Talking Dateline: Heartless

Keith Morrison (0:00)

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Keith Morrison (1:06)

Hello, everybody. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Talking Dateline. Today, I'm joined by Josh Mankiewicz to discuss his episode, which is called Heartless. Interesting title for this one. It's about the disappearance of a woman in rural Oklahoma, the armchair detectives that brought attention to her case, and the killer who is too close to home. But before we get into all of that, if you haven't listened to the episode yet, you can find it right below this one, or stream it right now on Peacock, and then come back and we'll talk.

We'll have more from Josh's interview with Talina's killer, and later your questions from social media. All right. Let's talk Dateline. So this was an interesting way to get into a story, Josh Mankiewicz.

You got it through our digital team. When you were doing the Missing in America?

Josh Mankiewicz (1:57)

Yes.

I got a call several years ago when Talina was missing before she'd been found by a friend of mine who knew Talina, I think, through work. And she said, this woman I know is suddenly missing, and nobody can find her, and maybe this is something that you guys could work on. So I sent it to Veronica, who's in our Dateline episode, who runs the Missing in America franchise for us. And so we did one of the first stories on that case. We were sort of one of the first places where Talina's case got some national play. Now, I'll be the first to admit, I don't think that our Missing in America thing did anything except generate a lot of tips. I do not think it played any role in solving the case.

But it did sort of begin to get the case out there.

Keith Morrison (2:57)

Was that what prompted the armchair detectives on social media to get involved?

Josh Mankiewicz (3:03)

It's impossible to say sort of what prompts. What got everybody interested in the Karen Reed case? What got everybody interested in the Lindsay Clancy case?

There's a sort of a spot or a sort of a match strikes on the internet, and suddenly there's this wildfire of interest, and there was some of that in the case of Talina Galloway. You know, people who had never heard her name before, didn't know who she was, had never been to Oklahoma, suddenly were super invested in finding out where she was. And we sort of talked to one of the leaders of that group, Jess.

Keith Morrison (3:44)

Yeah. Well, it's very interesting about these kinds of groups that form sometimes spontaneously, sometimes intentionally. The police occasionally like to work with them.

These police officers didn't seem necessarily all that enthusiastic. They were sort of ahead of them most of the time, I think.

Josh Mankiewicz (4:02)

It's hard to say.

I mean, obviously, I wasn't privy to every conversation or any of the conversations between sort of the amateur sleuths and the sheriff's investigators who were working this case. Those investigators, the sheriff's department, they solved it. They got to the bottom of it. And were they helped along at some point by the amateur sleuths? Maybe. But this is certainly mostly almost all their work. You know, the problem, as they say, in this episode, is that when you get all these tips from elsewhere, generated by people on the internet who unquestionably sort of mean well, and in some cases come up with legitimate, interesting, worthy to explore avenues of investigation, that can slow things down. Particularly if, as an investigator, you already think you know what's going on.

But those tips can't be discounted. I mean, our Missing in America story generated a tip that Talina had been seen here in the distant suburbs of Los Angeles. Well, not true, but they have to check it out. And so that, I think investigators feel like that kind of thing slows them down. But there's no question that, like, sometimes it leads to something.