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To listen to After the Verdict, subscribe to Dateline Premium on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at datelinepremium. Com. Hey, everybody. I'm Josh Mankowitz, and we're talking Dateland today with Blaine Alexander. Hi.

Hello. Hello, hello.

So Blaine is here to talk about her episode called The Haunted House Confession. Now, if you have not seen it, you, the listeners, it's the episode right below this one on your Dateland podcast feed. So go there, listen to it, or you can stream it on Peacock if you want to watch it, and then come back here. To recap, this is about a young woman named Shantay Blankenship, and her remains were found in a déserted and very scary-looking farmhouse in Brownwood, Texas. Law enforcement worked for a long time to track down her killer. Murder because they were certain that somebody in that churchgoing community was behind the murder. It would take a confession in church to crack that case. Now, for this talking Dateland, we have some extra sound from a couple of churchgoers, Linda and Russell Lamond, and they're going to talk about how their proximity to this awful crime gave them a new perspective. Let's talk Dateland. I am delighted to be here because this is your first two hour episode as a Dateland correspondent.

Absolutely is. There is nobody I would rather do this talking Dateland with than you, Josh. So thank you.

Now, you are a veteran TV reporter, but I'm guessing that you are experiencing the same thing I did when I joined, which is you go from stories that are a really long story is two and a half minutes in your old life, and now you're doing two hours, which means a lot more can be included. You can tell a longer story. There's a great deal more writing. But even so, there's stuff you have to leave out. You have to make some of the same choices that you do when you're doing a piece that lasts a minute and 10 seconds for the evening news.

Absolutely. There's so much to even undertake a story that's as long as the things that we do for Dateline, you have to gather so much information. By the time we finish these stories, you feel like you're an expert on these cases. There are all these different facts and different pieces of sound and information that you want to cram in, but even in two hours, somehow you run out of time. That's why I'm grateful for talking Dateline, because we could talk about all of these other things that never made it into the actual show.

Let's talk about the episode. The locals referred to that farmhouse, which was off the map in a lot of ways. They call that the Haunted House. What was that place like?

I'd done a ton of research for this story, read about it, all of that good stuff, read previous news clips and everything. I hadn't actually seen the house for myself. I didn't see it until I was riding with the investigator, Investigator Bird. We had GoPros in the car, and he was driving me down the dirt roads, and then we get there. And immediately I said, Oh, wow. You can immediately see why this place is called the Haunted House. I mean, it looks right out of central casting of what you would expect to see a haunted house look like. All broken down inside.

It looks like a horror movie.

It does. Then you consider some of the other things. I mean, there is a fence around it that tells people to keep out. If you go inside, the floorboards aren't there. You can't really walk through. There are animals inside and creatures. Then there's this storm cellar, which I wanted to... When we were putting this together, we wanted to make sure that everyone understands what a storm cellar is. I grew up in Oklahoma. Everybody has storm sellers for the most part. Lots of people have them, but this underground place where you go for tornadoes, in the event of tornadoes. That's where Shantay was ultimately found. The place itself almost becomes a character in this story just because of how how creepy it was, to be honest.

I also thought the town was much more of a character than a lot of localities are when we do Dateland. A lot of them are in bigger cities. This really felt like a movie. I mean, the drone shots of those dirt roads and those long straight aways, you get a sense of how isolated it must have been at the time.

Just to break down that isolation a little bit more, Dallas probably is the nearest big city, Dallas, Fort Worth. That's a two and a half hour, maybe three hour drive from Brownwood. But then the place where this happened, where Shantay lived, is actually slightly to the north of Brownwood. You have this small town anyway, but then an even smaller community that's nestled around the lakes. When you talk about a small community, I mean, everyone truly knows everyone there.

She made a tremendous impression on people, and Shantay did. Watching the story, I thought you were able to get a really good sense of what she was like.

