Perhaps the most bizarre moment in (what I think is) the final episode of Dateline NBC’s The Seduction podcast series — no, not that Jaime even still seems to love Patty Presba, or that Jaime and Patty communicated through the toilet at the county prison where she was trying to convince Jaime to take the fall, or that Patty, without explanation, finally pleaded guilty for her role in her husband, Ron Presba’s, death, or even that Keith Morrison recognized that Jaime was repeating back what Keith was saying, reflecting how susceptible he would be to someone like Patty — but when Keith Morrison was talking to Jaime about the moments after he’d been shot by Patty with a .44 Magnum (how did he not die?) in the arm, the collarbone area, and the leg, and the exchange goes like this:
Keith: Didn’t it occur to you, I mean at that point, to leave yourself? You managed to prevent her from shooting you, why the hell didn’t you just run? Why didn’t you recognize, this woman wants to kill me? I gotta go.
Jaime: It was very hard for me to walk.
Keith: Yeah, but c’mon, that’s not really an excuse. She just tried to kill you, you call 9-1-1, you get the eff out of there, don’t you?
Jaime: I kept feeling the love that I had for her.
Keith: The love? She just tried to shoot you to death!
Yes, Jaime is ridiculous for still being so compliant and “in love” with Patty, but I thought Keith’s exasperation (c’mon!) at Jaime not “running” away to be rather silly: He just got shot three times, once in the leg! I would say him not literally running away has a good excuse. But yes, point taken that if he had a phone on him, Jaime should have called 9-1-1, if for no other reason than to save his own life (as it later happened, an officer at the motel randomly ran their plates and that led to finding him).
We also later learn the one outstanding question I had: Who killed Ron Presba? We know he was killed with a blunt object to the head, and then his death was staged as a fiery car crash, but who killed him? In earlier episodes, Jaime seemed to get cold feet about killing him, and I didn’t believe Patty that Jaime had killed him.
But, as it turns out, Jaime did kill him with a sledgehammer and then staged the killing. What makes that act so brutal beyond the fact of it, and even beyond Patty having, in my view, coaxed him into it, is that, as Ron’s daughters attest to, Jaime knew Ron wasn’t what Patty said he was, a violent rapist. And Jaime still killed him. For Patty. For misbegotten love.
I suppose there is one further outstanding question the podcast obviously can’t answer: Why did Patty do it? For the insurance money? For hatred? For the power she felt from controlling another man to kill her man? Something else entirely? We will likely never know.
In just six more years, Patty will be eligible for parole. She’ll be about 67-years-old by then.
Milam's Musings 