At the Bottom of the Lake

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Speaker 3 They were kind of a Romeo and Juliet couple trying to run away together.

Speaker 4 And the tragedy

Speaker 3 of it all going so terribly wrong.

Speaker 6 A mystery hiding in a lake.

Speaker 8 I remember it being so unbelievable that a plane had landed in our family's lake.

Speaker 3 A couple of young people on it.

Speaker 10 We're trying to locate it with fish finders.

Speaker 6 They found it and her.

Speaker 3 She was a pretty girl. Some of her long hair was caught in the door.

Speaker 12 She just looked like she was actually sleeping.

Speaker 6 But where was the pilot?

Speaker 3 They were pretty sure he was heading to Mexico.

Speaker 12 I can remember we had calls from Interpol even.

Speaker 6 24 years later, a woman uncovers a little white lie.

Speaker 14 He said that he was actually 43. I was like, so what else have you lied to me about?

Speaker 3 Was he a monster? Was he Romeo? You just don't know. And those are the best stories, aren't they?

Speaker 6 Now, for the first time in public, the untold story.

Speaker 16 You're the only person on the planet who knows the truth.

Speaker 6 A mystery that dropped from the sky and sank out of sight. Decades later, will it finally be solved? I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 11 Here's Keith Morrison with At the Bottom of the Lake.

Speaker 20 It is, in its own strange way, a dissertation on love.

Speaker 23 Love intoxicating, impetuous, foolish.

Speaker 20 Love that lives like a fugitive in a long secret tunnel of regret.

Speaker 28 There's a reason that the story of Romeo and Juliet has held up over centuries.

Speaker 25 Or maybe,

Speaker 23 could you tell me?

Speaker 23 Maybe it wasn't love at all. Maybe it it was something else altogether.

Speaker 3 Oh, Diane, why did you take that ride? You know, why did you...

Speaker 3 Why did you put your life in his hands? How did it all go so terribly wrong?

Speaker 30 It began, the way myths sometimes do, with a whispered story, which started right about here.

Speaker 33 and traveled mouth to ear to mouth among the camps and cabins around a cold, deep lake in the rockies of remote northwestern Montana.

Speaker 39 One of the countless glacial lakes carved eons ago just west of Glacier National Park.

Speaker 34 This one called Little Bitterroot, named for the wild local plant that fed ancient tribes.

Speaker 30 And now the name for a magical summer place where Kim Kenas Rygrock's grandfather built a cabin in the 1920s.

Speaker 47 and where generation after generation has stored up a century's worth of memories.

Speaker 8 It was a family gathering place. We'd swim to the rock out there and stand on it.
A simpler time.

Speaker 48 You have to have a strong constitution to swim in that lake very much, I would say.

Speaker 8 Well, it's beautiful clean water, but it is a little brisk getting in.

Speaker 50 Twins Jim and John Young grew up on the shores of the lake too, free and easy.

Speaker 51 Back in the days, parents didn't worry so much.

Speaker 4 As long as we left at breakfast and home by dinner, we were fine, you know.

Speaker 44 We'd all meet down here and go swimming and stuff.

Speaker 53 Camp here.

Speaker 54 Swim off the dam.

Speaker 4 That was kind of the big thing. It was just right off over here.

Speaker 10 God, it sounds so idyllic.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it was fun.

Speaker 11 It was the summer of 1982 when the whole weird saga began.

Speaker 55 Jim and John were 15 years old.

Speaker 58 Kim was 20, about to head off to her junior year at college, when she and her mom drove to the cottage for a final summer visit.

Speaker 59 and encountered a surprise.

Speaker 8 As we pulled up, we saw someone on this corner of the deck that we didn't recognize. And I didn't even have the pickup stopped.
I was slowing down to pull into the drive there.

Speaker 8 Mom opened the door and hopped out to find out who was on our deck.

Speaker 10 She wouldn't run the other way?

Speaker 8 Not my mother.

Speaker 8 So I got the truck in gear and came up here as quickly as I could, and she was talking to this young man.

Speaker 61 What did he look like?

Speaker 8 He did not look like a lake person to me. You know, he was very well-kept looking.
He had a white, kind of a polo shirt on, and it, you know, looked like it had just come out of a suitcase.

Speaker 9 It was just bright white.

Speaker 55 Kim's mother made it clear to the young man, no matter how polite or well-dressed, he was trespassing.

Speaker 17 Were you worried about him?

Speaker 8 I was actually more worried about my mother.

Speaker 8 She wanted to know who he was, of course, and what he was doing here.

Speaker 8 And he was very vague in his answers.

Speaker 9 And I remember asking, where did you come from?

Speaker 14 And he pointed over here and he said,

Speaker 8 over the mountains.

Speaker 14 Well, and again we thought, what does that mean?

Speaker 8 No one comes from that way. You're not dressed like a hiker or a backpacker.

Speaker 8 And it didn't make sense.

Speaker 64 How unusual would it be to find a stranger here?

Speaker 48 This place has been in the family for generations, so.

Speaker 8 It had never happened that I'm aware of of to have someone on our deck that we didn't know.

Speaker 46 Anyway, the young stranger was clearly not dangerous.

Speaker 65 And after the talking to he got from Kim's mom, he got up and wandered off down the shoreline and out of sight.

Speaker 66 It was maybe 50 yards away where Jim and John had already encountered him, maybe earlier that day.

Speaker 50 But the fellow they saw looked very different.

Speaker 39 They remember him as not being well-kept at all.

Speaker 55 In fact, he was soaking wet and, it appeared, injured.

Speaker 54 Well, he had some pretty good bruises and scratches, you know, across his neck. You see it come out from out of his shirt, you know, so he had pretty good gouges on.

Speaker 43 And he explained this how?

Speaker 15 He said that a bear chasing, you know.

Speaker 44 Through the woods, yeah.

Speaker 54 He says, you guys went and have matches, my lighter's wet.

Speaker 70 What did you do?

Speaker 52 We jumped on our motorbikes and went down to the store down here.

Speaker 13 Off to buy matches.

Speaker 55 Sort of thing people would do for a stranger around here.

Speaker 72 Except, well, is it a coincidence?

Speaker 55 Around the same time as those unusual encounters, some other folks noticed that the lake itself looked kind of odd.

Speaker 67 Seemed to be a sheen of some sort on the water.

Speaker 74 Unusual oil slick, maybe?

Speaker 49 Pat Walsh was a young deputy sheriff at the time.

Speaker 73 One of the people that saw the oil in the lake was a pilot, and so he informed the deputies at that time that that is not oil from a boat motor.

Speaker 78 Yeah, I was going to say there are lots of boats in that lake.

Speaker 76 That's right. He said it's not oil from a boat motor.

Speaker 9 So what?

Speaker 67 There have been rumors of smugglers around here from time to time.

Speaker 7 Had a smuggler's airplane landed on the lake, then taken off again?

Speaker 17 How could an airplane go down in a lake without anybody hearing it?

Speaker 76 Probably wouldn't have made much more than a splashing noise. And if you're in a cabin on the shore, if you hear a splash, it's not going to mean anything to you.

Speaker 55 And then people around the lake heard about the young stranger and wondered, were these incidents somehow related?

Speaker 80 Jim and John remembered that the guy was carrying a duffel bag wrapped in green plastic.

Speaker 67 And when they returned from the store and gave him those matches they bought for him, he lit a fire and guess what he did?

Speaker 52 And he started just burning like they probably were maps, you know, but

Speaker 54 it just looked like newspapers, you know, and then it went to Matt to some clothing and stuff, but you know, and he burned everything there.

Speaker 26 Burned clothes and everything. Yeah,

Speaker 11 and then they said, then this strange man just soldered off, just like he did after running into Kim and her mom.

Speaker 8 We watched him go a little bit, and then I thought, well, this is probably spying on him. So then we went inside the cabin.

Speaker 9 Polite.

Speaker 8 Well, we not really, because we went inside the cabin and watched him

Speaker 8 until he was out of sight. That was basically the last we saw saw of him.

Speaker 11 Oh, but not the last they heard of him.

Speaker 67 Myths and mysteries can lie around and haunt you for decades.

Speaker 11 And the revelation that was coming to Little Bitterroot Lake would make very sure of that.

Speaker 6 Was it smugglers or something else? What secret was the lake hiding when we returned?

Speaker 10 The sheriff believed that there was a plane in this lake and we're trying to locate it with fish finders.

Speaker 6 But no one was prepared for what they found.

Speaker 10 She was a pretty girl and she was a young girl, and

Speaker 10 it was just a shame.

Speaker 12 She just looked like she was actually sleeping. That was the eerie part about her.

Speaker 23 As summer came to a close in 1982, there were rumors in the water.

Speaker 11 A crazy idea was making the rounds that a mysterious airplane had landed, maybe even crashed, on pristine Little Bitterroot Lake, and that the odd young man who wandered the shoreline, encountering several locals, was perhaps the pilot?

Speaker 8 I don't remember being afraid he might come back or anything like that.

Speaker 48 Sort of forgot about it?

Speaker 8 I think we kind of forgot about it.

Speaker 83 But naturally, the sheriff heard about all this and sent a young deputy named Jim DuPont to take a look around.

Speaker 55 By the time we talked to DuPont back in 2008,

Speaker 67 he'd been looking at the mystery for most of his career.

Speaker 63 In fact, our old video here hints at how long we've been following this story.

