By Sara James, Dateline NBC correspondent

It's a situation that's happened to me, and I bet it's happened to you, too. Someone new moves to the neighborhood. A stranger. We drop by, say hello, maybe even drop off a meal for the new man or woman on the block. We get to talking, exchanging life stories. The stranger tells us his name, where he's from, what he does, a bit about his past. And chances are, we believe it. Why wouldn't we? Most people are honest. Aren't they?  

But have you ever found yourself wondering, is it true? Is that person really who he claims to be? Have you ever suspected, when you met someone new, if perhaps the stranger was keeping something back, or embellishing something, or maybe, just maybe, making up the whole story?  

Having just made a major move myself, from big city Manhattan to a small town halfway around the world, I've thought about it even more. In small towns, people generally know one another, know one another's families. There's a track record. There's history. A new person can bring excitement, and inevitably brings mystery, too. There is no context. And, as I've learned, sometimes a stranger isn't at all who he seems to be.

All these questions began when I started reporting on the death of Jean Weaver, by all accounts a warm, friendly, principled woman. She was a loving mom, loving sister and great daughter, who was looking forward to a new life as her marriage was ending. She was a woman with much to live for, whose life was cut short. 

Reporting this story also made me think of that old adage that justice delayed is justice denied. I think of Jean Weaver's family, her sisters Kathy and Colleen, decent, kind, women who clearly adored their sister. When someone killed Jean, her sisters were immediately sure they knew who the killer was. But the man who they suspected fled, and they were left to wait -- for years.

They wondered where the suspect had gone. Thousands of miles away, others wondered about a new man in their midst. There were so many questions. And in the end, for all of them, there was one man who was -- and remains -- a stranger. A man they thought they knew. But, in the end, how well do we really know anyone?

"The Stranger" airs Friday, Feb. 29 at 9pm ET on Dateline NBC.

By Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent

If the images of Nona Dirksmeyer's fresh open face convey a certain vulnerability, it shouldn't be too surprising; at 19, though she sang beautifully, looked wonderful, and had been winning some local and state beauty pageants, she was still struggling with an awful secret.

Secrets, of course, do not survive murder investigations, and the details of Nona's troubles spilled out for all the world to pick over. Certainly her mother was shocked and dismayed when Nona told her that her own father sexually abused her when she was a little girl, and that later on she began to cut herself.

Imagine then, how it was when the whole town learned about not just that but also the extremely personal details of Nona's love life.  And then total strangers made it their business to pass around innuendo about her behavior and her morality.

Wasn't it bad enough that she was dead?  And that the accused killer was her own boyfriend, the kid Nona's mother had begun to treat as a future son-in-law?

That, however, is where the whole terrible business - including media coverage of the crime - began to bog down in what amounted to family loyalties.  Or, as a supportive out of town relative called it, "local politics."

And highly polarized politics, at that.  Debates over the boyfriend's guilt or innocence actually stirred up regional resentments and rivalries that date right back to the Civil War. As a result,  covering the murder of Nona Dirksmeyer was a sometimes tricky business; local media outlets began to take a lot of flak for allegedly slanting the story in favor of one family or the other, and no matter how thorough our efforts to tell the story even-handedly, somebody was always assuming we had to be on one side or the other.  Obviously, we were not - our mission is to follow each story as fairly and clearly as possible.  And of course, in this case, as in all others, its the jury that decides.

Were truth and justice served in Nona's case?  If you were to ask around in Russellville, Arkansas, the answer you'd likely hear as often as not is no.   Perhaps, after a review of the facts, you'll come to your own conclusion.