Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Eight steps on Sandra Birchmore’s phone at 9:40 p.m. Three minutes later, prosecutors say the building’s security footage shows Matthew Farwell leaving. That short stretch of time is one of the details federal prosecutors are asking jurors to weigh in the death of a pregnant 23-year-old woman. 

The government alleges Farwell killed Sandra on February 1, 2021, and staged the apartment to suggest suicide. His defense says she took her own life. Phone step data can establish what a device recorded; interpreting what happened to the person holding it takes additional evidence. Jennifer Coffindaffer and Tony Brueski exami...

Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s own description of a confrontation with Ken Urker has resurfaced. In a September 2025 recorded prison call, she said she damaged his headboard with a kitchen knife after finding a card addressed to another woman. She also said he took photos and spoke about seeking sole custody of Aurora.

The account now sits beside competing versions of the couple’s separation. Ken’s sister Autumn has said the relationship was over and that Ken wanted to bring their daughter to Texas. Gypsy has released September 2, 2026, messages that describe joint custody and an effort to avoid...

Kouri Richins made a new move in her fight for another trial, and prosecutors questioned the reason she gave. Her attorneys submitted a sealed request to pause the case while investigators examined possible interference surrounding the original murder prosecution. That separate investigation has led to charges against Wasatch County Sheriff Jared Rigby and former Summit County Sheriff Dave Edmunds. Both deny wrongdoing and have pleaded not guilty. 

In March, jurors convicted Richins of aggravated murder, attempted murder, insurance fraud and forgery. Eric Richins died in March 2022 after drinking a fentanyl-laced cocktail. A judge sentenced Kouri to life w...

Gypsy Rose Blanchard told PEOPLE she believed Ken Urker died from an overdose. The official cause had not been released. That distinction matters when the father of her young daughter is found dead and online speculation begins naming people before police do. 

Ken was found in his Raceland, Louisiana home on October 1, 2026, the day he turned 34. The Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office reported no evidence of foul play to that point, but said its investigation was still open. Investigators had not publicly alleged that Gypsy caused his death. 

Ken’s sister Autumn has disputed Gypsy’s statem...

Sandra Birchmore told friends that Matthew Farwell had made a complete 180, according to federal prosecutors. A friend had disclosed their relationship to the Stoughton Police Department. Prosecutors say Farwell went from anger to renewed kindness during the days before Sandra died. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Torey Cummings told the jury that Farwell met Sandra through a police youth program when she was a child. Prosecutors allege the former detective maintained a relationship with her beginning when she was underage. By February 2021, Sandra was 23, pregnant, and preparing to become a mother. Farwell’s lawyers maintain she took her own...

Caleb Flynn received life without parole following nine guilty verdicts. Patrick Mulligan filed his notice of appeal and requested appointed counsel, opening another legal fight over the verdict in Ashley Flynn’s death.

Mulligan has questioned whether prosecutors proved prior calculation and design. The defense also raised concerns about the jury instructions and venue. Those arguments will have to meet the demanding standards of appellate review, where the focus is on claimed legal errors rather than retrying every witness.

Tony Brueski and former FBI behavioral expert Robin Dreeke connect that challenge to the trial testimony of...

Christa Pike’s legal team warned a court about IV access before Tennessee tried to execute her on September 30, 2026. She survived two doses of pentobarbital, and her attorneys now say the very complications they feared caused injuries during the procedure. 

The pre-execution lawsuit identified thrombocytosis, a blood condition, and small veins. Lawyers sought different equipment and experienced personnel to place an IV line. Tennessee argued that previous blood draws showed accessible veins and disputed the claim that Pike faced a serious risk. A special master heard the competing evidence in August. 

That dispute did not end...

Bryan Kohberger said he was guilty. Now he wants it back. His judge wiped the hearing calendar. The prosecution wants the petition dismissed on paper. His alibi is driving alone looking at the moon, and his DNA is on the knife sheath left next to one of his victims. He accused his own attorney of lying  —  and that opened every conversation they had for three years. Sandra Birchmore told eighty people about her baby, paid for nursing school, and sent six hundred texts that day. Matthew Farwell's DNA is on the strap that killed her. He walked in wearing a ma...

