I'm Lester Holt. Tonight on Dateline. A young woman alone with danger in the dark.

I can't even believe she would meet someone at a park at three a.m. I think she knew the second she got in his car that something was wrong. A new chapter in a heartbreaking story.

I'd like to have a wellness check on my daughter. A secret life uncovered. She was on a dating site looking for sugar daddies.

Going into it blindly is not something I would recommend.

Never before revealed details. Is this guy dodging us? He kind of selected her as his victim, correct? Towards the bottom of the dig site, there was a damaged iPhone, looks like maybe clothing that was just a sinking feeling, really. I just replay this one I had with her and I just want to grab her and say, don't do it, don't go.

Here's Keith Morrison with the waiting car. Our minds have a curious way to see things. We sent something off, something wrong, even terrible.

You get something in the brain wants to believe the worst didn't happen. Kennedy Stoner knows that feeling.

Well, I was kind of pushing away from my gut instinct. I'm not really sure why I never imagined this ever happening to one of my friends.

I wouldn't think you'd want to imagine it right now or anyone that I know or so my mind didn't go there.

So she told herself it would be fine if she reached out from her home here in Salt Lake City, Utah. Messages to her friend Mackenzie Lueck.

I saw that she was opening my snapshots and I had texted her and I didn't get a text back. And this is stupid, but I was kind of wondering if she was mad at me for something.

The mind wants a simple explanation. After all, she knew her best friend was grieving. Mackenzie's grandmother had recently passed away in California.

I know she was heartbroken over that and so is the rest of her family because they're all very close. And she went to the funeral. She died. She left Utah. She went to the funeral. So I was thinking maybe she just took a few days off social media or something. Mackenzie's parents, though, hadn't heard from her either. After three days of escalating fear, Mackenzie's dad made that most dreadful phone call to the Salt Lake City Police Department.

Yeah, I'd like to get it if possible, have a wellness check done on my daughter. And I've been trying to get a hold of her and her phone just tends to go to voicemail. I just wonder if I could have somebody maybe go by her house and check on her.

The story Mackenzie's dad told was this On the night of Sunday, June 16th, twenty nineteen, Mackenzie had boarded a flight from Los Angeles back to Utah, arriving in Salt Lake City around 1:00. Thirty five a.m. Monday at 2:00 or 1:00 a.m. she texted her mom to say she landed safely.

After that, three days of silence between the two patrol officers went straight away to Mackenzie's townhouse.

Her car was in the driveway. That was a good sign. Repeated knocks at the door, however, went unanswered. Peering through a window, the officer saw nothing, not a soul around. It called Mackenzie's dad to report the news. And next, the officers found Mackenzie's friend's boss and professors.

None of them had seen her. Like all reasons why, by the end of this unsettling day, Mackenzie's case was referred to a place that sounded very serious indeed, the Salt Lake City Police Department's homicide squad. We had a lot of missing persons cases in Salt Lake City.

Lieutenant Todd Mitchell is the unit's chief detective. So I try my best to sift through those and find the the ones that kind of raise the hair on the back of your neck for lack of a better term in this race, the hair on the back of my neck. So that's why I decided we need to take action now and and at least start a national investigation into it.

Truth be told, most reports are easily resolved. The missing person may have simply lost their phone or just decided to take a break from some family drama. But that didn't appear to be the case with Mackenzie.

The relationship she had with her mom and dad. Would be the envy of most parents. They were always contacting each other, they'd send a little silly text back and forth on a daily basis.

Detectives Nate Wiley and Tiffany SAYES led the missing persons investigation, even though their specialty was murder.

I mean, a usual homicide investigation.

We start there's a dead body. We starting with something. We have a victim and we're moving backwards. In this case, we started with nothing.

First Action says, and while he took was to pull the Salt Lake City airport surveillance camera footage from the night of Mackenzie's disappearance.

And sure enough, there she was. So it's nothing out of the ordinary. We're able to see her come off the the terminal. And we followed her all the way down to the baggage claim to where she picked up her luggage.

Seemed perfectly normal. Fine, casual. Yes. Nothing out of the ordinary that we could see it all.

The last clip shows McKenzie, like so many other passengers, casually getting into a car outside baggage claim. But the identity of the driver. A mystery. News of this police investigation quickly spread among McKenzie's friends. The second that I heard about that, my stomach. Dropped, so Kennedy launched her own investigation. I went on Facebook, I dropped pictures of us together and I said she's missing. Like, if you know anything, reach out to me.

