Hi, everybody. I'm Josh Mankowits, and we are Talking Dateland. Our guest is Keith Morison.

Hi. Well, hello, Josh. Well, hello, Josh.

That was good. That was very good. Thank you. Like you've been working on it, almost.

I have been. I have been. It took two tries.

This episode is pretty interesting. It's about a group of phenomenally immoral teens who go on this crime spray before committing murder. But the real center of this is the reporter who ends up getting so close to the story. You can't tell whether he's observing it or participating in it or acting as an undercover agent. If you've not listened to Young Lords of Chaos, it is the episode right below this one on the list of podcasts. So go there and listen to it and then come back here. Now, when you come back, we will be catching up with the victims sister, Pat Shweeby's Dunbar. It's been 28 years since then, and she has a lot to share with us. So let's talk Dateland. So this is really two stories. I mean, it's Jim Greenhill's story, reporter, in what you get the feeling, is a downhill slide. I mean, he's drinking all the time. He doesn't sound like he's doing terribly well in life. And then it's also the story of these kids, weakness of people who couldn't stand up to somebody or people at that age, so desperate to be included that you leave behind any sense of what right and wrong is.

I mean, I got bullied a lot when I was little. I get bullied a lot here at Dateland, but that's a different story.

Well, for obvious reasons.

Yeah, and you are usually the ringleader of that. But I did get bullied a lot when I was a kid. I went to seven elementary schools. I was always the new kid at school. I was very small for my age. That's true. I will certainly say I know what it was like to be the outcast in school like a lot of those kids were. I was always delighted whether anybody who was the cool kids, wanted to talk to me or hang out with me or have lunch with me. But I certainly wasn't out there committing crimes and trashing things and doing things that were violent. I mean, Kevin Foster is a guy I would have been afraid of.

Oh, sure. And there's a Kevin Foster or somebody like Kevin Foster in almost every school. Not usually that extreme, obviously, but somebody in that position. And I was reading a piece the other day which suggested that parenting plays a much smaller role in a person's development than does peer pressure.

I think that if you're a parent, you do say to your kids, you should not smoke, you should not drink, you should stay in school. You don't think that you have to say to your kids, you should not commit murder.

Sure. But you know, it really doesn't always make very much difference what a parent says to a child. They will do what they will do. There seems to be, especially among young men, but also among groups of young women, occasionally, a propensity for performative violence, where they want to do things just for the sake of doing them. Then It makes you scratch your head as you say, How could people be this way? This is something about growing up, about being a teenager, about needing the approval of the alpha male in the group, and you'll do whatever that alpha male demands you do. In this case, Kevin Foster, who was very much the bully and the leader of the group. They were the accolades and the followers who wanted to impress themselves as people worthy of being in Kevin Foster's presence. Even when they were doing things that they knew if they were caught, they would pay a huge penalty. Maybe they weren't thinking about that.

In the jail interview with them, one gets the sense that the gravity of what these kids were facing and how What a fork in the road their association with Kevin Foster had been. It hadn't really hit them at that point. It hadn't. Is it remorse or is it just regret that we got caught? I don't know.

Who knows? What does life become? There is a life in prison, I guess, but certainly not the life you'd have outside.

Well, I mean, one of them was an artist, one was one new computers, one was in the band. I mean, these kids were- All kinds of promise.

Right.

Heading for lots of fun, interesting experiences. And instead, they're looking at cinder block walls for the rest of their lives.

Sure. But this poor guy, Mark Schweeby, is the school's music teacher. By all accounts, a very caring, nice fellow.

I mean, everything Everything you said about Mark Schweeby makes me think he was exactly the teacher you want teaching your kids in school. He was looking out for them. He was trying to keep them out of trouble. And he also probably was a good teacher, and they enjoyed being in his classes.

Yeah, exactly. And what really got to me was that Kevin Foster, the bully, chose the one who was taking the music teacher's classes to go up and knock on the door because the music teacher would come to the door and then get blasted in the face. But to agree to do that, knowing that that's what the outcome was quite possibly going to be.

I don't know how you would ever get a night's sleep after doing that.

A nice kid who liked his teacher. Yeah. I mean-Go figure.

Kevin says to Derek, Somebody has to nine to nine. If it's not him, it's going to be you. Right? Yeah. And so that's used as why I had to keep going. I'm not 100% sure I believe that.

I was never particularly sure I believed it either. You can say what you want to say, but he was certainly in the thrall of this guy Foster. And then that's backed up when you see the Jim Greenhill equally falls under the spell of this guy, too. So clearly, there was a magnetic personality involved. The Jim Greenhill piece of it is fascinating, too, in the sense that, as you say, as he admitted himself, he was not in a place in his life. He was abusing alcohol.

He says he was living off caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol.

