Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Jared Bridegan's killer is going to prison. His wife's trial just got more complicated than anyone expected. 
Mario Fernandez was convicted of first-degree murder and solicitation for shooting Bridegan in a Jacksonville Beach street in 2021, staged to look like a carjacking. Jurors took less than four hours. He's facing life without parole. Then, one day after that verdict, prosecutors filed two brand-new felony charges against Fernandez — both involving children, unrelated to Bridegan's murder, one tied to a girl who was around eight when the alleged conduct began. 
Shanna Gardner's own trial was supposed to start days later. Inst...

There's no version of this verdict where Lindsay Clancy walks out of a courtroom and goes home. Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis lays out exactly what waits for her down each of the two paths this jury can choose. 
Path one: not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. Under Massachusetts law that doesn't mean release — it triggers up to forty days of court-ordered observation, after which the state can petition for civil commitment with no time limit written into the statute. Andrea Yates walked that same road in Texas after drowning her five children in...

Duane "Keffe D" Davis spent decades telling anyone who'd listen exactly what happened the night Tupac Shakur died. This week his own recorded words became the prosecution's closing argument. This recap covers Wednesday's and Thursday's testimony in the Keffe D murder trial in one pass — the case the defense says was never anything but a paid fiction, cooked up for a book deal. 
The state opened this stretch with retired Compton gang detective Robert Ladd, who spent years inside the department's two-man gang unit tracking the South Side Compton Crips. Ladd told the jury the specific rank Davis hel...

Lindsay Clancy was sitting across from her psychiatrist on January 23, 2023, one day before she killed her three children. Jennifer Coffindaffer, 25 years in the FBI and no stranger to the guilty camp, joins Tony Brueski to hold every argument for Lindsay's guilt up against what actually made it into the record. 
The paper trail is the starting point. Beyond that psychiatrist visit, Lindsay had two nurse practitioners, a therapist, two December calls to a suicide hotline, and a five-day inpatient stay at McLean Hospital that ended nineteen days before the killings. The planning argument leans on errands, timing, and e...

State Police Sgt. Timothy Chiappini and Cellebrite examiner Ian Whiffin pulled two sets of messages off Lindsay Clancy's phone, one day apart, and prosecutors and defense attorneys are now building opposite cases out of the same device. On January 20, a message asks whether a sociopath can be treated. Prosecutors point to that line as evidence of a woman thinking strategically, not psychotically. The day before, on January 19, other messages describe hallucinations and symptoms of postpartum psychosis, and a second message on the 20th uses the word "intrusive." The defense says that's the real record of what was happening in...

Public records place Patrick Clancy in Manhattan by May 2023, four months after burying his children, with a new sales job at Microsoft and, according to reporting, solo trips through Latin America and Europe not long after. To some corners of the internet, that timeline reads like guilt. To Lindsay's own defense attorney, who told the jury in opening that Patrick suffered one of the worst tragedies imaginable, it reads like a man trying to survive. 
The actual testimony sits between those two extremes. Weeks before the killings, nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta raised bipolar disorder with the couple directly, a...

Two days of testimony, one recorded voice, and a story that keeps changing depending on who's listening. This recap combines Monday's and Tuesday's sessions — Day 5 and Day 6 — in the Duane "Keffe D" Davis murder trial, and the tapes jurors heard do a lot of the talking. On the 2009 recording, Davis tells detectives about the night Tupac Shakur was shot in Las Vegas: the drive from Club 662, a hidden Glock, his nephew Orlando Anderson as the shooter, and his own claim that the bullets were meant for Suge Knight, not Tupac. Jurors also heard from a BET director who testified Davi...

Patrick Clancy took the stand for the prosecution in his own children's murder trial and called Lindsay a wonderful, loving mother. Her friends said the same thing. Her coworkers said the same thing. Every single prosecution witness who actually knew Lindsay personally testified to her character, which meant the defense never had to call a character witness of its own. 
That's the strange shape of a fourteen-day, seventy-witness case built on a fact nobody disputes. The defense told this jury before opening statements that Lindsay killed her three children. The only question left is whether she was criminally r...

