‘Dateline’ to Head to Atlanta Before Airing Episode About Missing Person in Georgia

Mankiewicz said this type of work was motivated by a desire to share information and advance missing persons cases. He added that there was a good chance that many of the cases covered in “Missing in America” ​​would remain unsolved for another year.

“What we’re hoping to do with ‘Missing in America’ is change that arc a little bit, because there are almost certainly people who know something,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week in an exclusive interview.

The July 19 episode, one of six in the podcast’s third season, will focus on the 1998 disappearance of Shy’Kemmia Pate from her small town 45 minutes south of Macon, which at the time had a population of just over 1,600. Pate would be 34 today.

Pate, known to friends and family as Shy-Shy, disappeared “virtually before her family’s eyes,” Mankiewicz said.

On the evening of September 4, Shy-Shy was planning to attend a high school football game, the AJC reported in 2007. Her older sister, Laswanda Pate, was reportedly one of the last people to see Shy-Shy as she waved to her from a neighbor’s porch.

A few minutes later, as Laswanda returned from filling up with gas just down the road, Shy-Shy was nowhere to be found.

Mankiewicz said that this story is unique because she disappeared from a place she knew and felt safe in. This contrasts with more common missing child stories, in which an individual disappears into a crowd or an unfamiliar location.

“And that (difference) is one of those things that drives us to make the decision to make a story,” Mankiewicz said.

He said Dateline strives to focus on stories that aren’t often told, particularly those involving people of color. Canning added that Dateline’s name is recognizable and therefore has the ability to “bring attention to these cases that might not otherwise be covered.”

SCAD hosts several TVfests throughout the year, each focusing on a different type of television, from documentary filmmaking to comedy. While the four Friday sessions are geared toward students, they are open to anyone curious about true crime television.

The Mankiewicz-Canning screening will begin at 5:30 p.m. Other screenings will feature an exclusive screening of “How I Caught My Killer,” as well as workshops on adapting true-life stories into TV series and identifying stories that will work on the big screen. Tickets, which must be purchased separately for each of the four screenings, are $10 for the general public.

Crime novels have always had a strong hold on the American public, but they have gained increasing fascination in the last decade due to the explosion of media related to the genre. Canning and Mankiewicz believe that the plot is driven by the shock factor.

People “can’t believe this happened in their backyard,” Canning said.

Mankiewicz speculated that viewers and listeners want to see the criminal justice system, “which so often fails to function properly, function properly in this case.”