Benjamin Alford
Appearances
Dateline NBC
Talking Dateline: Deadly Obsession
Yeah. The best way to determine to start off and then to move forward, I thought, would be to come up with a system where we could vote anonymously. We chose red for guilty and black for not guilty. Everybody chose a card from the deck based on what they voted. Their verdict was.
Dateline NBC
Talking Dateline: Deadly Obsession
And then we put all the cards in the middle, and then I pulled them out, shuffled them, and then we flipped them one by one to find out where we were.
Dateline NBC
Talking Dateline: Deadly Obsession
At that point, once we realized that, OK, we're at a split, what's it going to take to get either way? We talked about it. One of the biggest issues was the drive and the timeline. Things didn't add up. The elephant in the room was there was nothing that actually tied Chandler to the location.
Dateline NBC
Talking Dateline: Deadly Obsession
We did the vote. At this point, kept our card for the last one. And it was, all right, so this is your vote. If we're going to call it, you need to explain your position and why you chose it.
Dateline NBC
Talking Dateline: Deadly Obsession
Interesting. And this was, if we're going to call it, then we should at least know why each of us, you know, obviously if you're all in a room together, there's only 12 of you, it's pretty easy to figure out who's guilty, not guilty.
Dateline NBC
Talking Dateline: Deadly Obsession
It helped close everything, like, as far as come to a conclusion that we can't move forward. The amount of discussion would bring us there.
Dateline NBC
Talking Dateline: Deadly Obsession
It's not what I wanted, and it's not like— I wasn't going to try and pressure anybody towards any decision. Everyone needed to make their own decision. And so then I wrote up my statement. You sent it to the judge. And sent it. And was like, pass it around. Everybody read it. Does everybody agree? Yeah.