Talking Dateline: Secrets of the Sliding Door

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Hi, everybody.

It's Josh Bankiewicz, and we're talking Dateline today with Keith Morrison.

Hi, Keith.

Hello, Josh.

I'll take mm-hmm as great to see you, Josh.

We're going to be talking about Keith's episode, which is called Secrets of the Sliding Door.

Now, if you haven't seen this yet, you can stream it on Peacock, and then you can head back here for the chat.

So here's a quick recap.

After a high school teacher named Simonette Mapes Croupy was found stabbed to death inside her Staten Island, New York home, one of the five boroughs.

Her place had been ransacked.

Detectives started with a couple of theories.

Was this a home invasion?

Was it a gang shooting?

But it was only when they found the mysterious phone number of a woman who identified herself

only as Ms.

Pumpkin on Simonette's phone that detectives uncovered a killer that was much closer to home.

And of course, because this is Dateline, it was her husband, Jonathan Kroupy.

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

Now,

what?

Well, you know,

you put the spoiler alert right out there just for fun.

Have you ever listened to Talking Dateline before?

They already have seen the episode.

No, only if they follow your inane directions, Josh.

I never do.

I mean, seriously.

Yeah.

Come on.

Are we having technical difficulties here?

No, you never knew.

Okay.

Well,

spoiler alert, I knew, and all the people watching and listening knew.

Sure.

Later, we're going to be joined by another Keith.

That's Keith Greenberg, who's one of the producers in this episode.

And we'll also have a couple of extra clips from interviews with Simonette's friends and family that did not make it into the show.

Simonette, known as Sissy, right?

Yep.

Yes.

Sissy, the lovely Sissy.

She was just a delightful person.

and somebody who cared a great deal about other people.

So, you know,

she is deeply missed even now.

And I think that really emerged from your episode.

We're also going to be listening to and answering some of the questions that you send in to us on social media and other ways, like that phone line that rings on Keith's desk.

Yeah.

So stick around for that.

Yeah.

All right, Keith, let's talk to Aitline.

So

the question that I had again and again and again while I was watching this episode is about Ms.

Pumpkin.

Ah, yes, of course.

The intriguing character in the story.

I'm pretty sure Ms.

Pumpkin is not the name she was born with.

I think you're probably accurately correct about that.

You know, this is a pretty familiar trope in both journalism and in

movie making and TV, which is, you know, the quote hooker with the heart of gold, unquote, the person who is engaged in the commercial sex trade, but is a solid citizen like everybody else and wants to help out.

And sort of once she realized, Ms.

Pumpkin, that

the guy that she knew by a different name was in fact the suspect in this case,

it sounds like she pretty much did everything she could to help out law enforcement.

Well, yeah,

you know,

I'm not sure she was falling head over heels to do so, but at the same time,

well, let me say this about Ms.

Pumpkin.

As far as I can tell, she was a kind of a modern person in the sense that

she was not in any way,

she did not feel diminished by what she did.

It was a business.

She ran it as a business, but she also was doing other things with her life.

I was struck by what the prosecutor said about Ms.

Pumpkin afterwards, which was, you know, sort of, you know, what a nice person she was.

She said,

this is going to sound strange coming from me, but when you step up when you are needed, when it is time to do the right thing, and then you do the right thing, it doesn't make any difference how you're making your money.

No, it doesn't.

It doesn't at all.

And

that particular prosecutor was an astute judge of character.

Right away, there were theories of what happened

to Sissy.

And, you know, sort of home invasion slash burglary is sort of one of the first things that

people's minds go to.

Except,

you know, the biggest danger when you surprise a burglar in your home is that you're between them and the door.

I mean, burglars do not come into your home to kill you.

Burglars come into your home to steal your stuff.

And what they really want is for you to not be there at any part.

So

the fact that she was, in fact, killed by whoever this was, and that

she was stabbed so many times, that does not.

feel like a burglary.

