Talking Dateline: Slow Burn

**Blayne Alexander** (0:05)
Hi, everyone, I'm Blayne Alexander, and today we are talking Dateline. I am joined by my good friend Andrea Canning to discuss her episode Slow Burn. Hi, Andrea.

**Andrea Canning** (0:14)
Hey, Blayne.

**Blayne Alexander** (0:14)
If you guys haven't seen the episode yet, you can stream it now on Peacock or listen in the Dateline podcast feed and then come right back here. Later on, we'll have an extra clip from the victim impact statement made by Jennifer's mother, Bette Corridis, and then after that, we will answer some of your questions from social media. Okay, Andrea, let's talk Dateline.

**Andrea Canning** (0:31)
Let's do it.

**Blayne Alexander** (0:32)
Before we jump into all of it, Andrea, can you just give us a quick recap of this episode?

**Andrea Canning** (0:37)
Yeah. I mean, this one started out with, there's a fire at Keith Caneiro's house. He's an entrepreneur, wealthy, very large home, and his family is inside the house, and they are dead, and Keith is dead, and the whole family, it appears, has been murdered. Then there is another fire, 10 miles away.
So the first one's in Colts Neck, the second one is in Ocean Township, New Jersey, and everyone's okay in that house. This is now Paul Caneiro. This is Keith's older brother. So two fires not too far away from each other, two brothers. Police start to quickly suspect that this could be Paul Caneiro, that he is at the center of both of these fires and the four murders. They wind up charging Paul with arson for his own house, and arson for his brother's house, and the quadruple murder of his brother's family, and he was convicted of all of his crimes.

**Blayne Alexander** (1:39)
So this was one of our hour-long episodes, and this one just hit me so hard because in the entire first act, I was just on this emotional roller coaster because you show this beautiful family photo with these kids. We know that they weren't in school, but I'm thinking, okay, hopefully they were at camp, or maybe they were with a friend or a family member. And I just would not allow myself to believe that they had been killed too.

**Andrea Canning** (2:04)
I know. That's what made this episode for me just so much harder. When you are doing this to children, I mean, it just takes it to another level. Innocent children, 8 and 11, this is their uncle.
I mean, Jesse took him to school for Special Person's Day.

**Blayne Alexander** (2:26)
That just gutted me when I heard that.

**Andrea Canning** (2:28)
What are you doing? It defies logic, the whole thing.

**Blayne Alexander** (2:33)
And I think the other piece of this is that they were stabbed. I mean, that is such an unbelievably up close personal way to kill anyone, right? But to kill a child. And so as I was watching your storytelling through the first act, I'm thinking, okay, we know there's a body outside. Oh, okay, it's Keith. He's dead. But then as they found more, I'm like, oh my God, there were more.
The whole thing was stunning to me. I want to touch on your interview that you did with the first responders. And I was so glad that you were able to speak with them because I think anytime we can talk with first responders, especially, as I mentioned, when you have these stories of a house fire and they go in and it's like, okay, what are we going to find? Who are we going to find? What does it look like? I wonder if you can just tell me a little bit behind the scenes about your conversations with them because these guys were clearly so affected by what they saw when they found Jesse and Sophia. What was it like sitting down with them?

**Andrea Canning** (3:29)
Well, first of all, our volunteer firefighters in this country, I don't think get enough applause, kudos, pats on the back. They do this for free.
And that Adelphia Fire Company was all volunteer. So first of all, it's such a selfless, I mean, all firefighters volunteer or not. They're very selfless individuals and they care a lot about the community. But then it's sort of like you take it up a notch when you don't even get paid, right? I mean, you could just see it in their eyes when they talked about, especially Carmelo, when he held Sophia in his arms, and we didn't actually show the whole thing because it was just extremely sad. But he was just still, I could just see it in his eyes how horrible that moment was for him when he realized that it was a little girl that he had picked up.