Hi, everyone.
I'm Lester Holt and we're talking Dateline today and here with senior producer Allison Orr and producer Anne Priceman to talk about this week's episode, Malice.
If you haven't seen it, you can watch the episode on Peacock or listen to it at the Dateline podcast feed and then come right back here to listen to our discussion.
In this episode we'll have a podcast exclusive clip from Blaine's interview with Susan Embert about a public Facebook post she made in the days after Jake Embert's death.
And then later, we'll answer some of your questions from social media.
So now let's talk Dateline.
First of all, ladies, thank you for being with us.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks, Lester.
The reason why Blaine is not here I'm sure she would love to be here talking to you about the episode and instead you get me and Anne is because Blaine is on her way as we speak and record this episode, to do what is going to be her first jailhouse Dateline interview inside a facility.
And you're going to see that.
I'm sure it's going to be a great, really interesting case on a future Dateline.
Allison, I don't know if you want to start off and just kind of give us the big picture of this story.
Watching it, I felt like I was watching a bouncing ball half the time.
There were so many twists and turns.
There were so many twists and turns.
Things got started.
They slowed down, you know, one step forward, one step back.
But the story essentially begins in 2014 in Georgia.
A man named Jake Embert was found shot to death in his home.
His wife on the scene told investigators and the coroner who arrived that she believed he'd shot himself in the head.
And it was very quickly ruled a suicide.
But his children his children from a previous marriage and his sister.
His family members didn't believe it from the get-go.
So what this story really became about was their long journey to find out what really happened and to seek justice.
And through three trials and lots of machinations through the justice system, Susan Embert was finally convicted of murder earlier this year.
We should point out this was a.
This is very sensitive subject matter when you're talking about suicide, and many families and people will, you know, be surprised by someone taking their life with their own hands.
But this family was able to really say this was out of character, that this is not something that he would do.
It just doesn't add up.
He'd been talking with his son.
They were looking forward to going to car races that night.
The son left for all of 40 minutes, and that kind of very quick turn seemed impossible.
He couldn't flip his mood that quickly.
So this is a mystery, and we've certainly presented it as such, but it's also about a fight.
It was the fight to find out what really happened.
And they needed to fight from the beginning.
Rachel Embert, right at the beginning of the story, says I need to find out what happened to my dad.
Like that spark was lit in her.
Not that she thought it was a homicide, but just the emotion that she had then that she channeled into fighting for a decade about how to bring this to justice.
Well, in Blaine's interview with Rachel, the victim's daughter, she says, what the blank happened?
You know, not to laugh it off, but you could almost see that as the title of this episode.
Lester, will you please say, here's Blaine Alexander with what the bleep happened.
I'll let our audience at home kind of imagine what that might sound like.
So how did the team, our team, learn about this story?
That goes back to 2018.
We saw a small news article about it in the local news in Georgia.
Our producer, Christine, picked up the phone, called private investigator Lee Wilson.
The family had been wanting to talk to Dateline.
They had drafted, sent letters to Dateline.
Christine went down there, met them in person.
She was immediately impressed with the force of conviction of this family and it was very intriguing.
So we were on the story from before the first trial started.
And then, after that trial ended, the appeals process began, which delayed and delayed and delayed our production.
I mean, our production is the least of it.
The justice system was delaying getting to answers.
And in that time, it's now 2026, a lot of life was lived.
Christine, who's not here with us... got married, had two babies.
She's on her second maternity leave while we've been covering this.
I believe Will Embert got married.
Rachel Embert had a baby.
I mean, a lot of time went by and a lot of life was lived while we were making this production.
Yeah, and typically that production would involve covering, you know, the handling of the crime scene and new evidence and scientific and physical evidence, yada yada.
But in this case, the investigation was one hour long.
It really was not an investigation.
It was a woman who made a 911 call saying my husband killed himself.
And they came with the understanding it was a suicide, despite the family saying wait wait wait wait, wait.
That's not possible.
You have to look at this again.
And the coroner arrived and about 15 minutes after he arrived, he determined it was a suicide.
Are you surprised he sat down for an interview?
Not really.
I mean, you could see it sort of in the interview.
He's not apologetic.
He showed up early to the interview.