Lindsay Clancy's own defense doesn't dispute what happened to her three children. The trial is about what was happening inside her mind, and the prosecution just spent fourteen days at Plymouth Superior Court trying to convince a jury it was less than it looks. 
The prosecutor opened by calling Lindsay "controlling, meticulous, and manipulative" and told the jury she faked a suicide attempt. Lindsay is paralyzed from the waist down. She cut her own wrists and neck before jumping from a second-story window, and the jury has watched her sit in a wheelchair through every day of testimony s...

Nolan Wells died on Horn Island, Mississippi on July 4, and the sheriff's office ruled out foul play within two days, before the state autopsy was finished, before anyone official had opened his phone. Seven weeks later, that phone still hasn't been forensically examined. 
The device left the island with Nolan's friends. His mother retrieved it from them in the first days and, before any forensic protocol existed, went through it herself with her sister. Both of his Snapchat accounts were completely empty. 
On July 15, the family's lawyers and District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath agreed to a joint fo...

Three witnesses. Under two hours. The defense in the Keffe D murder trial rested on Day 9 — and the witness they built their case around may have done more for the prosecution than the defense.

Dan Long, the retired detective who led the Tupac Shakur investigation for fifteen years, testified he couldn't verify key parts of Davis's story. But on cross-examination, he confirmed Davis identified the same four men the investigation had already developed as suspects. Then he told the jury he tried to seek a murder arrest warrant in 2009 because he believed there was probable cause — and pros...

This jury has three options on the verdict slip. Guilty of first-degree murder — life without parole, automatic appeal, a transfer from a hospital to a prison. Guilty of second-degree murder — life with eventual parole eligibility. Not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility — commitment to a psychiatric facility with no time limit. Every path leads somewhere the audience does not expect.

Eric Faddis walks through all three as a defense attorney and former prosecutor. He starts with the deliberation itself — how the burden of proof sits with the prosecution in Massachusetts, how the two-prong legal test works, a...

New felony charges against Fernandez were filed the day after his murder conviction. Both involve crimes against children. Gardner's trial, set to begin this week, has been pushed to May 2027 after an unopposed defense continuance.

Gardner's defense indicated the new charges may give Fernandez an independent motive for Bridegan's murder. She married Fernandez in April 2018, months after he received an other-than-honorable discharge from the Army following allegations involving a recruit. Both told police they barely knew each other. Gardner called it a marriage of "convenience" tied to the custody arrangement.

The prosecution's answer runs through...

Lindsay Clancy has been at Tewksbury Hospital for over three years. She is paralyzed from the waist down. She has been on 24-hour suicide watch since January 2023. If this jury convicts her of first-degree murder, she leaves that facility and enters the Massachusetts corrections system. The sentence is mandatory — life without parole.

Eric Faddis breaks down what that transition looks like. The prison system must accommodate Clancy's physical condition — around-the-clock medical care for a paraplegic inmate — on top of her psychiatric needs. In a treatment facility, she is a patient. In prison, she is an inmate who happen...

Reddington held up a list of Lindsay Clancy's prescriptions and started reading. Lorazepam. Sertraline. Hydroxyzine. Lorazepam again. Buspirone. More lorazepam. Trazodone. "It goes on and on and on and on and on." She took them as she was told, Reddington said. The system gave her medication after medication and still couldn't catch what was happening.

He called her a "darn good mother," held up a honeymoon wish jar filled with hopes for healthy children, and showed photos of Clancy smiling with her son Dawson. "They would have you think she killed him first, cruelly because she didn't...

Not guilty does not mean free. If this jury finds Lindsay Clancy not criminally responsible for the deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan, she enters a commitment process governed by Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 123. That process has no end date.