And in addition to that, the house was so completely ransacked from top to bottom, and yet nothing significant appeared to have been taken.

So somebody wanted to make it look like a total mess.

Somebody wanted to make it look like a robbery without actually robbing.

Upstairs in one of the bedrooms was a purportedly valuable collection of sneakers,

which

Crupi collected over the years and traded and paid, you know, it was a kind of a secondary income for him.

And those could have brought somebody some money and those were not stolen and they were not taken yeah this uh this kind of begs another question because i'm talking to someone right now who is famous for wearing sneakers um

so um uh i think our listeners would like to know how many pairs of sneakers do you have keith you know what i don't know but i'll tell you what i have is a closet with uh a bunch of i i don't know uh probably a dozen pairs of those kind of sneakers, those particular sneakers.

With

are you afraid to say the brand because you don't have a marketing agreement with Keith?

I mean, Compressor

right here.

Come on, here we go.

Here we go.

I'm talking Dale.

We got a shot at Keith's feet.

Trying to make it trying to make it over there.

Come on, there we go.

All right.

Never mind.

I never made it there.

Gentle listener, Keith has just knocked over the microphone by attempting to show us his sneakers.

All right.

Back to our story.

So

nobody stole Jonathan's sneaker collection, which was clearly pretty marketable.

It was the kind of thing

a thief would steal.

Yes.

So then they look at the alibi, because, you know, the husband's always the first one you look at.

Well, he lives there.

Yeah.

And, you know,

he had

a great alibi.

In fact, he had an alibi that was proven all day long by digital evidence

That he'd gone to the school.

He'd talked to an administrator there.

He had picked up some supplies.

He had gone here.

He'd gone there.

He'd gone the other place.

And he'd gone to get the car.

I don't know.

And then he said he went to the Home Depot for in the afternoon before he came home.

And that's when he discovered her body.

The one problem with the alibi was there was no video.

at the Home Depot.

So, you know, if Jonathan had not mentioned the trip to Home Depot on which he could not be found,

would that have been a bit more likely to be?

No, it had to be somewhere.

Yeah.

I was going to say that might have been made his alibi a little bit stronger, but on the other hand, then it would have left a gap.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But the gap would have been

at a time when they knew she was already dead.

That's true.

You know, it's a good call.

It's hard to know.

It's hard to know whether it would have been better or not, but that was the choice he made.

When we get back, we've got two interview clips to play that did not make it into the broadcast from Sissy's friends and family.

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So now we're joined by Keith Greenberg, one of the producers of this episode, and also

my favorite Keith, I'm going to say.

That's not a hard call, Josh.

You know,

we haven't talked quite enough about sissy.

I mean, she absolutely could have gotten a job teaching on Staten Island right near her family oh sure instead she chose to go to a much tougher neighborhood in brooklyn and that really kind of tells you a lot about her sure and i'm sure you you spoke to some of her students too didn't you keith i did yes um you know i think that she truly believed she had at one point um contemplated becoming a nun And I do think she was dedicated to a life of service.

She was very good to animals and very kind to animals.

She would pick up strays and she felt her life was to serve these children.

And in some ways she's still doing it because they all have taken something of her with them.

She would take

her underprivileged kids out for dinner together to celebrate various things, places that they would never otherwise have been able to go.

But she wanted them to see what life could be if they continued with their studies.

She was a very popular teacher.

So

we spoke with some of her friends and family, obviously, for this episode, but not everything made it in the episode.

We have an extra clip here of Sissy's cousin, Victoria, and her childhood friend, Eric.

Let's listen to those.

Sissy was about 10 years older than I am.

And I looked to her like a big sister.

Growing up, I had a difficult home life, and she

helped my brother and I have a sense of family and guidance.

Sissy laid down the blueprint for how I wanted to be as a woman.

I literally lived next to Simonette Mabes.

My room was right next to her room.

So she'd knock

on my wall.

And then we kind of talk a little bit through the wall.

