By Josh Mankiewicz, Dateline Correspondent

The guy reminded me of my grandfather. Same western shirt, same cowboy boots, same Brylcreem in his hair. Except that I never saw my grandfather cry.

Now, this fellow wasn't blubbering, but he'd choke up every so often and a tear would form, which he'd dab away with some Kleenex wadded up in his fist. And I just sat there and did nothing. Normally, when someone starts crying in the middle of a conversation, your urge is to get out of your chair and put your arm around them, or at least tell them how sorry you are. But this was television, so I just soldiered on.

He was talking about his daughter, who'd been killed by her husband. And sadly, he was one of six straight interviews I'd done for Dateline in which the person sitting across from me was crying. We cover a lot of murder cases at Dateline, and in each case, the person I was interviewing was telling me about the worst thing that had ever happened to them; the sister, the best friend, the wife taken from them suddenly and through violence.

Television is pretty good at showcasing emotion, and there was a time when getting someone to cry on-camera was hugely desirable. "Did she squirt?" one high-profile TV doctor used to ask his producers after they returned from an interview. I suppose there are still people who seek out the tears, but I'm not one of them.

One disclaimer here: Whenever people I'm interviewing start to cry, I almost always ask them if they'd like to take a minute to compose themselves, and sometimes they do. The problem comes when virtually the entire subject you're discussing is so wrenching that tears start flowing every 15 seconds, which makes stopping and starting a poor option, and may actually prolong the interview and thus, your subject's agony as well. So in those situations, I just go on and ask the next question.

The problem with doing that is that to ignore someone else's tears, you have to shut off part of yourself, that part that makes you want to reach out to an adult so shattered by the memories you're provoking that they start to cry. And whenever I do that, I always wonder if that part of me will automatically turn back on when the interview is concluded. So far, it always has. If I sense someday that it hasn't, I'll be facing a tough choice about continuing in this line of work, which has paid my rent for 34 years.

All of that brings me to Tom Richardson, convicted in court of murdering his wife Juanita by pushing or throwing her off a cliff on the shores of Lake Superior, 140 feet to her death.

Richardson gave me an interview not long after his conviction, and under Dateline's lights, we went back over the details of the day Juanita died. At different times in the interview, he would suddenly start to sob, his voice cracking. Seconds later, he'd be composed again, speaking in that flat Michigan accent that made him sound like a homicidal Sonny Bono.

I never saw any actual tears, which made me wonder -- just as Park Rangers at the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore wondered when Tom first reported that his wife was missing. One minute, they reported, he was sobbing with his head in his hands; the next, he was perfectly composed. Add to that the three different stories he told police in the first 12 hours after Juanita's death and you have grounds for the suspicion that put Richardson at the center of a murder investigation, and eventually led to his conviction. He is asking for a new trial.

I'd love to cover some stories in which I don't have to ask anyone if they'd like to take a break and dry their tears.  I can ask. But I'm sure not counting on it.

Click here for the whole story of what happened at Pictured Rocks.

By Ellen Sherman, Dateline Producer

Understanding the people in our stories is always a challenge, especially when they are deceased, which is unfortunately the case more often than not when you deal with crime stories.

In the case of Fla. v. Keller, we had our two principal characters, a husband and wife, who were both deceased. It was not as difficult to get a handle on the wife, Rose Keil, since she had several surviving sisters and parents, one of whom agreed to share memories of her sister with us.

Rose was an interesting study in contrasts, an innocent girl who left school at 15 and married an older man. Yet as naïve as she might have been, she learned from him and eventually was so saavy that she was able to best him in a multi-million dollar divorce settlement. Some felt she was in the relationship for the money, but she stayed with her husband for almost a decade and, by the accounts of her family, she really tried to make the relationship work.  What could have drawn a beautiful young girl to a man more than three decades her senior? That was the part that didn't compute to many, but her sister told us that difficulties with Rose's own father, were, she felt, the "X factor" that pulled Rose to look for a "father figure" in her love life.
 
As for Fred Keller, it seems few had a kind word to say about him. Sure, he was a successful businessman, but he was reportedly so litigious that he had sued his own children. That, coupled with the fact that he had, among other things, strong feelings about not dating women who were, in his eyes, racially pure, made him a difficult character to portray.
 
Yet, at least, for a while, I came away feeling that Rose Keil had really loved the eccentric Fred Keller, at some point. There's the old folk saying, at least I think it's an old folk saying, that "for every pot there's a lid" which could be the only way to understand why Rose Keil was attracted to, married, had a child with and devoted herself to a man like Fred Keller.

By Sara James, Dateline Correspondent

Being a network reporter means having the opportunity to travel to some places which are, to say the least, out of the ordinary -- such as the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

I made the trek there on a bright, sunny day, and as I waited in the prison yard for the interview subject to show up,  I leaned back against a 30-foot wall festooned with concertina wire.  A guard beckoned me over. "Hey, ma'am, that's a No Go Zone," he informed me.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Move away from the wall, please.  It's a shoot-to-kill zone."

I didn't waste any time following instructions.

If such precautions seem extreme, it's worth remembering that this prison is home to some notorious prisoners, and I was there to interview one of them.

When I met Kevin Coe, it was easy to see the handsome man he would have been in his 30s. He has blond hair, blue eyes, and a chiseled jaw. He seemed like the last person anyone in Spokane would have suspected as the terrifying figure from a nightmare which lasted for years.

But police say that Kevin Coe was the South Hill Rapist, a rapist who is believed to have been responsible for dozens of attacks.  A rapist whose brutality would leave his victims in terror from the day when they were thrown to the ground, a hand shoved down their throat, and raped, until now.

Indeed, one victim told us she was so traumatized, she never told her children about her attack all those years ago until she agreed to be interviewed by us. 

As we sat down there in the prison, where Kevin Coe agree to speak publicly for the first time in a decade, he insisted, again and again, on his innocence.  And yet, as those blue eyes locked onto mine, never flinching, I knew that Coe has also been labeled a psychopath,  and for a psychopath, a lie in the service of self-preservation is easy. 

What is the truth about what happened in Spokane, all those years ago?  Should Kevin Coe be freed, having served his time, or is he a danger to society?  After you watch his interview, I think you'll find you have an opinion.

Click here for the full report on "The Case of the South Hill Rapist."