Talking Dateline: The Ranch
2024-07-10 00:20:49
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Hi, everybody, it's Josh Mankiewicz, and we're talking Dateline today with Keith Morrison. Hi, Keith.
How are you doing, Josh?
I'm good. We're here to talk about Keith's episode called The Ranch, which is about the very frightening kidnapping of a guy named Eduardo Valseca. He's a father and husband. This all happened in a small city in Mexico, and what followed was a really unbelievable fight by his family, by his wife and kids, to get him home. Now, if you have not listened to this broadcast yet, it is the episode right below this one on the list of podcasts that you just chose from.
So you can go there and listen to it, or, if you want to watch it, stream it on Peacock, and then come back here. In addition to talking about this episode, Keith has a clip that you're going to play for us from your interview with Jane Valseca, and then later we will answer some questions about the broadcast from social media, so stick around for that. So let's talk Dateline.
Let's do it.
So this is, I'm going to say, an older episode. This was done in, what, 2010,, something like that?
Yes, we have done this several times. It remains one of my favorite stories ever, and it's probably the reason why we went back to recheck on it from time to time over the years, and things changed. Things changed in sometimes very dramatic ways, but the original story itself is extremely dramatic, and also romantic, and also terrifying, and also life-affirming, and the people in it, the people in this story, remarkable, remarkable family.
Well, and as a story, it's got a couple of twists that you don't see coming.
That is very true.
So let me ask you this to begin with. I mean, Jane and Eduardo, their story is sort of fairytale, I mean, like they meet by chance. Next thing you know, they're going out. Next thing you know, she's coming down to Mexico, and then they're living together in this sort of beautiful bubble, as they call it.
Uh-huh.
This kind of kidnapping for ransom is unheard of in the United States. It is an absolute antique in terms of crimes in the United States, but not in Mexico, and not in a lot of other countries too. So my question is, were they ever concerned about this when they moved down there?
They were not. They moved to a lovely town. San Miguel de Allende is, unlike any other place on the planet that I've been able to determine. It's an amazing place, full of really beautiful, lovely, friendly people. It's also an extremely popular expatriate community.
There are tons and tons of Americans and Canadians and Europeans who have decided just to move there and live there very happily in their retirement. It's a wonderful place. And Jane and Eduardo, both attracted to this place, found a piece of property at the edge of town on which they constructed an absolutely magical ranch, and then raised this truly idyllic family. But it was a peaceful place. You know, when they set up the Waldorf School, and the kids came from all around town, and they had this tradition of kind of going off in the Jeep in the morning and bumping down the roads to the school, it was on their own property.
It was phenomenal. And that town, and much of Mexico, in fact, are often thought to be maybe dangerous places, but it wasn't dangerous. It was no more dangerous than it is, you know, in some of the towns in America.
Except that people don't get kidnapped for ransom, often enough to generate an industry that's there to respond to it the way it exists in Mexico. Sure.
And there was a spate of them. that occurred right around the time they happened to live there. And when we went to the very top of the Mexican law enforcement apparatus, and were given an audience with the leaders of the Mexican version of the FBI, and they, you know, opened the doors to us to show us what they were doing. They believed that this was part of a kind of a rebellious group that was committing kidnappings as a way to make political statements and to finance themselves, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's what they thought this particular kidnapping was too, and that's what the investigation was.
And in the end, of course, it turned out it wasn't that at all. It was all the more shocking because it was just such a garden variety thing. Just a criminal. Just a criminal guy doing a copy of this stuff and kidnapping a couple of people around town. We found, we believe, the kidnapper's house, and we were able to...
He left in a hurry, that was clear, but he lived what appeared to be a classic middle class life where he had a family, and he was.
. I mean, he sat on the board of the Waldorf School. They saw each other every day. The kidnapper, on a regular basis, saw Jane Valseca as she was going through hell trying to find her husband, and he was the one who was holding him in a box. It was also instructive and illuminating to crawl into that little...
We built the box. We built a box. It was according to Eduardo's constructions, so it was about the same size, about the same kind of material.
And that, I have to say, that box, I mean, I don't think of myself as claustrophobic, but that box would have given me some serious issues.
Oh, God. Yeah. You think you're... So this little box, not quite long enough for you to lie down in, certainly not high enough for you to stand up in. You can't really move around much in it.
You're in a crouch all the time. The inside of it is carpeted with rough, rough carpet so that you move yourself on it, you're going to have bed sores in a matter of a couple hours. There's a light on 24 hours a day in the top of the box. It's right above your head. I mean, this is all very, very close to you.
So it's bright light, this black carpet, and rap music playing 24 hours a day. So you can barely hear yourself. And the only thing you're going to have to eat in the course of a day is maybe half an apple or a slightly rotten egg that they throw in at you.