Reach out, please.

I thought she was still in California until I saw Candy's message on Facebook.

Ashleigh find another of Mackenzie's college friends, put up her own Facebook post, and I tagged her in it.

And because I talked to her Facebook, some of her other family members reach out to me immediately. What family members? Some of her distant cousins, one who lives here in Utah. And we started talking and messaging and I said, you know, I have a feeling that she took a life share. I'm feeling really strong that she did that. So you're worried that maybe something happened? Definitely.

Definitely happened on their own, Ashleigh. And this cousin called Lyft and Uber to see if either one of them had picked up Mackenzie at the airport.

And that's really when this began, because somehow they let it slip lifted that she got in a lift that night.

What did you do at that point?

We contacted law enforcement about the lift, a big break for Saiz and Wili passengers because it gave them probable cause to serve lift with a search warrant and find out where her destination was, where she was dropped off, what time she was picked up, where did she go.

So we were able to get the destination from the airport all the way up to North Salt Lake address.

And she was dropped off at Hach Park up in North Salt Lake just before 3:00 a.m. in a park at 3:00 a.m..

Why would McKenzie come here?

And just as important, why would a driver leave a young woman alone burdened with luggage at a park in the middle of the night? Who would do such a thing?

It was, detectives say, his job to track down the driver who she discovered was not so easy to find.

We were like, is this guy dodging us? McKenzie's friends have a terrifying theory about why she's missing.

When we come back, I assume that the left driver abducted her. And here's one reason why her last text message that we recovered was at two fifty eight prior to her arriving at the Hatch Park location. And that was the last activity ever we had on her phone. One year before Mackenzie Lueck disappeared in June 2013, a disturbing story had gone national.

Several stories, actually, about women being assaulted by using lifter Bubar.

At least 14 women have now filed a lawsuit against the rideshares giant. And perhaps no surprise, Mackenzie's friend Ashley find. Imagine something like that the worse.

Assume that the left driver abducted her or maybe they were in a car accident in their car driven off the road.

The detectives thought that was a possibility, too. So they wanted very much to find that elusive Lyft driver who gave Mackenzie a ride the night she vanished.

We wanted to know if he was, in fact, going to be a suspect or not. He was, though, nowhere to be found. Just as odd, Mackenzie's phone, the detectives line was turned off just as her lift ride came to an end.

Her last text message that we recovered was at two fifty eight prior to her arriving at the Hatch Park location, and that was the last activity ever we had on her phone on the morning of Saturday, June 22nd, six days after Mackenzie went missing.

Detective Tiffany says finally tracked down McKenzies Lyft driver.

He says there wasn't a lot of conversation going on in the car. He did recall her being on her phone, but he didn't know who she was talking to because he fully cooperative.

Did he seem? Oh, yes. Definitely wanted to help you. He did. He didn't he didn't seem like he had anything to do with this at all because he had an alibi, a very good one, actually.

As soon as he dropped Mackenzie off, surveillance footage at a nearby intersection captured him, leaving to pick up another fare.

The date, time and location all confirmed by the tracking software on his lift app.

And he continued that through the night.

And so so you could eliminate him pretty easily based on the fact he was elsewhere very quickly.

Yes, she was smiling. She was in in good spirits. McKenzies, Lyft driver. He's Canada told police and later us he remembered the weird drop off location. Even Mackenzie commented on that, he said. Saying how it was odd to be dropped off in the middle of night at a park. Canada, though, said he wasn't too worried because someone with a car was there waiting for McKenzie and unloaded her luggage, said goodbye and drove away.

So who was that, someone in the waiting car? The detectives were hoping they could identify him or her through Mackenzie's phone records, and she had been texting a number with a two zero six area code right up to the point her phone went dead. So we were able to actually take that number and run it through our little databases. And it came back as absolutely nothing and come back to anybody.

I had to be some type of burner phone this out. So whoever that was did not want anyone to know any one in any official capacity to know who it was. It was pretty obvious at that point. But according to the Lyft driver, whoever met McKenzie at the park made no effort to conceal their identity from her. To the contrary, they seemed to know each other really well because I think all I heard was how are you doing? How the trip just kind of basic greeting.

The situation seemed very safe.

She obviously knew the person that she was getting into the car with, that Mackenzie had caught a ride with someone she knew was both good and bad news.

