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."

By Luz Villarreal, Dateline Producer

It was an early Monday morning in late August 2004. I was the first one in the office that day. I warmed up some instant oatmeal and started reading some of our local newspapers.  One story jumped out at me. The headline read "Investigation into girl's disappearance leads to murder charges against mother."

The next day, I was sitting in Dick Pulsifer's living room. He's a simple, quiet man with a shy smile. He worked in security at a Las Vegas casino and also ran a karate school in town. He told me he grew up in San Diego and married young. I could tell he was trying to keep his emotions in check.

While we talked, his wife, Cathe, was fielding phone calls from media organizations across the country. I was the lucky one; when I knocked on their door that morning, they agreed to give Dateline the exclusive to their story.

The woman in the headline I read the previous morning was Dick's first wife and the girl was their daughter, Michelle Kelly Pulsifer. She was only 3 years old when she went missing in 1969.

During this meeting and all those that followed, I learned just how hard Dick Pulsifer tried to find Michelle after his ex-wife mysteriously fled California nearly 40 years ago. He contacted social services, the police and the district attorney's office. He said they all turned him away.

He searched on the Internet and telephoned a few people listed as Michelle Pulsifer. Every time Dick was in a crowd, he wondered if he could recognize the little girl who would now be an adult, possibly with kids of her own. He held out hope that someday she would walk up his home, knock on his door and surprise him.

But that would never happen. Investigators told him Michelle never left the state of California alive.

When police arrested the little girl's mother, Donna Prentice, they also arrested her former boyfriend, Michael Kent. Both entered not guilty pleas in Santa Ana, Calif.

I spent hours talking to friends, relatives and investigators trying to piece Michelle's life together. I also tried to interview Donna. Her attorney wouldn't allow it. I tried to interview Michael Kent, but he was in poor health and died in jail six months after his arrest.

Next, I turned to Michael's son, Jamie Kent. He was only two years old at the time of Michelle's death and had no memory of her but he did remember what his father told him in 2004 after he was arrested and charged with her murder.  Still, Jamie didn't want to share his story with us. He has a family of his own now and wanted to protect them. But he is the only person alive who could defend his father and speak on his behalf. After several calls, Jamie agreed to talk to us and tell us what he knew.

The case took nearly three years to work its way through the judicial system. Throughout the process, I kept reminding myself, "This is a story about Michelle."  To me, it's not about Donna Prentice, Michael Kent or even the people that loved her. It's about a little girl who never had a chance.

Dick never stopped loving his little girl. All he wants now are answers. Was it an accident? Was it malicious? How did it happen? He said to me once, "I have no clue what happened to Michelle.  That's the question, and that's the answer I'll probably never get.   I don't know what a three year old could possibly do to make this happen."

Dick Pulsifer hoped to find out in court. We all did.

A special Dateline on this case, 'The Girl in the Little Blue Dress,' airs on NBC Friday, March 14 at 9pm ET. Click here for the full story and video.

 

By Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent

People often ask me what it's like to talk to men and women accused --  and often convicted -- of horrendous crimes. Is it frightening, they'll ask, to interview such people? Can you tell if they are innocent or guilty? Can you sense evil in the room?

And usually, to such questions, the answer is.. no. A person capable of doing something quite terrible will frequently arrive for an interview well scrubbed and thoroughly prepared, and will prove to be intelligent, funny or charming. And almost always, such a person will present a reasonably believable argument for innocence. Skepticism is an important companion during prison interviews; truth is rarely easy to pin down.

And then there is Vinson Filyaw. 

For one thing, what Vinson did to Elizabeth Shoaf is almost beyond description. In court he finally admitted it was all true: he kidnapped her, held her in truly dreadful conditions for ten days, raped her several times a day, chained her by the neck to the ceiling of his underground bunker, and gave her every reason to believe he would eventually kill her. 

