Talking Dateline: Cape Fear
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Log in now and check your prestige tier. Your next high-five moment is waiting. High5casino.com. No purchase necessary. Void were prohibited by law. Must be 21 years or older. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, everybody. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and we're talking Dateline. Today, as a special treat, I am joined by one of my closest friends on Dateline, producer Shane Bishop. Hi. Hi, Josh. And Shane has worked with me on a lot of stories and also on the episode that we're going to be talking about called Cape Fear.

If you haven't seen it, you can find it in the Dateline podcast feed. So go there, listen to it, Cape Fear, and then come back here. So to recap, when a young mother named Allison Jackson Foy went missing from a bar in Wilmington, North Carolina back in 2006, her family was really desperate for answers. And for nearly two years, investigators searched for clues until they finally came across her remains. And...

One of the things that was shocking about that was that those remains were next to the remains of another missing woman named Angela Ruffin. Investigators did have a person of interest, a prime suspect. The question was whether the case would be solved. So for this Talking Dateline, we have an extra clip from a recent interview I did with one of the victim's sisters for the new season of our Dateline Missing in America podcast.

Also, we have another extra clip related to a 2022 update in this case where you will hear from Allison's adult daughter. All right, so let's talk Dateline. How did we come across this case back then? Well, back in 2009, one of our old bosses had an idea for us to do mysteries, cold cases. And so he asked you and me and a few others at Dateline to put together what eventually became the Unsolved Case Squad.

And so I was looking for cases that weren't solved, which is unusual for us. And this was one that came across my desk. Yeah, most of the cases we do have already been adjudicated, or at least they're adjudicated very close to air, like Karen Reid was. It's always been clear to me that law enforcement agencies and families would love it if we did more cold cases.

Because those are the cases that are not getting publicity, and those are the cases that they're really hoping that a TV show could shake something loose. The problem with that is that viewers of Dateline are accustomed to seeing an episode that's an hour or two hours long, and at the end of it, I or Keith or Dennis or Andrew or Blaine say,

Bill was convicted. He's doing life. Good night. Right? There's always an ending. Or Bill was acquitted. But there's some answer. And in these cases, cold cases, there isn't any answer. So this was an opportunity and an effort by us to sort of

live in the mystery of cold cases, but they are ultimately cases that are not solved. You know, from our point of view as producers, it's very hard to do cold cases if they're still in the works, especially this is 2008 or 9 when we did this. So, you know, to get the Wilmington Police Department to talk to us about cases that were being actively investigated, that's really tough. And that to me is the main hurdle for us doing more of these. Because

The dateline stories that you, the audience, see on television or listen to here on podcasts, you know, once the case is over, that's usually when police and prosecutors are willing to talk because the verdict's in. That's also when you as a journalist can get your hands on the evidence, on the video from that interrogation, from that 911 call where the person doesn't sound exactly right. And it's hard to persuade any law enforcement agency

to give us that stuff before the verdict is in, before the case has been adjudicated. In this case, there wasn't even anybody who'd been charged. So what did you say to Wilmington PD to get them to play ball with us? I'll be honest, I can't remember. I do think that Allison's family was key in getting us access to things. Somehow they helped us get the cooperation of the police.

I mean, we've talked about this on Talking Dateline and elsewhere a bunch of times, which is, you know, engagement by the family with the investigating department can make an enormous difference. And also, like, brand new, fresh cases...

They're not going to open up their files to us. Like they say, it's ongoing. That's it. We'll talk about it when we have something. But in this case, I think maybe Wilmington PD thought this could help. Absolutely. You know, there'd been a second body found. There were people in Wilmington, obviously, pretty worried that a serial killer was on the loose. And I think this was an effort by the PD to show them, you know, as much as possible,

as much as they could, what was being done to stop this and to find the person who did this. So let's go over a little bit of the facts of the case. This happened late at night. Allison was in a bar and she needed to go home.

Right. She left a bar at last call at two in the morning about with a colleague that she worked with, not her husband. We later learned that her marriage was not the happiest. She just left and disappeared. There were conflicting reports. Had a cab driver picked her up? Had someone in the bar called a cab for her? Had she called a cab? Somehow she ended up in a cab. That much seemed clear. But after that, it was all a mystery.

