Blayne Alexander and Josh Mankiewicz sit down to talk about Blayne’s episode "The Haunted House Confession.” When 25-year-old Chantay Blankinship’s remains were found near an abandoned farmhouse in a small Texas town, investigators wondered if someone from the close knit congregation at her church was responsible. Blayne talks about her emotional interviews with Chantay’s family and boyfriend, and shares a podcast-exclusive clip of her interview with two members of Chantay’s congregation who witnessed the killer’s surprising confession. Plus, they answer viewer and listener questions, and Blayne reveals what she learned about cowboy hats and Texas Rangers.Have a question for Talking Dateline? Leave it for us in a voicemail at (212) 413-5252 for a chance to be featured on a future episode!Listen to the full episode of “The Haunted House Confession” on Apple: https://apple.co/4irOppdListen to the full episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mYpPprF9fRh9avU7J5oa9
Chapter 1: What is 'The Haunted House Confession' episode about?
Hey everybody, I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and we're talking Dateline today with Blaine Alexander. Hi. Hello. Hello, hello. So Blaine is here to talk about her episode called The Haunted House Confession. Now, if you have not seen it, you, the listeners, it's the episode right below this one on your Dateline podcast feed.
So go there, listen to it, or you can stream it on Peacock if you want to watch it, and then come back here. So to recap... This is about a young woman named Shantae Blankenship, and her remains were found in a deserted and very scary-looking farmhouse in Brownwood, Texas.
And law enforcement worked for a long time to track down her killer because they were certain that somebody in that church-going community was behind the murder. And it would take a confession in church to crack that case. Now, for this Talking Dateline, we have some extra sound from a couple of churchgoers, Linda and Russell Lamond.
And they're going to talk about how their proximity to this awful crime gave them a new perspective. So let's talk Dateline. I am delighted to be here because this is your first two-hour episode as a Dateline correspondent.
Chapter 2: How did Blayne Alexander experience her first Dateline episode?
Absolutely is. There is nobody I would rather do this Talking Dateline with than you, Josh. So thank you.
Now, you know, you are a veteran TV reporter, but I'm guessing that you were experiencing the same thing I did when I joined, which is, you know, you go from stories that are, you know, a really long story is two and a half minutes long. In your old life. And now you're doing two hours, which means a lot more can be included. You can tell a longer story.
There's a there's a great deal more writing. But even so, there's stuff you have to leave out. You have to make some of the same choices that you do when you're doing a piece that lasts a minute and 10 seconds for the evening news.
Absolutely. There's so much to even undertake a story that's as long as the things that we do for Dateline. You have to gather so much information, right? Like by the time we finish these stories, you feel like you're an expert on these cases. And so there are all these different facts and different pieces of sound and information that you want to cram in.
But even in two hours, somehow you run out of time. So that's why I'm grateful for talking Dateline, because we can talk about all of these other things that never made it into the actual show.
So let's talk about the episode. The locals referred to that farmhouse, which was off the map in a lot of ways. They call that the haunted house. What was that place like?
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the haunted house in the investigation?
You know, I'd done a ton of research for this story, read about it, all of that good stuff, read previous, you know, news clips and everything. I hadn't actually seen the house for myself. And so I didn't see it until I was riding with the investigator, Investigator Bird. We had GoPros in the car and he was kind of driving me down the dirt roads. And then we get there.
And immediately I said, oh, wow. You can immediately see why this place is called The Haunted House. I mean, it looks right out of central casting of what you would expect to see a haunted house look like. All broken down inside. It looks like a horror movie. It does. It does. It does. And then you kind of consider some of the other things. I mean, there is a fence around it, right?
That, you know, kind of tells people to keep out. If you go inside there, the floorboards aren't there. You can't really walk through. There are animals inside and creatures. And then there's this storm cellar, which... I wanted to when we were putting this together, we wanted to make sure that everyone understands what a storm cellar is. Right. I grew up in Oklahoma.
Everybody has storm cellars for the most part. Lots of people have them. But this kind of underground place where you go for tornadoes and even tornadoes. And so that's where Shantae was ultimately found. And so the place itself almost becomes a character in the story just because of how how creepy it was, to be honest.