But the man who sat down for an interview in the prison library was no longer the least bit terrifying, not anymore. Vinson seemed almost needy in his desire to explain how he had been victimized by law enforcement, that his attempt at revenge -- sexually abusing a young girl -- was somehow reasonable. Did he do those awful things to Elizabeth?  Well, yes, but she was really only "collateral damage" (said Vinson) in his own struggle for justice.  And then, a little later, he tried out a  new (and quite monstrously untrue) claim, suggesting that his victim actually enjoyed the experience and that it was her idea. Among prison interviews, Vinson's was, shall we say,  unique.

As is, in her own way, the remarkable young woman he attempted to destroy.  I'd been eager to meet Elizabeth. What sort of girl, I wondered, could survive the sustained attacks of a predator such as he, and then in the end somehow outwit him? Would she be tough, cynical, somehow hardened? 

Well, no, she wasn't.  This quiet, rather shy, teenager was obviously bright, even wise, about her circumstances in life.  But during the hours and hours we talked in the course of taping her story, she never once strayed into anything like the worldly cynicism you can see on TV or read in gossip magazines every day.   

When Vinson snatched Elizabeth, just 14 years old, she had never dated a boy, had never once spent even a single night away from home without a family member.  She was taken by a wiley wolf of a man who had just spent the better part of a year eluding the efforts of law enforcement.

She endured unspeakable horrors, faced what seemed to her certain death.  And she prevailed. 

The contrast -- Vinson to Elizabeth -- was quite remarkable.

Where his story was self serving, claims shifting back and forth to suit whatever version he was trying to sell, Elizabeth was open and brutally candid.  Where his fearsome behavior wilted in the presence of a television crew, Elizabeth seemed to gain strength from telling the experience.  And having come through it with her dignity and humanity fully intact, she smiled a smile to light up the room.

Every once in a while, a dark tale turns out well, and the worst in human behavior is overcome by the best.  Which is why it was quite an honor to tell the story of Elizabeth Shouf.

"Into the Woods," a very special two-hour Dateline on this case, airs Friday, March 7, at 9pm on NBC.

Click to read Elizabeth's mom telling how she first heard her kidnapped daughter was still alive.

For those interested in communicating with the Shoaf family, e-mail shoafs5@gmail.com.

Click here for complete coverage of this case.

A Dateline special on adoption in Guatemala airs on NBC Sunday, Jan. 20 at 7pm ET.

By Benita Noel, Dateline Producer

I felt like I was on a roller coaster. The car, which seemed to have no shock absorbency whatsoever, hit the bumps with a resounding thump - over and over again. I had my hand flat up against the roof to brace myself, but it wasn't much help.  More than once I went sliding across the seat, as did everyone else in the car.

It was March 22, 2007 and our driver was making his way - much too fast it seemed -  along a mostly unpaved, almost comically windy road from Guatemala City to Jalapa, 110 miles away. We'd been warned to avoid drinking too much water or coffee before the trip, and now I knew why. 

At least we were all laughing about it. I was with my field producer, Leonor Ayala, and our crew, cameraman Bob Abrahamsen and soundman Randy Foster. We also had our Guatemalan "fixer" in the car (hired to help us with everything from translating, to directions, to letting us know which areas of the city we shouldn't take our cameras into without security) - and a private investigator.  We were going to Jalapa to videotape the reunion of two young sisters with their family - nearly 5 months after they'd been kidnapped from their home, abused and almost adopted by unsuspecting families in the U.S.

In many ways, the shoot was a producer's nightmare. We'd all gotten up at the crack of dawn, only to wait an hour for everyone to arrive and get organized, and then we'd driven to a fast-food restaurant where we waited another hour for the police we'd be following. Nobody in Guatemala seems to be in much of a rush to do anything. And there wasn't much of a plan. Nobody seemed sure where the reunion would happen, or even if we'd make it to Jalapa on time. We were winging it.

