Episode 16: Dan Slepian, ’Dateline NBC’ and ’13 Alibis’

After spending nearly 30 years on death row, Ogrod was released from prison after an investigation uncovered misconduct by police and prosecutors. In his first national interview, set to air Friday night on Dateline NBC, Ogrod tells NBC’s Lester Holt how he was pressured to sign a confession filled with details he knew nothing about.

“I think that we would be stunned as a country to get a real understanding of how many people have been taken from their families, and put in prison for crimes they didn't commit,” says Dateline supervising producer Dan Slepian, who worked on the story, digging into what Slepian describes as “a thirty year old case with thousands and thousands of pages of documents.”

In our conversation, we talked about the details of this case—and his podcast, 13 Alibis, which also featured a man wrongfully convicted of murder. “This isn’t an aberration. It’s how the system works,” he told me.

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In Episode 15 of the podcast, I talk to Bill Kurtis, veteran anchorman and one of broadcasting’s most identifiable voices, familiar to viewers in Chicago, where he anchored newscasts at CBS owned-and-operated station WBBM-TV for decades alongside Walter Jacobson. Today, he can be heard on true crime shows like American Justice, Cold Case Files and American Justice. He was also the narrator of the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. If you don’t watch movies or television, you can catch Kurtis as the announcer and scorekeeper of NPR’s Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me.

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