I mean, the little walls are kind of paper thin back then.

Oh man, Simonette, I tell you, she had a heart of gold, to be honest with you.

She was extremely nice, extremely

kind,

and just a very loving heart.

Yeah, that gives you an idea.

It really does.

I mean, it really gives you a sense of who she was and what a loss this was.

So

Sissy's mom, who really I thought was kind of the emotional heart of this story.

Um, and you really got a great sense in this episode of sort of the anguish that she went through and is still going through because this doesn't go away.

You know, they had that conversation the night before she was murdered.

And that's the kind of thing, if you're a parent, you just end up replaying again and again and again and again, looking even now.

You know,

what did I not hear?

What should I have asked?

I mean,

that has to be miserable for her to go through.

I mean, I don't, I think maybe they had a sense, her family and Sissy Sissy also had a sense that, you know, Jonathan was maybe not the right guy for her, but that he was a threat to her life.

I don't think they sensed that at all.

No one ever sensed that.

The students never sensed that.

He was loved at his school.

He was

someone, one of his former students called him, quote, a big little kid.

He would talk to the class in cartoon voices.

uh came to school once dressed as uh the character wolverine uh and i remember the brother telling me a story when we were just chatting that one time he brought jonathan croupy to a bachelor party and jonathan croupi uh didn't seem to know how to behave properly in a strip club he seemed embarrassed and so uh her family thought he was the last person who could be involved in something like this uh Here's Here's something that wasn't in the episode, which is that we know that Jonathan Croupy was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but after he was incarcerated,

apparently he created an online dating profile.

And on his profile, this sounds like a macabre joke, but it's not.

He wrote, I'm not married and I don't have any kids.

No baby mama drama here.

I'm guessing that

Simonet's family is

not thrilled about

that.

They're aghast.

and he's a bright guy.

So he's also,

from what I understand, teaching in prison.

And so, you know, he's, he's, you know, he's doing time, but it might be considered easy time by the standards of her family.

I'm sure to her family, it's easy time.

Yeah.

It probably is, yeah.

Up next, we are finally going to answer some of the questions you've been leaving for us on Keith's voicemail.

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Let's go to Viewer Mail.

Viewer Mail.

Viewer Mail.

All right, fine.

Yes.

That's always Keith Morrison's favorite part of Tom.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

We play some of the 911 call.

And, you know,

you know, you listen to an F Dateline,

you're going to hear a lot of 911 calls.

Some of them frantic, some of them anguished, some of them phony.

I will say that again, I didn't know anything about this story when I watched the episode a couple of days ago.

And my first thought was, okay, well, this is the guy because

this sounds utterly phony.

I just came home.

My wife is dead.

Oh my God, I think my house was robbed.

Jen Lafont on Facebook wrote, you can hear the fake in his voice.

Danielle Dennis on Facebook said from from the 911 call, he was instantly guilty.

That's exactly what I thought.

I was like, wow.

You're incriminating yourself just by your tone of voice.

Just by talking, yeah.

It was true, and it really came true on that 911 call.

And

the prosecution was able to use that.

The thing about 911 calls, though, is that they can be very tricky.

You know, you can make a judgment about them right away.

And quite frequently in some investigations, judgments are made, and it often will lead the police in the wrong direction, sometimes tragically.

So,

you know, they take it with a grain of salt.

But

I mean, look, look, it's, I mean,

I did a story several years ago in

New York State in which a woman

called 911 and she said, I've just found my mom and

she's been stabbed.

And

I think she was walking downstairs and she was holding a knife and the cat must have tripped her.

And then, so she fell down the stairs and she stabbed herself.

And the cops are like writing all this.

They're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, just a second, right?

And she says, and by the way, I pulled out the knife.

So you're going to find my fingerprints and DNA on the knife.

And my mom is worth quite a bit of money, but this is not how I wanted to get the inheritance.

And then the cops are just like, the cops are just like, okay, please continue because we're eating this up.