That's pretty much it.

Over the years has described a lot of reporters that I've known, and probably that you've known and worked with. But one senses that this is less romantic and more frightening.

Exactly. I think he got involved in covering this story, and he became fascinated with the same issues. Why would a group of young men do this thing? But he found himself drawn increasingly, like these other boys in the group were, to the leader of the group, Kevin Foster.

I think it sounds like everything he does is what a good reporter would do. You try to make contact with the people in the story, you try to gain their trust, you try to get them to talk to you, you try to figure out what makes them tick. But then clearly, something starts to change.

Yeah. Yeah, it was a strange thing. And he confesses that it was a strange thing, but he wanted to spend time with him and know more about him. And he became so enamored, is the wrong word, but allowed himself to get so in that orbit that he even willingly wore Kevin's black jacket, black leather jacket, that he sent pictures of himself to Kevin.

It's like some bromance.

It truly, as you say, it was like a bromance. They write letters back and forth. I guess you have to do that if you're in prison. There's no other way to communicate, really. But the act of writing letters is a a romantic thing.

I can't remember a story of a report order being drawn in by a killer like that. This was very interesting. I looked up the famous quote from Frederick Nietzsche, which is, When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. There you go. If you're hunting monsters, make sure you don't become a monster. That's true. It feels to me like gazing into the abyss and the abyss gazing back is what happened with Jim Greenhill.

It was either that or it was so important to him to get Kevin to admit that he actually killed Mark Shweeby's. That was really important to Jim in writing this book, and he did eventually. But it just did seem like there was a lot more involved. It took Kevin telling Jim he wanted to kill the boys who testified against him before he finally went to see the police.

When we come back, we will be joined by Mark's sister, the victim's sister, Pat Shweeby's Dunbar. Okay, so now we're being joined by Pat Schweeby's Dunbar, Mark Schweeby's sister. Thank you. Thanks for coming here.

You're welcome.

Let me ask you what was going on in your life and in Mark's life at the time that this happened.

What was going on with me is I had three kids, raising those kids, keeping active as far as with the school, the church, the kids' activities, and the family. Mark was very active, obviously, with the school as far as being a band director.

What did Mark say about teaching? Maybe not about these kids specifically, but what did he say about his time at that school and teaching those kids and others?

Oh, he loved it. He knew it was his calling. Those kids were his kids.

Well, he got pretty deeply involved in it, too. I mean, he was totally committed in the relationship he had, even with the kids who wound up killing him or participating in his death. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I mean, one of them, he had written a letter of recommendation for college. Kids were in his jazz band, in his classes. So when I say he was involved, as far as he was concerned, he didn't have biological children, but those were his kids.

When you found out, when police told you what had happened here, what was your thought? What did you think?

I got a phone call from my father. Actually, the phone rang, and I was supposed to be working that day. And I just rolled over and said, I'm not answering the phone at 5:30 in the morning. And then my husband, he answered the phone, and he came up to me and he said, You need to take this call. And it was my dad, and my dad was crying. And my first response was, Oh, my gosh, something happened to mom. And I asked him, Is mom okay? And he said, Yeah. And I said, What happened to Bob? That's my brother who's 15 months younger than me. And he said, No, it's Mark. He's been murdered.

Jeez Louise. Yeah.

I was going to say, according to my kids. They just heard mom screaming. And I honestly don't remember that at all. After that, I just blanked out. I initially, honestly thought that it might have been a jealous boyfriend of possibly the person he had been dating. So I didn't initially think that they were correct. I mean, I could not, and still in my head, To think that kids, students, would do that was pretty much incomprehensible. It's incomprehensible. Yeah, it's like you don't think of that.

The question then is, This is 28 years ago now, but as you continue to try to live your life because you got to get up every day and do your thing, how did you learn to accept what had happened? What did it do to your life?

It changed my life significantly. There's life before and there's life after. How do you get on with life? I don't really see that you have a choice, Keith.

No, you don't.

I mean, to me, it's like one of the things I try to explain to people is that I am a murder survivor. You can make the choice that I'm going to still get up and I'm still going to enjoy my life, and I'm still going to have a productive life, and I'm not in any way, shape or form, going to let those young men who murdered my brother also murder me.

Is Mark's death why you're no longer teaching?

No. No, my kids graduated high school, moved along, and I just started having this sense of there was something else I'm supposed to do, and teaching wasn't it. I actually went and I became a pastor.

That's a switch.

That was a big switch. Let me tell you.

At one point, you started volunteering at a youth detention center. Yeah, we did that for- I got to believe that has something to do what you went through with Mark?

