farm people.

Then, as the Depression settled over the country, the painting was reassessed again, and now Grant Wood's farm couple seemed to be the very emblem of American pioneer resolve in times of adversity. You could see in the farmland couple what you wanted to see.

"American Gothic," by the way, is not hanging in Cedar Rapids. It's at the Art Institute of Chicago. To my middlebrow sensibility it's a great, great painting.

P.S. The courteous bailiffs at the Cedar Rapids courthouse, built intriguingly on a narrow island in the Cedar River, make an excellent pot of coffee -- but you have to be a juror or privileged guest to try it. Thank you.

A special hour-long Dateline on the case of Richard and Phyllis Nelson will air tonight, Wednesday, Aug. 22 at 10 p.m. ET/9 Central. Click here for transcript, photos and more on the case.

By Andy Cashman, Associate Producer

After 9/11, I had the privilege of working on a story I'll not soon forget.  As part of an hour-long documentary we were shooting for Dateline, I slept with, ate with and went on runs with the firefighters of Engine 24/Ladder 5.  I'd say I lived with them for the better part of 2 months and, as you can imagine, this was an emotional time in the lives of these firefighters. They had lost 11 of their members and I witnessed them cry, laugh and eventually heal a little bit.

On Saturday, Aug. 18, two firefighters from Ladder 5, Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino, were killed while battling a blaze at the Deutsche Bank building beside Ground Zero in downtown Manhattan. Though I got to know other firefighters better than Beddia and Graffagnino, I knew them a bit.  As soon as I heard about their deaths, a story came to mind...

By Fred Rothenberg, Dateline Producer

Bill Lee's friendly Kentucky accent was unmistakable -- even if I was hearing it at 3:30 in the morning.

Bill is the longtime coroner for Hardin County Kentucky, and he was calling on the Bat-Phone. That's what we jokingly called the phone that coroners and police, in and around Louisville, Kentucky, were using to alert us to death stories that we might want to cover.

The dedicated cell phone was on the night stand in my hotel room. Fellow producer Maia Samuel and I were alternating overnights when one of us was on call with the phone, and this was my sleepless night.

Dateline producers, camera and sound technicians and correspondent Victoria Corderi were in the middle of an extraordinary week, chronicling the Louisville medical examiner's office and its death cases.

And on Tuesday morning -- early Tuesday morning -- Coroner Lee had a possible case that would end up at the medical examiner's office later that same day.

In the weeks and months that followed I would often talk to Bill Lee, and when he'd call he'd always be considerate and ask, "Am I catching you at a good time?" This time, he dispensed with that courtesy line.

"Fred, this is Bill Lee from Hardin County," he drawled through my sleepy haze. "I'm calling to see if you'd be interested in a story."

In Kentucky, coroners are elected officials who go to death scenes to investigate and take charge of the bodies before handing them off to the medical examiner for autopsy. Coroners also are the ones who must communicate with the family members -- a rough job for sure.

Over the phone, coroner Lee laid out the basics of a bizarre tale. A man had confessed to killing another man and would soon be leading investigators to where, he said, he had buried a body. By this time, I was wide awake and furiously scribbling notes. Bill was offering to meet us at the Kentucky State Police Post, where investigators would be gathering to embark on a grim mission -- to dig up a body.

And Dateline would be going along every step of the way for a case that the county attorney would later say was unlike any he'd ever seen before.

It all started with a phone call, a wake-up call, and now this unusual case is part of a Dateline hour that will air on NBC Monday night, Aug. 20, at 10 p.m. ET.

Several members of the Dateline team reflected on their experience with the Louisville medical examiner's office. Read senior producer Maia Samuel's story on dealing with dead bodies here, and assistant producer Chetna Purohit's story about a tragic fire here.

By Maia Samuel, Senior Producer

Only one of our team of 10, which included Dateline producers, correspondent and crews, had witnessed an autopsy before. The rest of us were apprehensive, but still coolly confident we could handle what we were about to see. After all, in the course of our careers a few of us had seen dead bodies before. But at the sight of just the blood-splattered autopsy room floor, my knees threatened to buckle. It was going to be a challenging week.

By Chetna Purohit, Assistant Producer

It was chaos in Bardstown, Kentucky, in the early morning hours of Feb. 6, 2007.  Police, fire trucks, the Red Cross. A brick house burnt to its core.  Panicked relatives and neighbors stood anxiously in the cold behind yellow police tape waiting for answers -- for any sign of hope.