So one of the things that Allison's family did was hire a very entertaining guy as a PI. And at one point, he got an email from a woman who said that her husband might possibly be involved.

Now, we later learned that that woman was Susan Iannone, the wife of Tim Iannone, who was a cab driver who would become a suspect in this case. I mean, that's one of the great twists I've ever heard in any case, that the guy's sitting there doing a radio show in something called Blue Line Radio in Wilmington, North Carolina, because he'd been a law enforcement officer.

And he gets an email from Susan Iannone who basically says, I don't care what everybody's saying about my husband. He didn't kill Allison. And the guy was nowhere on anybody's radar as far as I know. And then suddenly he was because of that. I mean, you know, we'll wonder forever about Susan's motives in that. But I think you and I thought that was one of the strangest things we'd ever heard. Yeah, because...

The argument that she's trying to exculpate her husband is just as strong as the idea that she was trying to send him away. And I don't know what was going on in that marriage at the time, but they both sat down for an interview. I must say that is one of the strangest interviews I've done in more than 30 years at Dateline.

I remember as they're sitting there, I remember there's a period in every Dateline interview where the people you're interviewing, they're in a chair across from you, the correspondent, and we haven't started yet. And you could feel that room like a pressure cooker, like they were sitting next to each other. And I absolutely remember how unbelievably nervous

tense the atmosphere was he definitely was not thrilled about it and and it reminded me of like a school teacher who had a kid by the ear because he clearly had no interest in being there and she dragged him in and sat him down right in front of you yeah i i must say i was uh i was astonished at the end of that and then they get up and leave and you know you think like okay

I mean, this is now evidence. Look, the cops are going to see this. This will change the way they look at the case. The enduring image I have is of standing outside the building where we did the interview and they were leaving and they came through the same door and she went one way, he went another way. Like he was not happy with her.

And if you recall in that interview, she said to him, I've never told you this, but I'm the one who sent the email to the radio guy. And you said, is she in trouble now? And he's like, nah, I mean, why would she be in trouble? No, she implicates me in murder all the time. Yeah. It's unbelievable. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we will talk about a 2022 update involving Tim Iannone, including a statement from Allison's now adult daughter.

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All right, so tell me how Dateline assembled the unsolved case squad, these three investigators, who, by the way, you and I are still in touch with to this day. Yeah, it was really an unusual assignment to be told to go find, you know, three hotshot investigators. I flew around the country a lot. I met with, you know, forensic psychologists. I met with a lot of detectives. And with Alan Jackson, who was the prosecutor who put Phil Spector away. And who very recently was Karen Reed's defense attorney.

Right. And the second person was a homicide detective in Washington, D.C., Dwayne Stanton. And I think he'd investigated more than 600 homicides. And he was just smart and thorough. And the third person was Yolanda McCleary, who...

was the main character that CSI was based on. She was a CSI in Las Vegas for decades. The Mark Hagenberger character was based on her. That's right. Yeah. That's right. So we got them all together and with you, and it kind of all clicked. And it worked, yeah. I mean, it was fascinating. I mean, I loved it. We gave them the evidence that we'd gotten from Wilmington PD, and we sort of let them...

Sit in a room with me and we all just sort of went back and forth about what made sense What didn't make sense what possible theories there were it was it was fascinating one thing that was great was that while we didn't have Access to any interrogation tapes or any interview tapes with I anony you had interviewed Tim I anony and so Everybody on the unsolved case squad, you know took a look at that interview. Are you a murderer? No, did you kill Allison for no, I

Did you kill Angela Roth? No. And one thing I'll never forget is Dwayne Stanton picking up the fact that when you asked Iannone, did you kill Alison Foy? He said, no, I did not. And he nodded his head instead of shaking it no. Exactly. Exactly. Just good stuff that a good veteran homicide cop would catch that I didn't. Yeah, I thought that was fascinating. We only interviewed him one time. Did you talk to him another time?