Eric Faddis explains the legal mechanics. The court can order Clancy hospitalized for 40 days of observation and evaluation. After that window, the DA or hospital superintendent petitions for involuntary civil commitment. The commitment is reviewed periodically — the state must prove at each hearing that Clancy remains mentally ill and poses a danger. If the state fails to ma...

Most people following the Lindsay Clancy trial assume the defense has to prove she was insane. Massachusetts law says the opposite. Once the defense raises mental illness, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was criminally responsible when she strangled Cora, Dawson, and Callan on January 24, 2023. That burden does not shift back.

Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis walks through the legal standard this jury was handed and why it matters. The McHoul test requires the Commonwealth to prove two things — that Clancy could appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions and that sh...

Twenty-five witnesses. Eight days. The prosecution in the Keffe D murder trial rested its case on Day 8 — and chose a recorded jail call as the last thing the jury would hear before the break.

Duane "Keffe D" Davis was recorded on a Clark County Detention Center phone line saying something the fiction defense can't account for. In a separate call, he complained that authorities were using his statements against him. The prosecution also played a YouTube clip of Davis promoting his book as "the real truth." A separate video showed Davis explaining why his side had reason to...

One trial, three reckonings. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott sits with Tony Brueski for the complete interview on what the verdict coverage leaves out: the prison that waits, the hospital that never lets go, and the husband strangers decided to put on trial themselves.

The prison conversation confronts the physical truth first: a conviction sends a woman who cannot stand into a facility built on the assumption that inmates can. Shavaun, drawing on decades in forensic settings, describes the collision between mandatory life without parole and a defendant this dependent — and what becomes of a mind serving a sentence wi...

The man the prosecution called the only link between Bridegan and the gunman was convicted in under four hours. Gardner's jury selection starts August 31 — and the evidence profile is a different case entirely.

Against Fernandez, the prosecution had financial records and phone data but no evidence he ever expressed a desire to harm Bridegan. Against Gardner, prosecutors have her own texts to friends expressing exactly that. They have Jensen's messages about finding someone for Gardner. They have wiretaps from Gardner's phone and Apple Watch that survived a defense motion to suppress.

But Gardner's connection to He...

There is no support group for what happened to Patrick Clancy. The research on parents who survive what he survived barely exists, because so few ever have. But one man has — and his road map is at the center of this episode. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Tony Brueski to examine the loneliest grief in true crime.

Shavaun starts where the pain starts: a father who came home to find his three children gone, taken by the woman he loved and built a family with. She explains why this loss breaks the grief playbook therapists rely on. The pe...

Judge William Sullivan ruled on August 26 that Lindsay Clancy's jury can consider involuntary manslaughter as a lesser included offense — over the prosecution's objection. The Commonwealth charged Clancy with first-degree murder and fought to keep manslaughter off the verdict slip. Sullivan put it there anyway.

The ruling came after the prosecution's final expert gave the Commonwealth the clinical testimony it needed — and then undercut the prosecution's own rhetoric under cross-examination. FBI psychiatrist Gregory Saathoff had told the jury Clancy was in control and her account of the voice was unconvincing.

Reddington then read the prosecution's own open...

The state closed its case against Lindsay Clancy this week, and Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague didn't waste time on subtlety. Clancy, 34, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, is accused of strangling her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 7 months — with exercise resistance bands inside the family's Summer Street home on January 24, 2023. She's pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation, and defense attorney Kevin Reddington has spent the trial arguing she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis, compounded by psychiatric overmedication.

Sprague's closing went straight at that argument's foundation. She reminded juro...

An hour is a long time to spend telling a jury they've been played, but that's what Kevin Reddington did in closing arguments for Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury, Massachusetts mother charged with strangling her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 7-month-old Callan — with exercise resistance bands inside the family's Summer Street home on January 24, 2023. His pitch to jurors: the prosecution manufactured a heartless, controlling caricature of a woman who was, according to the defense, drowning in psychosis.

Reddington took particular aim at how prosecutors framed Clancy's suicide attempt. She allegedly jumped from a second-story window afte...

