When star Boston radio journalist Kirk Minihane tweeted the other day he was “pretty sure no one has ever been featured on @DatelineNBC and a then contestant on @FamilyFeudABC” he was only half right.
There was one other guy besides him who has been on both Dateline and Family Feud.
That guy was Timothy Bliefnick, who went viral for a dark-humor joke he made to Family Feud host Steve Harvey on the show in 2020.
Harvey had asked him “what’s the biggest mistake you made at your wedding?” and he replied “saying I do.”
The clip resurfaced widely across media outlets after Bliefnick was arrested three years later, in 2023, on a charge of murder in the shooting death of his wife in Quincy, Illinois.
He was later convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, making him the only killer who has been on both shows.
Dateline NBC featured a piece on the bizarre case.
Minihane, who appeared Thursday on Family Feud as part of a charity fundraiser, clarified Friday that he was the only Family Feud contestant also appearing on Dateline who “has solved a murder” rather than committing one.
Minihane was instrumental in helping solve the 2021 murder of teacher’s aide Sandra Birchmore, according to BostonMagazine.com.
Birchmore, 23, was found dead in her Canton, Massachusetts apartment, her death initially ruled as a suicide by asphyxia.
But federal authorities later determined that she had been killed, with a local police officer alleged to have murdered her.
Minihane was “the first journalist to raise questions about the Birchmore case,” reported the magazine’s Michelle McPhee.
“The tide began to turn in 2023, when Minihane released his podcast about Birchmore’s case,” McPhee says.
Minihane and Dave Cullinane, hosts of the true crime podcast “The Case,” weren’t convinced it was a suicide, focusing on the case for an entire season of their podcast, according to Boston.com’s account of the Dateline episode featuring their work.
The months of effort that Minihane and Cullinane spent pushing for access to evidence finally paid off when the district attorney’s office turned over footage from Birchmore’s apartment building,” says Boston.com’s Darin Zullo.
The footage showed a cop who later became the prime suspect in Birchmore’s death entering and leaving her apartment on the night she died.
Dateline ran its piece on the case last fall.