Visible from the street was a charred bicycle. For hours, fire inspectors combed through the remains of the house.  By daybreak the devastation was clear.  One by one, they carried out the body bags – ten of them.  Just as the last body was being placed in the truck, a man ran towards the home.  Police stopped him just in time.  I watched in horror as the medical examiner told him his 2-year-old twins were in the house.  It was Kentucky's deadliest fire in 30 years. An entire family wiped out. The youngest was just 17 months.

I thought I had seen the worst of it until I got to the medical examiner's office.  Walking down the halls, trying to comprehend what I had just seen, I walked past the autopsy room.  On the table was the body of a child.  In the chaos of the day I had managed to hold myself together.  Now, I completely lost it.

The following night I attended a memorial service and was moved by the strength of this close-knit community.  Amidst this tragedy, they found in each other hope for a better tomorrow.

'Dead Men Talking' airs on Dateline NBC Monday night, Aug. 20, at 10 p.m. ET.

 

Several members of the Dateline team reflected on their experience with the Louisville medical examiner's office. Read senior producer Maia Samuel's story on dealing with dead bodies here, and producer Fred Rothenberg's story about a late night phone call here.

By Natasha Lebedeva, Booking Producer

It was an unforgettable week in Louisville, Kentucky, in the middle of February. We were covering the work of the Louisville medical examiner's office and the death cases that occurred within that week. One of the scary things for me, frankly, was to see a dead body and to see an autopsy performed on it.

There is this public fascination with autopsies and unraveling the mysteries of death, which may have started with TV crime and hospital dramas. There is also an expectation that medical examiners may be able to perform miracles overnight, that pathologists in the mortuary may be able to give instant answers to police officers and family members about the cause of death.. As it turned out, it doesn't happen like that in real life and in real-life autopsies.

On our first day in Louisville, we went to the spacious autopsy room. The metal dissecting table had the body on it. The clippers, chisel, hammer and knives, were all laid out orderly next to the table. A peculiar smell was in the air, at first shocking, making you dizzy and a bit sick. However, surprisingly so, you get used to things, even the most unbelievable ones, rather quickly.

After a few autopsies you grow to understand that it's somehow normal and natural. We can learn from the bodies and find out what happened, though not instantly perhaps. It might require more testing over many days. You just realize that autopsies are a part of the process to get answers. Wondering if the deceased really had a disease, really died of natural causes? Only an autopsy will tell you. Confused about how someone died? An autopsy might tell you if some abnormality is to blame.

I've watched autopsies, and the experience was somewhat inspiring. It's clear that the body is only a shell after death, and you can learn a lot about what happened from the body.

'Dead Men Talking' airs on Dateline NBC Monday night, Aug. 20, at 10 p.m. ET.

Several members of the Dateline team reflected on their experience with the Louisville medical examiner's office. Read producer Fred Rothenberg's story about a late night phone call here, senior producer Maia Samuel's story on dealing with dead bodies here, and assistant producer Chetna Purohit's story about a tragic fire here.

By Vince Sturla, Dateline Producer

What would you do if a friend went missing while traveling in a foreign country? How would you find him? Who would you call? Where would you begin your search? This was the reality John Elwin's friends were in during the months following his disappearance -- caught up in a scenario that seemed scripted by Hitchcock.

Making this all the more confusing and unsettling was that the case unfolded slowly. Suspicions surfaced gradually. John Elwin had been missing for more than two weeks before his friend Luis Soltren got a call from Elwin's girlfriend, asking him to join her in an ad hoc investigation into where her boyfriend could be.

John Elwin

John Elwin was nothing if not well-loved by his friends. That thought kept recurring to me as I worked on this story.

Soltren, a self-employed building contractor with a business and family to look after, spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars of his own money to find out what happened to Elwin. It was a search that led all the way to the Philippines. Even for professionals, conducting an investigation in the Philippines can get to be a rather complicated affair. Mountains, jungle and rebels, spread over more than 7,000 islands, make it a difficult country for detectives with that country's National Police to traverse.

For example, a key location in the story was about 120 miles north of Manila. It took our Dateline team and me nearly 8 hours to drive there.

One of the Philippine investigators, Lt. Cresencio De Asis, kindly offered to guide us to the spot -- an area infiltrated by the New People's Army rebel group. Lt. De Asis had two bodyguards but given the area we were traveling to was told by his commander to take three more.

An hour later, De Asis's superior had second thoughts and decided to err on the side of caution by sending seven more soldiers for protection.

Nonetheless, for safety's sake, we were told it would be best if we left the area before nightfall.

It was a challenging area and an even more challenging investigation. In the end, I'm not sure if the mystery of Elwin's whereabouts would have been solved if it hadn't been for the efforts of Luis Soltren, Elwin's girlfriend, Kristen Flood, and their team of amateur sleuths.

Click here for the full story, 'Trail of Suspicion.'