And I also thought the town was much more of a character than a lot of localities are when we do Dateline. You know, a lot of them are in bigger cities. This really felt like a movie. You know, I mean, the drone shots of those dirt roads and those long straightaways. I mean, you get a sense of how sort of isolated it must have been at the time.
And just to break down that isolation a little bit more, Dallas probably is the nearest big city, Dallas-Fort Worth. That's a good two and a half hour, maybe three hour drive from Brownwood. But then the place where this happened, where Shantae lived, is actually slightly to the north of Brownwood.
And so you have this kind of small town anyway, but then an even smaller community that's kind of nestled around the lakes. When you talk about a small community, I mean that everyone truly knows everyone there.
She made a tremendous impression on people. And Shantae did. Watching the story, I thought you were able to get a really good sense of sort of what she was like.
And I'm glad. I'm glad to hear that because everybody that I spoke to really said that exact same thing. I mean, she was feisty. She had her opinion. She had her thoughts. Her routine with the walking was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. She'd wave at the car. She'd wave at the neighbors, right? People knew her.
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Chapter 4: Why was Shantae's boyfriend initially suspected?
I mean, that is that that is like, you know, wearing a sandwich board that says I did it.
Yeah. And, you know, when I talked with both of the, you know, Ranger Shea and Investigator Scott Byrd and both of them were just you could tell they were personally impacted by this case that they I mean, they put a lot of just kind of their own emotion and obviously brainpower into this.
But when they talked about John, I mean, they talked about the fact that, yes, he saw her not too long before she disappeared. There were the people who said, OK, maybe they argued and maybe he was possessive and deleting of the text messages. And then, you know, we talk about this. He slept outside in his car after he realized that. Chante wasn't inside.
And that was something that struck them as odd. So there were these kind of string of just odd things that made them certainly go further down that rabbit hole.
And then, of course, it turns out he's not the guy. He doesn't have anything to do with it. And he ends up being like a really important interview.
I'm glad that he was able to kind of tell his story, right? To, to, to in his own words, because he makes the point that even though he was cleared from, you know, by investigators pretty early on, a lot of the people in the community were looking at him and saying, okay, clearly it's John, clearly it's the boyfriend. Like that's the only way to go. And so, you know,
To have that hanging over his head until there was ultimately an arrest, which came more than a year later, was also something that was difficult for him as well. So I'm glad that he was able to talk. I'm glad he agreed to speak with us. How did you... Was it hard to get him? You know, well, one, I want to say something about sitting down and talking to him. John was so...
It was so clear that he was just still so impacted by everything that happened to Shantae. He left Brownwood for a while. He moved away. He got work elsewhere. You know, he's still close with her family today, by the way. But he had to leave. He just kind of couldn't necessarily deal with this for a while and then came back to talk.
I asked him how he felt after the interview and he said he felt relieved. And so I think that he was glad to be able to tell his story, glad to be able to talk about his love for Shantae because it was something that had come under question during this investigation. It was something that even when I talked to him, I could tell he was still upset by it and rightfully so. Right.
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Chapter 5: How did the church confession play a role in solving the case?
So I did a story with the Rangers once. The guy wore his hat like the entire time. I never saw the top of his head. And we don't do a lot of stories with people who wear hats.
It brings so much character, though, right?
Absolutely. One of the things I thought that really came out in this was the sort of zigzag nature of some of these investigations in which You know, they looked at the boyfriend, they looked at her grandfather, they looked at the pastor, they looked at that other guy who got very combative in the police interview. And that's how these things go. I mean, that's not just Dateline storytelling.
That is, you know, you're looking at these guys and you want to know, you know, do you have an alibi? And sort of, you know, what kind of read do we get off you when we ask you these tough questions?
And I think you're absolutely right. Yes, those was kind of a roadmap of their actual investigation. But what was so frustrating? And this is something that Investigator Bird kept coming back to when he talked to me. It was so frustrating because he had the killer's DNA right there in his hand. I mean, it's the best evidence you can use to identify someone, but I don't know who it is.
So he said at one point they were so frustrated. They said, we're just going to set up at this kind of four-way stop sign and just ask everybody who passes for DNA.
