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Hi, everyone.

I'm Andrea Canning, and we are talking Dateland. Today, I'm here with Keith Morissen. Hey, Keith.

Hi, Andrea.

All right. This episode of yours is called The Girl with the Hibiscus Tattoo, and it is based on your latest podcast, murder in the Hollywood Hills. If you haven't listened to that, you can check it out on our Dateland Originals feed wherever you get your podcasts. If you haven't seen the new TV episode, it's the episode right below this one on your list of podcasts. So go there and listen to it or stream it on Peacock, and then come back here. Today, Keith has a clip that he's going to play for us from an interview that wasn't in the show. After that, I'm sitting down with Dateland producer Susan Lebowitz to answer your questions about the show from social media. To recap this story, 21-year-old Christie Johnson mysteriously disappeared in 2003 after meeting a man at the Century City Mall in Los Angeles. He promised her an audition for the role of a bond girl, but Christie was found dead days later. Police identified her killer, Victor Paliologus, with the help of various women who saw Christie's story and realized they had been approached by Victor, too. Okay, now let's talk Dateland.

All right, good.

This was such a powerful episode, just the stories from these women and what they went through and what they almost went through and the way that they all came together. Forget about evil Victor. This is about these women.

It is about these women. It's about... It doesn't matter what time or what era you're in. If a bunch of people, a bunch of women, get together and decide that you're going to do something about a bad character like Victor, they can. They have the power. This all happens before me, too. At a time when women were telling stories about what had been done to them, what men had tried to do with them or had done with them, and they weren't believed. So this was a pretty remarkable decision a prosecutor made that he didn't have the physical evidence. He had a very slippery character as a suspect. The only thing the prosecutor had was the stories of these women.

Their stories were all almost identical. The white shirt, the stilettos all provide the tie. I mean, how could these women independently be telling these stories if it wasn't the same guy?

Can you imagine being one of them and hearing Having gone through an experience like that, and then you hear about somebody who's gone missing, who told her roommate exactly the same story that this slippery character told you a year before, two years before, 10 years before, come to an audition for a Bond movie, wear a man's white dress shirt and a micro mini skirt and sparkly tights and sky high heels, and I'll bring the tie.

Yeah, I mean, he had a script, and it's apropos saying script when we're talking about Hollywood, we're talking about movies, where women in LA are drawn in by things like that.

Well, many of the women who were approached and attacked were women who had gone to LA specifically because they were interested in the movies in one way or another. Christie, the victim in this case, had wanted to work behind the scenes, though heaven knows she was also So had somebody come along with a part for her, she would have been jumped at it.

She was beautiful.

Yeah, gorgeous. But also had real acting ability, had some past in dance and in acting, and was a real prospect. So when somebody came and offered her a possibility like that, she thought her ship had come in. And who wouldn't think that? His technique was exceedingly clever. He was a smart guy. He He dressed well. He looked good. He was tall and relatively handsome. He came off like a very serious industry person.

Yeah. I was texting you before the podcast, just asking you more details about dates because you don't know this about me, but I lived in Los Angeles in the '90s and went to the Century City Mall all the time. I had taken acting at UCLA, and I even got some head shots done. But I had chills when I started watching this because I thought to myself, that was me at that mall. I was putting myself in the shoes of those women, and I thought, with my aspirations, if someone had approached me like that in that mall, I was naive enough in my 20s, when I was there, early 20s, to probably say yes. I probably would have been excited about it. I'm not kidding.

And remember, he kept telling these women it wouldn't be him. It would be a director who would be there.

I could just see anybody falling for this.

A couple of them came from backgrounds where they learned to be naturally skeptical, especially if somebody comes along and offers you something like that. One of them, of course, is Cathy De Bono, whose dad was a detective. And the other one was Susan, who, again, had some law enforcement in her background. They immediately thought, No, this guy's a little creepy. There's something going on here. I I'm interested. I'm going to go to this thing, but I'm going to take a boyfriend with me. I'm going to take somebody with me. Then, of course, the creep ran away. Cathy, Cathy De Bono, decided to study psychology, and she got her PhD. She went to the FBI and enrolled in a specific course the FBI does on psychopathy, the people who are really incurable. Almost always in these cases, the psychopath begins his behavior, usually a him, begins his behavior sometime in his late teens to early 20s.

Do we know if Victor had done anything like that in his past?

The story involves quite a number of women who were assaulted. Christine Clujian is the first one we know about and whose story we have from 1989. Then there were quite a few of them throughout the '90s, culminating in the attack on Christie in 2003. And many of the women from the '90s came forward, but we don't think all of them. And Kathy believes that there were more women before 1989.

