Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski is a daily true crime podcast that provides real-time updates on criminal investigations, high-profile trials, and forensic breakthroughs. Hosted by veteran journalist Tony Brueski, the show features exclusive insights from FBI agents, forensic experts, criminal psychologists, and legal analysts. It covers cases like Bryan Kohberger and Lori Vallow, as well as cold cases and unsolved mysteries, aiming to uncover hidden truths behind captivating crimes.
Episodes
Why Did Nick Reiner's Trustee Quit After Four Months?
In this Nick Reiner case update, we follow the strangest thread in the entire trust fight: the man who was handed control of the money — and walked away months later.Paul Kanin took over Nick Reiner's trust after Rob and Michele Reiner were killed. According to the petition, his tenure was a wall of refusals, what Nick's lawyers call "a shifting series of excuses and justifications" — concerns ab
Why Do Mackenzie Shirilla’s Parents Think She’s the Real Victim?
Christine Russo lost her brother Dominic when Mackenzie Shirilla drove a hundred miles an hour into a brick wall in Strongsville, Ohio. Davion Flanagan, nineteen, died alongside him. In a published interview, Christine said it plainly about Mackenzie’s parents: “They created a monster — they’re monsters themselves.”Recorded prison calls between Mackenzie and her family show how the Shirilla house
Can Nick Reiner Even Mount A Defense Without His Money?
Strip away the famous name and the Nick Reiner case update comes down to a brutal structural problem: a man facing the most serious charges California can bring — two counts of first-degree murder in his parents' deaths, which he denies — says he cannot fund the defense he wants, while more than $1.5 million sits in a trust bearing his name.His petition argues every week of delay is a week his ch
Why Is Alex Murdaugh's Defense Team So Quiet About the Judge Who Now Controls His Fate?
Something unusual is happening in the Alex Murdaugh case, and almost nobody has noticed it: the fighting stopped. For three years, every development in this case triggered a war — motions, press conferences, accusations flying in both directions. Then South Carolina named the judge who will run the retrial, a woman with a documented professional history with Murdaugh's own lead defense attorney,
Should Alex Murdaugh Fear The Judge Who Sided With Police?
Everyone covering the Alex Murdaugh retrial is fixated on one half of Judge Debra McCaslin's story — her reported history with defense attorney Dick Harpootlian. This episode digs into the other half, and it's the half that should worry the defense.Before the South Carolina Supreme Court handed McCaslin exclusive control of the Murdaugh case — the motions, the evidentiary fights, and the retrial
Is Nick Reiner Racing the Clock to Drain His Parents’ Trust Fund?
A hundred and thirty-six pages. That is the length of the probate petition Nick Reiner just filed to force the release of over $1.5 million from the trust fund Rob and Michele Reiner created for their children. He wants the money for a high-powered defense attorney. He wants it for soap and socks. And he wants it before a conviction can trigger the one law designed to stop him.California’s slayer
Why Did Wichita Cops Lie To BTK Before His Arrest?
On January 8, 2005, the Wichita Police Department received a typewritten question from the BTK Killer. Dennis Rader had left it inside an empty cereal box in the bed of a pickup truck at a Home Depot parking lot. He wanted the police to tell him, in writing, whether a floppy disk could be traced back to his computer. He asked them to be honest.They lied.In the fifth and final chapter of host Tony
Did Nick Reiner's Parents Lock In His Payout At Birth?
In the latest Nick Reiner case update, the fight over Rob and Michele Reiner's money turns on a document older than the internet: a trust established for Nick when he was an infant.That document is now the center of a probate war. According to Nick's petition, his parents didn't leave the payouts to anyone's discretion — they wrote "mandatory and unconditional" distributions into the trust itself
How Was a Career Criminal Free to Allegedly Kidnap Someone Near Nancy Guthrie’s Home?