I'm glad. I'm glad to hear that because everybody that I spoke to really said that exact same thing. I mean, she was feisty. She had her opinion. She had her thoughts. Her routine with the walking was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. She'd wave at the car, she'd wave at the neighbors. People knew her. When she would go into church, everyone was just taken by just how involved she was. I mean, really, how moved she was by the music, how much she enjoyed being there. And that's something that drew a lot of people to her as well.

For the first hour I'm watching this, I'm thinking, Okay, this is the boyfriend. I don't even know how you guys are going to sustain this for two hours because it's so obviously him. I mean, you're the boyfriend, right? So you got to be close to the top of the suspect list, and you delete texts from your phone. I mean, that is like wearing a sandwich board that says, I did it.

Yeah. When I talked with both of the... Ranger Shay and investigator Scott Bird, and both of them were just... You could tell they were personally impacted by this case, that they put a lot of just their own emotion and obviously brainpower into this. But when they talked about John, they talked about the fact that, yes, he saw her not too long before she disappeared. There were the people who said, okay, maybe they argued, and maybe he was possessive, and deleting of the text messages. Then we talk about this, he slept outside in his car after he realized that Chantel he wasn't inside. That was something that struck them as odd. There was this string of just odd things that made them certainly go further down that rabbit hole.

Then, of course, it turns out he's not the guy. He doesn't have anything to do with it. And he ends up being a really important interview.

I'm glad that he was able to tell his story, in his own words, because he makes the point that even though he was cleared by investigators, pretty early on, a A lot of the people in the community were looking at him and saying, Okay, clearly it's John. Clearly, it's the boyfriend. That's the only way to go. To have that hanging over his head until there was ultimately an arrest, which came more than a year later, was also something that was difficult for him as well. I'm glad that he was able to talk. I'm glad he agreed to speak with us.

Was it hard to get him?

Well, one, I want to say something about sitting down and talking to him. John was so It was so clear that he was just still so impacted by everything that happened to Shantay. He left Brownwood for a while. He moved away. He got work elsewhere. He's still close with her family today, by the way. But he had to leave. He just couldn't necessarily deal with this for a while, and then came back to talk. I asked him how he felt after the interview, and he said he felt relieved. I think that he was glad to be able to tell his story, glad to be able to talk his love for Shantay, because it was something that had come under question during this investigation. It was something that even when I talked to him, I could tell he was still upset by it, and rightfully so. But I could tell that him just talking about and being able to express that love was important to him.

When we get back, we're going to have an extra clip of churchgoers Linda and Russell Lamand, the couple who were there for the killer's confession in church in front of the congregation, and what they learned about compassion from that. Every morning, we choose how to begin our day. This is today. I think about the people at home.

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It was late past midnight when they broke into the farmhouse.

Never in a million years would you think that you'd see your parents house taped off by that yellow tape? No. And they said, You remember being built.

They left behind a wall of blood and a clue that took a case of double murder on a long, strange trip. She looked at me and she said, I'm screwed. Murder in the Moonlight, a new podcast from Dateland.

All episodes of The Water in the Moonlight are available now. To listen ad-free, subscribe to Dateland Premium on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or datelinepremium. Com. The Texas Rangers, they have to wear that hat. That's not choice.

That is the uniform.

That is a requirement. If they do an interview without it, they will get in some trouble, I think.

Here's what's funny. Speaking Speaking of picking up things from your grandparents, Walker, Texas Ranger was my grandpa's one of his favorite shows. You guys remember that? Love that. After I finished my long interview with Ranger Shay, I said, I have to say I was very excited to interview you today because I love Walker, Texas Ranger, and he just fell out laughing. But I asked him, I said, I need to know about this hat. He says, Yes, it's part of the uniform, but here's the thing. They have to be a light color because in the old Westerns, dark color represents the bad guy. The bad guy. Yeah, the bad guy. You have to have your light-colored hat. He told me about it, gave me the specific name of it and everything.

I did a story with the Rangers once. The guy wore his hat the entire time. I never saw the top of his head. We don't do a lot of stories with people who wear hats.

It brings so much character, though, right?