The good news, of course, was it meant maybe Mackenzie just went off with a friend somewhere. The bad news, because there was now no proof of a crime, the detectives had lost their power to get any additional search warrants. We had lost our what we call probable cause that a crime had been committed.

And so think that because just like this, supposedly just because of what the driver said, suddenly you can't be getting warrants for things. Correct.

And so that was a hard part. And it really slowed down the investigation at that point because we didn't have a crime to attach to it. It was still now just a missing persons investigation without a warrant.

The detectives were blocked from getting detailed phone records, which theoretically would have shown who Mackenzie was texting. So who was this friend Mackenzie met at the park and where do they go coming up?

One place Mackenzie wasn't missing was on social media. Different people saying, hey, I'm looking at her site right now. It's showing that she's actively online. Her bank account was active, too. So we're hopeful that there would be further transactions on there so that we could find her when Dateline continues.

So many questions, why did McKenzie go to a park eight miles from home at three a.m., no less, who did she meet? It made no sense that her friend actually fine.

I can't even believe she wouldn't meet someone at a park at three a.m. It's just so unlike her.

It is so unlike her because McKenzie, like most of her sorority sisters, I talked a lot about safety.

I mean, I've been out with her a lot of times and she's always been extremely safe. She's texted me after going out at night and said, hey, did you make it home?

Are you OK? You would exchange things just to keep each other safe. Yes.

Ashley had met McKenzie almost four years earlier.

She was a little bit higher than people would think she would be. But once you got to know her, she had a big personality. She could make anyone laugh.

Kennedy Stoner also met McKenzie in college.

Her family doesn't live here, so she was on her own here. So she had a job. She was going to school. She's like checking off everything that a responsible adult would have on their checklist, I guess.

Mackenzie grew up near Los Angeles, El Segundo, California, and she was raised in the Church of Latter day Saints, but when she came to the University of Utah to study kinesiology, according to Ashley, Mackenzie didn't exactly remain devout.

I know she was registered here Ward in Salt Lake City, but I heard that she was never active. And that makes sense to me because I think she wanted to find her own path.

You saw her changing in recent times, didn't you? In what ways?

I think she was trying to almost gain confidence and security in herself. She'd always write herself like note saying how she wanted to feel more confident.

And because I think she realized she was really shy and she wanted to be more outgoing and meet people and she wanted to explore dating. And, um, there might not be how everyone else thinks the dating should be.

What actually is getting at is it Mackenzie was active on dating sites, so much so that by Saturday, June the 22nd, the sixth day after Mackenzie's disappearance, detectives had received several phone calls from some of the men Mackenzie met online, mainly to say they had nothing to do with her disappearance.

I mean, nowadays that's how people meet people. So while it was of significance, because it gave us one more thing to look at, it wasn't this big, huge red flag either. So was Mackenzie off on a lark with a guy she met online hookup she wanted to keep secret from her devoutly religious parents?

Well, that certainly seemed far more likely than some sort of kidnapping scenario.

She could have gone camping or have gone with a friend where they would lose cell service and wouldn't be out of the ordinary.

But once they did some checking around, that camping idea seemed a lot less likely. By standard procedure. They looked up airline flight records and discovered Mackenzie had been booked on the flight out of town to Las Vegas. So maybe she was there. And meanwhile, the detectives began to see activity on her bank account and something else, different people saying, hey, I'm looking at her site right now. It's showing that she's actively online.

So maybe she was just fine ignoring the fuss or zoned out an entirely unaware of it. And so we're hopeful. Sure, because when people go missing, even if it's on their own accord, they're still going to be banking transactions or paying for stuff.

And so we're hopeful that there would be further transactions on there so that we could find her not far from the police station, Canada, and actually hosted a rally to make sure everyone in Salt Lake City knew to be looking for Mackenzie.

Hey, guys, this girl's missing and we're looking for her. She could be in danger. We think she's in danger. But she. On Sunday, June, the twenty third detectives learned McKenzie had a flight booked for that very day, traveling from Las Vegas to Los Angeles to attend a friend's wedding, and she wouldn't miss that. So we contacted LAPD and they had officers waiting for that flight to land.

They waited by the jetway for all the passengers to deplane. McKenzie was not among them.

Then they learned this. It wasn't McKenzie who had been logging into her social media accounts that had been her friends that have obtained her email and password.