He was forthright.
He talked a lot.
Yeah, and he told Blaine that he allowed Jake's remains to be cremated a day after his death, based on what information he had at the time.
I guess I was surprised that a coroner didn't do their own independent investigation.
Have you come across this before?
In fact, we have come across it as an aspect of the criminal justice system.
A lot of big cities and metropolitan cities, places with big budgets have a medical examiner who is probably a forensic pathologist or at least a medical doctor, someone who's been to medical school.
That's what a medical examiner does.
In a lot of these rural counties, particularly in Georgia, it's an elected office.
And to be elected coroner in Georgia, in the county where this man was elected, you need to be 18 years old, have a high school diploma and then, after you're elected, you need to take a 40-hour course in coroner studies.
Now, Michael Fowler, the coroner here, he did have more training than that.
He had studied mortuary science and he had many, many years training working with dead bodies in disaster relief.
So he had a lot of experience.
He had more than just a high school diploma in 40 hours.
But that is the standard in some places.
It was very surprising to Jake Embert's family.
You know, given how a coroner's determination, they're not a law enforcement officer anymore.
That's why I think Michael Fowler says over and over in the interview I was depending on what law enforcement does.
It's law enforcement's job to investigate.
He looks at the state of the body, but he does the certificate that says homicide or suicide.
And that is very consequential to a lot of cases.
I mean, you know, and our viewers know, that we've done a lot of stories that are the question of suicide or murder.
So Yvonne looked for help.
She found a private investigator on Google named Lee Wilson.
What did you find out about him?
Lee was a detective with one of the local police forces for years, but he just got to work finding records you never even think of and putting together both a profile,
And it was a case.
It was a hefty, hefty case that it wasn't all circumstantial.
He did the work of a police officer, just a good old-fashioned detective.
He did some digging, I know, into Susan's previous marriages.
What did he find out?
Yeah, she'd been married three times before.
In the program you can see, Lee spoke to a couple of her husbands and they talked about the kind of tumultuous times that they had had.
And then there was a third husband who actually he supports her.
He's in the program, but the way that that came about was when Susan was planning to come to our interview to talk to Blaine.
She asked if she could bring a family member or somebody for support, which you know we usually allow.
We want people to feel comfortable when they come for an interview.
And she brought her ex-husband.
So that's a little unusual.
But then we're like, what do you have to say?
What do you think?
And he supports her.
He says she's not like that.
But the other two husbands, one of whom is now deceased, so we couldn't speak to him.
But the other two husbands told Lee Wilson about some rocky times.
All right, when we come back, we have got a podcast-exclusive clip about a Facebook post Susan Emberg made in the days following Jake's death.
So the biggest part of this episode is Blaine's interview with Susan Embert.
For fans who have been following Blaine's Dateline journey, this was a milestone for her time as a Dateline correspondent.
This was her first interview with a murderer.
Yes, indeed.
Blaine was new to the show.
Remember, we got on this story in 2018.
We'd been tracking the story for a long time.
And when Susan Embert was released from prison...
She wanted to talk to us.
And so she was the first interview that Blaine did with someone accused of murder.
But really significant in the story.
The interview happens before Susan Ember goes on trial for the second time.
Let's face it, a lot of defense attorneys would not let their client do that.
I mean, she clearly had a lot to lose, you would think.
Well, she testified in her first trial.
And her attorney at the time of our interview, her appeals attorney was the one behind it.
And I think there was a lot of belief in her.
And in fact...
This attorney was also one of her trial attorneys, and they got very close.
You could see that she was truly attached to Susan.
She would rub her back during the trial and hug her and comfort her.
I think there was a true belief that Susan had nothing to hide.
How did you guys prepare for this interview?
Well, you know, you prepare for an interview like this the way you prepare for any big interview right, Lester?
Like, you've interviewed world leaders and despots and politicians.
You get a binder full of information from your fastidious producer, right?
You get this massive binder.
You read it.
In this case, they also had the benefit of the first trial.
So Blaine was able to review all the testimony.
And Blaine's not here.
Can we gossip about her behind her back a little bit?
Okay.
So Blaine, beautiful, beautiful person inside and out.
She's got a really, really big brain.
