Snake River (Dateline) Charles Capone and David Stone
Did you catch Dateline NBC this week? They profiled the story and disappearance of Rachael Anderson. Rachel disappeared in 2010. Police looked everywhere for her, but couldn’t find her.
In 2013, her ex-husband Charles Capone and his friend David Stone were arrested for her murder, though Rachel’s body has never been found. The case was solely build on circumstantial evidence.
Stone eventually turned and became a state’s witness for leniency and testified against Capone. Stone says that he saw Capone kill his wife and helped him dispose of her body. The reason he said he never came forward is that he was a afraid of Capone, which I say is utter nonsense.
I didn’t believe a word David Stone said on Dateline.
And I ironically didn’t see any hotspots in Capone.
Capone has since been convicted of murder, and is awaiting sentencing. Stone was convicted as an accessory and could be out in as little as 18 months.
While I don’t know what the truth is here, I believe we have yet to hear the truth of what happened to Rachael Anderson. I am not buying Stone’s story. I wish there were more interviews of Capone to sift through.
What did you think when you watched the show?
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Note: My opinion of Charles Capone is assuming his interviews were prior to his conviction. If this is incorrect, please let me know.
Watching that short video above, I can’t help but to notice that he showed no “aw shucks” or “regret” or “sadness” over the fact that he makes poor decisions. There is no defending himself. If someone flat out asks you if you are a sociopath, even if it fails to get a sharp rise out of you with less control than a person might like, I would still expect a person’s inner offense to leak through. Doesn’t seem like he’s too bothered by much. I wouldn’t be happy if someone intimated that I was a sociopath. I would probably show some form of fear if someone tried to implicate me in someone else’s murder. Who wants to go to jail? Who wants legal trouble? I wouldn’t expect a person to sound like they were talking about another person when asked about themselves, especially under these circumstances.
Who says “I don’t believe so” when asked whether they are a sociopath? Probably only a sociopath.
His response fits with his demeanor to me. It doesn’t stand out.
It’s certainly possible he didn’t kill his wife. But he can still be a sociopath. 🙂 Or perhaps he has some other kind of emotional impairment. Lots of people are on the spectrum, so it’s common. Someone who relates normally to people knows they are not a sociopath, especially when the context is how they relate to family members.
PS this is the first time I’ve posted but am a longtime reader. Thanks for your blog.
Welcome, Anna!
A lot of his response will depend on just what a sociopath is in his internal dictionary. If you defined it as something other than whatever he thinks it is, then you’d likely get a different kind of response from him when you asked him, or after defining it to him. Not everything works this way, but there are times when it’s important to recognize that what someone understands a particular word to mean is important. I’m not saying this is necessarily one of those times, but it could be.
And it’s nice to have you on the blog. 🙂
David Stone strikes me as a follower. He is all over the place. The chances of his walking up on Capone murdering his wife aren’t very good. First, he goes along with Capone, or so he claims. He, first says, he thought Capone was his friend, then he says he went along with Capone out of fear. Then, he claims to have been lying all that time and goes along with his pastor, who tells him to confess to his part. Then he goes along with the police, and tries to help convict Capone for killing his wife. Then, there’s the story about Stone trying to hire someone to kill his wife. Stone is very angry at Capone for getting him into this trouble, as if, he didn’t have a choice. He seems to not realize that almost every human on earth would have been horrified and would have run as fast as they could to call 9-1-1 He lives in an unreal world of rationalizations and blaming the other person for making him do the things that he does.
I don’t think the whole truth will ever come out of these two guys. Capone strikes me as the stronger of the two, but neither one is fit to live in society.
I didn’t see hotspots either. Was it Charles Capone who had acted like he would strangle his wife before? If I understood that correctly, well I guess that looks like he might be hot-tempered sometimes.
I watched the episode before I saw your observations on here so watched the episode again. I don’t believe capone but he came across as more believable than stone. It seemed to me after the second viewing that it is quite possible that capone is a sociopath and that stone is an amateur evil doer, who showed his lack of moral fibre and abject cowardice when caught in the headlights, putting it all on capone to save his own skin. Capone showed no sorrow regarding the disappearance of his wife. He is where he belongs. What I did find incredible was stone’s wife staying with him after she had been told by the sheriff’s office that he had offered a co-worker $10,000 to murder her. However, having seen the capacity humans have for blind denial when all the evidence points to the contrary on quite a lot of cases now, I probably shouldn’t be so surprised.
I didn’t think Dateline did a good job on this story. Definitely needed more backstory on all involved, especially Rachel. We don’t know why they divorced 1 month after marrying. Rachel definitely picked bad men. Dateline just glossed over all involved in this case. Lacked substance imo.
Herein contains a statement by David Stone to the court:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTjziPZtpq4
Listen to the words of his statement at the 1:40 mark.
“There’s been a lie it was going on for three-and-a-half years, it was a part of [pause] being scared, as I said yesterday…um…and I can’t sit here today and tell you that I’m not *still* scared.”
There’s BEEN a lie.
It was part of being scared.
Still scared.
If we apply Peter Hyatt’s rules for statement analysis to this case, Stone implies by his OWN STATEMENT that he is STILL lying because he is STILL scared.