Speaker 57 Anyway, DuPont was assigned the case way back in 1982, partly because he was a private pilot as well as a deputy, so he knew a thing or two about small planes.

Speaker 23 And lo and behold, in the very spot where twins Jim and John said the young man had built a fire.

Speaker 12 We indeed found a little fire ring, and right away I found what's called a gust lock.

Speaker 12 And a gust lock is

Speaker 12 a bent piece of metal that actually fits into the yoke of an airplane.

Speaker 87 In the fire.

Speaker 12 Burned up in the fire. And plus there was some wires and a jack plug like on a microphone jack.
and I knew it was a mic jack from an airplane.

Speaker 43 So what then?

Speaker 12 I actually took that gust lock and went to the airport, found a 150, and indeed it fit the 150 that I looked at.

Speaker 34 A 150 would be a Cessna 150, like this one.

Speaker 23 So, did that mean the rest of a Cessna 150 was indeed in the lake, just like the gossipers were saying?

Speaker 45 DuPont reported all this to his boss, the sheriff, and the sheriff called in a couple of expert divers, Rick Hogg and Ernie Freeberry.

Speaker 10 The sheriff believed that there was a plane in this lake, and Ernie and I suited up and were on boats that were trying to locate it with fish finders.

Speaker 11 You can only imagine the challenge back then, technology being what it was in the 1980s, and the lake in spots being well over 200 feet deep.

Speaker 90 Still, the sheriff had confidence they'd find the plane and alerted the media, which certainly came to watch the divers diving and listen to the sheriff's optimistic daily predictions, overly optimistic predictions.

Speaker 10 He said that to the media quite a few times.

Speaker 37 Today's the day.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 10 we'd go out and everybody'd work hard and it wouldn't happen.

Speaker 70 And

Speaker 10 so they'd all go home again.

Speaker 37 And then the next day. Today's the day.

Speaker 10 It's just, I mean, everybody was doing what they could do.

Speaker 91 That went on for days, more than a week. So maybe all that talk about an airplane in the lake lake was just that talk.

Speaker 20 And then the sheriff heard about a thingamajig that was new at the time called side scanning sonar.

Speaker 51 So they brought one of those in and lowered it way down to the bottom.

Speaker 92 If we don't get results here today or tomorrow, we will call off the search because there's a limit to your resources and time and effort here.

Speaker 74 But just as the sheriff was about to give up, a breakthrough.

Speaker 12 When we got a hit on the sonar, he also brought a remote camera that you know that had an umbilical

Speaker 12 and basically flew that camera down to the aircraft.

Speaker 45 There it was, the plane, right there on the video screen.

Speaker 15 What was it like to see that thing?

Speaker 48 Do you remember?

Speaker 10 It was actually somewhat satisfying to know all the hours that you spent out there looking, it really was there.

Speaker 45 Except now there was another problem.

Speaker 22 The plane was more than 250 feet down, way too deep to safely send the divers.

Speaker 50 So they used the submersible camera to guide hooks onto the airplane and they pulled it up to a depth of about 100 feet where the divers were sent down to retrieve it.

Speaker 38 The water was very clear.

Speaker 35 They could see the plane almost like it was flying down in the cold, cold water.

Speaker 22 But then they saw something else.

Speaker 26 The plane wasn't empty.

Speaker 26 Inside?

Speaker 12 It's not pleasant when you see that.

Speaker 11 The body of a woman.

Speaker 63 Just a girl, really.

Speaker 10 She was sitting in a passenger seat,

Speaker 10 and her seatbelt was still on.

Speaker 60 What would she look like?

Speaker 10 As I recall, she was a pretty girl, and she was a young girl. Yeah, and it was just a shame.

Speaker 83 The divers each got behind a wing and sort of flew the plane up to the surface.

Speaker 83 As the plane came out, the crowd watching saw something many of the people here would never forget.

Speaker 11 The girl's hair was stuck in the door, and her long locks were waving in the water.

Speaker 65 The twins were there, crowded up close.

Speaker 54 It was a little more than I expected of her, you know. Many of them pulling it out and the hairs hanging out.

Speaker 52 I've never seen a dead person before.

Speaker 27 They put a sheet over the aircraft window to shield prying eyes, while the lawmen moved in.

Speaker 12 I removed her and just took her immediately down to our state pathologist in Missoula.

Speaker 60 What sort of condition was her body in?

Speaker 12 She was in excellent condition. She just looked like she was actually sleeping.

Speaker 12 That was the eerie part about her.

Speaker 11 The girl in the lake. Who was she?

Speaker 56 What was she doing alone in the passenger seat of a Cessna 150 on the bottom of a Montana lake?

Speaker 11 And if she was the passenger, where was the pilot?

Speaker 6 Coming up, a modern twist on a story old as time.

Speaker 3 What emerged was the suggestion that they were kind of a Romeo and Juliet, that their families had been disapproving of their relationship. They were eloping.
That was the suggestion.

Speaker 75 When dateline continues.

Speaker 33 Events around Little Bitterroot Lake were beyond puzzling as the autumn chill descended.

Speaker 20 The strange young man, the plane to the lake, the dead girl trapped in the plane.

Speaker 69 Then, Deputy Sheriff Jim DuPont had trouble shaking that image.

Speaker 12 Everything starts to transform in your brain of

Speaker 12 what happened that day, what happened to her when she went down, you know,

Speaker 12 the knowing that you're doomed type of thing.

Speaker 33 But where did she come from and why?

Speaker 45 A few hundred miles northwest of Little Bitterroot, across the border in Canada, in the heart of British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, is a sweet small city called Penticton, where on a Monday morning, almost a month before they fished that plane out of the lake, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Ron Peterson noticed unusual activity out of the airport.

Speaker 98 Where I saw the search and rescue aircraft in because that always has been a search base.

Speaker 4 So they're looking for somebody.

Speaker 88 Yeah, when I see things like that, I'd like to know what's going on.

Speaker 35 What was going on was indeed a search for a small plane gone missing the previous evening.

Speaker 85 The constable found out it was a training aircraft from Vancouver, four hours to the west, which had flown to Penticton the day before with two on board, both teenagers.

Speaker 52 And I found that a little bit unusual, especially in those days, because 19, 20 year olds didn't fly all over the country.

Speaker 4 Sure.

Speaker 55 They haven't had very much experience.

Speaker 52 No, and that terrain can be very treacherous.

Speaker 47 So the constable, though no one asked him to, started poking around.

Speaker 88 I spoke to the main refueler.

Speaker 52 He serviced the aircraft.

Speaker 102 He filled them up with fuel.

Speaker 52 And they'd spent the afternoon beside the aircraft on a blanket. And they were reorganizing stuff out of the airplane and putting it in these bags.

Speaker 17 Did you wonder if maybe they were smuggling something?

Speaker 9 Didn't know.

Speaker 85 Then Constable Peterson went looking for witnesses who may have seen the plane flying by.

Speaker 17 And yes, several did.

Speaker 23 They noticed because it had gone up into a narrow, windy valley, a posted no-fly zone and nod on the flight plan. It buzzed a ski mountain outside town.

Speaker 24 and a nearby observatory with its massive radio telescopes.

Speaker 15 I spoke to the fella there and I said, what happens if somebody flies over?

Speaker 88 Does anything trigger an alarm or anything like that?

Speaker 98 And he said, oh yeah, I said, this is a no-fly zone over here. And there was a disturbance registered.
He said that was a small airplane because he said we've seen them before.

Speaker 66 But after that, no idea where the plane went.

Speaker 63 And there was no emergency locator transmitter on board since it was a training aircraft and wasn't usually more than 25 miles from Vancouver.

Speaker 87 Was one of the thoughts that you thought maybe they'd crashed in the bush somewhere and just absolutely didn't survive?

Speaker 60 Absolutely.

Speaker 73 Everybody was looking for this plant.

Speaker 93 That's right.

Speaker 57 That very same summer Monday, a Cub reporter, brand new, 22 years old, had just started working at the Vancouver Sun newspaper.

Speaker 17 Margot Harper heard about the missing plane, dug a little, and came up with the names, the people on board.

Speaker 82 Jaroslaw Ambrozik, the pilot, known as Jerry, a 19-year-old who'd soloed just a year before, an emigrant from Poland at the age of 10, and a Boy Scout with dreams of becoming a commercial airline pilot, and his passenger and girlfriend, 18-year-old Diane Babcock.

Speaker 3 She was a very good student. She was a runner.
She was set on a career in nursing. You know, she was ambitious and she was determined to be successful.

Speaker 15 When Margot Harper started nosing around the high school from which Jerry and Diane had so recently graduated, she learned a theory was rapidly circulating here.

Speaker 41 A theory with an ancient and universal theme.

Speaker 3 What emerged right away was the suggestion that they were kind of a Romeo and Juliet couple, that their families had been disapproving of their relationship, and the suggestion emerged that they were trying to run away together.

Speaker 3 They were eloping. That was the suggestion, that they, in fact, had been trying to get away from parental pressure, from an unhappy

Speaker 3 social scene.

Speaker 43 Yarek had this strong parental influence that he was trying to get away from a father who was too tough on him or something. And she had a family that didn't want her involved with this Polish kid.

Speaker 3 From the kind of wrong side of the tracks, etc.

Speaker 16 That's what made it Romeo and Julia.

Speaker 4 Indeed.

Speaker 85 But according to Diane's family.