And she really studied this case from beginning to end before she sat down with Susan.
And Susan was fascinating to listen to the kind of weird contradictions, the way she speaks or misspeaks.
And Blaine was able to just really listen and then speak for the viewer when something is like huh, that doesn't sound right.
Yeah, I know that one of my techniques with an interview is you don't have to beat them up, but just ask them enough challenging questions to allow them to reveal themselves.
So Susan used the word ecstatic.
She used it several times to describe finding Jake dead.
Let's take a listen to that.
Take me back to that moment when you first saw Jake.
I was ecstatic.
I thought I was going to lose my mind.
I didn't know what to do.
So I called 911 like I was supposed to do.
I didn't know what to do.
That's what I did.
I called 911.
Was it a slip of the tongue?
What was your read on that?
I don't think it was a slip of the tongue.
I think she doesn't understand, in all honesty, what ecstatic means.
It seems to me rather strange to keep repeating it, particularly with the theory that she's faking her staging.
You would sort of check your vocabulary.
I think she thinks I don't know what word we could guess at, but she just didn't understand what ecstatic meant.
There were some other parts of the interview that didn't make it in the show, where Susan just had details that were wrong.
Like you know, she told Blaine that she and Jake had been together for four years, which was just sort of patently not true.
And it made for a strange little bit of back and forth of it.
Like, wait, is she lying or is she just truly mistaken?
And it was...
You know, as they got into the rhythm and kind of got to know each other over the course of the interview, I think it just it revealed itself.
But there were some other inconsistencies that had nothing to do with guilt or innocence.
That happened during the interview.
You guys artfully used the 911 recording in that interview, especially trying to establish did she use the term transmitted diseases or not?
And this gets back to that larger question you raised a moment ago as to does she not understand the word or the phrase or something else?
In her testimony and to Blaine, she's saying it was PTSD.
And I think everyone else upon hearing that did not think that because, as we know, she was connecting it to him, her allegation that he was gay.
The insinuation to almost everybody is she's trying to say sexually transmitted.
But it ended up being evidence of just sort of an ongoing fiction being created.
All right, well, we have some extra sound from Blaine's interview with Susan.
Susan made a public Facebook post in the days after Jake's death, and Blaine read that post to her.
Let's take a listen to how that went.
After Jake's death, sometime after his death, I want to read a post.
You made some posts on Facebook, and one of them seemed to be directed at Jake's family.
I want to read it to you.
You wrote, "'To whom it may concern, I do not play games.'"
And I do not tolerate any drama or negativity that comes my way.
I am way too smart for all of this.
So please back off or I will have no choice but to take necessary legal action.
I am way too grown up to spend my last days here on earth in jail.
Who were you talking to in that post?
I was talking to basically anybody that read it.
But mainly, I mean, I was talking to them.
I was just saying that I would call the law.
I'd call the law legally.
I'd do it legally.
Call the law.
If they messed with me, I would call the law.
His family?
Yes.
If anybody did.
And when you say messed with you, Like tried to jump on me or start trouble with me, and stuff like that.
Argue with me.
At that point, Susan, did you know that Jake's family was accusing you of murder?
No.
You had no idea?
No.
Her Facebook post was...
I don't know.
It feels like subtly, a declaration, defiant obviously, but almost like the family reads it as she did it.
She's saying, I did it and leave me alone.
But there's another way to look at it, which is just leave me alone, stop harassing me.
She felt harassed by the family.
The family felt lied to by her.
You know, it's an emotional time.
Everybody's tensions are certainly really, really high.
You know we talked about Jake's children, but Susan's daughter agreed to an interview and then she wholeheartedly believes that her mother is innocent.
Tell me about that.
How has she handled everything?
She's close with her mother and does not just as other people can never see her as evil, as a conniving plotting, terrible human.
She's dedicated to her mother, as is her son and her granddaughter.
They love, they see a different side to this woman than many other people.
And that's a really important voice to include that there's a different dimension as far as her family sees it.
So Blaine's interview with Susan Ebert wasn't the last time you all saw Susan.
Your interview with her was before her second and third trial.
What was the atmosphere like in the courtroom?
It was tense.
I guess we always say that.
