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The prosecution’s case for how five-year-old Harmony Montgomery died on December 7, 2019, depended almost entirely on the testimony of Kayla Montgomery — Adam Montgomery’s estranged wife. Kayla served a sentence for lying to investigators about Harmony’s whereabouts before she agreed to cooperate with the prosecution. The corroborating evidence — DNA in a ceiling vent, a co-worker’s testimony about a restaurant freezer, a friend who witnessed Adam pacing and repeating that he had made a mistake — supported Kayla’s account of what happened after Harmony’s death. It did not corroborate her testimony about how the child died.
The New Hampshire...

Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson served as the Murdaugh family’s housekeeper for approximately twenty years. She observed the defendant’s operational pattern across that period: the consistent use of intermediaries in financial transactions, the delegation of exposure to associates, the construction of deniability through layered relationships. Curtis Eddie Smith’s documented role — cashing approximately four hundred thirty-seven checks totaling roughly two point four million dollars — is one component of a broader infrastructure Simpson observed firsthand.
Simpson presents a specific theory of the crime. She posits that the defendant maintained a Plan A involving another individual’s presence at Moselle the night of the...

The question at the center of the Anna Kepner case has shifted from the accused to the adults who allegedly put her in harm’s way. Timothy Hudson’s own step-grandmother publicly stated on CBS that the parents should be held accountable and described the family cruise as “a recipe for disaster.” Anna’s ex-boyfriend has stated she was afraid of her stepbrother and took steps to avoid being alone with him. Three teenagers who had not been raised together were assigned to a single cabin aboard the Carnival Horizon.
The Crumbley precedent — in which both parents of the Oxford H...

The question at the center of the Reiner trust litigation is not whether Nick Reiner should receive his parents’ money. It is whether the legal mechanism designed to prevent exactly that — California’s slayer statute — can reach money the trust itself reportedly classified as due before anyone was killed. The 136-page probate petition filed on Nick Reiner’s behalf argues that half of his trust distribution came due on September 14th, 2023, his thirtieth birthday, in a payout the trust describes as “mandatory and unconditional.” Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead in their Brentwood home twenty-seven months later. Nick has pleaded no...

CertiK, a blockchain security firm with a reported valuation exceeding two billion dollars, has formally classified the abduction of Nancy Guthrie as a wrench attack by proxy — a crypto-related kidnapping in which the person taken is not the digital asset holder but a family member used as leverage. Their 2026 report documents thirty-four verified wrench attacks between January and April, a forty-one percent increase year over year, with estimated losses approaching one hundred and one million dollars.
The designation raises significant investigative questions. No publicly available evidence connects the Guthrie family to cryptocurrency holdings, exchange accounts, or blockchain-related data br...

Judge Debra McCaslin has been vested with exclusive jurisdiction over the Alex Murdaugh retrial and all related proceedings. During her judicial confirmation before the South Carolina General Assembly, McCaslin reportedly identified Dick Harpootlian — Murdaugh’s lead defense attorney — as one of three lawyers who shaped her legal career. She reportedly rented office space from him while in private practice. Neither the prosecution nor the defense has filed a motion to recuse.
Defense attorney and former felony prosecutor Eric Faddis provides analysis on the recusal standard, what McCaslin’s appointment means for both the prosecution and the defense, and the pre...

The combined FBI and family reward for information leading to the resolution of Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance exceeds one million dollars. An anonymous man who claims to know where she is buried chose not to collect it. He called Buscando Corazones Nogales — a volunteer search collective operating in Sonora, Mexico — and directed them to coordinates in the Mariposa arroyos near the Arizona border, approximately seventy miles from Guthrie’s Tucson residence. He described her clothing. He described the terrain. He said dig.
Volunteers searched twice based on his directions. Both searches produced no evidence connected to Guthrie. After the firs...