I'm sort of surprised. I was thinking about this while I was watching the episode. I'm sort of surprised they didn't take better care of him, because, I mean, he's their annuity. Like anything, like if he starves to death or has a heart attack or something, they don't get any money.
Yeah. Well, and they shot him several times. Yeah. I mean... It's phenomenal.
what they did to him. Yeah. It sounds like he survived.
No. I mean, the only part of what he quoted them as saying, the kidnappers, was that, you know, if you hear anything, if you can hear what's going on, that's why we have the music playing. If you hear what's going on, then we got to kill you, because you probably hear our voices and you'll know where we are. But there's obviously ways to do that. to soundproof a room that doesn't require deafening music.
And like starving your kidnapee to death, I know, doesn't strike me as the smartest way of doing that job.
If they wanted to be cruel, I could not think of many more ways to do it.
And he's half his body weight when he comes back and she barely recognizes him. Right.
The first time I met Eduardo, we went for dinner and he was exclaiming on the delightfulness of food and how he loved all food. now. So he ordered, remember, he ordered a sardine appetizer. They brought the sardines to the table and normally people will kind of like, just a full sardine came to the table, right? You'd take the fish off the bones and you'd eat the fish and you'd leave the bone.
He ate the whole thing. He ordered chicken. He ate the bones of the chicken. He ground them up in his teeth. He ate the whole thing.
He just loved all food.
It changed the way he ate. Yeah.
It totally changed his appreciation of those kinds of things about life.
I'm guessing that he should have gotten some significant psychotherapy when that period of captivity was over, because that's a hard thing to live with.
It's tough and I have to confess to you, I can't be sure.
I mean, he seems pretty well adjusted.
He was phenomenally well adjusted all along and just so incredibly grateful to be alive.
Does Eduardo think that this was a one-man job or that he had help, that there were other people?
There are thought to be three or four people in on this.
There had to be other people for the actual snatch. Yes.
But they have not been charged in connection with Eduardo's case that I'm aware of. anyway. They may be at some point. It's hard to know.
When we come back, we're going to have more from Keith's interview with Jane Valseca.
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At the beginning, the way everybody's talking about Eduardo, you think he's dead. And they're even talking about him, sort of in the past tense. And the kids say things like, I knew right then that I would never see my dad again. Right? So I'm thinking like, okay, he doesn't make it back.
How does this unspool?
How does it resolve?
So I thought you guys did a great job with that. But so by the time you went down there to do these interviews, and you're like, okay, first time around, he was already out. And obviously, Jane was still alive.
That's correct. Jane had had several bouts with breast cancer at that point. And just imagine this, and it's in our story too, but that she was suffering rather horribly with her disease. She should have been getting full-time attention. But she was concentrated on the effort to find Eduardo and to free Eduardo.
And she would travel to the United States to get treatment every once in a while, and then she'd be right back to Mexico.
I've interviewed a lot of people over the years. And I will say this about those two. Eduardo Velceca is one of the most upbeat and full of life and interesting men I've ever talked to. You could be in a terrible, terrible funk, and you go see, Eduardo, and five minutes later, you're dancing and happy. But Jane was, if you were going to write a romance story, and you wanted somebody to be the maiden you fall, the hero falls in love with.
because of her attributes, her loveliness, her lovingness, her sweetness, her charm, it would be Jane Velceca. She was extraordinary. I think we all, the whole crew, was in love with Jane. And so when she died, it was heartbreaking.
I can only imagine how difficult it had to be sort of reading these ransom letters that, Eduardo, he's forced to write, which he's talking to her, clearly not in the way he's normally talked to her. Yeah, and he's yelling at her, and why don't you care about me? And I mean, I get it. I mean, your kidnappers are making you do that. But it's got to be a horrible thing.
That's right, yeah. You know, early on, you kind of learn, they kind of learn what I sort of already know from reading about stories like this, which is this isn't going to come back. This isn't going to be over in a day. This isn't going to be over in a week. This won't be over in a month.
This is going to be a long, hard slog, and expensive, and filled with crushing sort of ups and downs, and things you think are going to happen, and then they don't happen. And boy, that was true, because it just felt like she was disappointed at almost every turn, again, and again, and again. And yet, you really get the feeling that, like, you know, I mean, as regrettable as it was, she was like the perfect spouse for that. Like, she kept the family together, and she knew what to say to the kids, or at least she figured out what worked, and she never lost hope, which is just amazing.
Well, you know, again, that's one of the elements that made this a great story.
So let's listen to that sound about Jane, in which Jane talks about how she and Eduardo met, and you get some sense of this sort of fairytale life they lived.