About 15 minutes outside of Jalapa, there was a series of frenzied phone calls between the private investigator, the police and various people at the Jalapa District Attorney's office. There was chaotic confusion; the reunion had already happened, no, it was happening in two minutes. It was happening on the street, no, it was happening in an office inside the building.  Someone had changed their mind - they didn't want us there after all. No, that was a mistake. Go to this corner, no, go that corner.

Bob, our cameraman, got anxious, frantically trying to pull his camera out of the pile of cases we'd jammed into the back of the car. I told him not to worry, the only thing that really mattered that morning was those poor little girls were finally going to see their mother again. Still, we all wanted to witness the moment.

Somehow, our driver managed to pull over in the right place just in time for Bob to point his camera out the window of the car and focus on a darling little 5-year-old girl running full speed down the sidewalk towards a nervous looking woman waiting around the corner. In an instant, all the stressed commotion subsided. We just watched in silence.

Galicia family reunited

Because we'd stayed a good block away, we couldn't hear anything, but I didn't need to, the tears were already spilling down my face. I could see the girls' mother wiping her eyes, her body shaking as she clung to her daughters and stroked their hair. I could see that the 5-year-old, who was clinging to a doll, had buried her head into her mother's leg, the same way my own daughter sometimes does.

Afterwards, we were invited inside the District Attorney's office to meet the family. The two kidnapped girls, 5-year-old Candida, and 9-year-old Claudia, were seated on a bench alongside their mother Clara, and an older brother, Ceasar. I was immediately struck by these children's smiles - they all have the most infectious grins, and they were beaming.  They waved at us playfully and giggled uncontrollably when Bob (pictured left) made silly faces at them. 

Clara, who is shy and soft spoken, was subdued, but obviously relieved, and immensely grateful.  She repeatedly thanked the private investigator, who had been instrumental in getting her daughters returned, as well as us. She was hoping we'd be able to help find her third kidnapped daughter.  I wished I could promise her we could.

Pictured: Clara Galicia

When I pulled out my digital camera to take some photos, the children were delighted.  I don't speak Spanish but it didn't matter. I showed them how to use it by pointing at the buttons they needed to push, and then let them take turns taking photos. It only took a moment for me to realize how little Candida had survived her traumatic ordeal. She was monopolizing the camera defiantly, bossing her brother and sister around as she took one photo after another.  I knew right then that this tough little cookie will be just fine.

Photo of Benita Noel and Leonor Ayala taken by Candida

Late that night, after we'd spent the day with Candida and her family, and we were bouncing our way back along that nightmarish road to Guatemala City, tears fell down my face again. Candida and her siblings are enchanting, joyful children full of curiosity, eagerness and beautiful spirit. Their parents are lovely, gentle people who despite their modest life and financial limitations, provide their children with an abundance of genuine, nurturing love.  I cried because I was incensed at the kidnappers who'd so brazenly abused this family. I cried because it made me ache inside to see a mother in such agonizing pain, wondering when, or even if, she'll ever see her third kidnapped daughter again.  I cried because I so wished I could help, and yet, had no idea how.

Pictured: Candida, Claudia and Ceasar

UPDATE - Producer Benita Noel responds to comments:
Sadly, I can assure you that these children were indeed kidnapped -- and that they were offered for adoption. When you watch our story on Sunday, you will understand how it happened. By telling the Galicia family's story, we are by no means implying that all adoptions are corrupt. During the course of putting this story together, I was repeatedly touched by the great joy and love that adoptive parents have brought to so many lucky Guatemalan children. I also believe that for the most part, the safeguards that are designed to circumvent crime do work. But, the reality is that unfortunately there are some corrupt operators who have tried to take advantage of the system.  I realize that any discussion about corruption in Guatemalan adoptions is extremely difficult for the thousands of parents in this country who have, or are about to, adopt from Guatemala. I am a mother myself, and I completely understand the inclination to protect those adopted children. Nobody wants to be stigmatized - nobody wants other people to point fingers at their children, or worse, say something to their face, suggesting that because there is some corruption, all adoptions must be tainted. While I was researching this story, many people told me that they wanted to speak up about bad experiences with questionable operators in Guatemala, or unscrupulous agencies here in the U.S., but they were too scared. Some were afraid they would never get their children home if they didn't keep quiet, some were afraid of repercussions from their agencies, and many were afraid of being crucified by other adoptive parents for daring to say anything negative about Guatemalan adoptions.  Recently, one family who has been through one traumatic ordeal after another in the course of trying to adopt was actually threatened by someone in Guatemala who promised their baby would never come home if our story aired.  There is no excuse for that type of manipulative bullying, particularly when you are dealing with innocent children and emotionally vulnerable adoptive parents. That is the reason I believe that whatever the scope may be, corruption needs to be addressed. To this day, the parents of the kidnapped Galicia girls are devastated. The last time I saw Rodolfo Galicia, the father, he was so distraught he had actually been hospitalized because he can barely eat. Clara Galicia actually contemplated suicide before the two girls pictured above were safely returned home.