And it's not her.

She was not guilty in any way.

Years ago, years ago, did a story about this poor sad sack of a fellow whose daughter was murdered in the middle of the night in a bedroom just down the hall from his

by

somebody.

A stranger came into the house.

He didn't know what had happened.

He woke up in the morning.

He found her dead, and he assumed that she had strangled on a blanket that was strapped around her neck.

So he called the police, and he was very, but he was just a low, very shy, low-key person.

And his 911 call sounded fake.

It sounded like he didn't care.

It was just one of those tragic cases that started with a 911 call that sounded fake, but wasn't.

Roxanne DeMezza from also, I think on Facebook, has a theory about the DNA on the door.

She says, Maybe rather than accidentally putting Ms.

Pumpkin's DNA on the doorknob, Jonathan did it on purpose to throw off investigators so that they would look for a female killer.

Possible, I'm going to say that shows a higher degree of planning on Jonathan's part than I think he was capable of at the time.

I think I'd have to agree.

Keith Greenberg is nodding.

Yes, I would have to concur with that.

He was not a criminal mastermind, even though he thought he was.

You know, he was a he lived in a bit of a fantasy, and I think he read too many comic books.

We checked the talking dateline voicemail and came across a bunch of interesting things.

First of all,

Keith Morrison, you have an overdue bill at Sneakers R Us.

So that's true.

You want to get in there.

I'm always behind on that one.

Here's one for both of us.

Hi, my name is Piper, and I have a question for, I guess, the whole team.

Do you ever finish an interview with someone, specifically the person who perpetrated the crime, and just wonder how they can deadpan lie to you?

Or do you ever just get so angry that people are so clearly lying?

And have you ever mouthed off to any of them to just tell them that you think they're horrible people?

Thanks.

Keith, you want to add?

Well,

you know,

you know when you're talking to somebody who's accused of committing murder and probably did,

that

they've got a story that has been very carefully rehearsed over and over again.

They're going to tell you that story and they're going to tell it with a straight face and they're going to put them, they're going to be on their absolute best behavior, even if they've been convicted of the crime and they've been sitting in jail for a while.

They're coming out.

The whole thing is that's not me to come out.

This is all, you know, my ex-wife's family and the cops, they're all in league together to make me look like a terrible person.

But there have been a couple of occasions where somebody has

their excuse was so egregious and so took advantage of people so horribly that I did get somewhat cross with them.

I have to confess.

Yeah.

Here's my answer to this, which is if you're a reporter, you got to get used to people lying to you because it's not just murderers that lie to us.

It's a huge number of people that I've covered in what's now nearly a 50-year career.

And instead of getting angry, your obligation as a journalist to the audience and to the, you, or your readers of your newspaper reporter or print, is to expose those lies, not yell at them.

So there have been times when I, I, you know,

you can say a lot more with a look on television than, than, you know, with a, with a, uh,

with any particular comment.

But sir, yeah, Keith and I and Andrea and Blaine and Lester and Dennis, we've all said, yeah,

come on, come on, come on, try something else.

Yeah, they're pitching a story.

And you know that there's an old rule when you're interviewing people involved in something like this, is that everybody lies.

Everybody lies all the time.

So

you just adjust your behavior accordingly.

That's it for talking to Dateline this week.

Keith, thank you.

Other Keith.

I absolutely.

Oh, you're talking to the other Keith.

Of course you are.

I'm always talking to the other Keith.

Well, I must say, Other Keith, it's been a delight having you on the program.

Somebody who actually is astute and remembers all the details.

I appreciate it very much.

Well, thank you very much, and I enjoyed being here.

And remember, if you have any questions for us about Dateline, you can always reach us 24-7 on social media at DatelineNBC,

or you can leave us a voicemail and we know who answers those voicemails now.

That number is 212-413-5252.

Thanks for listening.

See you Fridays Fridays on Dateline on NBC.

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