And they weren't doing it to try to ruin things or anything. They were trying to go on there to monitor the sites as well, to see if any information could come up.

And the activity on McKenzies bank account was the live transaction on the 17th and then an automatic payroll deposit from her work. And then the detectives got a tip from this guy.

Oh, just maybe bring all those blurry details into sharp focus coming up, I got on the computer and within an hour or two hours I found her profile the world of sugar babies.

Did McKenzie know what she was getting into?

A lot of people who go into it are like seriously so blind to, like, the whole reality of what it is.

It was a few weeks before McKenzie vanished, a chance meeting at the bar with this man, Rob Joseph, she just seemed like a very bright, bubbly, girl friendly.

They talked for more than an hour, said Rob, or she did. Well, he listened.

Rob is in Salt Lake City cop private eye now, which, of course, he told her, if you mention your next cop and your P.I., everybody all of a sudden wants to tell you their dark secrets, you know, or risky behaviors that have people react.

Really? Oh, yeah. You'd be surprised that people just want to tell you things that you don't want to hear anyway.

You only saw McKenzie that one time. He said didn't get her phone number and I didn't offer my number. I generally don't give out my number.

And that was that. He said he didn't expect to see her again. But just three weeks later, McKenzie was missing. And Rob said the friend who was with him at the bar that night made the connection.

He just mentioned to me casually, Hey, you know that girl we met at the bar? That's the girl that went missing.

Of course, Rob remembered the friend, college student and the secret she revealed to him that night.

I don't know whether she was seeking approval or just advice or recommendations and how she put it. She just said she was on a dating site and looking for sugar daddies. And I asked her which one?

And she said, seeking arrangements, seeking arrangement, a website designed to connect young women with prosperous older men.

Rob knew a lot about dating sites. He's a P.I., remember, and he figured if Mackenzie was missing, that just might have something to do with it.

I went straight home, got on the computer and got on to seeking arrangements. And I within an hour, two hours, I found her profile. There she was, beach baby. Ninety six. What was interesting about her profile was it was just very authentic and honest. She wasn't really hiding who she was.

Soon as he found it, he said. A screengrab of Mackenzie's profile to the Salt Lake City Police Department.

This was definitely another avenue that we had to look at and, you know, track down anybody that might have been in contact with her.

But it appeared that compartmentalized information about her life, the plane ticket to Las Vegas, for instance, had been paid for by a man she met through seeking arrangement and a three hundred dollar deposit to one of Mackenzie's bank accounts.

That was from one of her other dates that she had been on that she'd received a payment from. And that was prior to her going over to her grandmother's funeral.

Her friend Ashley said she didn't have a clue.

I didn't know anything about her being on that site. She didn't talk about it. It wasn't like a soldier conversation, not with me.

Mackenzie's friend Kennedy wanted to avoid the subject altogether, but she acknowledged that seeking arrangement is well known on campus. The site is not unfamiliar to a lot of women in college. Everybody knows what everybody knows of.

This site seeking arrangement was founded in 2006 by a self-proclaimed nerd and MIT grad named Brandon Wade. He declined our interview request. But in this 2016 Today show story, Wade said he came up with the idea as a way to meet young women. The average sugar baby is roughly twenty seven years old.

Fifty percent of them are college students. They are ambitious, they're beautiful, and they are on the website because they want to find somebody who's successful, who's going to actually help them or spoil them.

I think we're living in a culture where it's much more accepted and embraced for women to be up front about what they need and want.

Journalist Mary Ellen Mastrov writes about sex and culture and sees sugaring as a form of female empowerment and to hold power in a way that's open, that is less stigmatized than it has been in the past.

So they see this as holding power. I see it as very powerful. Yes, I've explained that a little bit.

Any time you go into a relationship of any kind saying, this is what I need and if you can't give me this, I'm going to move on is a powerful thing to say.

There is some debate about this, whether it actually empowers young women or exploits the innocent.

I mean, a lot of people who go into it are like seriously so blind to, like, the whole reality of what it is, you know, like Mackenzie Tasiilaq, a 20 something from Salt Lake City with a seeking arrangement profile.

But unlike Mackenzie, she told us she was anything but a newbie. When we spoke to her in twenty nineteen at the time, she'd been with the sugar daddy for six months. He was sixty three. Do you mind telling me how much he pays you?

My allowance is twelve hundred a month.

You told us it took her a long time to find an arrangement.