Coral Michelle Smith has been in and out of the Pima County criminal justice system for fifteen years — prison four times, probation revoked twice, a kidnapping charge dismissed through a plea deal — and on May 29th she was allegedly free to kidnap someone and commit aggravated assault with a deadly weapon at an intersection less than seven miles from Nancy Guthrie’s Tucson home. That proximity m
Jesse Ridgway Has Used Every Person in His Life and He’s Never Going to Stop
His fans cared enough to call the police a thousand times. He was never in danger. He let them worry for four years because it was making him rich. His creators trusted him enough to build on his platform. It collapsed and he sold it for parts. His wife went through the worst week of her life and he was on TMZ before she finished recovering. Every person who gets close to Jesse Ridgway becomes so
Christine Marie Says Samuel Bateman Never Saw Her Coming
All three parts of our interview with Christine Marie, woven together into one extended conversation — the cult psychologist and survivor who walked into Samuel Bateman's FLDS inner circle, fed the FBI the evidence that ended his freedom for fifty years, and is still living in Short Creek today doing the work nobody else will.She wasn't even supposed to be there for him. She and her husband Tolga
If You’ve Survived a Narcissist, Jesse Ridgway Looks Familiar
A lot of the women listening to this have survived a relationship with someone like Jesse Ridgway. The manipulator. The performer. The partner who takes your worst day and makes it about them. And when a man like that shows up on your feed doing exactly the things the person in your life used to do, something in your brain says: I need to see this named. I need to watch someone call it what it is
Eric Richins Told His Sister Kouri Richins Was ‘The Most Evil Person He’d Ever Met’
Eric Richins told his sister Katie that Kouri Richins was the most evil person he had ever met. He told her he would live through hell every single day until his youngest son turned eighteen rather than risk a family court giving Kouri equal custody. Katie begged him to leave. His other sister Amy begged him to leave. He had already sat down with a divorce attorney. He had the legal groundwork an
Why Are Cops Still Investigating BTK Cases Twenty Years After His Arrest?
In 2023, an Oklahoma sheriff named Eddie Virden announced a multi-state task force to investigate cold cases potentially connected to Dennis Rader during the years Rader was officially considered inactive. In August of that year, deputies excavated a property near Rader's former Park City, Kansas, home using cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar. In March of 2024, Missouri authorities officia
What’s Actually Driving Jesse Ridgway If It Isn’t Just the Money?
The Psycho Series hit a billion views. The pregnancy announcement got seventeen million views on X alone. The outrage pays. But is the paycheck the engine, or is it something the paycheck can’t explain? Jesse Ridgway has been escalating for twenty years. Each stunt darker, each one pushing further into territory a normal person wouldn’t touch. That pattern — needing more extreme material to gener
Could Jesse Ridgway’s Pregnancy Announcement Be Another Stunt?
Ashley Ridgway is either a participant in a staged hoax or a real woman whose husband turned the worst week of her life into a media tour. Either way, a psychotherapist has something to say about the dynamic she’s living in. Jesse Ridgway has spent twenty years fabricating events and presenting them as real — staged family violence that generated a billion views and over a thousand 911 calls, a c
Jesse Ridgway Can’t Stop Performing and Everyone Around Him Pays for It
Every woman listening to this knows this man. The partner who takes your worst day and makes it about them. The guy who starts every fire and tells everyone you’re the one who’s crazy. The person who backs you into a corner and acts stunned when you swing. Jesse Ridgway has been this person for twenty years. The faces change. The move never does.His fans cared about him enough to call the police
How Did Aaron Spencer Go From Murder Defendant to Running the Department That Charged Him?
A father charged with murder. A case thrown out by a judge who found a “coverup.” A sheriff’s race won by the defendant. And a county that may not be done answering for what happened.This is the full three-part conversation with an outside legal analyst covering every dimension of the Aaron Spencer case after the dismissal.The ruling is the foundation. Judge Ralph Wilson spent 19 pages explaining
Christine Tells Us What Bateman Says From Prison
The end of the Samuel Bateman story isn't the end. He's behind bars for fifty years and the women he claimed as wives are doing something almost nobody wants to talk about — going back to him. Not all of them. But enough of them that the question stops being a fluke and starts being a pattern.In this third and final part of our three-part conversation with Christine Marie, we get into the truth t
Is What Happened to Aaron Spencer Part of a Decade-Long Pattern in Lonoke County?
The dashcam SD card in Aaron Spencer’s case didn’t vanish in a vacuum. It disappeared inside a department with a documented history of evidence problems stretching back over a decade.In 2021, a seventeen-year-old named Hunter Brittain was shot and killed by a Lonoke County deputy during a traffic stop. Brittain was unarmed. He was carrying an antifreeze container. The deputy’s body camera was not
What Happens When Mackenzie Shirilla Becomes an Influencer From Prison?