Absolutely. One of the things I thought that really came out in this was the zigzag nature of some of these investigations in which they looked at the boyfriend, they looked at her grandfather, they looked at the pastor, they looked at that other guy who got very combative in the police interview. Colin. That's how these things go. I mean, that's not just dateland storytelling. That is you're looking at these guys and you want to know, do you have an alibi? What read do we get off you when we ask you these tough questions?

I think you're absolutely right. Yes, this was a roadmap of their actual investigation. But what was so frustrating, and this is something that Investigator Bird kept coming back to when he talked to me. It was so frustrating because he had the killer's DNA right there in his hand. I mean, it's the best evidence you can use to identify someone, but I don't know who it is. He said at one point, they were so frustrated. They said, We're just going to set up at this four-way stop sign and just ask everybody who passes for DNA. Let's talk a little bit about that sketch.

Yes. The Hale Mary sketch done by Parabon. Now, phenotyping to get a portrait is extremely controversial. Andrea did it in an episode, which I think was called Facing the Music, and they made a sketch of her based on her DNA, and it didn't really look like Andrea. You certainly wouldn't have looked at that sketch and thought, Oh, that's Andrea. Sometimes it doesn't work, and it can be incredibly misleading is the criticism. But in this case, it led to the guy.

It paid off. It absolutely paid off. In talking with Investigator Bird, there were several things that he believes really lined up. One of them is that with this, they choose an age of what they're going to make the sketch look like. It was within a year of Ryan Riggs' actual age. And so had they chosen, I don't know, a 75-year-old man or something, it obviously wouldn't have looked like him. Two, though, they talk about going through pictures, and this was one of the pictures on his Facebook page, believe it or not, that actually looked almost exactly like that.

Yeah, that I was struck by how much the sketch looked like him, particularly in the eyes. Yes. There's a lot of police-generated video in this, which I thought really helped the viewer live in the moment. You really see a lot of things. I'm actually going to say that this is one of those episodes where it really is important for people to go look at it and not just listen to the audio because you're going to learn some stuff from the pictures that you're not going to learn otherwise.

Absolutely. I think probably one of the strongest examples of that is when they're talking with Ryan at the end after he's done this confession in church, which was stunning in and of itself, the way that he is just so casually describing what he did to Shantay, not seeming to flinch, not seeming upset. That's something that you have to see, I think, to get the full effect of that.

A lot of times, it's very hard for killers to recount what it is that they did. He He just talks about it like he was having lunch. One of the other things that I thought was fascinating was there's those weird markings on her, which maybe makes you think this is some devil worshiping cult. She's killed on Friday the 13th. Then it turns out none of that really has anything to do with it. But again, it's one of those things that if you're working on this murder, you're going to look at those possibilities because that does all seem like the are lining up.

They really did. I think also when you juxtapose, we talked about the haunted house being a character. The church in its own way was also a character, right? Because you have this house of evil, the haunted house. But then at the end, the confession happens in the house of worship. I think that, especially when you talk with the Le mans, they were scarred by what happened there in church, by what happened, what was supposed to be this safe sanctuary of a space. So some of that evil did infiltrate the church as well.

This feels like a good time to play the extra sound from the Le mans who talked about what that confession did to them.

I can tee it up real quick. I am very glad that we talked with the Le mans, Russell and Linda, and appreciative to them for speaking with us because this is something that clearly still upsets them today. They're both people of very deep faith, very deep Christian faith. He was a leader in the church. To have this, we love, we forgive, but also we love Shantay, and you did a terrible thing to her. How do you marry those two thoughts? Anyway, they talk about it a little bit more in this piece, in this clip here. You've gone through a lot from mourning the death of someone who was a family member, to months of not knowing, to now these conflicted emotions. As you sit here today, how has this whole experience changed you?

It has I would say to look at things in a different perspective. If it had been a stranger, you would say, Hey, give them the death pin, an eye for an eye or whatever. But when it hit so close to home, your mindset and your perspective changes because, wow, this is right here in our lap. Now we have to see it maybe through God's eyes because I believe that everybody deserves a second chance. We can't look at somebody and say, Hey, you're a murderer or you're a sex offender or whatever your problem is. We can't look at you and only see what you did, but we have to see you for who you are.

