Pendleton, Oregon is the small town where Dateline NBC Correspondent Keith Morrison unravels a bizarre murder mystery on Friday, November 7, at 8pm on NBC. On August 14, 2012, a 19-year-old missionary, AmyJane Brandhagen, who was working part-time at a Travelodge motel to save money to buy bibles for kids in India, was brutally murdered. She didn’t have any enemies or jealous boyfriends. The police chief says the case haunted him.
And then almost exactly one year later, on August 9, 2013, another female member from the Pendleton Methodist Church, 53-year-old Karen Lange, was brutally assaulted and left for dead. Most people in town “knew it wasn’t a coincidence.” It was widely believed that there was a strange motivation behind the murder and assault. Police tracked down the alleged killer hiding in a crawl space in the Pendleton Convention Center. Known as Danny Wu, he told police “he just wanted to feel what it was like to kill someone” and when he attacked Karen, he “wanted to commemorate the anniversary of the first woman’s death.”