Mackenzie Shirilla is behind bars for driving a hundred miles per hour into a brick wall and killing Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. She was seventeen. A judge called her actions controlled, methodical, and purposeful. She’s serving life with parole eligibility in 2037. And since Netflix put her case back in the spotlight, her social media presence has exploded — tens of thousands of followers
How Did BTK Use A Church Council Seat To Hide In Plain Sight?
Dennis Rader was the council president of Christ Lutheran Church in Park City, Kansas, on the morning of February 25, 2005. The Wichita Police Department was, at the same moment, on its way to arrest him. The thing that had identified him as BTK was a metadata trace from a Microsoft Word document he had saved to a church computer in his role as council president.He had volunteered for the council
What Happens When Aaron Spencer Walks Into the Department That Tried to Put Him Away?
The front door of the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office is about to open for Aaron Spencer — not as a defendant, but as the boss.Spencer beat incumbent Sheriff John Staley by double digits in a three-way Republican primary. The county tilts hard Republican. Brian Mitchell Sr., the Democratic candidate, faces an uphill climb. Spencer’s path to the sheriff’s badge runs through a general election that
What Were the 11 Failures That Forced a Judge to Dismiss Aaron Spencer’s Murder Case?
Eleven failures. One detective. One missing SD card. One 19-page order from a judge who chose the most extreme remedy available — full dismissal.Judge Ralph Wilson’s ruling in the Aaron Spencer case didn’t stop at identifying problems. He catalogued a pattern: no photographs of the dashcam’s position in Fosler’s truck, no documentation in the incident report, no chain-of-custody record, no eviden
Why Is Everyone Connected to the Aaron Spencer Case Suddenly Leaving?
The detective was fired. The prosecutor is retiring. The county clerk resigned months ago citing persecution. And at the center of it all is a nineteen-page judicial order that documents — in constitutional detail — how the most critical evidence in the Aaron Spencer murder case was mishandled, lost, and never accounted for.Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. found that Detective Robbie McCain violated the Lo
What Does Every Piece of Evidence Say About What Happened to Three-Year-Old Elijah Vue?
The evidence in the Elijah Vue case tells one story. The two people charged in his death allegedly tried to tell another. Three-year-old Elijah was reported missing from a Two Rivers, Wisconsin apartment in February 2024. His mother’s boyfriend Jesse Vang said the boy wandered off during a nap. His mother Katrina Baur, 150 miles away, sent Vang a message within sixty seconds telling him what to s
Christine Reveals How Samuel Bateman Confessed On Her Camera, And Cops Ignored It
Samuel Bateman wasn't hiding. He was operating in the open, on a street where the local police knew his name, in a town where the sheriff drove past his house every day. The most disturbing question about his case isn't how he got away with it. It's why everyone around him let him.In this second part of a three-part conversation with Christine Marie, we get into the wall that almost saved him. Sh
Why Does Elijah Vue’s Mother Face Sixty Years While the Man She Gave Him to Faces Life?
Jesse Vang faces harm to a child through repeated acts causing death — a charge that carries life in prison, filed with repeater enhancers because of his extensive criminal history. Katrina Baur faces chronic neglect of a child with consequence of death — up to sixty years, but structured around a fundamentally different theory of responsibility. Vang is charged as the direct actor. Baur is charg
Why Did Brendan Banfield’s Own Lawyer Walk Away After Sentencing?
Christine Banfield’s sister looked Brendan Banfield in the eye at his sentencing and told him she never truly knew him. Nobody did. Joseph Ryan’s mother reminded a Fairfax County courtroom that her son had a face, a name, and a life full of meaning — and Banfield shot his face, soiled his name, and treated his life as garbage. Two families. Two lives destroyed. And the man responsible sat in fron
Why Did Wichita Suspect The Wrong Husband While BTK Was Still Free?
Bill Wegerle was a suspect in his own wife's murder for eighteen years. From the day Vicki Wegerle was killed in their Wichita home in September of 1986 until the day in March of 2004 when the actual killer mailed her stolen driver's license to a local newspaper, Bill Wegerle lived under suspicion of a crime he did not commit. His two children grew up under that shadow.The man who killed Vicki We
How Did Missing Three-Year-Old Elijah Vue’s DNA End Up in a Suitcase at a Thrift Store?