You can see photos of users' adopted children here, and read their adoption stories here.

Read correspondent Victoria Corderi's blog on the two sides of Guatemalan adoption here.

For more on the positive side of international adoption, see Dateline's story about a Philadelphia family that adopted three sets of twins from Russia.

A special Dateline on adoption in Guatemala airs on NBC Sunday, Jan. 20 at 7pm ET.

By Victoria Corderi, Dateline NBC Correspondent

I witnessed the joy of a successful foreign adoption when my sister came home with a baby boy from Guatemala more than  five years ago.  Today, my nephew is thriving and my sister is as thrilled as she was when she first held her son in her arms.  There are many people who've had  similar life-changing experiences.  But there is also a dark side to Guatemalan adoption: corruption, lies, forgery, kidnapping, broken hearts. The market is driven by the demand for adoptions from prospective parents in the U.S.  And, as so often happens when there is high demand and the potential for a profit, swindlers appear to exploit the system.

Guatemala has been an adoption magnet because the wait for a child is months rather than years. When we traveled to Guatemala City, we saw hotel lobbies brimming with Americans meeting with lawyers and foster mothers and cradling the babies they were in the process of adopting.  The sheer numbers of babies and strollers and anxious adoptive parents milling about the hotels and streets made for a surreal sight. At first blush,  it seems like a win-win situation: unwanted children escape the dire poverty that plagues much of this country while Americans longing for children are able to fulfill their dreams. 

But what if the children up for adoption were taken under false pretenses?  Or, if  poor, pregnant women are pressured by brokers offering money? And what if the children have been kidnapped outright?  These are not rhetorical questions.  We learned what happens during our investigation.  While we were in Guatemala, we found out about three young girls who'd been kidnapped by a ring that gave them new identities and tried to sell them for adoption.  We also tried to go inside the system by posing as a new adoption agency from the United States looking for contacts.  We set  up meetings with a controversial adoption facilitator  whose name kept coming up when we were looking into complaints about unethical operators in Guatemala.  What happened in both situations was eye-opening and dramatic. 

You can see photos users' adopted children here, and read their adoption stories here.

Read producer Benita Noel's blog on two kidnapped Guatemalan kids who were reunited with their family.

For more on the positive side of international adoption, see Dateline's story about a Philadelphia family that adopted three sets of twins from Russia.

 

By Chris Hansen, Dateline Correspondent

It's our twelfth "To Catch A Predator" investigation and this time we're set up in a 6,000- square foot home in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It's a town of about 50,000 people an hour north of Nashville, Tennessee.

Each one of these investigations has its own rhythm and Kentucky is no different. Within hours I am struck by the fact that fewer men are showing up at our hidden camera house than in past investigations.

Looking back I think this at least partially because the Kentucky Attorney General's office and the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation, along with local law enforcement, have been actively pursuing online predators in the past year.

Before Dateline's investigation in Bowling Green, the Attorney General's office with the help of the online watchdog group Perverted Justice had conducted two previous sting operations without us, making 20 arrests.

