Veteran “Dateline” correspondent Josh Mankiewicz has gone digital along with his first podcast.
In “Motive for Homicide,” Mankiewicz takes a deeper dive into the twisty story of two Houston murders featured on a Friday-night “Dateline” episode he anchored final November on NBC.
The primary two “Motive for Homicide” episodes, obtainable Thursday, are already #1 on Apple’s podcast charts. A brand new episode will premiere every Thursday beginning subsequent week.
“The beauty of this case is that it didn’t match the usual ‘Dateline’ template,” Mankiewicz tells The Publish. “It wasn’t the husband, it wasn’t the spouse, it wasn’t the boyfriend or girlfriend, it wasn’t for insurance coverage … what made it such a compelling story to inform was simply making an attempt to determine the motive, which had investigators scratching their heads for a extremely very long time.
“There have been theories that defined one sufferer’s homicide however didn’t clarify the opposite sufferer’s homicide,” he says, “and the reasons simply didn’t make sense.”
The younger victims — Iranian activist/researcher Gelareh Bagherzade and Coty Beavers — have been murdered 10 months aside in 2012. They knew one another, however connecting their slayings flummoxed investigators for six years.
![Gelareh Bagherzade]()
“I actually needed to do that one, because it fell type of exterior the everyday ‘Dateline’ footprint,” Mankiewicz says of the podcast, produced along side Neon Hum Media. “In case you don’t know the story already, you’re not going to know who it was within the first 5 minutes. This was a possibility to inform it another way and it’s additionally uncommon simply because the circumstances have been so bizarre and it’s such a protracted, extremely intricate case.
“A good friend of mine, who’s a murder detective, says all murders, if you’re in search of motive, classify them as love, cash or pleasure.
“That was the unique title of this podcast.”
Mankiewicz says that anchoring “Motive for Homicide” offered him extra flexibility than a typical “Dateline” episode when it comes to storytelling.
“In in a two-hour ‘Dateline’ we’re going to depart stuff out,” he says. “Every hour is 38 minutes of precise programming. In a podcast, it doesn’t make any distinction: when you can clarify one thing properly sufficient and clearly sufficient, you possibly can put it in. As an illustration, if I’m speaking about someone sentenced for one crime however not one other … that’s not one thing that’s going to get right into a ‘Dateline’ episode, because it’s troublesome to clarify and would require me speaking too lengthy on TV.
“However our followers, individuals who take heed to podcasts and watch ‘Dateline,’ will come as much as me on the airport and say, ‘Why didn’t the Modesto cops use Luminol on the second crime scene?’ They need to know precisely what went into that [perpetrator’s] sentencing suggestion — so you will get these little granular particulars into the story and nonetheless hold it entertaining for everybody else.”