And it's amazing. I was on the edge of my seat because it's near the end, and I'm thinking, Okay, they got the guy. Where's this story going? And then we have Kathy going to visit him in prison. And I'm thinking, Isn't that remarkable? Oh, my gosh. And the things she did, the kiss, the brushing his arm with the bandaid, I'm thinking to myself, Oh, my gosh.

She's brave. She spent literally years, writing him letters. So we're getting increasingly intimate, where she was inviting him to indulge in some of his fantasies in letter form, and he did. Victor was a fascinating in a bad way, a fascinating character. He's an incorrigible psychopath. In other words, said Cathy, incurable.

Which is scary when you think about the fact that this person could potentially get out. Everyone is extremely concerned about him reoffending.

One of the problems with law enforcement in this or any country is that courts are overburdened. They've got so much to deal with. They can't possibly keep up unless they make things very efficient. So 95% of criminal cases, something like that anyway, in the United States, are resolved by plea deals. The guilty person finally is persuaded, Okay, I did this thing, and I'll make a deal to not have to be charged with first-degree murder. I'll take second-degree murder, and I'll agree to spend 25 years behind bars or something, and they'll deal with it that way. Prosecutors, police, courts hate uncertainty. They hate the possibility that a person they know is a bad person, is going to go to trial, and there is a chance, and sometimes a fairly good chance, if the evidence isn't absolutely solid, like it wasn't in this case, except for the stories of the women, there's a chance that that person is going to get off, and they only get one shot at it. And so there's a natural inclination to want to hide in the safety of a deal. And Victor knew that. He had known that for years. He had done that over and over and over again.

And he wound up getting an agreement from the judge that he could confess to being responsible for her death. It's a very vague term, right? It could mean that they were in the house together, and she tripped and fell down the stairs because of something he did. But it's more of a men's lottery.

Yeah, he's not giving details about I strangle her. He's not giving any details.

He refuses to give details, but it appeared that the court was so eager to make a deal to resolve this thing. They wound up making a deal that gave him precisely the same sentence he would have received had he not touched the hair on her head. And that was because he was facing the death penalty. The normal course of events would be that if he took a plea, they would plea that down to life without parole. That's the next step down. Instead, they took steps down to life with parole. The courts were thinking he'll never get out because murderers don't get paroled. Then it turns out maybe they do. La got a new DA, and the rules were changed. The new approach was simply that there are too many people in prison. If somebody has been at least 20 years in prison, and they're over 50 years old, the likelihood of there being a danger to society is vastly reduced, and so they should be offered a chance at parole. It makes sense that older prisoners would be released because they're no longer a danger to society, but as Kathy pointed out, this guy is.

Okay, after the break, we'll be back with an extra clip from Keith's interview with Christie's mother, Terry Hall. Eleanor Williams's claims that she'd been trafficked by an Asian grooming gang led to protests, racist attacks, and claims of a cover-up. Eventually, she was jailed for lying. I don't want to be that girl that cries, Reanne, if I'm not that person. I'm Sky News' Jason Farrell, and in Unreliable Witness, we ask, Why did she lie? And explore unanswered questions with new revelations.

Follow Unreliable Witness wherever you get your podcasts. For true crime fans, nothing is more chilling than watching Dateline. Have you ever seen such a thing before? For For podcast fans, nothing is more chilling than listening.

What goes through your mind when you make a discovery like that?

And when you subscribe to Dateline Premium, it gets even better. Excuse me, I sound a little skeptical. Every episode is ad-free.

Oh, wow. So this could be your ace in the hole.

And not just ad-free, you also get early access to new intriguing mysteries and exclusive bonus content. So what were you afraid of? Dateline Premium. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or datelandpremium. Com. You ready for what's coming?

Victor was supposed to be up for parole in 2023, but he waived that, and his next parole hearing, correct me if I'm wrong, is 2025.

November 2025, yeah.

Right. But he's still alive. He's still in prison. He's awaiting this parole hearing. I guess we'll see what he does when it comes around. Who knows? Maybe he'll decline it again.

It's possible. It's hard to know.

Very bizarre. Keith, you spoke with Christie's mother, Terry Hall, back in 2023, prior to Victor's scheduled parole hearing. I know you talked to her on our After the Verdict podcast, which is where we revisit our old cases for our Dateland premium subscribers. This is what Terry had to say about the parole hearing.

A close friend of mine was actually monitoring on a regular basis to see where the inmate was, and to her surprise, realized that it was coming up prematurely. Sure.

We've heard of other cases, some deserving, where people who have had early parole heard, and in many cases, granted, or in some cases, at least, here in California. This was a particularly egregious one.