“I want everybody to be proud of me, but people get hurt there.” Christa Pike said that to her aunt at Christmas 1994, nineteen days before she and Tadaryl Shipp killed Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. The complete three-part Hidden Killers documentary Satan's Helper: The Christa Pike Story, in one cut, starts with that sentence and ends thirty-one years later in a witness room at Riverbend.

In between is the record. Her mother testified her daughter had been out of control since she was eight and that she'd smoked marijuana with her to establish a friendship. Her father signed pape...

Sandra Birchmore told eighty people she was having a baby. She paid for nursing school. She searched baby shower venues. She sent six hundred texts that day and left no note. The defense says she took her own life. Matthew Farwell's DNA is the major contributor on the ligature  —  the strap tied to a closet door handle. Surveillance shows him entering her building at 9:14 PM wearing a mask, leaving at 9:43. Her phone stopped three minutes before he walked out. He deleted every message between them and went home. His wife was giving birth the next day. Trooper Dunne ruled her...

Nine years since the Delphi murders. One conviction. And every failure in between.

In February 2017, Abby Williams, thirteen, and Libby German, fourteen, were found dead on a creek bank in Delphi, Indiana. Nine years later, Richard Allen sits in a prison cell in Oklahoma serving a hundred and thirty years. Everyone the defense says the evidence pointed to walks free. The system that convicted Allen is the same system that lost his tip in a drawer, erased its own interviews, and sat on a catfish account for four years.

This is the complete four-part docu-series...

Twenty-five minutes. That’s how long Sandra Birchmore spent on the phone with her best friend the evening of February 1, 2021. Lesley Davis testified the conversation was normal. Sandra never mentioned wanting to end her life.

Davis told the jury she went to police after Sandra’s death and named Matthew Farwell to two officers. Neither man documented what she said. On Day 5 of Farwell’s federal murder trial, the jury also learned that Farwell and Sgt. Robert Kuhn attended a 2019 police training conference in Wellesley where a state medical examiner’s office presentation covered suicidal hangings. Kuhn identifi...

Bryan Kohberger's alibi before his guilty plea was that he was out driving alone, looking at the moon and the stars. No witness. No phone. Now he wants that plea thrown out and a chance to argue it in front of a jury. The prosecution had DNA on the knife sheath, over twenty cell pings near the victims' house, surveillance footage, the Ka-Bar knife bought with a gift card on Amazon, and a roommate who saw him inside the home. His car was meticulously cleaned. The plea took the death penalty off the table  —  vacating it puts it back on...

Judge Steven Hippler was supposed to hear arguments about whether he should be removed from Bryan Kohberger's post-conviction case. He filed an order the night before vacating the hearing  —  along with every other court date on the books. The prosecution has asked Hippler to throw out Kohberger's petition without any hearing at all, calling his claims bare and unsupported. The defense cites Hippler's sentencing language  —  calling Kohberger's acts grotesque evil and saying he found nothing redeeming  —  as proof the judge cannot be impartial. They also want the case moved back to Latah County. Family attorney Jason Goldman says this is the begin...

Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s documented record starts with a 2001 biopsy that came back negative for muscular dystrophy. Dee Dee found a new doctor. It runs through a neurologist who caught the harm in 2007 and never reported it, and through prison where Gypsy gained fourteen pounds and came off every medication. After release: eight million followers, a ninety-day marriage, a baby born on the anniversary. It ends on October 1, 2026, with Ken Urker found dead on his 34th birthday. At Nick Godejohn’s trial the defense called Gypsy as its first witness, and she testified she planned the murder. The jury gave...

Six days after she wrapped a boot lace around another inmate's neck, Christa Pike picked up a prison phone, called her mother, and explained the difference between that and what she'd done to Colleen Slemmer. This one, she said, she premeditated. The call was recorded, like every call from that prison, and it's the first thing you'll hear in chapter three of Satan's Helper: The Christa Pike Story, the Hidden Killers documentary on the Colleen Slemmer murder.

Tony works forward from the trial. The jury that sentenced Pike to death in March 1996 heard her confession through headphones...