Linda, I'd ask you the same question. How has this whole experience changed you?

My eyes have been opened because before, I didn't know anybody who was in jail, so I didn't have that compassion.

I thought, Okay, you're in jail.

You're supposed to be there. What I feel is that God let us experience this so that I can show more compassion to those that do, we all sin, but do those extremely bad things, murder, assault, that thing on another human being, and we can show a little bit more compassion for them. I'm always stunned when I hear people talking about forgiveness and compassion for people like Ryan in a case like this. I would find that hard to conjure up, but they don't, clearly.

I think that that section of interview could be very difficult for a lot of people to listen to, of course, not least of all Shantay's family. But this notion of when you look at the context of how Ryan was able to go in front of his church, confess, have people in some way show support, and then proceed on to the sheriff's office and confess there and face the consequences. Michelle Shantay's mother was really upset about that. She was certainly noting the compassion that wasn't shown to her daughter. But then also this was a place that was very special to Shantay. This was Shantay's safe space. Obviously, Ryan, his family, had a relationship with the church and the pastor as well. I should mention, our team reached out to the pastor a number of times, and he never responded. Ryan's parents declined interview. But she was just very upset by the fact that the place that was so important to Shantay could receive such a confession.

I mean, I get why it made her family. It would make me crazy if that happened. But ultimately, he did get the punishment that the legal system would have doled out, regardless of whether he had gone to church first or not.

Sure. I asked that question. This is somebody that you've been looking for for 18 months, right? The crime is brutal. As soon as you got word, why weren't the police immediately called? Why was that allowed to happen? That in the end, he able to do things on his own terms to a degree, being able to go home, his parents taking him to church, going to the sheriff's office, rather than law enforcement coming in, carding him away, and that's the end of it.

Coming up next, your questions from social media.

Hey, guys, Willie Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with Emmy and Golden Globe winner, the legend Angela Bassett. To talk about playing the President of the United States in the buzzed about new Robert De Niro series, Zero Day, and Starring as the Queen in the blockbuster, Black Panther Movies.

You can hear our conversation now for free wherever you download your podcasts. Now they had the final answer, or did they? Nothing has more suspense than a dateland mystery, and no one wants to wait to find out what happens next. That's why everyone needs Dateland Premium, where listening is always ad-free. You get the whole story and nothing but the story. Or do you? Yes, actually. You do.

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Com. Okay, we are back with social media questions. Well, we got a lot of questions on a lot of topics. Jim Kelly from Facebook said, It showed how tech can use DNA to render an image of the killer and aid in their apprehension. Truly amazing. Now, here's the thing. There's an enormous amount of debate within the forensic scientific community over whether or not DNA phenotyping is legit or junk science. But Harabon does not market this as, We're going to give you an image of the killer. They market this as, We're going to provide you with a lead. You still need to do basic police work after that.

The investigators are very clear about that, too. It was, yes, we have the sketch, yes, we now have this name, but that would not be enough to take into court. That wouldn't be enough to convict someone, certainly. It led them to Ryan, but it was the fact that Ryan knew the things that only the killer would know. Yes, obviously, the DNA match was what really, really tied it together.

We have an audio question from Brandon Elkins. Let's listen to that.

Hi, guys. Blaine. That was Dayline At It's Best. It was absolutely phenomenal.

And thanks for the story, Blaine.

And once again, welcome to the family. My question for this week's episode is regarding Ryan and why police didn't seem to investigate him prior to the phenotype, the picture being released on social media. It just seems a lot of young men were interviewed, and it just seems as if he's somebody that would have been talked to when they just kept hitting dead end after dead end.

So I'm just curious if there was any reason why he didn't pop up at all.