I mean, it wouldn't take somebody with a legal background to just read that summary and just be outraged and think this is somebody that needs to be incarcerated for the rest of their life with no parole. So this behavior is not something that has been diminished through keeping him imprisoned for 20 years. If anything, this is just a time bomb about to go off. He will do it again. And quite frankly, Keith, it's been very disheartening to discover a lot of what's broken within our parole system.

Have you been informed about all the things that have happened in the last 20 years?

Yes and no. First of all, there is a process to register online through a social service agency that will give notification to the family if the parole is scheduled or if the inmate has been released for some reason. Apparently, what happened a couple of years ago, I believe, was during the heightened COVID period where there was an upgrade to the database, and somehow a lot of the information was not transferred over. We do have these agencies that are set up to notify the next of kin, so to speak, which would be the father, the mother, the brother, of when that inmate is released to the parole hearing.

Are you going to be able to speak at the parole hearing, you yourself?

Yes, I will be. Yes. And there's a designated certain amount of people, of course, the father, the mother, the brother, and I have a representative as well. So there will be an opportunity for me to speak.

As Terry was saying in that interview with her, there was somebody assigned to keep in touch with her about when things were happening, when there would be a parole hearing. But after, COVID did throw a monkey wrench into that notifying process. Unfortunately, we've encountered this now, several times on Dateland stories, that the The significant others of victims in these cases are not always notified. The prosecutors aren't notified. The detectives who worked on the stories often aren't notified. A lot of the people in this one would not have known about this at all had Kathy Di Bono not been watching carefully to see what was coming out.

Terry Christie's mother, I noticed, did not do an interview for this new updated story. Was there something behind that?

She is still a deeply grief-stricken woman. She and her daughter were incredibly close, had been all their lives. The last Mass of Christie in her life has been so... It's been awful. She had got to the point where she just couldn't sit in front of a camera and talk about it again. I got that completely, I understand.

And on a much lighter note, your look, going back in the time machine of Keith Morison and getting to see you interview these people with... And I was like, Wait, was My teeth was blonde, right? I'm looking at your hair, and I think it was in between. It was maybe blondeish-gray. I'm not even really sure.

It was going great by that point. But I'm telling you, one of the side effects of working on Dateland for as long as I have is watching yourself age on television. I look at some of those stories from... Well, I've been at NBC now since mid-1980s.

That's a long time.

I'm looking back at some of that old material. That clip that Seinfeld runs every once in a while, I think I see it and I think, Who the hell is that?

And it also made me think of Bill Hater with the older ones, like the SNL skits. But But you don't look that different, to be honest with you. I don't think so. The process is deeply disconcerting, let me put it that way. But I really enjoyed seeing the blending of the old version and then now- We've done that on a couple of stories, and I enjoy doing it, partly because we go and visit people when they're in the middle of a crisis or when they're in at the tail end of a series of crises which have changed their lives dramatically.

And then we go away again. This is how the media works, right? You do the story, then you say, See you later. And sometimes you keep in touch, but often you don't. And then 20 years go by. And then you find out, well, things have happened.

And I felt it just made for a richer story because we were able to be there from the very beginning with you, and now here we are with you all these years later.

It's fascinating.

I could have kept talking to you about this story. It was really just an amazing story. I was hooked from the beginning to the end.

Well, thank you.

When we come back, I'll be joined by Dateland producer Susan Lebowitz, to answer some viewer and listener questions. Hey, guys. Willy Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with Emily Blunt to talk about the awards season chatter around her performance in Oppenheimer, her pension for napping anytime, any place, and a question from her husband, John Krasinski. You can get our conversation now for free wherever you download your podcasts. Welcome back, everyone. We are joined now by producer, Susan Leibowitz, Dateland producer, that is, who is here to answer answer some of your viewer questions and observations. Hey, Susan.

Hey, Andrea.

All right, let's dive right in. The first question is from Dude in the Desert. Says, They briefly touched on the fact that he owned a few failed restaurants. Speaking of Victor, Dude in the Desert would be interested in what some of his former staff had to say. I guarantee he creeped out more than a few of the female staff members.

He's probably right. We didn't talk to any of his former employees, but he had three restaurants, one in Maria Del Rey, and that was reviewed by the LA Times. It got a great review. Really? It failed anyway. One in Brentwood, in the same building as Roger Corman, claimed to be movie director, who just died about a month ago, and another restaurant in West Hollywood. So really good location, but they all failed. And Cathy De Bono interviewed his partner in these restaurants who said at one point, something like, every time he went out with one of our regulars, they never came back.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. That partner knew there was something pretty unsavory about Victor.

All right. This is from a Bessa Annie. How do they find similar-looking people for the lineup? Personally, I would be offended.