Surveillance cameras in Two Rivers, Wisconsin captured Jesse Vang pulling up to the donation door of a St. Vincent de Paul store on February 19, 2024 and dropping off a dark-colored suitcase. He’d borrowed a neighbor’s Nissan Altima. He’d left his phone at home playing a Netflix movie. When investigators tracked down and tested that suitcase, the Wisconsin State Crime Lab found one DNA profile in
Who Was the Convicted Felon Elijah Vue’s Mother Chose to Raise Her Three-Year-Old?
Jesse Vang had a felony conviction for harming a child when he was seventeen. He’d been charged with human trafficking. He’d done federal time for a drug conspiracy. And when he was released in 2022, he was placed on supervised release through 2025. By February 2024, Katrina Baur was dropping off her three-year-old son at Vang’s apartment in Two Rivers, Wisconsin for what she described as “discip
What Do the Cops in the Sandra Birchmore and Karen Read Cases Have in Common?
Every case Michael Proctor ever investigated now carries a question mark — and that question mark just got a lot bigger. According to a lawsuit filed against the Town of Canton and Massachusetts State Police, the fired state police trooper who led the investigation into John O’Keefe’s death had been exchanging messages with Canton Sgt. Sean Goode for more than a decade. Messages that, according t
What Happens When a Coverup, a Car Crash, and Missing DNA All Point to the Same Problem?
In Lonoke County, Arkansas, a judge found that investigators' handling of evidence in Aaron Spencer's murder case was "so egregious" the prosecution had to be dismissed. The dashcam SD card that could have told the whole story was handled in violation of department policy and lost. Spencer, who killed the man accused of crimes against his daughter, was running for sheriff against the incumbent wh
Christine Admits When She Became Bateman's Mole
A man who trusted almost no outsiders sat down across from Christine Marie and handed her the access that would eventually put him in federal prison for fifty years. He didn't know what she was. He didn't know her history. He didn't know what she could see.When Christine and her husband Tolga first moved to Short Creek — that quiet stretch of FLDS country along the Utah-Arizona border — they came
Why Can't the FBI's Lead Agent Confirm Basic Evidence Collection in Anna Kepner's Case?
The FBI built its case against Timothy Hudson on DNA evidence, surveillance footage, cellphone data, and a cabin timeline aboard the Carnival Horizon. DNA recovered from Anna Kepner's body points to her stepbrother with a probability prosecutors called 120 sextillion to one. The injuries Anna sustained were severe enough to rupture both eardrums. Her body was found hidden under the bed in the sta
What Was Lonoke County So Afraid Of in the Aaron Spencer Case?
When a judge uses the word "coverup" in a written order, he's not guessing. Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. looked at how Lonoke County handled the Aaron Spencer murder prosecution and found a pattern — not a mistake, not an oversight, but a pattern of policy violations that gave "the appearance of a coverup." Then he threw the entire case out.Aaron Spencer's thirteen-year-old daughter was found in the tr
Why Did The Press Print BTK's Own Self-Made Nickname For 30 Years?
Dennis Rader was the BTK Killer. He was also the man who named himself the BTK Killer. He typed the name onto an envelope and mailed it to the Wichita Eagle in October of 1974, and the city has been calling him by that name ever since.In the first chapter of a new five-part investigation, Hidden Killers host Tony Brueski takes apart the mythology Dennis Rader built around his own crimes. Factor X
What Did Mackenzie Shirilla's Car Record in the Seconds Before the Crash?
The data recorder inside Mackenzie Shirilla's Toyota Camry captured a story she never told anyone. The accelerator was at full capacity. There was no attempt to brake. The car was aimed in a straight line at a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio, traveling close to a hundred miles per hour. Dominic Russo, twenty, and Davion Flanagan, nineteen, were dead when first responders arrived. Shirilla su
Did Investigators Deliberately Destroy the Key Evidence in Aaron Spencer's Case?
A dashcam SD card that was most likely recording during the final moments of the Aaron Spencer case disappeared from police custody. Investigators handled it in violation of their own department's procedures. A judge reviewed the evidence — or what was left of it — and concluded the pattern of failures gave "the appearance of a coverup."That language came from the court, not the defense. Special
What Do The Three Timestamps In The Nancy Guthrie Case Actually Prove?