Speaker 3 I spoke with Mr. Babcock, Diane's father, who soundly dismissed that theory and said that there was no reason that they would have had to elope.
And if Jerry and Diane had wanted to be together,

Speaker 3 that they could have been together. And I remember thinking at the time, it didn't quite ring true.
And I wondered whether Mr. Babcock

Speaker 3 was appealing to his daughter through the media to come home if she was out there somewhere, that everything would be okay. They were absolutely out of their minds with,

Speaker 3 you know, worry, desperation, fear. At that point, their daughter was simply missing, and so was Jerry, and so was the plane.

Speaker 23 Then so it went.

Speaker 67 Families frantic with worry, search and rescue missions flying all over British Columbia, wondering where those teenagers could have gone.

Speaker 40 And then a week later, everything changed with a strange and alarming phone call from New York City.

Speaker 4 What was that like?

Speaker 98 Stunning.

Speaker 93 I won't. What?

Speaker 97 Coming up.

Speaker 6 One mystery solved.

Speaker 19 So many more not.

Speaker 25 They're gonna look for you forever.

Speaker 25 And they'll never find it.

Speaker 26 By the last days of August in 1982, Canadian search and rescue had been scouring the mountains for a week for probably a crashed airplane and the missing teenagers Jerry Ambrozic and Diane Babcock.

Speaker 75 But what happened then stopped them cold.

Speaker 75 Back in Vancouver, a close friend of the couple's had received a phone call.

Speaker 55 And it was hard to believe, but the call was said to be from the missing pilot himself, Jerry Ambrozic.

Speaker 69 What did you think when you heard that?

Speaker 3 I was just floored. I couldn't comprehend.
I don't think anyone could.

Speaker 18 When I first heard this, I'm going, you've got to be kidding me.

Speaker 40 But it was true.

Speaker 55 At least according to the friend.

Speaker 81 A young man named Tom Polowski.

Speaker 90 who reported that Jerry had called him with an astonishing story.

Speaker 11 A story that explained what happened to that small plane plane they'd been looking for.

Speaker 81 The plane had been ditched, Jerry claimed to his friend, crashed on purpose onto the surface of a lake across the border in Montana.

Speaker 4 And Diane was still in the plane, deep in the cold, cold water of Little Bitterroot Lake.

Speaker 83 And Jerry, in shock, he told his friend in that phone call, had fled the scene of the crash, calling his friend somehow now from a bus terminal in New York City.

Speaker 3 I think one of the things that was so captivating about the story for everyone was, yeah, this notion that somehow this young couple could actually pull off this incredible magical disappearing act.

Speaker 3 The idea that they'd successfully run away to be together, right?

Speaker 3 And that they had defied all odds and that they made it. And then you hear that, well,

Speaker 3 he's crashed the plane and her body's at the bottom of the lake and he's on the run.

Speaker 3 It becomes a completely different story.

Speaker 56 But investigators and reporters alike wondered, was Jerry's friend Tom telling the truth about that phone call?

Speaker 99 They put him to the polygraph and he was to be found truthful.

Speaker 56 All this was pre-internet, of course, and that's probably why the RCMP had no idea that a sheriff down there in Montana had just begun investigating an oil sheen on the water and reports of a stranger wandering the shoreline.

Speaker 7 And then, after that phone call from Jerry, the RCMP called the sheriff and told him about the young couple and the plane way down deep and the young woman still inside.

Speaker 27 Constable Peterson went to Montana to help out.

Speaker 39 And in Vancouver, the Mounties put a tap on Tom's phone, just in case Jerry called again.

Speaker 41 And sure enough, he did.

Speaker 25 Hello, this I would select call to Tom Pulafski from Lewis Gomez.

Speaker 25 From where?

Speaker 25 It's to Tom Pulafski from Lewis Gomez. In Dallas, Texas.

Speaker 57 That Jerry would use an alias was strange.

Speaker 55 But that he was at a phone booth near this store in East Dallas, Texas?

Speaker 11 Wild.

Speaker 25 Hi.

Speaker 25 What the hell are you doing, Jerry?

Speaker 33 Then, as they talked, Jerry offered a version of the story that didn't sound much at all like the story of Romeo and Juliet and all the headlines.

Speaker 30 Like he didn't really care what she did.

Speaker 57 But then, later, same conversation, Jerry said that losing Diane was like half of him dying.

Speaker 34 She's gone.

Speaker 25 I'm alone. I mean, I'm lonely.

Speaker 81 Jerry was calling, he told his friend, to try to make sure Diane was found.

Speaker 78 But given the circumstances of Diane's death, he said he would not be coming home, would not turn himself in.

Speaker 25 If you find a place with a dead body in sight,

Speaker 25 then that's her. It's murder.
That's what it's going to be. So I took a...
But you didn't kill her, so why why should you, you know, why should somebody look for you?

Speaker 4 I don't know why.

Speaker 25 You come but look for me there, I don't want her to look for me. Well, but listen, I mean, you can't be, you know, you don't want somebody to look for you for a thing that you didn't do.

Speaker 25 I didn't do anything. It's all I mean, it's not like I killed her to take a single wound in her or of a knife or anything that I killed her.

Speaker 11 But Jerry had already told Tom his decision was made.

Speaker 41 He wasn't coming home ever.

Speaker 17 Did you wonder why he wouldn't, once he lost his girlfriend, why he wouldn't kind of throw himself on the mercy of the court and come back and apologize and try to get on with his life?

Speaker 52 Yeah, I believe that too.

Speaker 102 And Tom, his friend, really, really, really worked on him to do that.

Speaker 102 Because, you know, the longer you leave it, the worse it gets.

Speaker 52 The story gets bigger and bigger as to why you ran away, you know, and now it becomes more suspicious.

Speaker 15 And a bigger story.

Speaker 83 So reporter Margot Harper embarked on her first international assignment to Little Bitterroot Lake.

Speaker 55 where they believe they were very close to finding the airplane and Diane.

Speaker 3 And I remember thinking and kind of hoping against hope that somehow, maybe, maybe she'd escaped somehow, you know.

Speaker 3 I mean, it seemed inconceivable that the body in the plane could be anyone but her, but you just don't know until you actually see.

Speaker 23 And see she did.

Speaker 42 She arrived at the lakeshore just in time to see the plane emerge from the water with that indelible image, the girl's hair stuck in the door, her long blonde locks wet from waving around in the water.

Speaker 3 I remember looking at it and thinking, oh my god, you know,

Speaker 3 she looks like Ophelia

Speaker 3 from Hamlet. I remember just walking over to the plane and I looked inside and she

Speaker 3 was perfectly preserved. You know, the lake was so cold.
She was kind of slumped over. My recollection is her head was against the side of the door.

Speaker 3 Her hair was streaming out and she just looked like she was asleep.

Speaker 53 You've never forgotten that?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 That image with her hair streaming out the window and coming out of that watery grave is one that has really haunted me.

Speaker 3 I think almost like no other image in my career.

Speaker 66 After Diane was taken away, the sheriff invited Margot back to the hangar to see what else was on the plane.

Speaker 3 They had taken out a life raft, some kind of disguises, survival gear. There was another duffel bag with sleeping bags and extra clothing

Speaker 3 and it became in that moment crystal clear what the plan had been.

Speaker 3 It was clear that they were going to, you know, crash the plane, dump the plane,

Speaker 3 ditch it, and jump into a life raft and make their way to shore and try to disguise themselves somehow.

Speaker 3 And so I filed a story the next day in the Vancouver Sun, which was front page, confirming the, I want to say the elopement theory, but it's it's hardly an elopement now, is it? It's something else.

Speaker 3 It's an escape fantasy, really.

Speaker 7 But the reality?

Speaker 17 Diane was dead.

Speaker 67 And two law enforcement agencies from two countries were now at work to solve the mystery of what really happened at Little Bitterroot Lake.

Speaker 97 Coming up.

Speaker 4 He could have gotten her out of there.

Speaker 12 Well, that's my opinion.

Speaker 6 More questions about what happened and suspicion about why.

Speaker 12 Did he really want to run away with her forever? If that's the woman I was going to elope with and I couldn't get her out of the airplane, you would have found me in it too.

Speaker 75 When dateline continues.

Speaker 27 It was when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police showed up that the mystery behind what happened at Little Bitterroot Lake finally, like the plane itself, emerged into something something like clarity.

Speaker 20 Or at least, who was who and what they were doing there.

Speaker 79 The young pilot, 19-year-old Jerry Ambrozic.

Speaker 41 Jerry's girlfriend, 18-year-old Diane Babcock, descending in the plane to her death.

Speaker 8 I remember it being so unbelievable. First of all, that a plane had landed in what I considered our family's lake.

Speaker 8 and that someone was killed

Speaker 8 and that we had actually met the person who was flying that plane.

Speaker 45 Now, Flathead County detectives set about trying to figure out exactly what happened when the plane came down and how and why death came to poor Diane.

Speaker 12 We concluded that she did,

Speaker 12 she died by drowning.

Speaker 89 Diane did have a broken collarbone, a fracture in her neck, and a bruise to the right side of her forehead, all most likely incurred when the plane hit the water.

Speaker 11 But they were all survivable injuries.

Speaker 96 Except, when they found Diane, she was still strapped in.

Speaker 89 So, maybe the seatbelt, instead of saving her life, helped end it.

Speaker 7 Maybe the buckle jammed.

Speaker 50 Pat Walsh is a retired detective.

Speaker 40 He was a deputy back then.

Speaker 76 Her lap belt had flipped over so the buckle was against her body, or she couldn't have reached it in a hurry without realizing.