Let's talk a little bit about that sketch. Yes. The Hail Mary sketch done by Parabon. Now, phenotyping to get a portrait is extremely controversial. Andrea did it in an episode, which I think was called Facing the Music. And they made a sketch of her based on her DNA. And it didn't really look like Andrea. You certainly wouldn't have looked at that sketch and thought, oh, that's Andrea.
So sometimes it doesn't work and it can be incredibly misleading is the criticism. But in this case, it led to the guy.
It paid off. It absolutely paid off. And talking with Investigator Byrd, there were several things that he believes really lined up. One of them is that with this, they choose an age of what they're going to make the sketch look like. And it was within a year of Ryan Riggs' actual age. And so had they chosen, I don't know, a 75-year-old man or something, it obviously wouldn't have looked like him.
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Chapter 6: What role did DNA phenotyping play in the investigation?
And then it turns out none of that really has anything to do with it. But again, it's one of those things that if you're working on this murder, like you're going to look at those possibilities because that does all seem like the stars are kind of lining up.
They really did. I think also when you juxtapose, we talked about the haunted house being a character. The church in its own way was also a character, right? Because you have this house of evil, the haunted house. But then at the end, the confession happens in the house of worship, right? Yeah.
I think that especially when you talk with the Lamans, I mean, they were scarred by what happened there in church, by what happened, what was supposed to be this kind of safe sanctuary of a space. And so some of that evil did infiltrate the church as well.
This feels like a good time to play the extra sound from the Lamans who talked about what that confession sort of did to them.
And I can tee it up real quick. I am very glad that we talked with the Lamans, Russell and Linda, and appreciative to them for speaking with us because this is something that clearly still upsets them today. You know, they're both people of very deep faith, very deep Christian faith. He was a leader in the church.
And so to kind of have this, we love, we forgive, but also we love Chante and you did a terrible thing to her. How do you kind of... marry those two thoughts. So anyway, they talk about it a little bit more in this piece, in this clip here. You've gone through a lot from mourning the death of someone who was like a family member to months of not knowing to now these conflicted emotions.
As you sit here today, how has this whole experience changed you?
It has taught us I would say to look at things in a different perspective. If it had been a stranger, you would say, hey, give him the death penalty, an eye for an eye or whatever. But when it hits so close to home, your mindset and your perspective changes because, wow, this is right here in our lap. Now we have to see it.
maybe through God's eyes, you know, because I believe that everybody deserves a second chance. We can't look at somebody and say, hey, you're a murderer or you're a sex offender or whatever your problem is. We can't look at you and only see what you did, but we have to see you for who you are.
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Chapter 7: What unique insights did police video provide in the case?
I mean, I get why it made her family. It would make me crazy if that happened, but ultimately he did get the, he did get the punishment that the legal system would have doled out regardless of whether he had gone to church first or not.
Sure. And I, You know, and I asked that question. This is somebody that you've been looking for for 18 months, right? The crime is brutal. And as soon as you got word, why didn't why weren't the police immediately called? Why was that allowed to happen? That in the end, he was kind of able to do things on his own terms to a degree. Yeah.
Being able to go home, his parents taking him to church, going to the sheriff's office rather than, you know, law enforcement coming in, carting him away. And that's the end of it.
Yeah. OK, coming up next, your questions from social media. Okay, we are back with social media questions. Well, we got a lot of questions on a lot of topics. Jim Kelly from Facebook said, it showed how tech can use DNA to render an image of the killer and aid in their apprehension. Truly amazing. Now, here's the thing.
There's an enormous amount of debate within the forensic scientific community over whether or not DNA phenotyping is is is legit or junk science. But Parabon does not market this as we're going to give you an image of the killer. They market this as we're going to provide you with a lead. You still need to do basic police work after that.
The investigators are very clear about that, too. It was, yes, we have the sketch. Yes, we now have this name. But that would not be enough to take into court. That wouldn't be enough to convict someone, certainly. So it led them to Ryan. But it was the fact that Ryan knew the things that only the killer would know. Right.
Like, yes, obviously, the DNA match was what really, really tied it together.
We have an audio question from Brandon Elkins. Let's listen to that.
Hi, guys. Blaine, that was Dateline at its best. It was absolutely phenomenal. And thanks for the story, Blaine. And once again, welcome to the family. My question for this week's episode is regarding Ryan and why police didn't seem to investigate him prior to the phenotype. the picture being released on social media.
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