Lottie Spencer Blatz and Waseem Daker on Dateline
If you caught Dateline NBC last weekend and watched the featured story, your jaw likely dropped and hit the floor. The story was a mind-blowing.
A woman, Lottie Spencer Blatz, claimed she had been relentlessly stalked by a younger man, Waseem Daker. She said they met playing paintball and became friends, but she said they never had a romantic relationship. Then Daker, according to Blatz, started stalking her and became obsessed with her.
Blatz filed charges against Daker multiple times for stalking and Daker ended up getting locked up for 10 years.
In the middle of all of this, Blatz ‘s attractive neighbor, Karmen Smith, who lived in the same house that Blatz did (on a different floor) was murdered. When it happened, Blatz told police she knew who it was. It was Daker, the man who stalked her.
That hit me as very unusual and strange. Stalkers may kill the person they are obsessed with, but not typically their neighbors.
Blatz talks about when she was being harassed by Daker, she took her phone off the hook and as soon as she did, she heard Daker start calling Karmen Smith and shortly after Smith was murdered. What are the odds?
Over the Dateline broadcast, Blatz does an about face now that Daker is convicted of murder, and she tells us and the courts that she lied. She says that Daker never stalked her, and that she had a consensual relationship with him after all. She is now calling Daker the victim here.
When you are watching the show, you are left confused and unsure what to believe.
When I watched Blatz tell her original story, I saw a lot of red flags and I didn’t believe her. Yet when she did an about face, her clues dramatically subsided.
I think Blatz has some serious mental health issues, but I also believe she is a pathological liar and even worse, she may be a master manipulator.
At the end of the show, from what I saw, I couldn’t help but wonder if Blatz manipulated and toyed with Daker’s emotions, and pulled his strings like a puppet and got great joy out of it. By pushing his buttons, she may have pushed him to the brink–causing him to do stupid things.
And when I think that Blatz was so sure of who killed her neighbor, I immediately wonder what evidence there was to convict Daker. Blatz claims she gave a blanket to Smith before she was killed, but only Daker’s hairs were on the blanket — not Blatz’s. How does that happen?
I can’t help but question if Blatz set up Daker. I would put Blatz in the target of my investigation. She would have had the motive to kill Karmen Smith out of pure jealousy if Daker gave her any attention. Or she could have manipulated Daker to kill Smith and refused all contact with Daker until he did. Both are plausible.
I fear this story is way more twisted than anyone knows and the dark one behind all of this may very well be Blatz and not Daker. I can say I do believe Blatz this time around on some elements–enough that the whole case needs to be reassessed, hands down.
Agreed on all counts Eyes. My 25 yr old son & I watched the show and he came to all the same conclusions that you arrived at as the show progressed. He even believes Blatz did the murder. She is indeed scary.
Wrong; you’re jumping to a faulty conclusion. I have no idea what this obviously mentally ill woman’s issues are, but I am quite familiar with this defendant, and he is definitely a psychopath. The two of them may have killed Karmen, but there is no question in the minds of anyone who even has a nodding acquaintance with him that he masterminded it. Just because Lottie is insane in no way makes him innocent. Trust me; there is no point in a new trial.
“Additionally, after Waseem served time for the stalking Lottie, he went to Syria AND HE CAME BACK to the US. A guilty man who committed murder and managed to get far away out of the country wouldn’t choose to come back imo – not if it meant risking a murder charge with the possibility of life in prison.”
I don’t necessarily agree with that. If he’s cocky enough to represent himself at trial (for his life), he’s cocky enough to think he can/did beat a murder rap and come back to the US.
As far as mentioning his descent, his name is Waseem. If it was John or Brian, I doubt they would have brought it up so much, but knowing his name was a little different, they probably figured many viewers would be curious as to his background. Especially these days where anything “foreign-sounding” is such a hot button and polarizing issue among the populace.
I think Lottie lied in bits and pieces both times, and even when she told the truth, she would only tell part of it to manipulate her audience into thinking the way she wanted them to. (Like when Fox News, during the months leading up to the 2012 election, would run a graphic over and over saying the average gas price when Obama took office was 1.80 per gallon, but now (summer 2012) gas is 4.00+ per gallon. Then they would stop there. What they said was the truth, technically, but it was presented in such a way to slant the viewer into believing a false equivalency, that because A happened during B, B must be the reason. What they would leave out every time is that, 4-5 months prior to Obama being elected, gas was also 4.00+ per gallon (summer of 2008). If they had presented that information, they would have not generated the graphic’s desired effect. It’s manipulating by only presenting part of the truth, and allowing someone else to fill in the blanks the way you want them too.
I think originally Lottie enjoyed this bit of control she had over a younger man early in what was undoubtedly a sexual relationship and was egging him on and pulling his strings on purpose, maybe to just prove that she could. When Karmen Smith was murdered, I think she realized she created a monster that she had lost control over, and worried that police would find out that she pushed Daker on purpose, looking to see how much power she had over him, but then not realizing that he was really in charge until it was too late. I wonder if she wasn’t perhaps a little jealous of Karmen. (she’s prettier, has more interesting job, etc…), and wanted to bring her down a peg by sicking what she thought was her trained “dog” on her for a little while, thinking he would just make some sick phone calls and freak her out and ruin her “perfect” life, never realizing that her control over Waseem was an illusion until the unthinkable happened.
Now she really does feel bad (I don’t think she’s a sociopath, but I do think she’s incredibly “disturbed”), but she doesn’t want to admit, for various reasons, her full involvement, so she tells bits and pieces of the truth to make Waseem look innocent, but not really incriminate herself either.
I think lying, or at least manipulating, is like breathing to Lottie, and she does it all the time, maybe even without even recognizing why or to what benefit she does it. I would believe ANYTHING that came out of her mouth. Her original story, her recantation, ANYTHING.
There is ZERO doubt in my mind Daker murdered Karmen Smith and nearly murdered her son. What I don’t quite know is how much involvement Lottie had in it. Was it an accident brought on by recklessness, like I theorized above, or did Lottie know exactly what she was doing, and completely expected what happened? It’s at least the former, and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being the latter either.
I don’t think it’s nefarious at all that the prosecutors aren’t charging Lottie with perjury. The crime of perjury can be extremely hard to prove in many cases, just ask the prosecutors that tried Roger Clemens for it. They lost even after having one of his teammates as a witness, contradicting Clemens’s supposed perjured testimony. They lost bad, and looked like fools doing it.