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Dateline NBC

Deadly Denial

Dateline NBC

NBC News

True Crime, Culture, Social, Society & Culture, News

4.438K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2020

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this Dateline classic, when Raven Abaroa comes home to find his wife stabbed to death, detectives began digging into the couple’s complicated past. Josh Mankiewicz reports. Originally aired on NBC on April 25, 2014.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The wedding was beautiful. I thought he was the love for my life. I wanted all of this

0:21.0

to be behind us and go on half-weaver after.

0:25.0

A single mom meets single dad. He was very handsome. All smiles are very outgoing, charming.

0:33.0

Everything he did just melted my heart. But there was a single question about his past.

0:39.0

He said, I should probably let you know that my wife was actually murdered.

0:45.0

I just came in the house and I saw Janet on the floor. He was crying, he was in shock.

0:52.0

The crime was never solved. I wanted them to find the real killer.

0:59.0

You didn't want to believe it. Who would want to believe that?

1:14.0

She'd found plenty of the wrong guys. Now here in front of her was someone different.

1:20.0

We met at a daycare where both of our children went to daycare.

1:25.0

Vanessa Pond of Salt Lake City was 25 and a single parent. When back in 2007, she met Raven Abaroa.

1:33.0

Like Vanessa, he was single and raising a child alone.

1:37.0

He was very charming. He would always come up with such fascinating dates.

1:43.0

He seemed different. He seemed very different. A good guy. Very good guy.

1:47.0

And you've all formed. Hard.

1:50.0

But along with the charm and the lavish dates, Raven also had a story, a horrible, awful story,

1:58.0

that had changed his life and would also change Vanessa Pond.

2:03.0

The story Raven told wasn't just about himself. It was about his first wife, Janet.

2:08.0

He said, well, I should probably let you know that my wife was actually murdered.

2:13.0

The murder, Raven said, happened three years earlier when he and Janet were living in Durham, North Carolina.

2:20.0

It happened in a home invasion and he came home and found her and that he didn't want to talk about it any further.

2:27.0

It was not the kind of thing Vanessa expected to hear from the man who had just stolen her heart.

...

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