Prosecutors decoded monitored prison calls in which Mackenzie Shirilla and her mother Natalie communicated using a fabricated language specifically designed to evade the institution’s recording system. In one decoded exchange, according to the prosecution, Shirilla asked whether they could tell police she had experienced a seizure prior to the crash. That seizure claim became the foundation of the defense theory at trial.
Shirilla was convicted in August 2023 of killing Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan after driving her vehicle into a brick commercial building at approximately a hundred miles an hour in Strongsville, Ohio. She is serving two co...

When the South Carolina Supreme Court assigned Judge Debra McCaslin exclusive jurisdiction over the Alex Murdaugh murder retrial, the appointment carried a history that neither the prosecution nor the defense has publicly addressed. McCaslin reportedly rented office space from Murdaugh's lead defense attorney, Dick Harpootlian, during her years in private practice. She reportedly named him among the lawyers who made a lasting impression on her professional life during proceedings before state legislators. The two worked together on a class-action. And McCaslin presided over pretrial matters in a separate murder case in which Harpootlian served as defense counsel.
The...

A probate petition filed in Los Angeles County has brought the Nick Reiner murder case into a second courtroom — one where the rules are different and the stakes may be just as high. Nick Reiner, who has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner, is petitioning for the release of more than $1.5 million held in an individual trust his parents established at his birth in 1993.

The filing rests on the trust’s own distribution terms, which the petition characterizes as “mandatory and unconditional”: half payable when the bene...

She helped raise the teenager now accused of killing Anna Kepner. And she just went on national television and pointed the finger at his parents.

Timothy Hudson’s step-grandmother, Sonya Ziske, broke her silence in a CBS News interview that fractured what was left of this family’s public front. She blamed Anna’s father Christopher Kepner and stepmother Shauntel Kepner directly. She called the cruise a “floating city that is usually like Sin City.” She said they created a “recipe for disaster” by putting three teenagers who weren’t raised together into a single stateroom, by allegedly failin...

Rex Heuermann isn’t reading sports books in his cell. He’s not reading cookbooks or self-help or anything a person does when they’re processing what they’ve done. According to Suffolk County Sheriff Errol Toulon, the Gilgo Beach killer has been pulling crime novels from the jail library — specifically books about serial killers and the investigators who chase them.

That detail alone is disturbing. But it’s not the whole picture.

According to reporting, Heuermann also struck up a correspondence with Keith Hunter Jesperson, the Happy Face Killer, who reportedly sent over ten letters from...

Property in South Carolina. A timeshare in Las Vegas. Investigators examining ties to Atlantic City. And women who disappeared near all of them.

Rex Heuermann’s Gilgo Beach sentencing closed the New York chapter — three consecutive life terms, a hundred years, no appeal. But the judge who handed down the sentence said five words that reopened everything: eight that we know of.

Heuermann purchased four lots in Chester, South Carolina. Twenty miles from that property, a woman vanished. He bought a timeshare in Las Vegas. Two weeks later, an escort disappeared. The connections are timeline-based, not...

Nick Reiner trust payout — his trust reportedly had no clause to stop a distribution after a murder charge. Does your family's trust have one? Most don't.

The probate petition filed in the Nick Reiner case exposes something that goes well beyond one family. The trust Rob and Michele Reiner established for their son in 1993 allegedly used the most common settings in estate planning — mandatory distributions at fixed ages, no behavioral conditions, no trustee discretion to withhold. Those default settings are the reason Nick Reiner's legal team can now argue that more than $1.5 million was his before anyone died...

Lonnie Franklin Jr. was not a criminal mastermind. He used the same .25 caliber handgun for every killing. He operated within a ten-block radius in South Los Angeles for over two decades. At least six of those he killed were found blocks from his own home. He once worked as a mechanic for the LAPD. And the LAPD knew about him by 1988 and chose to tell nobody.

The women Franklin targeted were young, Black, and poor. Some had ties to the street economy. During the crack epidemic, their deaths didn't make the news. Their murders became cold cases...

The number is reportedly over a million dollars. That is what Asa Ellerup earned from a Peacock documentary about the Gilgo Beach case — her ex-husband’s case. The case where he pleaded guilty to killing eight women.

Now the families want the money back. And more.