One of them was a 59-year old criminal justice instructor at an Ohio college who used to be an elementary school teacher. He had been chatting online about having sex with a decoy posing as a13-year-old girl before showing up to meet her at the undercover house.

Even after this earlier high-profile case, though, we still saw men in our investigation eager to meet a young teen home alone for sex. As you will see, seven men show up over three and a half days and all seven are arrested after I talk to them and they leave the house.

You'll see in Kentucky that we employ the same online decoy, Casey, who we used in New Jersey. She is just as effective in this latest investigation as she was before talking to the men in person.

You'll see the grooming process in real time.

Also in Kentucky we see a range of men show up, from a factory worker to a man who says he's a police detective and carries a gun.

Watch the heart-pounding moments when, as he leaves our hidden camera house, he refuses to follow orders from the arresting officers.

'To Catch a Predator' Kentucky airs Friday, Dec. 28.

Click here for more about the series.

By Marianne O'Donnell, Dateline Producer

I saw a young man holding a sign with my name on it as I left the baggage claim area of Florence's main airport.

"Hello" I said, forgetting that English was not the lingua franca here.

"Buongiorno!" he smiled hesitatingly. "Ms. O'Donnell?"

"Oh, right, buongiorno," I corrected myself.

The driver said his name was Mauritzio, and for a moment I wondered whether the dispatcher of a car service or the editors of Vogue had sent him here. He had a perfect right angle for a nose -- what they call a classic Roman nose, I guess -- a defined jaw and dark hair gelled back. A lock of it had managed to escape the rest of the black slick; it curled seductively above his brow like an upside-down question mark. He wore a tailored blue pinstripe with a black leather coat and caramel colored loafers. He wasn't a driver. He was Adonis. As I seated myself in the back of his spacious Mercedes, he climbed behind the wheel, slipped on his black sunglasses and grinned into his rearview mirror.

"We go?" he asked.

"Uh, sure." I stammered. "I mean, good ... uh," since the breadth of my Italian started with 'bongiorno' and ended with 'arrivederci', with nothing in between, it was obvious I was going to need more than his driving skills.

"Bene?" he helped me.

"Right. Right. BEHH-nay," I parrotted. Saying it was a little like taking a rollercoaster ride. Up on the 'beh', down suddenly on the 'nay'. Italian was fun. "The Brufani Hotel in Perugia, please."

Ten hours earlier I had been sitting inside my senior producer's office in New York when I realized I was going to have to hotfoot it to the nearest airport and get myself to Italy. My assignment was to work the ground in a small city in the central part of the country. Perugia. I knew famous chocolates came from there, succulent Perugina Bacci's, but Dateline doesn't cover candy festivals. It does cover murders, though, and a particularly ghoulish one days earlier had left the town still shaken.

A young British woman, studying at the University of Perugia, had been stabbed in the neck and left to bleed -- slowly -- to death in the bedroom of a little cottage she had shared with three others. One of those was an American student named Amanda Knox. And if Italian police were right, she had something to do with her friend's murder. My job, among others, was to try to get an interview with Knox's mom, who had just arrived from Seattle to comfort her daughter, now in an Italian jail cell.

Days later, I waited in the bone-chilling wind that swept through the medieval piazza of stone and statues, along with my colleagues from Italian, British and American media. Word was the mother was due to walk through the piazza at any moment on her way to the office of her daughter's Italian lawyer. In one moment we were a rag-tag bunch milling around, in another we were a condensed cloud of bees, swarming toward a small, coated woman rushing along with her head down: the suspect's mother. The cameramen flicked on their lights. I took an elbow from one reporter in the ribs; a soundman behind me used my shoulder to steady his boom. Cameras, microphones, wires: we became one unholy body pressing in, cornering a terrified woman who looked back aghast at our communal brazenness.

"My daughter is innocent," she quickly said, in a trembling voice. "She's sure that as the investigation continues the truth will come out and she'll be proven innocent, ummm it's gone with one tragedy with the death of Meredith to know the tragedy that my daughter's living in. It's a terrible situation."