Um, well, the next day I needed some pictures of him, uh, some B roll, we call it. So Susan and Tim, I said, uh, so that interview is done. Josh is gone, but I need to, I need to get some pictures of you guys. And so, uh, we met him at the park the next day and the private eye that you mentioned earlier was so worried about my safety.

that he sat in a parking lot nearby with his hand on his gun, he said, because I'll never forget, he just said, that guy looked like he was going to throttle you. Yeah. I must say, when that interview was over, I thought to myself, like, we've learned some things that police and the district attorney's office maybe didn't know a few days earlier. And I thought that maybe some action would be taken as a result of some of the stuff that came up in our interview. But that didn't happen.

Wilmington PD had cleared him, if you recall. The detective that we interviewed had recently called Susan and told her, please tell Tim that he's been cleared. And that was kind of their position, and it stayed that way. I'm always suspicious of police departments that say that because...

There is no legal clearing of anybody. Like there is no, that is not a legal finding, you know? Well, there's a great moment in your interview with the police chief and the detective when they said, we have cleared Mr. Iannone of any involvement in this murder. And you said in classic Josh style, because, and the guy responded, well, I don't want to get into a whole lot of becausees. And he didn't.

No, I remember that. Yeah. I've tried to use that with my kids sometimes. I don't want to get into a whole lot of because. Right. But you need to clean your room. Yeah. So a lot of years went by. And if one thought that Tim Iannone was going to get charged, one would have been wrong. He was not. Not for Allison's murder. Yeah, I mean—

Tim Iannone got into a lot of trouble. He has a record that goes back to the late '70s, early '80s. He was a habitual felon and he did five years between 2013 and 2018.

And then he got out. In 2021, Wilmington police were going through some old evidence and they found old rape evidence from 1996. When a woman told police that a guy had picked her up in a car, raped her, held her against her will. That evidence went untested like a lot of sexual assault evidence until 2021 when the state legislature passed.

provided in North Carolina some funds for for rape kit testing. And when the Wollington police got that kit back, they found the DNA matched Tim Iannone of all people. Yeah, I mean, the evidence that was tested was linked back to Iannone. OK, so now I'm climbing onto a soapbox, which Talking Dateline has provided me the opportunity to do.

In this country, we need to start prosecuting rape and sexual assault the way we prosecute murder. It is inconceivable that a police chief or lead investigator would say, you know, we've had all these murders in my jurisdiction, but we do not have the time or money to get to them. So we're going to take all this evidence and we're going to put it in this warehouse. And then when we get some more evidence or some more money, we will get to that and we will actually begin investigating these murders.

That would not be an acceptable situation for anybody. But that doesn't happen with rape kits. Only now are jurisdictions around the country finally catching up to that giant backlog of rape kits, which is nothing less than a shame.

So after that information came back, the DNA from the 1996 rape, I know he was arrested in November of 2021. He was charged with rape and kidnapping. He went to trial in 2022. He was found guilty. A jury sentenced him to serve at least 48 years in prison. He's not a young man. He is not eligible for parole until 2074 when he will be 113 years old.

So it amounted to a life sentence. However, it's not the murder that we went to Wilmington to investigate. That's still officially unsolved. Allison's family was left hanging. Yeah. And it kind of ended with...

The person they wanted locked up eventually got locked up. And what actually happened to Allison isn't known. Yeah, I've asked Iannone through some jail apps, you know, to talk to me and he's never responded. So the victim in the 1996 case, she spoke to NBC affiliate WECT after his sentencing in 2022, along with Allison Jackson Foy's daughter, Courtney. Let's listen to that.

I just want everybody to see that even after 26 years, it is so important that you stand up for yourself and you speak out for yourself. Watching Michelle get the justice that she very much has deserved for a very long time, 26 years later, it gives me great hope that we've been waiting 16 years so far. Maybe one day we'll get our day in court as well.

Well, maybe they will get their day in court, but it hasn't happened yet, which is too bad. But, you know, for Michelle Shepard, the first voice you heard in that, you know, this is some resolution. The man who she accused of raping her has been put away, probably for the rest of his life, given the length of the sentence.

And, you know, the more money that's available for testing of old rape kits, the more findings like this one are going to happen. The more people are going to be charged with things that, you know, came out of the past. And, of course, the other possibility is, you know, the reverse of that is that there are people who were accused.

And DNA can also prove someone's lack of guilt because we've seen that any number of times too, in which somebody accused of a terrible crime ends up getting exonerated by the same DNA that family or law enforcement was hoping would convict them. Okay, after the break, we will be back with an extra clip from a recent interview I did with Allison's sister.