Valerie Mack’s son has filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging civil conspiracy. The suit names Asa Ellerup, her daughter Victoria, and Rex Heuermann. The accusation is not that Asa was oblivious. It is that she knew or deliberately avoided knowing what was happening and helped conceal it.

Suff...

It is on the record. Melissa Barthelemy’s sister stood up in a Suffolk County courtroom during Rex Heuermann’s sentencing and told the court he called her from Melissa’s phone after he killed her — and described what he had done.

The sentencing itself delivered what everyone expected: three consecutive life terms plus a hundred years, a judge who called Heuermann disgusting, families who cheered when officers removed him. But the legal details inside the plea agreement tell a different story than the one most outlets reported.

Rex Heuermann confessed in open court to killing...

The people watching the Mackenzie Shirilla case have a theory. They call it the Parental Architect theory, and the argument is blunt: Steve and Natalie Shirilla didn’t just fail to stop what their daughter became. They built it. Not intentionally. Not with malice. They built it by spending seventeen years choosing comfort over conflict — and the person who emerged from that household believed, at her core, that consequences were something that happened to other people.

The documented record supports the argument in ways that are difficult to dismiss. A thirteen-year-old permitted to date with no intervention. Scho...

Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty to murdering eight women over seventeen years. His ex-wife sat across from him in a jailhouse visit and asked how many. He said the number without hesitating. His daughter told documentary producers she believes he most likely did it. His ex-wife still lives in the house — in the rebuilt basement where he told her the killings happened.This is the full three-part conversation between psychotherapist Shavaun Scott and Tony Brueski. Scott previously joined the show to discuss why people stay in relationships with dangerous partners. This picks up in new territory — what happens after the...

Every legal analyst in the country has an opinion on the Murdaugh retrial. Very few of them built the case the prosecution used. Eric Bland did. He exposed the financial crimes that became the state's motive theory, represented the victims who testified, and watched the Supreme Court tell prosecutors they overdid it. He also represents Sandy Smith in the Stephen Smith investigation — the cold case that SLED reopened because of the Murdaugh murders and that has produced zero arrests in eleven years.

On True Crime Today, Bland answers the questions that haven't been asked on the cable pa...

Benjamin Torres was six years old when his mother Valerie Mack disappeared. Her partial remains were found the same year in Manorville. It took two decades to identify them. Rex Heuermann has now pleaded guilty to her murder.Torres has filed a wrongful death lawsuit naming Heuermann, his ex-wife Asa Ellerup, and their daughter Victoria. The complaint alleges Asa and Victoria knew of or deliberately avoided learning about the killings, had access to a secured area in the basement of the Massapequa Park home, and collected over a million dollars from a Peacock documentary. Asa's attorney has denied...

On June 9th, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department officially reclassified the Nancy Guthrie case from a missing persons investigation to a homicide. The FBI did not push back. And yet, in comment sections across the internet, one of the most popular theories about Nancy’s disappearance is that she’s alive and in FBI protective custody — that the whole thing was staged as part of an intelligence extraction.That theory is one of four that Tony Brueski takes apart in this episode, using nothing but documented, sourced, on-the-record facts.The protective custody theory collapses under its own weight: it requi...

In June 1983, Cindy Paulson ran barefoot across an Anchorage airfield in handcuffs after escaping from Robert Hansen. She told police his name, his address, his car, and his plane. A security guard backed her up. Police investigated — and chose to believe the baker over the teenager.

Robert Hansen confessed to killing seventeen women. He flew them into the Alaskan wilderness in his private Cessna and hunted them with a rifle. He marked the burial sites on a map. Some of those confirmed kills happened after Cindy Paulson's report was filed and shelved.

This episode of Su...

Every woman Rex Heuermann killed was someone the system had already overlooked. Women whose disappearances did not generate search parties or news coverage or sustained pressure on investigators. He selected them and then he went home to a wife and children who thought he was a boring architect with a long commute.That is two realities held inside one person for seventeen years. He timed the killings for when his family was on vacation. He answered the judge with one-word responses and never looked at the courtroom gallery. His attorney said the plea brought him relief.Psychotherapist Shavaun...

