Talking Dateline: Open Desert

Dateline NBC

NBC News

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

4.4 • 38K Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2024

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Andrea Canning talks to Josh Mankiewicz about his episode, “Open Desert.” On March 8, 2020, 16-year-old Britney Ujlaky told her dad she was leaving a park to meet up with a friend. She never came home. Her partially-clothed body was found three days later in the Nevada desert. Detectives investigated multiple potential suspects before they turned their attention to the last person to see Britney alive. Josh and Andrea discuss Britney’s strong relationship with her father, Jim Ujlaky, and the blackmail scheme that gave her family false hope after she disappeared. Later, Josh shares a podcast-exclusive clip from his interview with Jim about his first impressions of the killer. Plus, Dateline producer Ann Preisman joins the conversation to share her experience making the episode and to answer viewer and listener questions from social media. Listen to the full episode “Open Desert” here: https://link.chtbl.com/dl_opendesert

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone I'm Andrea Canning and we are talking Dateline.
0:07.0	Today I'm here with Josh Mankowitz.
0:09.0	Hey Josh, how you doing?
0:11.0	Good.
0:12.0	All right, so this episode is called Open Desert if you haven't seen it.
0:15.4	It's the episode right below this one on your list of podcasts. So go there and
0:19.4	listen to it or stream it on Peacock and then come back here. Today Josh has an extra clip
0:25.0	that he's going to play for us from his interview with the victim's father. Plus we're
0:29.2	going to be joined later by this episode's producer and a good friend of mine and
0:33.2	Priceman to answer some questions from social media.
0:36.6	To recap this story back in March of 20,
0:39.3	16-year-old Brittany Lackey was reported missing from her hometown of Spring Creek, Nevada.
0:44.6	She was last seen with her friend Bryce who said he had dropped Brittany off to meet a mysterious
0:49.3	cowboy named J.T.
0:51.6	Detectives and Brittany's family searched far and wide for her body and her
0:55.2	killer. Eventually they found her remains in a nearby desert. And DNA evidence at the
1:00.2	scene showed them that her killer wasn't that cowboy, but her trusted friend, Bryce.
1:06.0	Okay, let's talk Dateline. Josh, what really hit me from the very first line of this episode was the child not answering the phone.
1:17.0	Yeah.
1:18.0	Right. That happens to all of us as parents.
1:20.6	You know at first it's like no big deal your kid didn't answer their phone you don't really think much of it and then if they don't answer the second time or the third time or they're not answering text your mind immediately goes to the worst place at the same time you're like no no no everything's fine and usually it is but then
1:37.3	unfortunately as we've learned on this show
	...

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