i didn t sit up looking at him all night. [ inaudible question ] i think i would have, yeah. so their alibis were each other. detectives kept prodding. would you have done anything for him? within reason. would i lie for him? no. because you know what? if he made his bed, he s got to lay in it. for almost a month, detectives went back and forth between ron and cindy and stephanie s husband, dale. who, by that time, had been advised by a friend better get a lawyer. so, i called. and my attorney said, you don t know the onslaught, the tidal wave that s coming toward you, do you? you have no idea. i said apparently not. oh, yes. and what a tidal wave it was. dateline returns after the break. break.concentrated power.
a major winter storm is moving twarloward the mist and northeast and wreaking havoc on travelers trying to get home. intelligence committee will vote on a report detailing their impeachment inquiry which included two weeks of public testimony. the report then goes to the judiciary committee which starts its own hearings this week ahead of the possible writing of articles of impeachment against president trump. now back to dateline. now back. reasonable care to dateline. i m craig melvin. it had been a month since stephanie roller-bruner was bludgeoned and strangled and drowned in a rimpf just yards from her house. investigators zeroed in on three people of interest. ron her boyfriend who broke up her, ron s wife cindy, and dale,
so i m here, asking for help. and i m going to end up getting a divorce because there s no way i can go back. only she did. finally, this domestic violence expert weighed in. when a victim is attempting to leave a relationship or has left a relationship, it is by far the most dangerous time for a victim. but what was the trigger that, according to the prosecution, set dale off? the answer, he said, may lie in an unfinished e-mail stephanie was writing to the other man, ron, just before she was murdered. and though dale denied he knew what she was doing i honestly didn t know. i had no idea. the prosecutor said dale must have seen her writing it, an email begging ron for another meeting because she couldn t accept the idea that her new love was leaving her. i think dale bruner got angry at that and hit her with something.
an ex-girlfriend from dale s past, woman named julie, who told the jury and us the strange story of what happened one night when she lived with dale 20 years ago. he hadn t come home for dinner one night and said he would be home. and you called him on it? he came home. we argued about it. and he became very angry. yelling at me. he pushed me down on to the floor and put his hands around my neck and said if you ever say or do that again, i ll kill you. he had a look on his face that i had never seen or recognized before. it was the most scared i had ever been in my life. even though that was a long time ago, said the prosecutor, it told a terrible tale which, sadly, is as old as time. dale, he said, was a man sometimes overcome by rage and his m.o. was to go for the throat. she was strangled so hard and with such force that it broke a
every trace of her had been scrubbed from the house. it also seemed suspicious, said the detective, that dale changed his story a bit. first time he called the police, he said they had an argument before she left to go out walking. later, he said there was no argument. was there an argument of any kind? no, we never had an argument. there was no argument. it was just the facts were on the table. what were you guys talking about that she needed to clear her head? we were just talking about us. within a few weeks of stephanie s murder, the state ramped up the pressure on dale. social services sent the bruner children to live with stephanie s brother in california. i m in a fight with mike tyson with no gloves. and they re taking my kids away, too. dale wasn t completely alone, mind you. some family stayed around, reported back to her sister, ramona, dale was truly grieving. we kept asking, what is dale acting like? what is he saying? unless he s some kind of actor that