Three machine timestamps anchor the Nancy Guthrie disappearance in facts that can't be disputed. Her doorbell camera disconnected at 1:47 a.m. Twenty-five minutes later, the software detected a person at the door. At 2:28 a.m., the pacemaker monitoring her heart lost its signal — with her phone still inside the house she never re-entered. Forty-one minutes. That's the window.The FBI released the
What Does The Letter Kouri Richins Hid In An LSAT Book Reveal About Her Psychology?
Deputies found a six-page letter inside an LSAT prep book in Kouri Richins' jail cell while she was being treated for a medical episode. The letter scripted her brother's testimony. When confronted, she didn't deny writing it. She said it was part of a fictional novel about a Mexican prison.That explanation is the psychology in miniature. Every threat Kouri Richins faced produced a story. Not a c
What Relationship Dynamics Did The Mackenzie Shirilla Trial Ignore?
The prosecution built its case on a breakup — Dominic Russo was leaving, Mackenzie Shirilla couldn't handle it, and she drove into a building at nearly a hundred miles per hour. Netflix's The Crash reinforced that framing. But a psychotherapist who has spent three decades in domestic violence and forensic mental health says the relationship between Mackenzie and Dominic was far more complicated t
What Does A Psychotherapist See In Mackenzie Shirilla That The Trial Never Considered?
The prosecution called Mackenzie Shirilla cold and calculated. A judge called her "hell on wheels." The public split into two camps after Netflix's The Crash — she's a monster or she's innocent. But a psychotherapist who has spent three decades inside the minds of people who harm others sees a clinical picture that's messier than either side wants it to be.Shavaun Scott is a licensed psychotherap
What Does Blanca Simpson Know About The Morning After The Murdaugh Murders That She Was Never Asked?
The South Carolina Supreme Court stripped away twelve and a half hours of financial crimes testimony. What fills that gap at retrial may depend on the kind of evidence that didn't get its full day in court the first time — and Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson has had three years to sit with what she saw versus what prosecutors actually asked her about.She testified for three hours in 2023. The jury hear
Why Didn't Mackenzie Shirilla's Defense Call The One Expert Who Could Have Changed Everything?
The defense raised a medical condition that could have explained the Strongsville crash. Then they never called an expert to testify about it. No medical records entered. No testimony. The prosecution's intent narrative went unchallenged on the point that could have introduced reasonable doubt — and a jury never heard an alternative explanation for why the car hit that building at nearly a hundre
Is Blanca Simpson The Same Murdaugh Witness She Was In 2023?
Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson spent twenty years inside the Murdaugh household. She fixed Alex's collar the morning of June 7th, 2021. She remembered the shirt. She found the wet towel by the shower the next day. She was the person Maggie cried to when Alex's finances were collapsing and nobody would explain why. She told all of it to a jury that convicted him in three hours. Then the Supreme Court e
What Made Kouri Richins Escalate From Valentine's Day To The Moscow Mule?
The Valentine's Day attempt failed. Eric Richins survived — gasping for air, reaching for his son's EpiPen. He told friends he believed his wife was trying to end his life. And for seventeen days, Kouri Richins lived inside the same house, shared meals with the same children, and arrived at a second plan with five times the lethal dose.The psychological architecture behind that seventeen-day gap
What Evidence Did The FBI Unseal In The Anna Kepner Cruise Ship Case?
Unsealed court records in the Anna Kepner case lay out what the FBI has assembled: security footage tracking the defendant's movements aboard the Carnival Horizon the night Anna was killed, a phone that ended up smashed in a trash bin, and DNA testing that reportedly points in one direction. Anna was found beneath a bed in the cabin she shared with her stepbrother — concealed on a ship in interna
What Does The Prosecutorial Silence Mean For Wendi Adelson In The Dan Markel Case?
After Donna Adelson was convicted, the State Attorney told reporters that decisions regarding additional charges in the Dan Markel conspiracy were coming in the coming weeks. Months have passed. No charges. No grand jury announcement. No public movement of any kind. For a case where prosecutors have repeatedly labeled Wendi Adelson and her father Harvey as unindicted co-conspirators — in open cou
How Did Mackenzie Shirilla Get 36 Prison Violations and Still Think She Doesn’t Belong There?