In September 2025, Gypsy Rose Blanchard called a friend in prison and the recording surfaced after Ken Urker died. She described finding a card he wrote to an ex, drinking until she couldn’t stand, carving a word into their headboard with a kitchen knife, and throwing their prison letters “in the air like money.” Ken texted that he’d photographed it and would file for sole custody of Aurora. People close to her told her, “You scared the f— out of him. You know what you were in prison for.” She told the story herself. Before prison, she’d built Facebook c...

Every failure in the Delphi investigation moved in the same direction. Away from alternative suspects. Toward Richard Allen.

The recording system erased every early interview. The only tip from a person who placed himself on the bridge went into a drawer for five years. A catfish account that communicated with one of the girls who was killed went unannounced for four years. The FBI allegedly found evidence pointing to men with Nordic beliefs — buried. The defense filed a hundred-and-thirty-six-page document naming men with confessions, crime scene connections, and dried blood — excluded.

Every time the system had...

Bryan Kohberger filed a post-conviction petition accusing Anne Taylor of hiding exculpatory evidence, coercing his plea, and fabricating a story about touring a death row cell. That claim opened attorney-client privilege. Three years of protected conversations are now exposed. Before the plea, Taylor's team filed a sealed memo with Judge Hippler warning that Kohberger had difficulty comprehending adverse rulings and asking for more time. Hippler denied it. Kohberger pleaded guilty weeks later. Now he is wielding that memo against the attorney who wrote it. If Taylor testifies, she carries the plea colloquy  —  every sworn answer where Kohberger said yes, he u...

Aurora was born December 28, 2024, one year to the day after Gypsy Rose Blanchard walked out of Chillicothe. The pregnancy announcement in July said “not planned at all” and “I want to be everything my mother wasn’t.” She tested the baby for her own chromosomal condition and announced the negative result, then said she won’t post the child’s face. That baby came after a ninety-day marriage to Ryan Anderson that ended with a Facebook post, a reconnection with Ken Urker, and eight million Instagram followers in her first month free. Her parole ended in June 2025. That summer she was on a l...

Sandra Birchmore was found dead in her apartment on February 2, 2021. The lead state police investigator testified he didn’t inspect a duffel bag in the bedroom — the bag that held the strap she was found hanging from.

Without what Trooper Dunne called an obvious indication of foul play, investigators wouldn’t collect an item like that or send it to a crime lab. The conclusion came before the evidence was examined.

Sandra had told everyone about her pregnancy — her boss, her coworkers, her third-grade class. She left no note. Her phone stopped transmitting data before the last...

Ken Urker wrote Gypsy Rose Blanchard in 2017 after the HBO documentary. He proposed in prison in 2018 and ended it in 2019, saying she needed time to build her own identity. Ryan Anderson wrote in 2020 after the same film and married her at Chillicothe in 2022 with Lifetime’s cameras rolling. Weeks before that wedding she was on the phone with Ken, telling him about a dream where she left Ryan. Two men fell in love with a documentary. She said yes to both. She went in at 23 with a second-grade education. She gained fourteen pounds her first month, came off every me...

The surgeries in Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s medical file are real: eye procedures, ear tubes, salivary glands removed because Dee Dee said she drooled, a feeding tube that kept her on PediaSure into her twenties. 

Her teeth were pulled. She sat in a wheelchair she never needed. In 2001, Tulane tested her for muscular dystrophy and the biopsy came back negative. 

Dee Dee found another doctor. In 2007, neurologist Bernardo Flasterstein noted “Munchausen by proxy” in Gypsy’s chart after watching her stand — and never picked up the phone. 

Prosecutor Dan Patterson said he could have charged...

Ken Urker's cause of death is pending toxicology, and Gypsy Rose Blanchard announced it as an overdose within a day. Sandra Birchmore's death was a suicide on paper for five years, until the state medical examiner withdrew it in April 2026 and a jury in Boston was handed the question. Bryan Kohberger's motion to remove Judge Hippler for bias is argued in front of Judge Hippler on October 15, 2026. Four listener Q&A segments in one episode. Autumn Urker says her brother slept with a gun because of strangers online; a year-old prison call has Gypsy describing a knife and Ken's...