You have to fish through all of those guys who like literally they're like let's meet up at a hotel, have sex and I'll give you money.

And I'm like, that's a prostitute. Shades of gray could be confusing for anybody sitting here, let alone a novice on seeking arrangement. I've seen girls who have had sugar daddies. They're not even the same person after it.

Did you read Mackenzie's profile? Yes, I did. She came from a very sheltered sort of upbringing. Would that have made it more dangerous for her?

Oh, most definitely. Going into it blindly is not something I would recommend, like at all.

Well, let's talk sugar.

This episode is all about getting ready for your sugar daddy seeking arrangement does make what they call, let's talk sugar videos that offer up advice. Another sugar baby's giving tips on everything from how to ask for an allowance to what to pack in your purse. Perfume, they say. Right. And pepper spray.

Not that you'll need it on your date, but going out looking hot is always a risk.

Did McKenzie watch the videos? We don't know. But one of her decisions, said TaeJa, betrayed her lack of experience.

Why would you meet in the middle of the night in a park?

And there was something else. Whether McKenzie did it or the person she met, we don't know. But remember, right after the Lyft driver dropped her off at the park, someone turned off Mackenzie's cell phone. Which happens to be contrary to seating arrangements, most important rule you never want to get stuck for unless that's your life line. Coming up, we've got an IP address that comes back to his residence tracking text messages and a tip from a concerned neighbor.

She described it as just being really offensively smoky and very odorous.

When Dateline continues. Detectives in Salt Lake City were trying to find out if McKenzie Luke's disappearance was voluntary or not. Remember the flight she was supposed to be on to Los Angeles? They found out it had been paid for by a sugar daddy. But remember, Mackenzie wasn't on that flight. And they found out she wasn't on the way to Vegas either, it was at that point that we were able to say, OK, we've got enough here that we can build our probable cause back up and really kick in and start serving some search warrants again.

And after detectives went in search of the mystery person McKenzie was texting the night she vanished with a 206 area code conversations going well before she left L.A. to all the way to where she ended up in Hach Park.

That digital trail eventually led them to a Wi-Fi router at this Salt Lake City house owned by a man named a Ajayi AJ X National Guard, successful tech worker, part time model.

Police knocked on his door, talk with him, found he was friendly, helpful.

Sure, he said he had girlfriends, but Mackenzie, they showed him a photo and he told them he'd never seen that lady before.

So why then the police asked, did Mackenzie get texts routed through a home Wi-Fi system?

He said, well, I have an open Wi-Fi because I run an Airbnb business. And so it could be anybody from here.

Did he run an Airbnb business? He did. He rented out the two bedrooms down in his basement for Airbnb.

They looked around, saw nothing amiss and left. And then that same evening, A.J. stopped by the police station to say he discovered something so burned out he had texted with McKenzie Lueck the night she disappeared. He'd forgotten, he said, because McKenzie was the one who reached out to him without identifying herself. Maybe he said she'd seen his seeking arrangement profile.

So I think that's how she met on my profile. So she just texted your number? Yes.

Said he had no idea who it was. You're still saying that? That's the only text and that's the only messages you got from her, right. That I can remember. So for her to just send me a question mark. So there's a possibility that I talked to in the past. So but she blew him off, he said ghosted him. So he forgot all about her. But he told that story with so much confidence, too much.

Maybe we had two different things. Now we've got an IP address that comes back to his residence and now we know that he's solely had contact with her. Except there was no proof McKenzie had been abducted by A.J. or anyone else, for that matter. So he was free to leave. But before doing so, he gave the detectives his cell phone number just in case they needed to get hold of him. A cell number actually registered in his name.

Remember, police didn't have that before. They just had that bogus two zero six number used by the texting app. So now with age personal cell number, you could get a search warrant for his court records and tracking data.

And two days later we got the confirmation back from the FBI that McKenzies records were showing her going from the airport to Hatch Park and AJS records were showing going from his residence and also meeting up at Hach Park at the exact same time. And that was enough to get a warrant to search Paige's home, where investigators noticed the mattress was missing from the bedroom and there was a strong smell of bleach. They also spoke with a concerned neighbor.

Her face blurred in this police video, wanted the police to know that A.J., the week before had started an illegal backyard trash fire.

And she described it as just being a really offensively smoky and very, very odorous debris, even flew into the neighbor's yard that looked like maybe they were clothing pieces of like maybe fake leather vinyl, something.

