The Dateline correspondent was fascinated by true crime long before she became the queen of it. Now, at 53, she makes it her business to show the whole picture of how a murder happened and share the human side left in its wake.
Andrea Canning wasn’t sailing on the sapphire blue water surrounding the Virgin Islands for pleasure. She was there to cover and possibly help piece together the disappearance of 41-year-old British tourist Sarm Heslop in 2021. Her mission was to interview Heslop’s boyfriend, Ryan Bane, on his 47-foot catamaran called Siren Song, the vessel where Heslop had last been seen.
Canning’s boat pulled up alongside Siren Song, and she made contact with Bane, her Ray-Bans and her breeze-blown blond hair making her look like any other tourist sailing the pristine waters that day. But she wasn’t any other tourist. “It’s Andrea Canning from Dateline,” she told him, straining her voice to be heard over the wind.
“He told us to go away, saying his dog was going to jump in the water,” she recalls. “But I asked him, ‘Did you kill Sarm?’ I don’t think he was expecting Dateline to show up at his boat in the Virgin Islands on the water.”
But there is plenty about the Dateline correspondent, Dateline: True Crime Weekly podcast host, and screenwriter that people don’t see coming. The Canadian-born journalist is at the height of her career, raising six kids (five girls and one boy) between 7 and 17 years old with retired Lt. Col. Tony Bancroft, an F-18 fighter pilot, and she will (politely) not take no for an answer, especially when it comes to her career.
Canning was born in Collingwood, Ontario, named for ski racer Andrea Mead Lawrence, who became the first American alpine skier to win two Olympic golds. Canning was raised on her grandfather’s ski resort, Blue Mountain, with skis practically strapped to her feet from the time she could walk. Growing up on the mountain was idyllic, providing endless entertainment and plenty of adventure. And Canning had a big imagination—she devoured mystery series by Agatha Christie and those featuring heroine Nancy Drew. “I was always interested in mystery from the time I was a little girl,” Canning recalls.
While some of her interests are still the same, being a competitive downhill skier throughout her youth helped her become the intrepid woman she is today. “There is an element of just having to be fearless when you ski competitively,” Canning says. “If you hold back, you’re not going be successful and you’re probably going to get hurt.”
It’s hard not to have feelings when you’re sitting across from someone who is baring their soul in the worst moment.
It’s often not a guy waiting in a dark alley. It’s the principal of the middle school or the friendly guy who works at the grocery store. A lot of times it’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing, just everyday folks who snap. And all these innocent people get caught up and become collateral damage.
Carving Her Path
Growing up in that small mountain town, her family had a television with three channels. “The news would come on at 6 o’clock, and I thought it was so boring,” she says with a laugh. “It just annoyed me that I had nothing else to watch.”
Canning raced with the Canadian National Ski Academy and attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1994. She later studied radio and television arts at Ryerson Polytechnic University (now Toronto Metropolitan University).
With her dad’s constant refrain of “just go for it” in her head, Canning took a no-prisoners approach to her early career, cold-calling the primetime drama Baywatch, saying she wanted to be an intern for the hit lifeguard show featuring Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff. She ended up carving out her own role as both an intern and a live-in nanny for Hasselhoff and his then-wife Pamela Bach to help with their daughters, Taylor and Hayley.
She went on to intern at the entertainment news show Extra before becoming a full-time employee. “That’s when I decided I wanted to be on the air in local news. I went out and shot a reel with myself on camera, and I traded babysitting for editing help from this editor at Extra,” she says, laughing. “He edited my résumé reel, which I sent to 50 stations and got one call from Greenville, MS.”
From there, Canning cut her teeth at a series of local news stations, including Barrie, Ontario; West Palm Beach, FL; and Cincinnati, OH. Her small-town upbringing helped her feel at home. She felt especially welcomed in Cincinnati, and she thrived in the role as the weekday evening news anchor. “By the time I left, we were the number one show,” Canning says. “People are so wonderful in local news, and you get to become a fixture in people’s homes every day, which is really gratifying.”
In 2004, she was hired by ABC and covered national breaking news, including the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, the Iraq war, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the Casey Anthony trial. In 2011, Canning interviewed actor Charlie Sheen, who was amid a turbulent period of his life, at his home in Beverly Hills, CA. The interview went viral—Sheen behaved erratically and seemed to come undone as Canning questioned him on his bizarre behavior and controversial remarks, even asking him if he was on drugs during the interview.
During Canning’s time at ABC NewsOne, journalist Martha Raddatz worked in the office next to her in Washington, DC, and it “became her mission to find me a husband. She said in almost a motherly way, ‘I need to help you. You need a husband,’” Canning says. “I was in my early 30s at that point, and I was thinking about getting married and having kids. She came back from Baghdad one day and flew into my office and said, ‘I found your husband.’”
