There was also a sheet of glass between us. He put on a show of being angry-“I could throttle you right here”-but it was a display.
So there were some questions to ask which he may have felt uncomfortable about. We were trying to get to the bottom of how much this person had done and whether or not he was responsible for a couple of very specific killings. There have been a couple of incidents, though…I remember where had finally agreed to be interviewed. They’re more inclined to want to talk to you, but they’re just nice as pie, charming, and delightful generally when you talk to them. They’re always the smartest one in the room, even when they aren’t. Frequently the kind of people who do agree to talk to us are people who believe that they are capable of persuading us of their innocence, even though we kind of know they’re guilty, the narcissists in the crowd. People who agree to be interviewed-we’re never forcing them to be interviewed-agree to sit down and talk with us because they want to put on a good impression. Throughout your career you’ve sat down with many suspects-some of whom, I imagine, you privately think are guilty of the crimes for which they’re being accused. It was like being a priest in a confessional booth, where the person is going to tell you the whole thing, beginning to end. He was already doing his time and he wanted to tell somebody the whole story. When he heard that we wanted to talk to him, he’d already been sentenced. What do you think was happening that day of the interview? Was it a matter of trust between you and Ramos? Or was he just ready to purge himself of the story? He didn’t try to push blame onto anybody else. Here was a guy who simply remembered every single solitary detail of this story, chapter and verse, over the whole period of time. And certainly it’s self-serving the way they tell a story, but not in this case. You go in expecting that people are going to lie to you, and they generally do. People lie to you all the time in these interviews. I don’t know whether he was a savant or what he was, but he told the story in such incredible detail and it all held together. This young man, at the time we talked to him, was in his mid 20s or 30-ish. So you just need to hear the whole story. But our philosophy is if you don’t have it all on tape, you can’t use it later in the edit room. We usually interview people for a couple of hours, and then what you see on Dateline is a few minutes of it. So when Morrison heard that NBC wanted to start making Dateline audio podcasts, the correspondent tells Vanity Fair, “This story was uppermost in my mind.” Morrison still considers his sit-down with Ramos, after he had been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, to be one of the most gratifying conversations of his career.
But Morrison says the episode only aired a handful of times. The grim story was perfect Dateline material-full of twists and turns like a staged kidnapping, an attempted murder, and multiple lovers’ betrayals. Their romance spun out of control, with Ramos and Presba eventually pleading guilty to murdering Presba’s husband, Ed, and staging his death in a fiery 2008 car accident. But there’s one jailhouse interview that still sticks with him-one he conducted back in 2010 with Jaime Ramos, a California man who had an affair with his married counselor, Patty Presba, who was over 25 years Ramos’s senior. Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison has interviewed plenty of suspected murderers in his 27 years with the NBC news magazine.
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