Speaker 99 The buckle had actually flipped around.

Speaker 60 Yes, it flipped.

Speaker 76 It flipped around, which is going to happen if it's a little bit loose and not cinched down tight.

Speaker 82 But aside from that, the belt was not malfunctioning in any way.

Speaker 12 It wasn't jammed. It wasn't locked.

Speaker 106 And yet, it was obvious, Diane did not even try to get it open.

Speaker 81 Not like you'd think a person would if her life depended on it.

Speaker 12 One of the first things I checked during the autopsy was her fingernails. None of her nails were broke.
There was no bruising or anything of the fingertips.

Speaker 12 And just imagine yourself being in a craft that's sinking

Speaker 12 and you're holding your belt and you're scrambling. You know the belt's stuck.
You know, you can't get the belt free.

Speaker 12 I'd probably break my fingers trying to get the thing break. If nothing else, by straining, pulling just on the belt fruitlessly

Speaker 12 until you have to give it up, you know. So there was none of that.
And

Speaker 12 I don't understand that today.

Speaker 19 Why did that happen?

Speaker 96 And then suddenly, a new twist.

Speaker 40 Dan's doctor revealed to investigators that just days before the crash and her death, she'd had an abortion.

Speaker 86 So that raised Deputy Jim DuPont's antenna, especially given what Jerry had said in one of those calls to his friend, taped by the RCMP after the crash.

Speaker 86 Sure, because I guess she was in love with me or something like that.

Speaker 87 Anything go through your mind at that point?

Speaker 12 Did he really want her to be there? Did he really want to run away with her forever? She is the one that was madly in love with him.

Speaker 12 It probably wasn't the same type of issue in reverse.

Speaker 56 So maybe the crash presented an opportunity to not have a clingy girlfriend.

Speaker 55 Or maybe, as Diane's family would later claim, she was a vulnerable young woman afraid of being left by the only lover she'd ever had, and her emotions told her to get on board even if Jerry didn't really want her to.

Speaker 57 Jim, a pilot remember, had been doing some informed thinking, and he figured Jerry would certainly have had time to save Diane's life if he wanted to.

Speaker 12 I would guess you'd be lucky to get five minutes. You know, five minutes is a long time when you're in a hurry.
You can do a lot of things in five minutes.

Speaker 12 You can get two people out of an airplane and get what you want out of it.

Speaker 49 And if there was that much time, why didn't Jerry get her out of there?

Speaker 74 Why didn't he even take out the two-person rubber raft he'd stashed in the cargo compartment?

Speaker 7 A theory began to harden in the deputy's head.

Speaker 4 He could have gotten her out of there.

Speaker 12 Well, that's my opinion. That's

Speaker 12 my opinion, is he could.

Speaker 17 And you must have been thinking that at the time.

Speaker 12 I was concerned to why, because I know he also...

Speaker 12 he also got out with his equipment.

Speaker 11 Oh, yes.

Speaker 109 Jerry's equipment.

Speaker 63 That duffel bag wrapped in green plastic.

Speaker 57 He was seen with it on shore after the crash.

Speaker 11 It contained his clothes and money.

Speaker 45 Though they didn't know that for quite a while.

Speaker 32 2,200 bucks he and Diane, mostly Diane, had saved for the trip.

Speaker 76 I thought it was very convenient that

Speaker 76 he got that bag and he wasn't able to get her out.

Speaker 98 Convenient.

Speaker 76 It's convenient for him.

Speaker 43 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Not so convenient for her.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 12 We've all been 18 and in love, and we know how intense that is.

Speaker 12 If that's the woman I was going to elope with and run away with, and I couldn't get her out of the airplane, you would have found me in it, too.

Speaker 18 And that really was the heart of your belief that this guy had done it on purpose?

Speaker 12 I think he

Speaker 12 took advantage of an opportunity and let her go down, or just didn't try.

Speaker 12 And he saved himself and not her.

Speaker 12 One of the two things happened.

Speaker 12 I don't know how you could explain it any other way.

Speaker 7 And there was one more thing troubling Jim DuPont. Maybe more important than all the other clues.

Speaker 57 Namely, if Jerry Ambrozic didn't do anything wrong, why did he run?

Speaker 57 Not long after poor Diane was lifted out of Little Bitterroot Lake, she was laid to rest in a small family plot in a cemetery across the border in British Columbia.

Speaker 63 And in Montana, Lawmen decided what Jerry did was a crime.

Speaker 110 They filed charges, negligent homicide.

Speaker 11 So Jerry Ambrozic was now a wanted man, a fugitive. And the manhunt was on.

Speaker 6 Coming up from Canada to the U.S., to south of the border.

Speaker 64 I wasn't sure he wasn't in Mexico.

Speaker 6 And more tragedy for Diane's father.

Speaker 100 How much more can the family endure?

Speaker 56 Jerry Ambrosik was like a ghost, an apparition on the lakeshore, and then gone.

Speaker 46 Vanished into where?

Speaker 31 There was just one clue to where he may have reappeared, telephonically, at least.

Speaker 56 A phone call placed from Dallas, Texas.

Speaker 22 That last phone call he made to his friend Tom was traced to a phone booth.

Speaker 40 You remember those, don't you?

Speaker 31 Long gone now, it was near a grocery store in East Dallas.

Speaker 74 Rick Hawk, one of the divers who'd pulled the plane out of the lake, was also a detective, and he was assigned to find Jerry.

Speaker 45 He knew about the phone booth, but...

Speaker 10 There wouldn't have been much of a guarantee he'd go back to that same phone booth.

Speaker 10 And my sheriff wasn't about to send me down to Texas to sit on a phone booth for

Speaker 10 an unspecified number of hours, days, weeks, months. He was an 18 or 17 or 18 year old kid.
He got all the way to Texas somehow and disappeared. I thought he was under a cactus someplace.

Speaker 91 A reasonable assumption, one would think.

Speaker 107 It was like the guy just didn't exist.

Speaker 38 Months passed, then years.

Speaker 84 They kept looking, but with rapidly diminishing expectations.

Speaker 7 Jerry didn't contact anyone, far as they could tell.

Speaker 64 I wasn't sure he wasn't in Mexico.

Speaker 20 Certainly could have been.

Speaker 78 So it's sort of, what's the point of trying to chase around after a ghost?

Speaker 77 Well, that's my job.

Speaker 84 By 1991, nine years after the crash, Deputy Jim DuPont had become the elected sheriff.

Speaker 111 This 1980 photo is one of the only ones we have of Ambrozak.

Speaker 33 And Jerry Ambrozak

Speaker 79 had joined the list of America's Most Wanted, appearing on several versions of the popular TV program, including Final Justice.

Speaker 32 He stayed on that very big deal list all the way through the 1990s.

Speaker 76 About the third time it was featured on America's Most Wanted, I actually went back to D.C.

Speaker 18 What do you do when you take part in a show like that?

Speaker 76 Well, my job was there to be on the phone in case

Speaker 76 a tip came in that sounded real, and none of the calls that came in were credible.

Speaker 47 It was depressing.

Speaker 67 Without a tip, short of Jerry turning himself in, there was almost nothing for law enforcement to go on.

Speaker 18 This was kind of a lost cause during your period of time.

Speaker 12 Oh, because I can remember. We had calls from Interpol even on some.
People called and said, hey, I think it's this guy, and they ended up not to be him.

Speaker 11 In Canada, Diane Babcock's father called the RCMP once a week for years, and then once a month, hoping for news.

Speaker 62 It never came.

Speaker 40 Then, in 1999, 17 years after the crash, Diane's father and mother were driving to the cemetery where she was buried, as they had done so faithfully each year since her death.

Speaker 11 It was a bus that collided with them, smashed into their car.

Speaker 89 Diane's mother, Adele, was killed.

Speaker 40 She was 65.

Speaker 100 They thought, mine,

Speaker 100 how much more can the family endure?

Speaker 78 By 2000, RCMP Constable Peterson retired.

Speaker 43 Those unsolved cases stick with you

Speaker 17 in our line of work.

Speaker 4 They do, yep.

Speaker 88 In fact, sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about them, you know, long after.

Speaker 37 And as the 25th anniversary of the crash closed in, with Sheriff DuPont pondering retirement after four terms, he wondered if what he considered the biggest case he couldn't solve would haunt him long after he took off the Sheriff's Star for good.

Speaker 15 This case seemed to really get under his skin.

Speaker 107 Jim

Speaker 76 spent a lot of time talking to the family and whenever

Speaker 76 there was any communication with the victim's father,

Speaker 76 Jim would be the one that would talk to him and he always tried to stay in touch with him.

Speaker 78 Yeah, that'll certainly get you invested in the case if you know the family.

Speaker 76 I felt he had a personal investment in it, yes.

Speaker 32 No matter.

Speaker 86 The fugitive had successfully done what few had ever pulled off.

Speaker 95 He disappeared without a trace, as if he was at the bottom of some lake himself.

Speaker 3 I often wondered what happened to Jerry Ambrozic. Over the years, I, you know, I had all kinds of theories.

Speaker 3 You know, probably the theory that was floating around the journalistic community here was that he was, you know, a broken man sitting in a Mexican bar somewhere.

Speaker 11 And then?

Speaker 11 It was almost like it happens in the movies. A twist quite out of the blue.
Once again, there was a woman.

Speaker 11 My my

Speaker 97 coming up.

Speaker 6 She wanted an honest man.