Well, I think everybody for their live lineup is they're finding in the jail. One of the things that's interesting is that he had let his beard grow after he was arrested. So the Detective Virginia Obenchain made sure he was clean-shaven for the lineup, and then they found other men in the jail that looked enough like him.

I always feel like I would fail one of those police lineups if I was a witness. I think it's hard.

Well, she said that one of the things that's interesting rather than the six-pack photo lineup that we hear about a lot is that with the live lineup, you can see how someone moves, you can see how tall they are, you can see a lot more about them that is indicative of who they are than just a photo.

That's true. All right. Mad World. I wonder if they interviewed Victor's ex-wife. I bet she has some stories to tell.

Victor's ex-wife would not respond to our request. And as far as I know, she hasn't talked to anyone. I mean, she may have talked to the law enforcement, but not to us. And I'm sure she does.

All right. This is again from Mad World. Kudos to the composite sketch artist and the witness to have such an accurate picture. And You mentioned something on Twitter, Susan, that this sketch artist was featured on another episode of Dateland.

She was. She was the head... She was retired just recently, but she was in charge of all the sketch artists with the County Sheriff's Department. Her name is Sandra Enzlo. We have a web story about her that we put up in 2017 about that other case, which was the young woman named Crystal Taylor, who was pregnant and was murdered and took them about 20 years to solve that crime. Sandra was really proud of the work she did on this case because it really helped make the case, right? Without Susan Murphy, getting that sketch done, then the other information from Victor's parole officer wouldn't have come in. He wouldn't have been found so quickly.

Skech artists have remarkable brains. I don't know how they do it, but it's really phenomenal. All right, this is from Cathy. When I first saw Christine during during this episode tonight, I knew I recognized her and her manner of speaking, but I couldn't quite place her. I agree. I had the same feeling that I had seen her before. I didn't know why, but Cathy looked it up and her instincts were right that she'd seen her before. Christine had a small role on a Frasher episode in 2000.

Christine Clujian is an actress and has had parts. She's a working actress. I didn't recognize her from her work. I just know her from story.

Yeah. I just felt like she's one of those people I felt like I had seen before, which I get all the time in this job. I get people... I feel like I know you from somewhere. People who aren't quite sure why. And then normally, I'm always hesitant to say dateland because then you don't know if they're going to say yes or no, and then you'll be embarrassed. And then the one time I do say dateland, they're like, No, I think you look like my cousin or something.

I know Josh says people have accused him of being on soap operas. Soap opera?

I have never got that before. That is really funny. All right, this is from Andy Giamarco. I'll bet every girl that worked in that mall knew who Victor was and were creeped out. Did you hear, Susan, about any other women in the Century City Mall who were weirded out by Victor that maybe he didn't have a bad situation with him personally, or maybe they did?

There were a few people who came forward who said, I saw that guy, and I ran away from him. That instinct.

As I mentioned earlier in this episode, I, in the '90s, would go to the Century City Mall all the time.

I'm trying to picture a young Andrea watching in the Mall.

But it just makes me wonder, did I see Victor? I certainly don't remember. I think I would remember if someone had approached me being a bond girl. But I went there enough that I surely could have possibly seen him there at one point. So very, very creepy story. Very well-told story, as I told Keith. Very powerful. Kudos to the women who came forward and the women who brought him down. Good job for them and protecting future women from him.

Right. That's their job now.

Thank you, Susan, so much for sharing sharing our viewers' thoughts. We always love to hear from our Dateland viewers and listeners.

Thank you.

That's Talking Dateland for this week. In the description of this episode, you can find a link to Keith's After the Verdict episode with Christie's mom, Terry Hall, available exclusively to Dateland premium subscribers. You can also find links to Josh's story on Crystal Taylor that Susan mentioned, and to the video about the sketch artist who worked on both cases. Remember, if you have any questions for us about stories or about Dateland, you can reach out to us on social at datelandnbc. Also, if you want to check out more true crime from Dateland, we have a new podcast for you called Dateland True Crime Weekly. Every Thursday, I'm digging into the biggest true crime stories of the week, bringing you the latest on trials and investigations around the country. So check that out wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you Fridays on Dateland on NBC. So many twists and turns.

There are more surprises on the way.

Dateline is on fire. I'm Andrea Canning. Welcome to Dateline True Crime Weekly, a new podcast covering breaking crime news around the country with the best reporters on the case. So in Santa Fe. Nbc news analysts and Dateline producers on the ground. It's kind prosecution. I'll dive into stories that are catching Dateline's attention this week. This is. And get to the bottom of what you need to know.

The question is, did you really think that you were going to get away with it?

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