We all belong outside. We're drawn to nature. Whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to or the succulents that adorn our homes, nature makes all of our lives, well, better. Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it. But the outdoors is closer than we realize. With AllTrails, you can discover trails nearby and explore confidently with offline maps and on-trail navigation. Download the free app today.

As the day wraps up, get the scoop on what's been happening with Here's the Scoop, a new podcast from NBC News with me, your host, Yasmin Vesugian, along with Morgan Chesky and Brian Chung. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with NBC News' trusted journalists. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful.

I'm Josh Mankiewicz with a Dateline 24-7 Marathon.

On July 4th, fireworks light the sky, but in these cases, it's relationships that are explosive. It's just unfathomable that a person could be that evil. It was starting to get scary. When these sparks fly, my advice is watch out. This is going to go sideways fast. The only thing I could ask is why. I was absolutely shocked. Our When Sparks Fly Marathon, Friday through Monday on Dateline 24-7.

So a couple of updates. Susan Iannone died in 2024. Do we know if she ever changed her tune about supporting Tim, particularly after his conviction? We don't. Allison Jackson Foy left behind two daughters. So we're coming up on 20 years. Courtney was 12 when her mom disappeared. She's now 31. She's got a baby of her own. And she's carrying on her mom's love of gymnastics by running a gymnastics school.

And her younger sister, Jordan, she's going to nursing school and she's writing a book about her own life and her mom's story. And I'm going to read that. I think you are too. Just really sweet kids. And I've just been continually impressed by Courtney and Jordan. They're communicative. They're interested. They're very engaged. And it's really for them to decide what's good enough. Is justice the fact that Iononi is locked up forever?

Or is it important that their mom's case is investigated and resolved? And that's a tough question to answer. Yeah. And it's one that we've faced in other Dateline stories that we've done, in which justice frequently is incomplete. And I've said this a bunch of times before. The criminal justice system makes a terrible therapist. Like the idea that it will undo the damage that this murder did just by convicting somebody. If you think that, you're making a mistake. It won't. Right. Yeah. We've seen it over and over.

So there's also an update in this story regarding Allison's sister, Lisa Valentino, who we interviewed for this story. And I, and she continues to work on her sister's case along others. I interviewed her again recently because she's got a new job as the New Jersey state outreach coordinator for a group called the Q Center for Missing Persons. And it turned out that I, I interviewed her for season four of Missing in America, which is, which is available now, wherever you get your podcasts.

And she and I caught up earlier this year. It was great to talk with her again. Here's a little bit of that interview. You know, knowing what I've gone through with my sister being a missing person and now still an unsolved homicide almost 19 years later. And I come back and I work with the families of Q. I'm the New Jersey State Outreach Coordinator. This is one of the hardest periods of time in your life. And...

You don't know what to do. And Q steps in and says, here's some concrete steps that you can take to get the case back out there. Here's some ways to deal with law enforcement. And more than that for a family member is you have someone to talk to. And just nine out of 10 times, it's people who know what you're going through because they've walked in your shoes before. I mean, that's, for me, a lot of advocacy, teaching you how to be an advocate and

and a voice for your missing loved one, because that's so key. No one knows your missing person better than you, and you have to learn how to become their advocate and be their voice. You know, this points up one of the interesting things that's happened, and I've seen it, and you have too, again and again on Dayline, which is it takes people

who were just grieving relatives, who were just people who'd had something horrible happen to them. And it turns them into warriors. And that definitely happened with Lisa. And I can name right now five or six other people that that's happened with. It's such a privilege to get to know people like that who take the worst thing in the world that happens to them and somehow they're resilient enough to turn it into some force for good. You just can't say enough about them.

That is it for Talking Dateline for this week. Shane, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. And remember, if you have any questions for us about stories or about Dateline, you can reach us 24-7 on social media at datelinenbc.

Now, if you have a question for Talking Dateline, you can leave it for us in a voicemail at 212-413-5252. Keith personally answers all those calls. It's on his desk, that phone. So that's your opportunity to be featured in a future episode. And if you do call and Keith answers, tell him he still owes me 20 bucks on the Christmas party. We'll see you Fridays on Dateline on NBC. Thanks for listening.