Speaker 14 Being deliberately untruthful

Speaker 14 really bothers me.

Speaker 6 She ended up with a wanted man.

Speaker 14 I was like, so what else have you lied to me about?

Speaker 75 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 110 Hey, everybody, it's Rob Lowe here.

Speaker 58 If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe.

Speaker 72 And basically, it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J.

Speaker 110 Fox.

Speaker 72 There are new episodes out every Thursday.

Speaker 57 So subscribe, please, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 6 Returning to our story.

Speaker 8 It was unbelievable.

Speaker 6 It was also a mystery. A young couple, possibly eloping, ditched their small plane in a Montana lake.

Speaker 3 They were kind of a Romeo and Juliet couple.

Speaker 6 Diane was found dead in the sunken plane.

Speaker 12 She just looked like she was actually sleeping.

Speaker 6 But her lover, Jerry, had disappeared. And for decades, he's been a fugitive.

Speaker 3 They were pretty sure he was heading to Mexico.

Speaker 6 Now, a little white lie was about to lead to the astounding truth.

Speaker 60 Did you confront him about these discoveries of yours?

Speaker 14 I didn't want him to know I'd seen the article.

Speaker 6 After 24 years, would the mystery finally be solved?

Speaker 14 Should I make that call or should I just let him be?

Speaker 6 For the first time in public, the incredible story.

Speaker 16 Some people probably see it as a crime story.

Speaker 64 Some people see it as a love story.

Speaker 43 How do you see it?

Speaker 6 Here again is Keith Morrison.

Speaker 44 There was a woman.

Speaker 23 Gina Johnson was her name.

Speaker 78 This is about what happened back in 2006, 24 years after the Cessna 150 went down in Little Bitterroot Lake.

Speaker 81 Gina had gone through a divorce.

Speaker 55 And she had somewhat reluctantly made a decision to put herself out there online.

Speaker 16 This getting online, was that a big decision for you?

Speaker 14 My work schedule doesn't allow for a lot of going out and meeting new people.

Speaker 90 Gina works for Texas Instruments in the Dallas area. What matters in our story is what she does for that giant semiconductor company.

Speaker 14 My job is to help when they are bringing up a new technology on the line. They send our lab a sample, so it's my job to find

Speaker 14 very small, minute things that look off and then look closer.

Speaker 86 Gina's job title?

Speaker 23 She's a technician in failure analysis.

Speaker 14 I guess it's a good job for me because I do that in every aspect of my life.

Speaker 4 Have you always done that?

Speaker 14 I'm generally a very trusting person, but when something doesn't add up or it just looks off, I automatically feel the urge to look closer.

Speaker 24 A kind of built-in BS detector, honed just then on the raw and recent wounds inflicted by a certain ex-mate's cheating lies.

Speaker 62 So, as she wrote in her online profile, I hate dishonesty.

Speaker 14 Being deliberately untruthful

Speaker 14 really bothers me.

Speaker 81 Anyway, men responded.

Speaker 37 And in the spring of 2006, one reply in particular caught her eye.

Speaker 14 He had a nice picture.

Speaker 14 He was close to my age. At the time, I was 33.

Speaker 14 He wanted to find someone he was going to settle down with and have a family with and, you know, marry.

Speaker 5 Saying all the right things.

Speaker 14 In different order, you know.

Speaker 14 He seemed intelligent and he seemed to like a lot of the activities that I would like.

Speaker 82 And something else in that ad caught Gina's eye.

Speaker 74 The words, I am honest and don't cheat or play games.

Speaker 14 And I was like, oh, good, because that's very important to me.

Speaker 62 So Gina and this guy, who had the rather vanilla-sounding name of Michael Smith, made dinner plans at a local restaurant.

Speaker 14 And you met him there? Yes, I met him there.

Speaker 14 He drove a Viper.

Speaker 43 He showed up in a Viper?

Speaker 86 Even back in 2006, a Dodge Viper had a sticker price upwards of $80,000.

Speaker 14 When I saw that, I thought, okay,

Speaker 14 it appears that he makes a good living.

Speaker 11 So they were having dinner, and, well, remember, Gina is a paid professional noticer.

Speaker 14 And I noticed his class ring. So I took a closer look

Speaker 14 and

Speaker 14 it said he had a bachelor's in aerospace engineering. Okay.

Speaker 14 And I thought, well, that's odd.

Speaker 40 What exactly made it odd?

Speaker 27 Well, Gina and Michael were supposedly about the same age, but Michael's class ring said he'd finished college around the same time Gina was finishing high school.

Speaker 7 So Gina, being Gina, she said something.

Speaker 14 Wow, you must be pretty intelligent. And he just smiled really big.

Speaker 53 And let it go.

Speaker 5 And let it go.

Speaker 14 But that stuck in my head, like, I just couldn't quite get it out of my head.

Speaker 42 But as the days passed, they talked of all kinds of things, as people do at the fresh end of a relationship.

Speaker 60 Did he talk much about his past?

Speaker 14 He said that he had

Speaker 14 only been in love once, and that it was this girl that he had known from when he was a teenager,

Speaker 14 but that she had been killed in a horrible accident,

Speaker 14 and that he was just heartbroken over her loss.

Speaker 55 In fact, they bonded in a way over their respective personal losses.

Speaker 16 More as just good friends, at least at first.

Speaker 14 We didn't kiss for a couple of weeks.

Speaker 19 Really?

Speaker 4 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 14 Well, he was patient, and I appreciated that.

Speaker 11 But when they did get intimate, Gina's radar went off again.

Speaker 20 Remember, Michael Smith had told her he was, what, 34?

Speaker 14 Maybe into your 30s,

Speaker 14 most people can still really maintain that youthful, I might be 20-something look.

Speaker 5 Okay? Sure.

Speaker 14 Speaking from experience, between those 30s and 40s,

Speaker 14 age just starts to do things to you.

Speaker 4 Odd, isn't it?

Speaker 14 Yeah. It doesn't seem to matter how good a shape you're in or whatever.
There were those little things, the details that he looked older than he actually was.

Speaker 84 Gina didn't say anything then,

Speaker 13 just pondered, silent in her heart.

Speaker 11 And then...

Speaker 14 We were going through the grocery store and he's talking about how good he looked for his age.

Speaker 14 And he's like, don't you agree?

Speaker 14 And I looked at him like, you want me to be honest with you?

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 actually...

Speaker 14 You look older than you say you are.

Speaker 4 How'd he react to

Speaker 14 He wasn't really pleased with that. We kept discussing this.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 he's like, well,

Speaker 14 actually, I am older.

Speaker 14 And then I was instantly enraged.

Speaker 4 Well, I should think.

Speaker 36 You're the woman who loves honesty.

Speaker 14 Yeah, because I'd been harping on how important honesty was to me the entire month that we'd been going out.

Speaker 113 And he lied to you about his age?

Speaker 14 And how much I hated being lied to.

Speaker 5 I was like, okay, well, how old are you?

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 he said he was not

Speaker 14 34, that he was actually 43.

Speaker 43 So, did you get up and walk out on him?

Speaker 14 No, I griped at him. So, what else have you lied to me about? Because if you've lied to me about that, what else have you lied about?

Speaker 14 Did you lie about your name? Is Michael Smith even your real name?

Speaker 4 Uh-huh.

Speaker 14 And he just kind of hung his head and goes,

Speaker 4 Oh boy.

Speaker 14 And I was like, you're freaking kidding me.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 27 as you and I know, he certainly wasn't some guy named Michael Smith, was he?

Speaker 97 Coming up.

Speaker 6 Should she stay or should she go?

Speaker 14 I was a little nervous about going on the trip.

Speaker 6 And that was the easy decision.

Speaker 14 Should I make that call or should I just let him be?

Speaker 16 Gina Johnson had held her suspicious tongue for one whole month.

Speaker 24 Gina, the detailed noticer, didn't believe for a minute that the man she met online was just 34 years old.

Speaker 47 In fact, she had noticed multiple red flags in the story he had spun, Buttoned her lip about all of it.

Speaker 75 And then one day she couldn't hold back.

Speaker 20 She finally belled the cat.

Speaker 15 Careful what you wish for.

Speaker 14 Okay, what's your real name? Tell me, what is it?

Speaker 5 And he told me.

Speaker 5 What was it?

Speaker 14 Jarek

Speaker 14 Ambrozik. I think he said he went by Jerry or something.

Speaker 11 There it was.

Speaker 7 His real name.

Speaker 62 The man at the center of our mystery.

Speaker 60 So why did he change it to Michael Smith?

Speaker 18 Did he tell you?

Speaker 14 No, he did not.

Speaker 14 And then all I could think about was how his profile had talked about how honest he was and how dishonest this was.

Speaker 113 If you ever needed red flags, he tells you to walk out.

Speaker 61 Huge red flags.

Speaker 14 Huge red flags. Did you? I didn't break up with him immediately, if that's what you're asking.

Speaker 5 That's what I'm asking, yeah.

Speaker 21 So did you give him another chance?

Speaker 14 Yeah, the next day I went to work and I actually Googled his real name.

Speaker 5 Oh.

Speaker 14 And the very first thing that came up was the story of the plane crash. Jarek was wanted.

Speaker 53 What was it like to find that out?

Speaker 14 That freaked me out.

Speaker 14 It said he was the most, it was the longest running fugitive from America's most wanted.

Speaker 27 Wanted, the article said, for negligent homicide in connection with the death of sweet young Diane, killed in the ditching of that plane all those many years years ago.