“And, yes, I'm eating breakfast with it.” Christa Pike said that to her friend Kim Iloilo at breakfast on January 13, 1995, about a piece of Colleen Slemmer's skull she was carrying in her pocket. Kim had already heard the rest the night before, when Pike came to her room, said she'd just killed Colleen, and danced in a circle singing la, la, la while she described it. Kim didn't go to the police. Neither did the student Pike showed the bone to in class later that morning while pointing at the brown spots on her shoes. Chapter two of Satan's Help...

Bryan Kohberger's reason for firing his judge is the judge's own sentencing speech. At the July 2025 sentencing, Judge Steven Hippler called Kohberger a "faceless coward," the "worst of the worst," and said his acts had buried anything human in him. Kohberger's appointed attorney Greg Rauch argues that a judge who said that can't fairly decide whether Kohberger's guilty plea was coerced, especially with no jury in the room; this is a bench proceeding, where Hippler alone rules. The motion gets argued October 15, 2026, in front of Hippler. Kohberger pleaded guilty on July 2, 2025, to four murders and told Hippler under oath...

Richard Allen — the man convicted in the Delphi murders — arrived at Westville Correctional Facility in October 2022 weighing roughly a hundred and eighty pounds. He was a CVS pharmacy clerk with depression and anxiety. He had no criminal record. He had voluntarily told police in 2017 that he was on the trail the day Abby Williams and Libby German were killed.

The state of Indiana placed him in a maximum-security segregated unit. Solitary confinement. A cell measuring twelve feet by eight and a half. Twenty-four-hour surveillance. Three showers a week. Chains on his hands, feet, and torso every time he m...

Prosecutors say Matthew Farwell walked out of his state police interview about Sandra Birchmore's death with the conversation unrecorded and his home and phone never searched. Sandra, 23 and pregnant, was found dead in her Canton apartment on February 4, 2021. The state medical examiner called it suicide in May 2021 and withdrew that finding in April 2026, now listing it as undetermined. Dr. Michael Baden, hired by her family, says the fractured hyoid bone and the placement of the ligature point to strangulation. Federal prosecutors in Boston allege Farwell, then a Stoughton detective, met Sandra through the police Explorers program, was with her...

Sandra Birchmore wanted a baby "to have someone to love." That's what she told her boss at East Elementary in December 2020, two months before she was found dead in her Canton apartment. On the first day of Matthew Farwell's federal trial, her boss, her mentor, and her property manager each took the stand. Her cousin told reporters Sandra was thrilled about the pregnancy. Her close friend said she'd seen Sandra browsing car seats and onesies two days earlier. A stroller box sat near Sandra's door with her keys and sneakers on top. Prosecutors said she sent roughly six hundred...

A year before Ken Urker died, Gypsy Rose Blanchard says he told her he'd file for sole custody of their daughter. She said it herself, on a September 2025 call to a friend in prison that the Daily Mail published, right after describing the night she found a card to his ex and took a knife to his headboard. The sheriff's office says it never got a report. By September 2, 2026, the texts Gypsy gave Page Six show the two agreeing to joint custody without lawyers and Gypsy writing "regardless of if we stay together or not." Ken's sister Autumn says...

Ken Urker's sister says he slept with a gun every night, and she says the fear came from the internet, not from Gypsy Rose Blanchard. Ken was found dead on October 1, 2026, his 34th birthday, after his employer and Gypsy's brother Dylan went to the Raceland home when he missed work. The sheriff's office calls it a drug-related death investigation; the coroner is waiting on toxicology. Gypsy told People he overdosed and started a petition called Kenan's Law, saying they had reported harassment to four platforms before he died. Autumn Urker, who says the relationship ended a month earlier and...

Caleb Flynn's lawyer filed the appeal, asked for a public defender, and said his firm was finished. Alleigha Botner deleted her texts the morning Ashley died, lied to the FBI, and was not charged. Matthew Farwell's defense attorney called a relationship prosecutors say started at 15 an affair. Sandra Birchmore told friends Farwell did a complete 180 in the twelve days before her death. Four Q&A segments built from your letters take on both cases in one episode. Listener questions press on why Mulligan walked away from his own filing, what Botner's first 24 hours tell you about a person who...