Two mothers. Two psychotic episodes, according to their defenses. Two insanity verdicts — one already delivered, one hanging over a Plymouth County jury room. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Tony Brueski to map the road Andrea Yates has traveled since 2006 and measure how much of it waits for Lindsay Clancy.

Yates was acquitted by reason of insanity two decades ago. She has spent every year since inside a state facility, and the people closest to her case say she remains there because the system has no exit built for someone with her history. Shavaun explains the machinery that produces th...

A guilty verdict in the Lindsay Clancy trial sends her somewhere no expert has fully described on camera — until now. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Tony Brueski for the prison episode: what life without parole actually means for a woman who cannot move her own body and whose mind is the entire reason this trial exists.

The reputation problem comes first. Prisons run on hierarchy, and inmates convicted of harming children sit at the bottom of it. Clancy would enter as the most famous face in the facility, convicted of the act other incarcerated mothers consider unforgivable, unable to...

Day 7 ended Mario Fernandez's murder trial with closing arguments from both sides and a prosecution rebuttal. The defense had called just two witnesses — staff from the Discovery School who described Fernandez and Gardner as caring, involved parents — before resting its case.

The prosecution's closing asked the jury to see the totality: the checks, the trust clause, the phone gaps, the January visit to the man who once owned the murder weapon type. Stifler told them Fernandez is the thread connecting every piece of evidence. Dreicer fired back, accusing the prosecution of misstating the financial evidence and presenting two...

Every segment of this episode has one comment that turned out to be true, and in each case it hurt the person who posted it.

The Patrick-did-it crowd said a nurse would never search for the carotid artery. The search is on Lindsay Clancy's phone, and her own defense attorney displayed it during his cross of Sgt. Timothy Chiappini, because it supports his argument that she was researching her own death. Prosecutors had framed the same history as searching for ways to kill. Chiappini didn't recall the search at first, then agreed the device identifier matched her...

The prosecution spent Day 7 connecting a gang title to a murder charge. A retired Compton Police Department detective took the stand and told the jury exactly where Duane "Keffe D" Davis sat in the hierarchy of the South Side Compton Crips.

Robert Ladd tracked Davis and the gang for years. He identified Davis by a specific title — and explained to the jury what that title means when the gang acts. Tupac's childhood friend Malcolm Greenidge, court-ordered to testify, told the jury the shots came from the back seat of the white Cadillac. Davis was in the front. La...

An FBI profiler thinks Lindsay Clancy is a psychopath who was sick of her kids. That's how one commenter puts it, citing Pat Brown, with Matt Walsh as a second vote. The commenter rejects both of them. She's closer to the record than the people she quoted.

Pat Brown was never in the FBI. She's an independent, self-taught profiler with a criminal justice master's who has written that she felt too old to join the Bureau and built her own practice instead. She has posted videos arguing Lindsay fabricated her psychosis. Matt Walsh is a political commentator...

Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a forensic psychiatrist who works with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, took the stand today in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury, Massachusetts mother accused of strangling her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 7-month-old Callan — with exercise bands inside the family's Summer Street home on January 24, 2023. Clancy faces three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation. She's pleaded not guilty, and her attorney, Kevin Reddington, is running an insanity defense built on severe postpartum psychosis and psychiatric overmedication.

Reddington spent cross-examination taking Saathoff's testimony apart piece by piece. Saat...

Kirk Heilbrun told twelve jurors that Lindsay Clancy is still grieving her children. That she spent months trying to get help. That she is not self-centered. That she used the words "I have lost everything, and I don't want to be here." He said he would not consider her a beast.

Then he told those same twelve people that she's criminally responsible for killing Cora, Dawson, and Callan — and that her moral awareness was "influenced" by suicidal despair but never extinguished. He was paid $54,000 by the Commonwealth to reach that conclusion. His last encounter with a postpartum ps...