Mackenzie Shirilla has been found guilty of thirty-two out of thirty-six conduct violations inside the Ohio Reformatory for Women — and in every phone call home, she still insists she had a car accident.The record starts quiet. Months without a single citation after arriving in August 2023. Then a steady escalation: unauthorized medication belonging to another inmate, photographs depicting drug u
Mackenzie Shirilla's Recorded Calls Are Building a Case Against Her
Two cases. Two different kinds of evidence problems. Mackenzie Shirilla's own family is building the record against her on monitored prison calls — while in the Anna Kepner cruise ship case, the DNA points one direction and a federal judge just said the prosecution's case isn't strong enough. Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis examines where both cases stand.Shirilla has thirty-si
Why Was Three-Year-Old Elijah Vue Sent to a Convicted Felon Still on Federal Supervision?
Jesse Vang had a felony conviction for harming a child when he was seventeen. He’d been charged with conspiracy to commit human trafficking — with the alleged victim being the same woman who later placed her three-year-old son in his care. He had a federal drug conviction. He was still on supervised release when Katrina Baur drove her son Elijah Vue two and a half hours across Wisconsin and left
What Does the DNA Actually Prove in the Anna Kepner Cruise Ship Case?
The DNA odds are 120 sextillion to one pointing at Timothy Hudson. But an FBI agent admitted on the record that he is unaware of any DNA evidence directly connecting Hudson to Anna Kepner's cause of death. That admission — buried inside a hundred and forty-five pages of unsealed transcript — may be the single most important sentence heading into a September trial. Defense attorney Eric Faddis bre
Why Did Ted Bundy Make Sure the Country Would Never Get the One Answer That Mattered?
Ted Bundy spent ten years on death row making absolutely sure of one thing: that the country would never get the why.The Chi Omega trial in Miami, summer 1979 — the first criminal trial broadcast nationally on American television — was his stage. He fired his attorneys. He rehired them. He fired them again. He cross-examined witnesses, including Nita Neary, the woman who had seen him on the stair
Was Kouri Richins Recruiting Her Own Sons From the Podium?
Eye rolls during victim impact statements. Smirks while therapists read her children's words. Then tears — real tears — when her own family called her the glue of the family.Pain aimed at her: contempt. Praise aimed at her: emotion. That behavioral split tells you everything about the wiring we've been breaking down in this series. And then she spoke. For forty-five minutes. To three boys who'd a
What Are Mackenzie Shirilla's Parents Saying on Recorded Prison Calls?
Natalie Shirilla called the Russo family "evil people" on a recorded prison line. Steve Shirilla's teaching contract was not renewed after he appeared on a Netflix documentary defending a convicted killer — his daughter. Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis examines what this family is doing to Mackenzie Shirilla's case from the outside.Mackenzie Shirilla was convicted in 2023 of ki
What Is Mackenzie Shirilla's Prison Record Telling the Parole Board?
Thirty-six conduct violations. Guilty on thirty-two. Recorded calls where she refuses rehabilitation, calls herself the third victim, and tells her mother she plans to become a life coach. Mackenzie Shirilla's institutional file at the Ohio Reformatory for Women is growing — and defense attorney Eric Faddis says the parole board will read every page of it.Shirilla was convicted in 2023 of killing
How Did Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar Raise a Son Who Can't Accept a Single Consequence?
A federal judge just found Josh Duggar’s sworn testimony not credible — for the second time. The first time, it was Jim Bob on the stand. Same judge. Same courtroom. Same word: not credible.Josh Duggar’s motion to vacate his conviction was denied on June 1 after Judge Timothy Brooks ruled that Josh’s account of how he mailed his appeal was “something akin to a magic bullet theory.” But the mailin
The Crash: Did Anyone in the Mackenzie Shirilla Case Ask the Right Question?
The prosecution asked whether Mackenzie Shirilla intended to kill her boyfriend and his friend. A judge said yes. But a psychotherapist who has spent thirty years inside the minds of people who commit violence says the real question was never asked — and the answer might be something the legal system has no category for.Shavaun Scott, author of The Minds of Mass Killers, sits down for a full thre
What Will Murdaugh's Housekeeper Say Differently When She Takes The Stand Again?