Speaker 14 It was pretty shocking.

Speaker 60 Did you confront him about these discoveries of yours?

Speaker 9 Uh,

Speaker 14 I didn't want him to know I'd seen the article.

Speaker 11 Why not?

Speaker 57 Well, for one thing, Gina said she wasn't sure if he was guilty.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 11 she's not proud of this, she told us, but Mike, or Yarick, had invited her to come along on his business trip to

Speaker 65 Japan.

Speaker 14 I was

Speaker 61 a little

Speaker 14 nervous about going on the trip because there was that thing in my head saying is he

Speaker 14 somebody I need to worry about or really is he harmless.

Speaker 18 But he liked you.

Speaker 14 And he very much liked me and he had been nothing but nice to me.

Speaker 17 But you didn't really want to believe that he had engaged in homicide.

Speaker 14 Who do you want to

Speaker 5 know?

Speaker 14 Do you ever really want to believe that somebody's capable of harming that?

Speaker 53 So Did you kind of fool yourself there?

Speaker 14 No. No, I went in with eyes wide open.

Speaker 55 But before the trip, Gina, well, you know, she just couldn't not say something, could she?

Speaker 40 Jerry took it well, she said.

Speaker 22 Not defensive, more

Speaker 40 wistful.

Speaker 14 He talked about wanting to go back and be with his family again and being able to one day not have to hide his true identity.

Speaker 14 And I was like, well, if you're innocent, just go ahead and turn yourself in and go up there and, you know, I'll support you through it. I said, but I just can't see myself

Speaker 14 being with someone who's living a lie.

Speaker 14 You of all people. But he was like, no, I'm just not ready yet.
I'm just not ready yet.

Speaker 11 So to Japan they went.

Speaker 14 Notice the netting around the top to keep the pigeons out of the rafters. Very clever.

Speaker 35 Here Gina was in Kyoto, one of the world's most beautiful cities, especially especially during April with the cherry blossoms in full bloom.

Speaker 14 Oh, the place is gorgeous.

Speaker 14 And he took me to lots of great places. He was patient, but he did start to get impatient with me because I love taking pictures.

Speaker 14 And there was a lot of beautiful scenery in Japan, so I was snapping pictures. most of the time.

Speaker 48 Maybe you weren't paying quite enough attention to him.

Speaker 14 Yes, towards the end of the trip,

Speaker 14 he started to get a little testy with me because I wasn't warming up to him.

Speaker 4 And so, eventually, they had words.

Speaker 50 And the trip to the Far East went south.

Speaker 4 Mind you, Michael,

Speaker 22 Yaric, ever the gentleman, willingly gave up his first-class seat home to Dallas.

Speaker 35 So Gina could experience flying up front on an international flight.

Speaker 22 And when the plane hit the ground, the relationship did too.

Speaker 4 It really bothered me

Speaker 14 that someone could live this lie.

Speaker 14 And he was calm. He was cool about it.
He said, well, if you ever change your mind, my door will always be open to you.

Speaker 53 But it was a breakup.

Speaker 14 It was a breakup.

Speaker 27 Then, for a few months, Gina danced on the head of her dilemma.

Speaker 53 How often did you think about it?

Speaker 9 All the time.

Speaker 14 I mean in my head I'm thinking well if he's innocent why is he so hesitant to turn himself in? Should I make that call or should I just let him be?

Speaker 50 After all, he trusted her to keep his secret.

Speaker 47 But by that time Gina had also read about Diane's family.

Speaker 14 Her father has no closure. I would want the person who was there to be held responsible.

Speaker 11 It just so happened that while Gina was mulling all this over, that sheriff up in Montana, Jim DuPont, set out on one last wistful vacation before he officially retired.

Speaker 12 I was with a friend and we were reminiscing over a beer where we were, and he asked me about, you know, is there any cases you're leaving behind that weren't solved or anything?

Speaker 12 And this case popped immediately into my brain, and I wish we had some answers to it. I wish we would have found him just to find out exactly what happened and what occurred.

Speaker 83 Then, Sheriff DuPont went back to his office to pack it all up.

Speaker 40 Unaware that 1,800 miles south, a woman in the Dallas suburbs was about to present him with the ultimate retirement gift.

Speaker 14 I picked up the phone and I was shaking, and I just left a message saying that I think I had been dating this suspect. And I said, you know, just

Speaker 14 give me a call and I'll talk to you about it.

Speaker 90 And when the soon-to-be retiring sheriff got that message, I almost fell out of my chair.

Speaker 11 So, happy ending. All straightened out.

Speaker 22 Or maybe not.

Speaker 30 Coming up, meet Michael Smith.

Speaker 73 What went through your mind when you realized they've got me?

Speaker 75 When date line continues

Speaker 33 when Gina Johnson called the Flathead County Sheriff's Department about a certain ex-boyfriend, she didn't have to wait long for Sheriff Jim DuPont to return her call.

Speaker 14 He sounded excited. He sounded very excited.
And I guess that he knew I was telling the truth because I told him details that had not been published that

Speaker 14 Jarek had actually told me.

Speaker 36 I don't know when I've last spoken to somebody who brought an end to an international manhunt before.

Speaker 5 Really?

Speaker 14 I figured it happened all the time.

Speaker 5 That's right.

Speaker 81 Didn't take long after that.

Speaker 56 Dallas VD found an old mugshot of this Michael Lee Smith.

Speaker 41 Turned out he'd been arrested twice for burglary back in those early years in Dallas.

Speaker 77 And that photograph looked like his high school school picture a lot.

Speaker 86 So on a Wednesday morning in August 2006, 24 years after a Cessna 150 sank into the frigid depths of Little Bitterroot Lake, a team of plainclothes officers knocked at the door of an upscale house in Plano, Texas.

Speaker 7 And there he was.

Speaker 101 A nice young guy in a Polo shirt asks if I'm Michael Smith.

Speaker 4 I go, yeah.

Speaker 68 Another guy jumps out on the side side and puts a gut in my face.

Speaker 57 This is Yarek Ambrozic,

Speaker 20 the fugitive so many had searched for.

Speaker 74 The man who pulled off the impossible and vanished for decades.

Speaker 16 Did you know immediately the jig was up?

Speaker 68 I did not know. I didn't know at first.

Speaker 99 I was very disoriented.

Speaker 112 And so what happened? Well, the guy had a papers in his hands, and on top of the papers, it had my Yarosov Czesov Ambrozic.

Speaker 68 And so when I saw that, I pretty much put the dots together pretty quickly.

Speaker 32 He asked one of the officers to fetch the pet parrot he put out on the patio to catch the morning sun.

Speaker 43 What went through your mind when you realized, okay, finally, they've got me?

Speaker 88 I was fairly calm.

Speaker 112 I didn't really,

Speaker 99 you know, sort of process all this.

Speaker 46 And then just like that, he was in jail, in a padded cell, as he recalls it.

Speaker 40 Deemed a suicide risk.

Speaker 65 But there was an upside.

Speaker 21 He got to call home to talk to his parents for the first time in nearly a quarter century.

Speaker 43 What was that conversation like?

Speaker 99 You know, surprisingly, it was very calm and it was like nothing ever happened almost.

Speaker 18 What was it like to catch up with them?

Speaker 112 It was amazing.

Speaker 4 They never sort of lost hope.

Speaker 108 Over the years, they never actually moved and switched houses and changed numbers because they always thought I would come back.

Speaker 4 They never forgot you.

Speaker 112 Never forgot me.

Speaker 11 So why?

Speaker 86 Why did he, or he and Diane, decide they just had to run away in the the first place?

Speaker 55 Why come up with that crazy plan?

Speaker 22 And why did he run after she was killed?

Speaker 83 How did he pull off his decades-long disappearing act?

Speaker 11 Well, that,

Speaker 55 that is quite a story.

Speaker 45 Straight out of a movie.

Speaker 113 When people say, what is this story about?

Speaker 16 I mean, some people probably see it as a crime story. Some people see it as a love story.

Speaker 43 How do you see it?

Speaker 112 Well, it's definitely a love story.

Speaker 88 And unfortunately, a tragic accident happened and Diane ended up drowning and I went into shock and lost basically out of my mind.

Speaker 35 After he left that lake in Montana, he took a train to New York and then hitchhiked to Texas, where the man he was riding with stole the $2,200 Yerick had managed to save in one of those duffel bags when the plane went down.

Speaker 26 So there he was in Texas, totally destitute, hungry, homeless, hopeless.

Speaker 32 And then he met a guy who gave him a place to stay for free and told him how to get a new identity.

Speaker 99 I went to a cemetery and found somebody that deceased that was less than a year old. And so he would not have any record on him, dental records, doctor's records or anything.

Speaker 50 But he was about your age?

Speaker 68 He was about pretty close to my age. Michael Lee Smith of all the names.
Pretty generic name. And same day went to the records building in Dallas and asked for a birth certificate.

Speaker 68 Here's his name, here's his birth date.

Speaker 118 Five minutes later, the guy came back with a certified copy stamped.

Speaker 108 No questions asked.

Speaker 99 So I had a birth certificate.

Speaker 4 It's a little harder these days.

Speaker 99 I don't think you can do that these days.

Speaker 45 But back then, he could.

Speaker 30 And he used that birth certificate to get a driver's license and a social security card, and then a job as a carpenter and a GED.

Speaker 46 And eventually a degree from the University of Texas at Arlington, Aerospace Engineering.

