Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

For two decades, Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson watched Alex Murdaugh operate through other people. Curtis Eddie Smith cashed checks. Associates carried messages. Relationships provided cover. Deniability was built into every arrangement. Alex Murdaugh, according to the woman who knew the household better than anyone outside the family, never did anything alone. So when the defense walks into the retrial claiming “other suspects” committed the murders of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh, Blanca doesn’t flinch. She has her own theory about other people — and it doesn’t point away from Alex.
Blanca believes Alex had a Plan A that involved someone else being...

On May 27, Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres kept Timothy Hudson free. On June 10, after receiving sealed evidence filed two days earlier, the same judge ordered Hudson detained and used language federal judges spend their careers avoiding. He wrote that Hudson allegedly exhibits “a level of psychopathy and lack of remorse” and could “snap at any time.” He said no placement could contain the danger.
Something in that sealed filing moved Torres from caution to certainty. The defense had argued perfect compliance for months. The judge had been defending his own release decision since February. Whatever prosecutors delivered on June 8 was enou...

The language in Nick Reiner’s trust reportedly leaves no room for interpretation. Half of the fund was due on his thirtieth birthday. The trust itself calls it “mandatory and unconditional.” That birthday was September 14th, 2023 — more than two years before Rob and Michele Reiner were killed. Nick has pleaded not guilty to both counts of murder. And the money his parents’ own trust document said he was owed has never been paid.
Everyone citing California’s slayer statute assumes it settles this. It doesn’t — not the way most people think. Eric Faddis explains the two critical distinctions: a...

The man on Nancy Guthrie’s porch covered the doorbell camera with weeds. He improvised. That tells investigators he’d never been to the property before. But whoever planned the operation knew the eighty-four-year-old lived alone, kept a routine, and couldn’t fight back. That level of detail comes from inside a person’s life.
Sixteen days before Nancy vanished, eighty-three-year-old Gail Crane was taken from her Kentucky home by a recently fired caregiver. Found a hundred miles away. Injured. The caregiver was arrested. The insider playbook is documented — and it maps directly to the behavioral evidence at Nancy’s ho...

The first jury sat through more than twelve hours of financial crimes testimony. The South Carolina Supreme Court said that was excessive and ordered any retrial to sharply limit it. Now one judge — Debra McCaslin — decides where the line falls. That single ruling could shape the verdict before a witness takes the stand.
McCaslin was given exclusive jurisdiction over every Murdaugh proceeding, including the retrial on charges that he killed his wife Maggie and son Paul. She reportedly rented office space from Dick Harpootlian, Murdaugh’s lead defense attorney, and during her judicial confirmation reportedly named him as one of...

He called once. Gave coordinates. Described clothing. Fifteen volunteers searched the Mariposa arroyos near the Arizona-Mexico border and found nothing. Then he called back. New directions. A second search. Still nothing. A third search was scheduled. And through all of it, this anonymous man never contacted the FBI, never contacted Pima County, and never reached for the million-dollar-plus reward that has been sitting unclaimed since Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her Tucson home.
The persistence is either the behavior of someone who genuinely knows where she is and miscalculated the exact location — or it’s the behavior of someone adju...

Natalie Shirilla told her daughter on a monitored prison call that rehabilitation programs are for “actual criminals.” Her daughter was convicted of driving a hundred miles an hour into a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio, killing Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. The Ohio Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal. And the family is still operating as though this was a misunderstanding.
Investigators didn’t need Mackenzie Shirilla to talk. Her vehicle’s data recorder captured accelerator at full capacity, zero braking, and a direct line into a commercial building. Weeks before the crash, a family friend reported...

The woman now controlling every motion, every evidentiary fight, and the retrial itself in the Alex Murdaugh double murder case once shared an office with the man defending him. Judge Debra McCaslin reportedly rented space from Dick Harpootlian — Murdaugh's lead attorney — when both were in private practice. They worked a class-action together. And in a separate murder case where Harpootlian represented the defendant, McCaslin was the judge who reportedly denied the state's request to revoke bond.
The South Carolina Supreme Court handed McCaslin exclusive jurisdiction after reversing Murdaugh's convictions for the killings of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. The reve...