We weren't sure what it was.

What was it like for you when this discovery was made? I don't even know how to describe it. I mean, it was just a sinking feeling, really. I mean, we it's like we want to know what happened, but we also don't want to know what happened, because if it's what we think happened, then we don't want to know that happened, if that makes sense. Coming up, that was probably the hardest part in the investigation, is watching him walk out the door that night.

Hard for detectives, but it gave McKenzie's friends reason to hope.

Maybe Kensi was still alive and he was hiding her because the police let him go. Police looking for McKenzie Luecke had heard a disturbing story from a neighbor who said a eulogy had set a suspicious fire.

The neighbor had found debris in her backyard, so they looked in his backyard and found something else disturbing, a freshly dug patch of soil.

They called in a cadaver dog, which gave the unmistakable signal a human remains. And, A.J., we've been calmly watching it all from his driveway was taken into custody. We have an opportunity to.

A team from the crime lab spent the night digging up the backyard, they found more burnt clothing, purses or backpacks, and then down towards the bottom of the the dig site, there was a very burnt and damaged iPhone. And the medical examiner identified human tissue, just fragments. Mind you, they couldn't be certain who or even what they had exactly. We had these tissue samples or pieces. And so in order to charge somebody or arrest them, that needed to be confirmed.

And we knew that was going to take time.

So without solid proof the murder had been committed, they once again reluctantly let go.

That was probably the hardest part in the investigation, is watching him walk out the door.

That night, McKenzie's friends heard he was released and they took it as a sign of hope that maybe Kensi was still alive and he was hiding her because the police let him go the next day.

Then the DAYBREAK detectives got a call from the state crime lab about the remains found in the backyard.

They were able to identify that as being consistent with McKensie. The SWAT team took AJ into custody and police called a press conference to announce his arrest.

We are filing charges of aggravated murder in the homicide of McKenzie like Kennedy was watching on her cell phone.

I almost blacked out or something.

I dropped my purse, my phone, and I dropped to the ground on the street and I was just falling. I just couldn't even believe it. I still can't believe it.

But the detective work was not done. Although they'd found human tissue in the firepit and linked it to McKenzie, they had not found her body. So the investigation continued. And once again, Hajj's personal cell phone gave them away. So that's my phone number. Remember when he first spoke to police about McKenzie?

Well, the very next day, his cell phone changed its way up into these mountains, about two hours north of here, up to Logan City, and then goes partially up to the canyon and then returns back to Salt Lake City a couple hours later. So that was odd to us. Had he a nervous killer exhumed her body from that backyard fire pit to rebury her up here, they set off to search Logan Canyon and it took us the better part of the day until we found her.

That's going to be another tough part of your job.

It was horrific. It was a site that none of us wanted to see. The search for Mackenzie was over, but the investigation was not. In the weeks following, a woman came forward to say she'd been sexually assaulted by AJ a year earlier at his residence, the same residence where Mackenzie was killed. She said she met him through a dating app, a religious one. AJ was charged with aggravated kidnapping and forcible sexual abuse.

In that case, the evidence was tightening around him. Evidence of what he did to Mackenzie was growing. And finally, October 7th, 2012, a Yula Ajayi pleaded guilty to murdering Mackenzie Lueck. And as part of his plea deal, he admitted he thought about killing McKenzie. And then he planned the killing of Mackenzie, a thoroughly premeditated murder, that he knew that he was going to murder Mackenzie before. Before she even touched down at the airport, you kind of selected her as his victim, correct?

Was there any explanation at all of what? His motivation was to do that. None. He never offered any reasoning of why. Or even how Ajayi also pleaded guilty to sexually abusing his first victim.

He was sentenced to life without parole. Oh, and one more thing, said the detectives.

He was active on the seeking arrangement site right up until he was arrested, even after we had made contact with them. He was still on that page, still trying to. Get a date. We don't know why, you know, some selfish jerk used his position on it on a dating website to somehow ensnare this bright, pretty woman. And for what?

I mean, you look at his profile pages on these sites and he comes across as a gentleman, somebody that he truly isn't. And that's the whole cautionary tale, as you never know. Are they actually who they really say they are? Always she'd been surrounded by people who loved her, worried about her, cared about her. Mackenzie Lueck was an innocent setting out, if only for a moment, to explore new possibilities, unaware that in the world she was entering, the innocent can also be prey.

That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Friday at nine eight Central. And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.