Lindsay Clancy, 34, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, is standing trial for the murders of her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 7 months — allegedly strangled with exercise resistance bands inside the family's Summer Street home on January 24, 2023. She faces three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation, has pleaded not guilty, and her defense, led by Kevin Reddington, is built around an insanity claim: severe postpartum psychosis and psychiatric overmedication.

Cross-examination is where the prosecution's expert stopped having it easy. Dr. Gregory Saathoff, the FBI-affiliated forensic psychiatrist who diagnosed Clancy with bipolar II and testified she was criminally resp...

Lindsay Clancy, 34, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, is on trial for the murders of her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 7-month-old Callan — allegedly strangled with exercise resistance bands inside the family's Summer Street home on January 24, 2023. Clancy faces three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation. She's pleaded not guilty, and her defense, led by attorney Kevin Reddington, is arguing she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis and psychiatric overmedication when it happened.

Today the prosecution's expert took the stand, and he didn't hedge. Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a forensic psychiatrist with the FBI's Beha...

Lindsay Clancy is right-handed, Patrick Clancy is left-handed, and the knife on the nightstand was set down by a lefty. That's a real comment on this channel, and it's the kind of detail that sounds like evidence until you check whether anyone testified to it.

No one did. State Police analyst Sherri Crook told the jury the knife had been moved about an inch on the nightstand, leaving an outline in blood, and that she couldn't say where it sat before that. Investigators recovered no usable fingerprints from it. No witness in this trial has said a...

Day 6 of the Fernandez trial ended with the prosecution resting and the defense asking Judge London Kite to throw the case out. The motion argued what the defense has pressed all trial: the solicitation charge requires evidence of a communicative act, and six days of testimony produced nothing showing Fernandez asked Tenon to kill Bridegan. No message, no witness, no recording.

The prosecution's answer was the boldest legal theory of the trial. An "earnest ask" isn't needed, they told the judge, because the murder is the proof. Fernandez is the only connection between the alleged gunman and...

The Commonwealth called Dr. Avram Mack to prove Lindsay Clancy was responsible and got a witness who repeated her account of the voice. Jackson County's DA promised a grand jury every piece of evidence her office collected and never collected Nolan Wells' phone. Jennifer Coffindaffer, retired from the Bureau after 25 years, joins Tony Brueski for the full interview on both.

Clancy's side rested August 21, 2026. The closer was Resnick, the psychiatrist from the Andrea Yates acquittal, who told jurors she was psychotic and obeying a command voice on January 24, 2023. Coffindaffer has been on the guilt side since day...

Eleven hours. That's how long forensic psychiatrist Dr. Gregory Saathoff, who's worked with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, spent interviewing Lindsay Clancy over Zoom across May and June 2026 — and today he told a Plymouth Superior Court jury what came out of it. Clancy, 34, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, is accused of strangling her three children — Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (7 months) — with exercise resistance bands inside the family's Summer Street home on January 24, 2023. She faces three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation, has pleaded not guilty, and her attorney Kevin Reddington is arguing she was in the grip of severe...

Day 6 of the Keffe D murder trial brought the 2017 Death Row Chronicles recording into the courtroom — and one exchange between the interviewer and Duane Davis landed harder than any confession the jury has heard so far.

Davis described the night Tupac Shakur was shot, named his nephew as the gunman, and discussed Sean Combs and money. He said Combs wanted Suge Knight "taken care of" and then ghosted him when the situation got hot. The defense fought to keep the recording out, arguing it contained references to other crimes. The judge admitted it with limiting instructions — every vers...

Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a forensic psychiatrist who's consulted with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, spent today explaining what he found when he sat down with Lindsay Clancy — the Duxbury, Massachusetts mother accused of strangling her three children, 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 7-month-old Callan, with exercise resistance bands inside the family's Summer Street home on January 24, 2023. Clancy faces three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation. She's pleaded not guilty, and her attorney Kevin Reddington is building an insanity defense around severe postpartum psychosis and psychiatric overmedication.

Saathoff isn't new to this territory — he told the...