Well, it's kind of like one of these fairytale stories. I had just come back from a big trip to Europe when I met Eduardo, my husband, at the Sutton Place Gourmet, which is a gourmet supermarket in Bethesda, Maryland. I was there to use the public phone at the entrance of the market, and Eduardo and his older son from a previous marriage were in the shop buying chocolates. So I parked my car, and I was running to the public phone to make a couple of calls that I needed to make, and he was coming out, thought I was trying to rush in before closing time. The manager had locked the door behind him, so he, being very friendly, as he is, said to me, oh, I'm sorry, miss, they've just closed the door behind us.
They won't be letting you in. And I said, oh, it's okay, I'm just going to use the phone, and that was it. But I wouldn't say it was love at first sight, but there was definitely initial attraction. He went to his car, and I'm making my phone calls, and I hear moments later a car passing. So, because there had been this initial attraction, I went to turn with the phone over my right shoulder just to see if it was him, and it was.
So our eyes met.
So he ended up turning around and came back, and we struck up a conversation. I asked him where he was from. He said he was from Mexico, and I talked about my love of travel. He said, oh, if you go to Mexico, you have to go to San Miguel de Allende, and friends had just told me about it as well. So that was the excuse to exchange business cards and keep in touch, which we did.
We spent the following month with lots of phone calls, letters, sent packages to each other, exchanged photographs, and fell in love over the phone, really. So he convinced me after about a month to come meet him somewhere, and he rented a beautiful suite in Ixtapa that had two bedrooms, and so it was very much a gentleman, and I appreciated that, and so I went, and we fell in love.
Did you use the second bedroom? I'm sorry.
I'll never tell. Yeah, we won't go there. But we fell in love completely, and after our week together, he had convinced me to go home and quit my job and finish the semester at school and come to Mexico, which I did. So it was just a couple of months, and we were house shopping in San Miguel de Allende.
That's a very sweet story, and good for you for grilling her on how that weekend went. Tough questioning. Wow, you're a, you're savage.
Don't try to get away with anything with me.
No matter what, yeah. Hey, you know, I met my wife in the TSA security line at LAX, so.
Just when I thought stranger things couldn't happen, sure enough.
I know, I know.
They were busy that day. I offered to frisk her for weapons, and you know. Next thing, you know, we were married. Okay, that part isn't true. Okay, after a break, we will be back to answer some of your questions from social media.
Let's take some social media questions. Shami B wants to know, how long was the Ranch episode in production? The fact that Jane passed, it was heartbreaking. So, I mean, this was, what, 10 years from the first episode to the last.
10 years of several episodes, yeah. Yeah. We would go back repeatedly and re-interview and bring things up to date. And as we discovered more things, I mean, you know, we were, this investigation went on for years, trying to figure out who it was and where they were. And we had sightings.
We thought that we had them in our sights physically at one point, the kidnappers, that is, and came close. But anyway, yeah, so we had to redo the episode several times.
Denise Tracy wants to know, she says, I'm glad Eduardo and the ranch hand got out alive and the kidnapper got caught, but poor Jane. Well, poor Jane, definitely. Yeah. I'm glad they let the ranch hand go and didn't just kill it, which is kind of what I thought was going to happen.
Well, yeah. And had they been the true bad guys that the Mexican state police thought that they were, they probably would have killed them. But this was this, you know, amateur kidnapper, when he realized he wasn't going to get any money, he just said, oh, to hell with it and let him go.
Alba North, who's a friend of ours from social media, says, I need a Keith and Eduardo Positive Vibes podcast. Um, I think you, I think you, may have hit on something there. Yeah.
Yeah. That's a good idea. I like it.
Jamal 1028 says, I love Eduardo and Keith partnering like an eighties cop duo.
Yes.
I totally see that.
Yeah.
Yeah. The Mexican guy, the Canadian guy, they're solving crimes on both sides of the border.
Absolutely. Yeah. Right. Happy solving crimes.
One's in a great mood all the time. One's in a terrible mood all the time. Yeah.
Yeah. Which one's in the, oh, that would be me, I guess.
Sorry. Yeah. There's really not much question about that. Thomas Percy says, Jane and Eduardo left a beautiful legacy in their children. Such amazing and wise people they have raised.
I'm sad that Jane did not live to see the abductors arrested. And she did not, right?
Right.
Please tell me, everybody involved, with the obvious exception of Jane, is doing okay today.
Yes. Eduardo lived for a time in Spain. He came back to the United States. The children are all, they're, they're, you know, they, they picked up a lot from their terrific parents and they're, they are, they're living good lives.
Okay. That's a nice one. That's nice to hear. That is Talking Dateline for this week. Keith, thank you.
Oh boy. It was my pleasure.
Everybody, thank you for listening to us. And if you have any questions for us about our stories or about anything on Dateline, you can reach out to us on social at, at DatelineNBC. See you. Fridays on Dateline on NBC.
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