Christa Pike's aunt remembered Christmas 1994 one way, and her mother remembered it another. To the aunt, Christa said she was scared of the Job Corps center in Knoxville: she wanted everybody to be proud of her, but people got hurt there. To her mother, she said a girl was hovering over her bed at night with a knife and that a boy named Tadaryl Shipp would protect her. She went back. On January 12, 1995, she and Shipp killed Colleen Slemmer, the girl she'd said had the knife. Satan's Helper: The Christa Pike Story is the Hidden Killers documentary on the...

Matthew Farwell's defense attorney chose one word for the relationship with Sandra Birchmore: affair. Prosecutors say it started when Sandra was 15. Stevens told the jury Farwell made regrettable decisions and did not kill Sandra. She used the same phone to build a different woman: Sandra searching the suicide ribbon the same day she planned a celebration for the baby. Prosecutors said zero searches for how to end her life existed on her devices. Stevens said the original medical examiner ruled suicide, that the government took three and a half years to reopen the case, and that the feds pressured...

In September 2023, Richard Allen's defense team filed a document that should have reshaped the Delphi case. The Franks memorandum ran a hundred and thirty-six pages. It names men the defense alleges were connected to the murders through confessions, social media posts matching the crime scene, and a car that allegedly returned from Delphi with dried blood.

One man's son was dating Abby Williams at the time of the murders. According to the filing, he posted imagery on social media that allegedly mirrored symbols found next to the girls' bodies — symbols that were never made public. Another man al...

Federal prosecutors say Matthew Farwell strangled Sandra Birchmore and staged her death as a suicide in February 2021. Prosecutor Cummings told the jury it started with a photo from the Explorers program, Sandra at 12 standing at the end of a line. By 15, prosecutors allege, he was with her. When a friend called Stoughton police about $248 and disclosed the relationship, prosecutors say Farwell did a 180. Turned kind. Asked for a key. He allegedly entered her building that night with his hood pulled up and a mask covering his face during a period when he was vocally opposed to masking. Defense attorney...

On the first day of Matthew Farwell's federal murder trial, prosecutor Torey Cummings put Sandra Birchmore's last text on the screen. She called it a message of welcome to the man who'd known Sandra since she was 12. Four minutes after she sent it, Farwell walked into her Canton apartment building with his hood up and a surgical mask on, a man Cummings said was actively opposed to masks. He left 29 minutes later. Three days after that, Sandra was found with a duffel bag strap tied from her neck to her closet door.

Sandra told friends he'd asked...

Botner sent more texts than Caleb Flynn did. She wrote I want to kill her, researched how to erase their conversations, deleted her own texts the morning Ashley died, and lied to the FBI about the affair. Investigators skipped her home, skipped her DNA and fingerprints, skipped every Flock camera, skipped the field behind the Flynn house, and skipped following up on a solo trip to Florida a month before the killing where she says she lost a phone. Her alibi rests on a parked car in Vandalia. Flynn was arrested three days after the 911 call. Listener questions press...

Patrick Mulligan filed Caleb Flynn's notice of appeal two days after the life-without-parole sentence, then told reporters his firm would not touch it. He asked the court to appoint a public defender for the man he just defended. The appeal challenges Judge Pratt's jury instructions and the venue decision that kept the case in Miami County. Mulligan's argument: the state failed to prove prior calculation and design. Flynn's argument at sentencing: I did not kill my wife. Listener questions dig into the gap between those two positions, the realistic odds of an appellate overturn after a two-hour deliberation and...

Who wrote the first version matters. In Louisiana, Gypsy Rose Blanchard told People magazine that Ken Urker overdosed before any official cause of death existed. The sheriff's office there says no signs of foul play, and his sister says he'd left Gypsy a month before. In Massachusetts, prosecutors say Canton police and state troopers told the medical examiner within hours that Sandra Birchmore had killed herself. That version held until the FBI charged Matthew Farwell with strangling her; he has pleaded not guilty and went on trial in Boston on October 6, 2026. The department that employed him found two more...