Anyway, thanks, guys. I appreciate it once again. Brandon First, I'll say, one, thank you so much for the kind welcome. I really appreciate it. This just goes to prove that our Dateland viewers are basically detectives in and of themselves. I mean, that's a fantastic question. We never actually got a great answer to that. John Shantay's boyfriend, said that he had mentioned Ryan's name, but it never really went anywhere. We don't know the degree to which investigators went down that road.

Another audio question. This one's from Katherine Ipert the timing of Ryan's confession.

Hi, this is Katherine from South Carolina with my question for Blaine. I find the timing of the confession intriguing. Was it ever confirmed that the paragon image scared Riggs into his church confession? Katherine, thank you for your question. A great question. Yes, that's what investigators believe. What happened was the paragon image was released. Soon after that, Ryan, who had been at his parents house, disappeared. After several days or so on the run, he came back and went to the church.

I do love it when people call in with audio questions. It's nice to hear everybody's voice.

Oh, that's the most fun part about this, whether it's on social media or the new phone number we have. I love hearing people's voices and actually asking the question. So more of that, please.

Dateline fans, as we already know, are dog lovers. Patricia N. The Mutts says, Always take issues of animal cruelty seriously. Ryan Riggs committed an animal cruelty. It escalated from there, resulting in the rape and murder of a beautiful young woman. It is true that a lot of rapists begin with cruelty towards animals, specifically cats, since that's perceived as a more feminine animal.

It shows how closely she's paying attention because, yes, he did mention that in his childhood, he had this chihuahua that he would try and drown. But that is, yes, an early indicator. It starts with animals and then escalates from there.

Patricia also said that the Good Samaritans that went looking for her and found her in this place where no one ever goes. She says that was divine intervention, which I'm guessing people in that church might agree with.

Well, not only the church, but that's something that Investigator Scott Bird said to me multiple times. Had it not been for the fact that they were able to find her as quickly as they did, they would not have been able to track down the killer without that evidence. So, yes, he is not shy about the fact that he believes that this was absolutely divine intervention.

As you might expect, as we all might expect, Shantay's family and friends were watching. Linda Lamand wrote, Thank you so much for telling Shantay's story, Blaine. You did a wonderful job. I agree.

That's so kind. I don't take that lightly. I really appreciate hearing from Linda. Thank you for that comment.

Shantay's mother, Michelle, said, Thank you all so much for telling my baby's story. She deserves this.

I have so much love for Michelle. My heart really goes out to her and to Stephen, Shantay's stepfather, for both of them to sit down and talk with us and trust us to tell Shantay's story in the right way, in a respectful way, really meant a lot. So thank you, Michelle, for that.

My prediction is that you will still be in touch with some of these people in a few years.

I've got to say, a few hours before this episode aird on Friday, I got a text from the very first straight-line interview I ever did. It was Jolene, and she was the sister-in-law of Heidi Farkas, and that was my story that aird in 2023. Yes, it will always stay with me. I think all of these families will because when you do a story to your point about the depths that we go to know and understand the story, the case, but also the person, that a connection isn't one that goes away quickly.

You produced this with Marissa Mayer?

Yes. Who's fantastic.

Who is the greatest. Congratulations. And to both of you. A very good story, good episode, and a great tale from start to finish.

Thank you so much, Josh. This was one that will stay with me and an honor to do this one. Thank you, my friend.

Remember, if you have any questions for us about stories you think we should cover or about Dateland, you can reach us 24/7 on social media at @datelandnbc. If you have a question for us here on Talking Dateland, you can leave it for us in a voicemail at 212-413-5252 for a chance to be featured on a future episode. And that phone rings on Keith's desk, just FYI. Since we're talking about Keith, be sure to check out Keith's new podcast, which is called murder in the Moonlight. It is about a double homicide and a single shiny clue that helps investigators crack the case. You can binge the entire series right now, wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up this Friday, convicted murderer, Laurie Vallaud-Dabel, who some of you may know as Mommy Doomsday, speaks with Keith Morison in her first ever television interview. We will see you Fridays on Dateland on NBC.