Dateline NBC: "What They Saw" (NBC News, Universal, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched a rerun of a 2019 Dateline NBC episode called “What They Saw.” Who “they” were were the children of Jarod and Ciara (pronounced “Sierra”) Ingram, and what they supposedly saw, or at least heard, was laughing and screaming from the home in which they were living with Ciara after the adult Ingrams divorced. The show dealt in a whirlwind way with the background of the Ingrams: how they met when they were both new military recruits, they fucked on the first date and conceived their first child, Xavier, that night. Later they got married because they realized the military would only station them together if they were a lawfully wedded couple, Unfortunately, despite having another child, daughter River, the two had a rocky time together and agreed to split up but continue co-parenting their children ini Columbus, Georgia. However, Ciara met a man online who offered to help her move back to Indiana, where her family was from, and eventually they began dating. He had already bought a plane ticket to Columbus intending to bring her and her three kids (the two with Ingram and one other, son Brandon, from a former marriage) back to Indiana with him.

The prosecution’s theory is that Jarod got insanely jealous and angry over the potential loss of his kids, and so one night as he was outside his ex-wife’s apartment to pick up his kids for a weekend visit, he supposedly went into her home after putting his kids in his car and emerged wearing a clean shirt and a white bottle of something the police and prosecutors claimed was bleach to wash down the crime scene. Jarod was arrested for the murder of his wife in 2012 and originally spent over a year in jail until he was finally allowed to post bond, and then he was kept in legal limbo until he was indicted for the crime and stood trial in 2016. During the delay he met and started dating an old high-school friend named Katie, who despite the murder charge hanging over his head agreed to marry him and even pressured him into having the ceremony immediately instead of waiting for his trial to finish, one way or the other. (By the way, Jarod Ingram is Black and both Ciara and Katie were white.)

The two key witnesses in the trial against Jarod Ingram for killing Ciara were their children Xsavier and River, and Jarod’s attorney claimed in court that their testimony was “conditioned” by the police interrogating them and the so-called “forensic interviewer” who was called in presumably for his expertise in handling children giving evidence in criminal cases. The videotapes of the interrogations as shown on Dateline were inconclusive; at some points you hear the police apparently whisper to the kids cues about what they should say next, at other points there’s no evidence of them doing that. Originally aired in February 2019, this Dateline seemed reminiscent of the ones shown previously about Pam Hupp in Missouri – also a woman who befriended an unhappily married woman and was the principal witness in a trial in which the victim’s husband was the He alsidefendant. The differences include that the husband in the Pam Hupp case was convicted by a jury, then the case was reversed on appeal and the husband was acquitted in a bench trial heard by a judge without a jury. Jarod Ingram was acquitted, pure and simple, though the prosecutor in the case (a woman, like the one in the Hupp case) still insists that Jarod was guilty despite the jury’s verdict.

Jarod laments the fact that he hasn’t been allowed to see his kids since the murder of their mom – Jarod told Darian Aaron of local Columbus TV station WWBI in 2028, “They spent 6 years with people who believe I did this. When you’re grieving, especially over a loss like this kind, I feel like you need someone to blame, and for 6 years.” He also told Aaron that the case had made it virtually impossible for him to find work, despite his acquittal; he said, “Even if that conversation goes well and that stranger walks away feeling like, you know, this guy is an okay guy. I know he was accused of something…they have to then explain that to somebody that has never met you and that’s usually where it stopped.” It’s an odd case because it’s difficult to imagine anyone else having doue it, but the physical evidence linking Jarod to the crime is flimsy: there was his fingerprint on Ciara’s cell phone but no sign of blood on his clothes or anything else that suggests he was in the middle of a life-or-death struggle with a woman he’d served in the military with and therefore presumably knew something about hand-to-hand combat.