I think it probably did. It was probably part of why I went into ministry. But what I always thought was weird about going into the youth detention centers was that as a When they were in, they did not allow women to go in with the young men due to the possibility of additional violence. So yet every time I went in, I never went in with the young women. I always went with the young men. And not by my choice, but by the head chaplain's decision that, yeah, you can handle it, and they need to hear from you.

That might be.

When we come back, we're going to have more from Mark Sister Pat.

How do you feel about Jim Greenhill's book? How have you felt about it over the years?

I embrace that Jim wrote the book. I definitely embrace it. The only thing that I have challenges with the book, and he and I've talked, so I'm not going to surprise anybody with this one, is that So much of it is the focus on the perpetrators as opposed to the victim. But I feel like that is the majority of what happens in telling these kinds of stories. It's rare that we really talk about the victim and the victim's life and the impact of the victim's death on the families, et cetera.

You're quite right. The person at the heart of this is the person who suffered, who was killed, and the family.

Too often, we don't tell their stories.

What was your sense of his relationship with Kevin Foster? Did you read that portion?

Oh, yeah. I think, and this is based on also talking with Jim since then, that maybe Jim was a little bit lost himself, and he saw himself or where he could have gone, I should say. Not where he did go, but where he could have gone in Foster. Maybe he had to explore that for himself. We all have those moments in life that we see somebody and we go like, Man, is that me? Could that have been me? If I had taken a left turn instead of a right turn, if I had taken that fork in the road, could I have gone there? I think it's a good thing that we explore that. But again, this is Jim's book that we're talking about. So therefore it reflects Jim It doesn't reflect Pat. That's true. I would have done something different, but I would have come from a different perspective.

Any of those kids reach out to you over the years?

No, only one. I'm laughing because it was Derek Shields. Derek wrote me a letter and asked me to write a letter to the court to ask for leniency and let the court know that I had forgiven him, and maybe they would reduce his sentence. How'd that go? Oh, I've still got the letter. Did I write the letter? No. No. No. My feeling on it is that... It's two parts. One is that this was not Pat versus these individuals, okay? It was the state of Florida because this was a crime against society. It just happened to be my brother. And the other part was that, I'm sorry, Derek, but you made a choice. It was not a good choice. You know it wasn't a good choice, but you chose to not only go home after hearing about this, you chose to come back and meet up with the guys. You chose to go with the guys. You chose to not tell anybody, either before, during, or after.

And those were all moments where doing that, standing up for what's right and for your brother and for any other victims that might have come after that, that would have made a huge difference.

That would have made a huge difference. Yeah.

Peter Magnati was released last year early. How did that sit with you?

Not the best. I mean, I mean, Derek and Chris both got life without parole. Pete, I wanted him to have life without parole. We agreed with the state attorney that he would receive 32 years for his testimony. But where's the justice if he didn't have to serve the 32 years? There you are. Yeah.

Especially given the business that you're in now, in the pastor business, have you had any thoughtful days about whether it's important for you to forgive these young men for what they did?

From a forgiveness perspective, how about we look at it and we say, Have I forgotten them? I can forgive them, but I can't forget what they've done. We're not ever From my faith perspective, we're not called to forget. You don't just say, Oh, well, hey, yeah, I forgot all about that. It's a question that goes through my head oftentimes. But I don't walk around carrying this burden of hate or seeking vengeance. That destroys a life. Like I said earlier, I won't let them destroy my life.

Yeah, you have to let it go. Otherwise, it'll leave you up. Finally, what do you carry around with you now about your brother, your memories of him?

I still miss him. He was an integral part of my life. He was my baby brother. When you're the oldest and you got that little one, even though he was a good nine inches taller than me, he was still the little one. I miss conversations with him just about life, just about today's plans, tomorrow's plans, whatever. He was just one of those good guys. He cared about people.

Yeah, he seems like a great guy.

Yeah. And he wasn't perfect, but he was a good guy.

What a loss. And for nothing, for nothing.

Yeah. Exactly. That, I think, is the biggest challenge for me is that it was like, why? What was the point? I just don't get it.

I'm not sure any of us ever will. It's a terrible thing is when you happen to be one who's in the middle of one of those terrible things.

Exactly.

Thank you for talking to us about this and about your brother.

You're most welcome. Thanks a lot. You're most welcome. Thank you. Thank you for not forgetting him.

We do not forget around here. Pat, thanks so much. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Remember, if you have any questions for us about Dateland or about our stories, about anything else, you can reach out to us on social at Dateland, nbc. That's at Dateland, nbc. See you Fridays on Dateland, on nbc.

One more thing. I'm going to be catching up with a reporter at the center of this story, Jim Greenhill, for an all-new episode of our podcast, After the Verdict. We'll be talking about his relationship with Kevin Foster and where things stand today and the big changes Jim made in his life since we last spoke. That episode will be available on September fifth for Dateland Premium subscribers wherever you get your podcasts.