Asa Ellerup filed for divorce from Rex Heuermann after his arrest. Then she kept visiting him. She showed up to court appearances. She participated in a Peacock documentary. She sat across from him in a supervised jailhouse visit and asked him directly how many women he killed. He said eight.From the outside that looks like a contradiction — you leave a person legally and then keep showing up. But psychotherapist Shavaun Scott says the contradiction is the point. The divorce protects the self. The visits protect the version of reality she built her entire adult life around. Both th...

Mickey Stines made someone help put a bulletproof vest on his wife. Per defense filings, he’d lost forty pounds in two weeks. He reportedly told a staffer that someone demanded he end his own life or “they” would harm his family. Weeks later, the former Letcher County sheriff allegedly walked into Judge Kevin Mullins’ chambers and shot him.

Stines hadn’t slept in seven days. He was calling family members who’d been dead for years. He FaceTimed his aunt the morning of the shooting and asked to speak to his grandmother — a woman he’d personally helpe...

Massachusetts gave Adam Montgomery custody of his five-year-old daughter despite twenty-one criminal cases on his record. New Hampshire’s child protection system saw the bruises, documented them, and emailed police that everything was fine. Two states failed Harmony Montgomery while she was alive. Now the legal system is asking for a second chance to convict the man who, according to prosecutors, killed her and hid her body for months.

The Harmony Montgomery case has reached its most consequential juncture: a murder retrial with less evidence, a compromised key witness, and a defense team arguing an alternative theory. Al...

Here's what we know. SLED reopened Stephen Smith's case in 2021 because of information found during the Murdaugh murder investigation. In 2023, SLED officially reclassified Stephen's death as a homicide. His body was exhumed. A second autopsy was performed. Those results are sealed. Kenny Kinsey — the prosecution's star forensic witness from the Murdaugh murder trial — is now independently investigating Stephen's death because he believes critical opportunities were missed in 2015. And still — no arrest. No suspect named. No charges.

Eric Bland represents Sandy Smith and has a direct line into this investigation. On True Crime Today, he addresses whether SLED is del...

A civil court ordered Adam Montgomery to pay fifteen and a half million dollars for the wrongful death of his daughter Harmony. He will never pay a single dollar. But the judgment sits in the record as a measure of what one court believes Harmony’s life was worth — a number that stands even as the criminal murder conviction has been reversed.

The Harmony Montgomery case now occupies a legal no-man’s-land: Montgomery is convicted of concealing his daughter’s remains, tampering with evidence, and witness intimidation. He faces decades in prison on those charges alone. A civil co...

Something arrived under seal in the Anna Kepner case — and within two days, the judge who’d been defending Timothy Hudson’s freedom for four months reversed himself and ordered him detained. The question everyone should be asking: what was in that filing?

Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres had released Hudson in February under juvenile rules. He’d called the government’s case “a much closer call” with “various defenses.” On May 27, after a full hearing, Torres kept Hudson free. The defense pointed to months of flawless compliance. And then prosecutors filed sealed “newly disclosed, supplemental information” on June 8. On June 10, To...

Angel Maturino Reséndiz killed at least fifteen people across six states, riding freight trains from Texas to Kentucky to California. He landed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Holly Dunn was the only person across every one of his confirmed encounters who survived — and she survived with injuries that should have killed her.

But this episode isn't about the Railroad Killer. It's about Chris Maier. The twenty-one-year-old boyfriend who was bound and kneeling beside railroad tracks in Lexington, Kentucky, about to die, and who used his last seconds to make a promise to the woman he...

Adam Montgomery walked into jury selection for his own murder trial smiling, tongue out. Then he refused to show up for most of the proceedings, choosing to stay in his cell. The jury convicted in under a day. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction. And now the Harmony Montgomery case is headed for a second murder trial where everything about this man’s behavior will be on display again.

The retrial raises questions the first trial never had to face on its own: whether Kayla Montgomery’s uncorroborated testimony can carry a murder conviction, whether the defense theo...

