Talking Dateline: The Mushroom Mystery

**Josh Mankiewicz** (0:05)
Hi, everybody, I'm Josh Mankiewicz, we're Talking Dateline. Today with Blayne Alexander. Hello.

**Blayne Alexander** (0:13)
Hello.

**Josh Mankiewicz** (0:14)
So, we're here to talk about Blayne's episode, The Mushroom Mystery. Now, that's a story about a woman named Katrina Fouts who plotted to poison her husband David using poisonous mushrooms. That, for a variety of reasons, did not work, so Katrina's friend Terry strangled David. In the end, Terry confessed to killing David, and Katrina was found not guilty of murder, but she was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder.
Now, if you haven't seen this episode, you can stream it on Peacock or watch it on your DVR, or you can listen to it on the Dateline podcast feed, and then come right back here for this discussion. And then later, we're going to have an extra clip from Blayne's interview with the killer Terry's ex-wife. But first, let's talk Dateline.

**Blayne Alexander** (1:04)
Let's talk Dateline.

**Josh Mankiewicz** (1:05)
I was thinking about where to start.
And because it's me, I'm going to start at the more trivial. There's an old joke that the other vegetables don't want to hang out with the mushroom, and they're excluding him. And he goes, why? I'm a fun guy.
Get it, right? Okay, that apparently, according to your story, according to your story, it's not my joke, according to your story, that's not true. It's fungi? I mean, she's a scientist, presumably she knows.

**Blayne Alexander** (1:37)
That was one of the many things that I learned through the course of doing this story, by the way. I always thought it was fungi, but I've not dedicated years of my life to studying mushrooms. And so yes, hearing it pronounced that way, I said, you know what, that's not how I've said it, but I trust you, I trust you.

**Josh Mankiewicz** (1:53)
Yeah, I mean, that wrecks that joke, but okay.

**Blayne Alexander** (1:56)
Keep telling it, because most people don't know if that's the actual pronunciation, so you're fine.

**Josh Mankiewicz** (2:01)
It's a crowd-pleaser, yeah. No, they can't get enough of it. This feels actually, just to delve a little deeper into this, this feels a little different from the GIF versus JIF debate, right? Because that, it feels like it's got a certain number of people on both sides. But, you know, when the woman who studies mushrooms for a living says fungi, then I'm inclined to stop telling that joke.
So when I first heard about this story, about somebody getting poisoned with mushrooms, my mind immediately went to that poisoning story in Australia from a couple of years ago, in which a woman fed death cap mushrooms, actual death cap mushrooms, to members of her family, estranged members of her family, because they were going through a divorce, and managed to kill several people, and ended up getting locked up for it. But I immediately thought, oh, this was inspired by that, but not true. Your story happened before that Australia poisoning story, so maybe they got the idea from this.

**Blayne Alexander** (3:07)
You know what?
It's possible. But one thing that we learned in the course of this is that Katrina, the woman who has been convicted of this, she really enjoys true crime shows. I mean, that's something that she does. She watches, we know the Dateline, something she watches, she watches some of the others. And so who knows where ideas are birthed, but certainly she took in a lot of it. I think the other thing is that, what's interesting about mushroom culture, mushroom hunting culture, is that if you're in that part of Indiana, that's something that is pretty familiar to you. And so while you or I may not think of mushrooms as a way to poison anybody, that we're thinking of how to poison people, but while that might not be something that's top of mind for us, it certainly makes a lot more sense because it's part of the everyday conversation. Mushrooms are just very much a part of the way of life there.

**Josh Mankiewicz** (3:55)
I guess, although if 1% of the eggs that I ate were potentially fatal, I'd probably stop eating eggs. At least I'd stop searching for them myself. I would get ones that I trust.
I would not be going out mushroom hunting if I lived in Indiana or anywhere else for exactly this reason. They were looking for a fatal mushroom. They didn't find one, but they found one that did some significant damage.

**Blayne Alexander** (4:26)
Do you want to know something strange? I actually am not a mushroom eater myself. I think that it's because years ago, at some point in my very, very young developmental life, I learned that mushrooms could be poisonous. For whatever reason, I then decided that I didn't like mushrooms. When I got older, it became a texture thing, and I just don't necessarily eat them. I pick them off of pizzas if I have them. Not because I think I'm going to get poisoned at this point, but I'm not a mushroom girl, and I think that it started in my mind from there.