Blanca Simpson testified for three hours in 2023. The jury convicted Alex Murdaugh in three hours. A court clerk's misconduct erased all of it. And now Blanca is preparing to do something almost nobody in true crime history has had to do — go back to the stand with three additional years of knowledge, perspective, and clarity about what she saw.This three-part exclusive is the most comprehensive
The Crash: What If Everyone in the Mackenzie Shirilla Case Is Telling Their Own Version of the Truth?
Dominic Russo's father says he needs the truth so he can grieve. But what if the truth he needs isn't the truth the evidence supports? What if grief has so completely fused with certainty that the family can't distinguish between what happened and what they need to believe happened?Mackenzie Shirilla says she has no memory of the crash that killed Dominic and Davion Flanagan. The families say she
What Did a Sorority Sister Find After She Saw Ted Bundy on the Stairs at 3 AM?
Florida had no Ted Bundy file. Florida had no idea he was coming.He arrived in Tallahassee on January 8, 1978, under the name Chris Hagen, with stolen credit cards and a room at a boarding house six blocks from the Chi Omega sorority at Florida State University. He spent a week at the disco next door. Sorority sisters reportedly noticed a man staring at them from the bar. Nobody thought anything
Why Did It Only Take Three Hours for a Jury to Convict Kouri Richins?
Guilty on all counts. Unanimous. Three hours of deliberation for a case that took three weeks to present. And the defendant showed almost no reaction. A juror called her "like a statue."This episode examines the psychology behind that absence of emotion. Not stoicism. Not strategy. A system in overload — the circuit breaker that trips when a mind built on narrative control is forced into sustaine
The Crash: Was Mackenzie Shirilla the Only Toxic One in That Relationship?
The prosecution's version of the Mackenzie Shirilla case depends on a simple dynamic — she was the aggressor, Dominic Russo was trying to leave, and the crash was her final act of control. Netflix's The Crash leans into that framing. But psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, who has spent decades in domestic violence work, says the clinical reality of relationships like this one is almost never that nea
The Crash: Is Mackenzie Shirilla a Calculated Killer or a Broken Teenager?
The text messages Mackenzie Shirilla sent Dominic Russo were controlling, threatening, and ugly. The TikTok persona was image-obsessed. The arrest behavior was bizarre. Everything about her personality fed a narrative that she was cold enough to plan a murder at seventeen. A judge agreed. But a psychotherapist who has treated both victims and perpetrators of violence for over thirty years reads t
Why Did Rebecca Haro Plead Guilty At The Last Minute?
Rebecca Haro maintained her innocence for months. She told investigators a stranger had taken her seven-month-old son from a parking lot in Yucaipa. She gave television interviews with a visible black eye. She begged on camera for her baby to come home. After she was arrested and charged with murder, she pleaded not guilty. She sat in custody at the Robert Presley Jail on a million dollars bail a
The Crash: Did Everyone Fail Mackenzie Shirilla — Including Herself?
Her defense attorney failed to call the one expert who might have changed the verdict. The prosecution charged murder when the evidence arguably supported a lesser charge. The post-conviction system shut the door on new evidence over a single missed day. And then Mackenzie Shirilla herself made the decision to appear in a Netflix documentary that may have cemented the public perception the prosec
Was Someone Else Supposed To Be At Moselle The Night Of The Murdaugh Murders?
different things.Alex Murdaugh's attorneys told national television they have new information about other potential suspects. They're building a retrial strategy that points the finger away from Alex. Meanwhile, the woman who spent twenty years inside that household has her own theory about other people being involved — and it points directly back at him.Blanca believes Alex had a Plan A. Someone
The Crash: Did the Netflix Documentary Make Things Worse for Mackenzie Shirilla?
The Netflix documentary was supposed to be Mackenzie Shirilla's moment. The first time the public heard her voice since the conviction. A chance to tell her side. Instead, it may have been the worst decision she's made since the crash itself.She sat in front of cameras, composed and remorseful, maintaining she has no memory. A fellow inmate immediately contradicted her — described a different Mac
Why Did Colorado Give Ted Bundy a Law Library and No Handcuffs During His Murder Trial?