Speaker 62 And then Hiccup.

Speaker 108 When you start applying for security clearances with aerospace jobs, they're going to dig deep into your background.

Speaker 101 And I kind of knew that they would probably find not Michael Smith.

Speaker 108 And so I kind of pretty much

Speaker 118 decided the time to switch into and get into computers.

Speaker 34 He turned out to be quite an entrepreneur. His tech support private lesson web design company made lots of money.

Speaker 16 You had a nice big house.

Speaker 60 You had, what, two or three cars?

Speaker 99 Yeah, I had a couple of cars.

Speaker 105 Viper.

Speaker 93 Yeah, it was toys.

Speaker 68 It was a lot of hard work over the years, and eventually sort of the work sort of became the salvation.

Speaker 55 Eventually he landed Honda Racing as a client and with a U.S.

Speaker 11 passport now, he traveled the world, including that trip to Japan with Gina that we told you about.

Speaker 24 And then a few months after their breakup, those officers were at his door and he was in the clink.

Speaker 7 Was there kind of a light bulb moment?

Speaker 99 Yeah,

Speaker 99 first few days

Speaker 68 that I figured out the only person that actually knew about my past that would do anything would have been Gina.

Speaker 55 So was this relationship revenge?

Speaker 99 That's what it looked like to me.

Speaker 60 Was it a blessing in disguise, though?

Speaker 99 It was.

Speaker 116 As crazy as it sounds, you know, and after 24 years living as Michael Smith, I finally got my family back again.

Speaker 33 But blessing or not, remember, there was a steep penalty waiting to be paid.

Speaker 56 Yarek Ambrozik was facing a charge of negligent homicide back in Montana.

Speaker 83 And no matter that he'd matured into that sleek and polished business owner in Plano, Texas, he was facing as much as a decade in the very humble confines of a state prison.

Speaker 6 Coming up, for the first time in public, the pilot tells his story.

Speaker 103 I'm laying halfway in the water, halfway on the wing, with my arm trying to open, hold the door open and trying to reach in to get Diane.

Speaker 119 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 119 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 119 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 119 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 30 It was a headline-making moment that September of 2006 when Yerica Brozic, ex-fugitive, was escorted off the plane in Kalispell, Montana.

Speaker 3 I remember looking at the wire late in the afternoon one day. I'm like, what? And it was just unbelievable.
The fake name, the

Speaker 3 career as a successful software developer. It was the furthest thing from what I had imagined as Ambrozic's fate.

Speaker 81 Wasn't a broken man in a Mexican bar at all.

Speaker 3 He wasn't a broken man in a Mexican bar at all.

Speaker 55 Ambrozic was marched through the airport and into the custody of an eagerly awaiting Sheriff Jim DuPont.

Speaker 12 I just sort of actually wanted to physically see what he looked like.

Speaker 43 You've been thinking about him all these years.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I've been thinking about him a lot. You could tell he was intelligent.
My opinion, he's a sociopath, but

Speaker 12 I don't know if he's got any feelings or not, but they certainly didn't pick up any from him.

Speaker 10 Do you believe he's a sociopath?

Speaker 12 Yeah, you know, there's good sociopaths and bad sociopaths, and I don't believe he's got feelings.

Speaker 12 How do you lose your mom, your dad, your family, your friends, and your loved one at the bottom of the lake? I don't get it. I guess I'll never will.

Speaker 86 It was pretty obvious the sheriff didn't exactly hold Yarik in high regard.

Speaker 20 But there was a legal question now.

Speaker 82 The charge would be negligent homicide.

Speaker 55 If we put Yarik in the Montana State Prison for 10 years, in Montana.

Speaker 85 Negligent homicide.

Speaker 50 You do something really stupid that could cause the death of a person, and sure enough, somebody dies.

Speaker 4 Negligent homicide.

Speaker 112 Well, we did something stupid.

Speaker 103 This was not my idea.

Speaker 68 This was not just me.

Speaker 103 And that's not negligent homicide.

Speaker 71 That's, you know, two kids in love did something stupid.

Speaker 68 This is what it comes down to.

Speaker 85 So Yarik pleaded not guilty, dug in his heels.

Speaker 65 Here's his defense attorney, Chuck Watson.

Speaker 28 The word homicide was extremely problematic for Yarik. I mean, he takes responsibility for the fact that he screwed up landing the airplane.

Speaker 28 And he takes responsibility for the fact that he shouldn't have left. But I guarantee you you that he hasn't gotten over her death to this day.

Speaker 48 Do you see this as a Romeo and Juliet story?

Speaker 29 There's an element of that in the case.

Speaker 109 These are two young people who thought they were star-crossed and decided to take their future into their own hands.

Speaker 24 Exactly, said Yarik. The sheriff and prosecutor was so determined it was homicide, but it wasn't anything like that.
And he clammed up, let the lawyers do the talking, waited for the consequences.

Speaker 74 And now, sitting here with us years later,

Speaker 89 he's finally ready to give his account in public for the first time of where their crazy idea came from and just what happened when it all went wrong.

Speaker 11 Here goes.

Speaker 99 You know, we're just two crazy kids in love, and there's some barriers, I guess, in our relationship that we saw that's going to be difficult to overcome.

Speaker 112 I went up watching this movie called Tarzan the Ape Man and also Apocalypse Now.

Speaker 99 And so we came up with this crazy plan to elope and live in a jungle, survive off the land.

Speaker 17 That's nuts.

Speaker 99 It is nuts if you think about it.

Speaker 43 It didn't seem nuts at the time.

Speaker 68 It did not.

Speaker 104 Where did you plan to end up?

Speaker 68 South America is what the goal was.

Speaker 4 Did you hitchhike down there or something?

Speaker 68 Hitchhike, taking buses, yeah.

Speaker 116 Back then,

Speaker 68 the borders were not as strict.

Speaker 99 We were already past the Canadian-U.S.

Speaker 88 border by that time, so it was just a matter of the U.S.-Mexico border and

Speaker 112 onwards.

Speaker 24 The idea of ditching a plane came to him while taking flying lessons.

Speaker 22 They'd land on water and get out before the plane sank.

Speaker 68 They'd take the dinghy, put the bags in the dinghy, get in there, row to shore that the plane sinks, and

Speaker 88 nobody knows any better.

Speaker 20 But as they were getting ready to go, that summer of 82, there was a hitch.

Speaker 7 Diane got pregnant.

Speaker 99 It just sort of happened.

Speaker 101 So we ended up,

Speaker 4 she went to a doctor and then they aborted the baby and it was a few days before actually we took off.

Speaker 68 So I asked her, we actually went to the theater the night before and I said, how you feeling stuff and she's 110% good to go.

Speaker 65 So on Sunday, August 22nd, 1982, they went to the Vancouver airport, rented that Cessna 150, and full of excitement, flew east to Penticton, where they hung around all afternoon and then fooled people a bit when they flew north before turning around to head southeast into Montana.

Speaker 87 How did you prepare for landing on the lake, the two of you?

Speaker 88 Before we took off, we ended up switching our clothes to so swim close.

Speaker 71 We distributed everything to two bags.

Speaker 20 And three hours later, they were flying on fumes as they descended in the near dark toward the shimmering surface of Little Bitterroot Lake.

Speaker 60 As you were coming in for a landing, you must have been pretty nervous.

Speaker 99 Sure.

Speaker 103 Nobody practices landing on water on a fixed-wheel aircraft.

Speaker 23 He slowed to stall speed.

Speaker 23 He took off his seatbelt, figured his grip on the controls would hold him in place.

Speaker 15 Diane kept her seatbelt fastened, lap belt and shoulder harness.

Speaker 22 And then

Speaker 99 when this wheels hit that...

Speaker 88 that the water, it was like hitting a cement wall.

Speaker 4 And suddenly you're in some cold water.

Speaker 71 Cold water, and I remember tasting blood, and so it was blood in my nose, blood in your mouth.

Speaker 88 Did you see it?

Speaker 93 Like water?

Speaker 99 No, it was outside's pitch black. It's worse, even underneath the water.

Speaker 103 So I'm spinning around, trying to orient myself.

Speaker 88 Once I stabilized and I came to the surface, I yelled out, you know, Diane, where are you?

Speaker 112 Are you okay?

Speaker 68 And then from there, she said, Yeah, I just can't get my seatbelt off.

Speaker 43 She probably didn't say it quite so calmly.

Speaker 112 No,

Speaker 68 she was actually fairly calm, I believe.

Speaker 30 Desperately, he said he tried to get to her, unaware that when the plane hit the water as shown in this animation it flipped so he ended up behind the airplane and when he struggled through the water to what he thought was the passenger door where Diane was he was actually on the wrong side across the plane from where Diane was hanging upside down trapped in her lap seat belt.

Speaker 103 By the time I got to the door and got to try to open it and when it did open and the water started rushing in the plane was almost completely underneath the water because of the broken windshield and the side door windows.

Speaker 103 I'm laying halfway in the water, halfway on the wing with my arm trying to open, hold the door open and trying to reach in to get Diane.

Speaker 88 And then all of a sudden the plane just

Speaker 93 submerges below the water.

Speaker 99 That's how it ended.

Speaker 34 The plane did not float.

Speaker 33 It sank in mere seconds.

Speaker 65 Diane couldn't get out of her seatbelt, he said.

Speaker 33 And he couldn't help her because there simply wasn't time.

Speaker 68 50-20 seconds, the plane went down.