It wasn’t a split decision. All five justices on the New Hampshire Supreme Court agreed: Adam Montgomery’s second-degree murder conviction in the Harmony Montgomery case could not stand. The ruling, authored by Associate Justice Bryan Gould, found that trying the murder and assault charges together prejudiced the jury against Montgomery — the airtight assault evidence propped up a murder case that depended almost entirely on one compromised witness.

That witness is Kayla Montgomery. Adam’s estranged wife. She went to prison for lying to the grand jury investigating Harmony’s disappearance before cutting a cooperation deal. The defens...

On paper, Nick Reiner is the sole beneficiary of a trust worth more than $1.5 million. In reality, the newest filing in the Nick Reiner trust fund fight says he petitioned a judge partly so he can buy socks. This one starts with the smallest number in the file — the $300 cap on a jail commissary account at Twin Towers that, per the petition, was promised funding and never received a single deposit — and climbs all the way up to the biggest battle in this case outside the murder charges themselves.

The petition accuses the trustee of offering “a shifti...

If the wrench attack theory is correct, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department has spent four months investigating a conventional kidnapping while the actual crime involved a cryptocurrency-motivated targeting pipeline with overseas handlers and disposable operatives. If the Mexico tip represents a genuine lead, the investigation lacks a functioning cross-border channel to pursue it. And if both of those failures are real, the case may be further from resolution than the public understands.

Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer provides a full-length evidentiary and procedural analysis. She examines the CertiK classification, the gaps in the wrench attack th...

The prosecution won the first trial in under three hours of jury deliberation. The second trial might not go the same way. The Supreme Court limited the financial crimes evidence. The defense has new evidence and subpoena power. The jury pool has spent three years watching documentaries and forming opinions. And the AG just complicated everything by putting the death penalty on the table.

Eric Bland predicted a high likelihood of reconviction when the ruling came down. He also said something most legal commentators skipped — that there's a real possibility of a hung jury. One or two ju...

The public demand for criminal charges against the parents of the teenagers aboard the Carnival Horizon has intensified since Hudson’s step-grandmother publicly called for prosecution. But the legal path to charging them faces a jurisdictional obstacle that may be insurmountable.

The Carnival Horizon is a Panamanian-flagged vessel. The incident occurred in international waters. There is no federal contributing-to-delinquency statute that would apply. The Crumbley precedent — parents convicted after their son committed a school shooting — involved parents who purchased the weapon and ignored documented warnings the morning of the attack. The factual distance between that case and a crui...

What happened to Lynette Hooker: Brian Hooker says his wife had the ignition key when she fell from their dinghy in the Bahamas. But Lynette’s daughter says Brian was always the one driving — and her mother having the key doesn’t add up.

That inconsistency is one of several that have turned a reported boating accident into a federal criminal investigation. On April 4, Brian and Lynette Hooker left dinner in Hope Town, Bahamas, on an eight-foot dinghy headed to their anchored sailboat, Soulmate. According to Brian, rough seas knocked Lynette overboard. She had the key. The engine...

Richard Speck killed eight student nurses in a Chicago townhouse on July 13, 1966. He strangled five and stabbed three over the course of five hours. He used nautical knots from his time on Great Lakes cargo boats to bind them with bedsheets. And he lost count. Nine women were in that house. He killed eight. The ninth — Corazon Amurao, a twenty-three-year-old exchange nurse from the Philippines — rolled under a bunk bed and did not move for six hours.

What made it possible wasn't luck. It was discipline. The ability to override every survival instinct screaming at you to run...

In February, sources indicated the FBI was in contact with Mexican law enforcement regarding the Guthrie investigation. Sonora’s attorney general publicly stated no formal request had been received. Four months later, an anonymous tip directed a cross-border search for Nancy’s remains near Nogales — and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department says it learned about the operation from media reports.

The tip was not routed through the FBI’s legal attaché office in Mexico City, the suboffice in Hermosillo, or the Pima County tip line. It was directed to Buscando Corazones Nogales, a volunteer collective that conducts se...