In true matchmaking style, Raddatz connected Canning to Capt. George Anthony Bancroft II, a Marine fighter pilot and instructor from New York whom Raddatz had met on one of her frequent trips to Iraq. While Bancroft was deployed, the two corresponded pen pal style. Meanwhile, Canning familiarized herself with military lingo via episodes of the television show JAG. When they finally met in person, there were fireworks. “In my teens I went to see Top Gun with my best friend, and we were sitting on a curb waiting for our parents to pick us up. If someone would have whispered in my ear, ‘You’re going to marry one of those guys,’ I wouldn’t have believed it. It’s so weird that that ended up happening.”
Bancroft had the chance to visit Blue Mountain and meet Canning’s mom, Katherine, a few weeks before she died of breast cancer at age 64. “I remember
her giving me the thumbs-up [on him]. She really liked him, even though it with such a short meeting,” she says. “But he got to meet her that one time, which was really special.”
At 35, Canning married Bancroft in her hometown of Collingwood, wearing a satin-lined gown while he donned his Marine Corps dress blues. In an article covering the nuptials in The New York Times, Raddatz is quoted as telling the wedding guests that she wasn’t taking on any other matchmaking requests. “I’ll never do it again,” she said. “I’m batting a thousand.”
True Crime Queen
In 2012, Canning became an NBC News correspondent for Dateline, while also contributing to Today, NBC Nightly News, and MSNBC. “I had always gravitated to these crime stories,” she says. “So Dateline seemed like the natural choice for my interests, and I loved the two-hour platform where we really get to tell the whole story.”
Throughout her time as a Dateline correspondent, Canning has covered high-impact stories like the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing as well as the story of New Jersey Judge Esther Salas, whose 20-year-old son, Daniel, was killed by a gunman posing as a delivery driver. Over hundreds of broadcasts, Canning has interviewed convicted killers and accused suspects from all over the world. But interviewing the victims’ families is the part she thinks about the most. “It’s really hard not to have big feelings when you’re sitting across from someone and they are baring their soul to you in their worst moment. You can’t help but be emotional. I try my best to stay focused and not start crying,” she says. “But you might be in their home or where the body was found, and it triggers so many painful memories.”
Canning recalls one of her most chilling interviews: with Lissa Yellow Bird on Spirit Lake Dakota Reservation for a Dateline special called “The Secrets of Spirit Lake” about missing and murdered Indigenous women. “She was the victim’s aunt, and she took me to this desolate field where her niece was abandoned and her body was dumped,” Canning explains. “I remember saying that people were discarded like they were trash. It’s so gut-wrenching when you think about it that way. It just hits home when you are with someone they loved so much and someone who loved them.”
Immersing herself in the most notorious and shocking murders and tragedies over the past few decades, Canning has also learned that dangerous people can come from unexpected places. “It’s often not a guy waiting in a dark alley. It’s the principal of the middle school or the friendly guy who works at the grocery store,” Canning says. “A lot of times it’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing, just everyday folks who snap. I have found myself becoming a champion for families that are going through these horrific situations and getting their message out there—that really matters to me.”
Eight is Enough
Keeping her emotions in check and being a professional reporter is an essential part of the job, and one that she does her best with, even when she’s filled to the brim with empathy for the victims’ families. But there are times when it’s hard not to think about the people she loves. “If you have not had anyone in your life who has been murdered, the closest you’re going to get is imagining that it’s your child,” she says. That’s a potent thought because so much of the past two decades has been focused on her five daughters and one son.
With years of practice, Canning knows that maintaining a busy job that involves such commitment and travel requires being nimble and focused, and having the best team around you for support. “Obviously, my family is my number one priority in my life, but at the same time, it’s not like I can leave an interview to respond to a call from my kids,” she explains. “So it’s about constantly shifting priorities and what you need to take care of in the moment. Dateline is my job, and I always say if you can’t make that work, or if you don’t, then this isn’t the job for you.”
In the midst of her supersonic career and raising six kids, Canning also found the time to write more than 30 television movies for the Hallmark channel and Lifetime network, including the Ruby Herring Mysteries, in which a news reporter discovers a knack for solving crimes. “I couldn’t do my job well if I didn’t have the support of my husband, amazing kids, and my nanny—it really does take a village. For this job to work for me, I need so much help, and it comes in so many ways,” she says. “On the reverse, I couldn’t be a great mother, wife, and friend if I didn’t have this job. I don’t think I’d be fully satisfied.”
Even as she sits perched at the top of the media mountain, Canning is always surveying, weighing her options, and considering her next move. “I’d love to write a murder mystery novel. And then sometimes I think maybe I should quit and go to law school and become a prosecutor,” she says with a laugh.
But what Canning does next is a mystery only she can solve.
It’s about constantly shifting priorities and what you need to take care of in the moment. Dateline is my job, and I always say if you can’t make that work, or if you don’t, then this isn’t the job for you.”
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