With that her lawyer led her forward by the elbow, into and through our shield. Of course we followed, wanting more, always more. She stilled looked terrified, but she offered nothing else.

In the weeks that followed we would all keep following the investigation for every new morsel of evidence: a bloody footprint found; a knife recovered; surveillance footage of suspects. As I stood with my press brethren in front of the courthouse off the piazza one afternoon, a stooped, white-haired woman caught my eye and shuffled over.

She wore a dazzling red coat and matching hat; her lipstick and makeup applied to perfection. She must have been in her 80s, but she was the epitome of Italian sophistication. She leaned on her polished wooden cane and began questioning me in her native tongue. I used my broken Spanish to try to understand. I got that she was distressed and a little embarrassed by the murder and worried what the rest of the world would think of her sleepy, medieval city on a hilltop, where such a crime, it seems, never happens.

But I clearly couldn't sustain a conversation with her.

In frustration she looked over at the cameras and reporters conversing around the door, waiting for the latest word from the prosescutor in the case. She sighed. I felt bad. "Non bene? Scusi."

I wasn't sure that my apology was properly worded or needed. At least she seemed to forgive my lousy Italian. "Grazie" she said softly, smiling. And she was off.

That night, after hours in the cold yielded nothing new in the case, I joined my cameramen, soundmen and fellow producer in a restaurant on the piazza.

Along with its chocolates, Perugia is known for its homemade pasta and wines. I was having a simple red from a local vintner. I took a sip, immediately relaxing as the wine swirled inside my mouth. In a long day, in what had been an exhausting week, it was a moment of bliss -- a little bit of 'bene' -- in a job that sometimes seemed to be anything but.

Click here for 'Deadly Exchange,' the full Dateline story about the case, including photos, video and a 'Who's who' gallery.
 

By Leonor Ayala, NBC News

From its dry arid deserts in the north to the frigid, icy landscapes of the south, Chile is one of the most geographically diverse countries in South America.  And according to environmental scientists it is also bearing the brunt of the damaging effects of global warming.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Latin America  recently to see firsthand the effects of climate change. He  spent two days in southern Chile, touring Patagonia.

"The change is now progressing much faster than I had thought," said Ban. "It's alarming."

Ban Ki-moon's visit came just before the release of a much anticipated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the impact of global warming.  The IPCC ,  which shared the Nobel peace prize with Al Gore, called for international treaties to limit the emission of greenhouse gases.

Click here for a slide show of Leonor Ayala's visit to Chile and Argentina.

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 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.'

by Tim Uehlinger, Dateline Senior Producer

We had just a few hours to make it all happen.

In March, I flew down to Knoxville, Tenn., with Today's Matt Lauer for an exclusive interview with the husband of a student teacher -- a husband charged with murdering her teenage boyfriend.

From the moment we arrived, it has been one of the most unusual stories I have ever covered.

When we landed in Knoxville, Matt and I were greeted not by the accused or his attorney, but by the news that prosecutors in Knox County had attempted to block the interview, citing the possibility of too much pre-trial publicity. This is unusual; it's usually the defense arguing that the accused is being harmed by public notoriety. After the judge eventually decided there were no grounds to stop the interview, the defendant was moved from his cell to a small conference room within the confines of the Knox County jail, and the interview was allowed to take place. It was one of the most compelling and emotional interviews I have ever witnessed: the defendant fully and freely admitted he had killed the 18-year-old boyfriend. But the story got stranger still.

In the last two months, correspondent Natalie Morales and I were assigned to follow up and expand on this unusual tale, and as you'll see, the ins and outs of the story only raise more questions. Was the accused a cold-blooded, pre-meditated murderer? A sympathetic character who snapped under the pressure of being caught up in a tragic love triangle? Or was it all an accident? The defendant again sat down for an in-depth interview, and this time, told the story of a marriage gone haywire--a couple who all the while had projected the image of the ideal, all-American family.