Speaker 11 His last glimpse glimpse of Diane was not that haunting image of her hair in the airplane's door.

Speaker 41 No one knows how that happened.

Speaker 11 No.

Speaker 40 The last he saw of Diane, he said, the sight he cannot stop seeing, is Diane trapped in her seatbelt, upside down and sinking, and calling out for him to save her.

Speaker 4 What was that like? It was horrifying.

Speaker 36 Watch it go down there with her inside.

Speaker 68 It was 20 seconds before.

Speaker 112 We're the two most happiest people in the world and

Speaker 88 my life was just torn to pieces at that moment.

Speaker 118 You know, we never, never, ever anticipated something like this.

Speaker 18 What did you do right then when that plane went down?

Speaker 116 I was hoping somehow she would be able to get that seatbelt off.

Speaker 112 So I'm swimming around

Speaker 117 just to see if I can, maybe she'll pop up somewhere that she got the seatbelt off and came up.

Speaker 49 But she did not.

Speaker 65 No, he said the only thing that floated up was that one duffel bag, the one containing his clothes and the $2,200 they'd saved for the trip.

Speaker 96 A fact pointed to by many law officers as suspicious.

Speaker 4 They would say, why did he only get his clothes and the money and let her clothes go sinking down to the bottom of the lake?

Speaker 112 Just random.

Speaker 4 Law officers will say there's no accident in life.

Speaker 43 Things are either on purpose or they don't happen.

Speaker 99 Yeah, well, you know, people always speculate, but it was just a random by chance.

Speaker 27 Speculate.

Speaker 11 That's what people did, all right.

Speaker 41 That a man who truly loved her might have tried harder,

Speaker 96 might have sacrificed.

Speaker 60 Afterwards, this became a problem for some of the people who were looking into the incident because numbers of them would say, God, if that was me, I would have done anything.

Speaker 56 I would have drowned if I had to.

Speaker 85 I would have got into that plane.

Speaker 4 I would have got her out of there.

Speaker 43 I would have saved her somehow, even if I died in the process.

Speaker 4 Why didn't you do that?

Speaker 118 Easy to do do that when you're sitting on a couch with a cup of coffee but not so easy when you're you've got 15-20 seconds and the plane is sinking in front of you and you can't open the door.

Speaker 112 When you do open the door the plane's almost completely underwater.

Speaker 68 People just don't visualize and picture what this was and how quickly this happened.

Speaker 26 What took over then, he said, was overwhelming, numbing shock.

Speaker 99 My limbs were starting to get numb and I could barely do the paddling in order to stay afloat, so I ended up, I didn't take that one back, paddling doggie style, and got to shore and

Speaker 108 spent the next few days in

Speaker 40 shock.

Speaker 21 And in shock, he ran, he said, around the country for weeks to New York City and finally to Dallas, where turning himself in seemed like a very bad idea.

Speaker 33 Does that sound like Romeo and Juliet?

Speaker 11 Or something else altogether?

Speaker 97 Coming up.

Speaker 6 Justice delayed or justice denied.

Speaker 17 This is one of those kind of cases where really you're the only person on the planet who knows the truth.

Speaker 75 When dateline continues.

Speaker 94 Trying a criminal case more than a quarter century old is a tall order.

Speaker 17 Memories fade, witnesses die, a fact not lost on Yerick's defense attorney Chuck Watson.

Speaker 28 If you take this case apart, the only thing that they can prove beyond reasonable doubt is that he left, that he ran away.

Speaker 16 He just made the wrong decision.

Speaker 29 He did make the wrong decision, but it was an understandable decision, a forgivable decision.

Speaker 7 Not surprisingly, Diane Babcock's family was pushing hard hard for a prison sentence.

Speaker 55 They did not believe Diane was some actress in a Shakespearean love tragedy. They did believe she was an unwilling participant who did not live to tell her side of the story.

Speaker 73 This is one of those

Speaker 17 kind of cases where really you're the only person on the planet who knows the truth.

Speaker 17 Sure.

Speaker 18 Mr.

Speaker 17 Babcock was hoping that you would spend at least 10 years in prison.

Speaker 18 He was

Speaker 17 quite understandably and naturally wanted to blame somebody for the death of his daughter, and there you were.

Speaker 53 Could you understand why he felt that way?

Speaker 25 No.

Speaker 88 I find their attitude almost appalling.

Speaker 101 This was not some crime that you see on TV.

Speaker 68 This was two people in love eloping an accident happened.

Speaker 55 In May 2007, After Yarik had spent nine months in the county jail, the prosecutor cut a deal.

Speaker 20 He dropped the charge of negligent homicide, and Yarick agreed to plead guilty to criminal mischief and criminal endangerment.

Speaker 22 The sentence, 10 years on each count,

Speaker 27 suspended, which meant he would not spend a single day of that sentence behind bars in Montana.

Speaker 51 The county attorney acknowledged that Diane's family didn't like the outcome, but alas, what could he do?

Speaker 122 Their belief, if true, means that she was essentially kidnapped or murdered. Oh, yeah,

Speaker 122 And that is a terrible burden for a family to deal with over the loss of a child. And if I were dealing with a prosecutor who felt otherwise, I wouldn't be happy with him either.

Speaker 59 Dan's family declined our requests to take part in this report.

Speaker 65 And Sheriff DuPont is no longer with us.

Speaker 96 He died in 2012.

Speaker 96 But in his last years, he grew close to the Babcocks. And he spoke for them as much as for himself.

Speaker 12 It was a tragedy to that family. We could have executed Jerry Ambroznik, wouldn't it? And it wouldn't have helped them.

Speaker 60 They needed to see some kind of justice done.

Speaker 12 They needed to see some, yeah, and they didn't.

Speaker 50 Mind you, Yarick Ambrozik's legal troubles weren't over.

Speaker 86 Shipped back to Texas, he was, to face federal charges, including passport fraud.

Speaker 27 After all, he'd gotten a U.S.

Speaker 4 passport under a false name, Michael Lee Smith.

Speaker 65 But again, After another four months behind bars and some stiff fines, Yarik was set free.

Speaker 12 The federal government, in their wisdom, for punishment, deported him back to where it all started, to Vancouver, so he got a free ride home.

Speaker 83 To the very place he and Diane so desperately sought to escape as teenagers, where

Speaker 51 no criminal jeopardy awaited.

Speaker 55 A theft charge he'd faced for essentially stealing that airplane had long since been dropped by Canadian authorities.

Speaker 104 Yarik Mbrozik was on final approach to freedom, back where it all began.

Speaker 43 Does it feel like home?

Speaker 108 It does, especially now with my parents and my sister and her kids being here, it's definitely home.

Speaker 60 It's a very interesting life you have now.

Speaker 17 These pieces that none of them seem to belong together and you have to put that one over here and this one over here.

Speaker 112 Like I'd

Speaker 68 lived like in 24 years as Michael Smith and I think was a model US citizen when I did that.

Speaker 20 Did do that.

Speaker 113 I mean I'm a model fake US citizen.

Speaker 103 Well, nonetheless, I made lots of money and then I paid lots of taxes.

Speaker 99 So I was exemplary citizen, model or fictitious, whatever you call it.

Speaker 81 Still, even after all this time, there are questions.

Speaker 58 Did he truly love Diane and do all he could to save her?

Speaker 11 Were they eloping?

Speaker 27 After all, there was that phone call to his friend Tom when Yarik said Diane was just tagging along.

Speaker 42 I wanted him

Speaker 43 It supports their theory that you're a really bad dude who killed his girlfriend and now, you know, saying I was in love with Romeo and Juliet. Right.

Speaker 103 Well I'll say people read anything they want into it, but the only way I can explain this is the shock that was in.

Speaker 43 And you know a lot of people still don't believe you and probably won't believe you even when you go chapter and verse through the whole story.

Speaker 17 Sure. And how much you did love her.

Speaker 4 They still won't believe that.

Speaker 112 And you know, all I can do is tell them what happened and how it happened. The rest I can't control.

Speaker 79 He has written it all down now, every bit of his story, in a book called A Tear in My Life, The Brutal Truth.

Speaker 96 To set the record straight, he said.

Speaker 67 And he's created an elaborate website with all the documents from his cases, all of them.

Speaker 37 He's an unusual person, Yarikambrozic.

Speaker 30 Stubborn, particular, hooked on the tiniest of details.

Speaker 3 Was he a crazy man? Was he a monster? Was he Romeo? Was he a grief-stricken boyfriend? You just don't know.

Speaker 37 Does it help to tell his story?

Speaker 39 Does he feel responsible, guilty?

Speaker 79 If you're Yarik Ambrozic,

Speaker 39 It's complicated.

Speaker 73 You said you were a lifelong Catholic.

Speaker 18 Is it important to you to feel somehow forgiven for this?

Speaker 68 You know, I'm not expecting anybody to forgive me.

Speaker 108 You know, I know what happened, and I, you know, unfortunately lost something very precious to me, and we could have a great life together, but that ended that night.

Speaker 112 But getting

Speaker 112 people to

Speaker 108 accept that, I don't think it really matters to me.

Speaker 96 And if we can believe him, he is still deeply in love with his teenage sweetheart, that innocent young woman who entrusted her fate to her Romeo.

Speaker 38 Diane of the vision so haunting, who rose from the lake as if merely asleep.

Speaker 41 Diane, so long in her grave.

Speaker 6 That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again next Friday at 9 8th Central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.

Speaker 19 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 6 For all of us at NBC News, good night.

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