One of the things... There were at least a dozen members of Jake's family in there.
And one person on Susan's side, it was an aunt, Jake's family.
They were... determined.
They just wanted this taken care of, this done and done right.
And it was interesting to be around.
The judge in the third trial really wanted the media present.
Did you get that sense?
Oh, she said it.
We were on a remote hearing, and she started out by saying, I was a teacher.
And one day I watched a trial, gavel to gavel, And I was so impressed with it that I became a lawyer.
And now that I'm a judge, I very, very much believe in transparency, that the public, the American public, benefits from seeing how the justice system works.
We also get a kind of a heartwarming window into the effect.
This would happen on all players here.
It ends.
The episode ends with Jake's son Will, revealing that he's pursuing a career in law enforcement.
That was a special moment.
Yeah.
I think we say this, but really do want to emphasize, he's in law enforcement.
So what happened to his father and what happened with law enforcement's response...
Does not happen on his watch.
And we've talked about his training.
He said it's on suicides, on geriatric deaths, on homicides.
We do the same thing.
We go on the scene.
We document it.
We count pills.
We... take photographs, we call forensics.
He's a very good guy.
Apparently he's a lot like his dad rather stoic, but he throws out hysterical jokes every once in a while.
So anyway, more importantly, he really sees this as a correction, an improvement.
Okay, well, after the break, Anne and I will answer your questions from social media.
So Ann, we got tons of questions from Dateline viewers about how little evidence there appeared to be.
Here's what Linda Newsome wrote us on Facebook.
She says the cops didn't even bother to investigate.
Brand new officer just out of the academy had never even seen a dead body and he just wanted to get the heck out of there.
And this one is from Barb, Barb, Barb on Facebook.
Why don't small police sheriff departments ask for help investigating deaths?
I watched too many murder shows where small town law enforcement egos get in their own way.
So murderers get away with it.
It did generate a lot of discussion, because that's a big part of the story is that quick investigation and the experience level of the officers.
I think it.
Honestly, it befuddles people why this particular department didn't call not just didn't call for help, but didn't have healthy skepticism that every law enforcement officer is trained to have.
And I guess if you're going back to evidence.
Susan herself giving a lot of different statements, contradictory, was evidence in itself.
Those few photos ended up being incredibly helpful and I think the past history with financials and some behavior really allowed at least the third set of prosecutors to really form a, I think, a very holistic case.
But, you know, they would have certainly liked more.
And as we've discussed, the family takes the investigation into their own hands.
Here's what one viewer had to say about Yvonne and the hairbrush.
This came from Carrie Ann McComber, the sister of the man deceased.
I watched Dateline.
Bingo.
Well, let's take a listen to that.
You basically have a detective's mind at this point.
No, I just watch Dateline.
And not the first time Dateline's been mentioned during interviews.
Yvonne is a combination of tough cookie and softy and not a woman to be trifled with.
Very, very smart.
I didn't know that she was an active viewer.
It's always nice to hear that Dateline has an impact and it makes sort of our work very an extra added bit of worthwhile, I think.
And it was great to hear that.
All right, of course, fans have questions about Susan Embert.
Up first, this one from Tammy Lynn on Facebook.
How did she explain away the pregnancy?
What about that, Ann?
She explained it in her interview that she took a test.
The test came back positive, and then she did it again a little while later, and it was negative.
That's how she explains it.
All right.
And finally, Pamela Fitzgerald on Facebook wrote, Well, I am ecstatic that they got it right.
Almost every word she said, her facial expressions and body language gave it away.
That's at least Pamela's assessment of it.
I think it's—what's next for Susan is she's going to prison for life.
The family wants to make sure that's not the— resolution for this, that there's more to do.
They don't want to happen to any other family.
I know they want changes to how a coroner becomes a coroner.
They would like changes in how victims are informed and included In the process, because very often they would find things out like Susan was let out.
They'd find out after the fact or wouldn't find out at all on other things that they'd find out through months later or whatnot.
Most importantly, they want people to pay attention to what happened with the way this case was not investigated.
Well, Anne, thanks very much.
It's been great having you here.
Thanks so much for having me.
That's it for Talking Dateline this week.
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In the meantime, thanks for listening.