We went to great lengths to cover all sides of this story. It is a tale so disturbing that some people connected with the case wouldn't talk at all. But in our report, the story of the teenage victim is told, and for the first time, the former student teacher at the center of the case has her side presented. The former student teacher agreed to, then cancelled, a scheduled interview. But her attorney says the 29-year-old educator was trapped in "a classic, loveless marriage." There is a lot more to this story than appeared in the headlines, and we have it in a Dateline exclusive.

"A Deadly Triangle" premieres tonight, Monday July 16, on Dateline NBC at 10 p.m.

by Keith Morrison, Dateline Correspondent

Even in his drab prison jumpsuit, chained and handcuffed, confined behind a thick glass barrier in the county jail, Sean Goff is an engaging man. Which shouldn't have surprised me, of course.  After all, the man was a minister, a youth pastor, before-- well, before what he did. 
 
We met in the narrow confines of the visitor's center, separated by that barrier, not long after his conviction for a crime that was so horrific it had left more than a few people pondering the possibility for evil in one human soul.  Did I expect his face to betray something sinister or monstrous? 

Instead, the man who shuffled in leg irons to take his position behind the glass practically radiated goodness.  He was wan, of course, pale from his months of confinement during the trial and the long period of preparation since his arrest.  But he was as well groomed, as he was kindly, friendly... engaging.

And he was obviously bright. We talked for, what, 90 minutes? About the Bible, about the theological underpinnings he believed he had discovered for polygamy (a personal error, he now believes), and about many of the endless arguments surrounding Christian dogma. I confess I enjoyed the exchange; Goff is an easy man to talk to.

Then we turned to the murder of his young wife, Joy... his wife-number-two. And that's when Sean Goff's talent for argument took a turn into territory that sounded, quite frankly, as bizarre as it was self-indulgent.  Round and round we went, as he took my questions about his dreadful behavior on a merry-go-round of circular logic. Each answer became a denial -- frequently in blatant disregard of known facts -- of the crime for which he was convicted. He built elaborate excuses for the limited "bad judgment" he was prepared to admit.

Sean Goff with Joy Risker -- wedding photo

 In the end, he said, his religious beliefs dictated his controlling behavior toward his wives.  In the end, he said, it was Joy who was at fault for the horrible bloodbath that ended in her death, that it was she who refused to live by his rules, and she who attacked him.  In the end, he said, it was his commitment to the sanctity of family that led to his decision to dismember and hide Joy's body deep in the Arizona desert.  After all, he reasoned, had he turned himself in; his children would lose a father!
 
 I must tell you, I was not particularly kind in my questions. I called him on his excuses, sometimes harshly. Occasionally, to challenge the sincerity of the religious certainty he pulled around him like a cloak, I was probably unfair.  And yet he never once lost his measured cool.

It became obvious, eventually, that Goff had no intention of confessing the crime he was convicted of inflicting on Joy. And so the interview drew to an end. And then, with his strange calm certainty, free of any apparent sense of guilt -- apparent at least to me -- he told me he has been forgiven for what he did, expects to meet Joy in heaven and has started a new ministry -- in prison.  He smiled as the guards re-attached his shackles.  His goodbye seemed heartfelt.

Sean Goff, some members of the jury had come to believe, is a psychopath, incapable of genuine feeling.

A felt a chill as I drove home. What was the true nature of the man, beneath that charming, deflecting, demeanor?  Does he have a conscience?  Perhaps he does. Perhaps he is merely determined to keep his torment private. And then again, maybe Sean Goff is harboring some evil inside, well hidden behind those engaging public displays of piety and goodwill.

Keith Morrison's report, "Body of Evidence" airs Sunday, July 15, 7 p.m. on Dateline NBC. Click here to see our Web crime files, and to watch more Web-exclusive videos and to weigh in on the verdict.

[Originally posted on Jan. 8, 2007]