The State of Utah convicted Ted Bundy of kidnapping in March 1976. One count. Colorado charged him with one murder. That is what the system believed it was holding: a kidnapper and a single-count defendant.The actual man had killed at minimum sixteen women across five states by the end of 1975.That gap — between who the charge sheet said he was and who he actually was — is the reason he was able
What Kouri Richins Was Doing From Her Jail Cell Should Have Been Impossible
Most people, when arrested for murder, let their attorneys handle the case. Kouri Richins wrote a six-page letter hidden in an LSAT prep book with scripted testimony for her brother. She read other inmates' letters to her mother over recorded phone lines. She held up documents on video calls for her mother to photograph. And when the letter was found, she told her mother on a recorded call that i
The Crash: How a Defense Attorney Would Have Torn Apart the Mackenzie Shirilla Prosecution
The prosecution's case against Mackenzie Shirilla sounds devastating in a headline — surveillance footage, black box data showing full throttle and no braking, threatening texts, a prior incident treated as a rehearsal. But a criminal defense attorney who has spent his career cross-examining prosecution evidence sees something different: a case with real vulnerabilities that was never properly ch
The Crash: Did Mackenzie Shirilla Ever Actually Get a Real Defense?
A medical condition that could explain loss of consciousness — raised at trial but never supported with expert testimony. A post-conviction petition containing a neurologist's opinion — filed one day late. A key prosecution witness whose account was contradicted by text messages — never challenged by the defense. At what point does a defense stop being a defense?Mackenzie Shirilla was convicted o
Did Two Agencies Stop Talking Over Nancy Guthrie's Case?
On May 5, FBI Director Kash Patel went on a national podcast and said the Pima County Sheriff's Department did not initially cooperate with the bureau in the Nancy Guthrie investigation in the way the FBI expected. Sheriff Chris Nanos has publicly disputed Patel's characterization of the relationship between the two agencies. That on-record split has become one of the defining moments of the case
The Crash: Was Mackenzie Shirilla's Conviction Built on Evidence or Assumptions?
The distance between "Mackenzie Shirilla did something catastrophically reckless that killed two people" and "Mackenzie Shirilla executed a premeditated mission of death" is enormous. The verdict says it was murder. The evidence lives somewhere between those two conclusions — and this conversation is about figuring out where.Shirilla was convicted of four counts of murder for the Strongsville, Oh
What Does Murdaugh's Housekeeper Know That Nobody Ever Asked Her On The Stand?
Twelve and a half hours. That's how long prosecutors spent putting on financial crimes testimony in Alex Murdaugh's first trial. The Supreme Court said it was too much. Way too much. They told the state to cut it back in round two.Blanca Simpson testified for three hours. She covered the shirt, the towel, the pajamas, the car. But anyone who's listened to Blanca talk about that household knows th
The Crash: What If Nobody in Mackenzie Shirilla's Case Knows the Real Truth?
One of the fathers in Netflix's The Crash says something that stays with you. He says he needs the truth so he can grieve properly. It's a gut-level statement from a man who lost his child, and you feel it immediately. But it raises a question the documentary doesn't fully explore: what happens when someone's need for a specific answer becomes stronger than what the evidence actually supports?Mac
How Did the Only Woman Who Escaped Ted Bundy's Volkswagen End Up Putting Him in Prison?
Ted Bundy crossed a state line in September 1974 and became a new person. Washington had his name. Washington had his composite. Washington had two hundred thousand tips. None of it followed him to Utah.He arrived in Salt Lake City as a first-year law student with clean plates and a clean record. Between October 1974 and August 1975, he moved across Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. Nancy Wilcox, sixtee
How Did Nobody See Through Kouri Richins for 14 Months?
A children's book called "Are You With Me?" with a father in angel wings on the cover. Published one year after Eric Richins' death. Promoted on local television by the woman convicted of killing him.The prosecution called it deflection. And it was. But this episode argues it was something far more psychologically complex: Kouri Richins building the version of reality she needed to inhabit. Not a
Recommended
#100MasterCoaches with Mel Leow, MCC
100% Mixtape Podcast
100 With The Hunter's
10-41: A UCSO Podcast
108.3 WGKSRADIO DEEP HOUSE PARTY
10 at a Time
10Fold Founders
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10-Minute Contrarian
10 Minutes Korean - Learn Korean & English Naturally
10 Minutes with Jesus
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
