A crew from the U.S. network television show Dateline NBC is in Prince George gathering footage and interviews for an episode on the 1997 murder of a Prince George woman and the subsequent conviction of her husband for second-degree murder 13 years later.
Producer Izhar Harpaz and cameraman Simon Doolittle arrived yesterday from New York and will be in town today.
They've been collecting scenes from around the city, including the Prince George courthouse, where, in November 2010, a jury found Denis Florian Ratte guilty in the death of Wendy Ann Twiss Ratte.
The NBC crew is also interviewing Citizen reporters Frank Peebles and Mark Nielsen.
The visit comes 10 days after a crew from CBC's The Fifth Estate was in Prince George to assemble a show on the same case. They also conducted an extensive interview with Peebles.
On Aug. 18, 1997, Wendy Ann Twiss Ratte, 44 at the time, was reported missing and the family's van was found parked at a supermarket, now Value Village.
The case had languished for years but in 2008, Denis, her husband, became the subject of an elaborate undercover operation, known as a "Mr. Big" sting, in which police officers posed as high-level criminals to gain the suspect's trust.
During the trial, the jury watched a video recorded with a concealed camera, where Ratte took the officers to the scene of the shooting, in the backyard of the family's home, and then to a wooded area east of the city where he told them he dumped her body, which has never been found.
Dateline NBC hopes to have its episode aired early in the new year as does The Fifth Estate.