A 136-page petition now sitting in a Los Angeles probate court makes one of the most uncomfortable legal arguments in recent memory: Nick Reiner, charged with killing both his parents, says the trust they created for him when he was born owes him more than $1.5 million — and he wants it to mount his defense against their murders.

The case turns on four words inside the trust itself: “mandatory and unconditional.” According to the filing, Rob and Michele Reiner locked in the distribution schedule with language that left no room for a trustee’s discretion. Half at thirty...

Three teenagers who weren’t raised together. One stateroom on a Carnival cruise ship. Parents sleeping across the hall. Anna Kepner was eighteen. Her stepbrother, now charged with her murder, was sixteen. Her biological brother was thirteen. And no adult checked on that room for hours.

That’s the setup behind the most-asked question in the Anna Kepner case: can the parents be charged? A family member has now gone public demanding exactly that. Timothy Hudson’s own step-grandmother told CBS News that the cruise arrangement was a “recipe for disaster” and called for Christopher and Shauntel Kepner to...

Not as much as you think.

Rex Heuermann’s sentencing delivered the version the families needed: three life terms, a hundred years, a judge who called him disgusting, officers removing him while the gallery cheered. But the plea agreement underneath that spectacle contains concessions, omissions, and open doors that most coverage never examined.

He confessed in open court to killing Karen Vergata. No charge. Her family present. His defense team spent three years fighting to suppress the DNA evidence and then he gave up his appeal in the same deal. Melissa Barthelemy’s sister testified that...

Rex Heuermann has been locked in a cell at the Riverhead Correctional Facility for over a thousand days. The Gilgo Beach killer. The LISK. The man who admitted to killing eight women across Long Island over seventeen years. And according to Suffolk County Sheriff Errol Toulon, in all that time, Rex Heuermann has never once shown a change in emotion. No despair. No discomfort. Nothing.

The sheriff, who has spent more than four decades in law enforcement, said he’s never seen an inmate like this. His assessment, according to reporting: he believes Heuermann is a sociopath.

The judge answered that question with five words: eight that we know of.

Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty to eight murders in Suffolk County. He is serving three consecutive life terms plus a hundred years with no right to appeal. By every legal measure, the Gilgo Beach case is over. But the judge who handed down the sentence made sure the courtroom understood he was not convinced the number was final.

Heuermann purchased four lots in Chester, South Carolina. A woman disappeared twenty miles from that property. He bought a timeshare in Las Vegas. An escort...

Nick Reiner case — a trust document written for an infant in 1993 is now reportedly the reason a judge may release more than $1.5 million in the middle of a murder case. And nobody updated it for thirty-two years.

Rob and Michele Reiner allegedly created individual trusts for each of their children, funded separately from the larger family estate. The terms for Nick's trust reportedly required mandatory payouts at age thirty and thirty-five — fixed dates, no discretion, no conditions attached. When Nick turned thirty in September 2023, over two years before the alleged murders, the first half was apparently due. Acco...

By 1988, the LAPD had the ballistics. They had the pattern. Same .25 caliber weapon. Same ten-block radius in South LA. Same profile of women being killed. They knew a serial killer was responsible. They told nobody.

Not the public. Not the families. Not Enietra Washington — the only woman who survived an encounter with Lonnie Franklin Jr. and could have identified him. For twenty-five years, multiple LAPD chiefs kept the Grim Sleeper a secret while Franklin continued killing. The families didn't learn their daughters were connected until journalists at LA Weekly broke the story in 2007.

Franklin was ev...

Over a million dollars. That is what Asa Ellerup reportedly earned from a Peacock documentary about her ex-husband — the man who pleaded guilty to killing eight women, seven of them inside the house they shared for twenty-seven years.

The families of those women are suing her. Valerie Mack’s son filed a wrongful death lawsuit naming Asa, her daughter Victoria, and Rex Heuermann. The claim is civil conspiracy — not that Asa failed to notice what was happening, but that she actively concealed it. The Suffolk County DA’s office cleared her in the criminal investigation. The civil case doe...

She answered the phone and heard the voice of the man who had just killed her sister. Melissa Barthelemy’s sister told a Suffolk County courtroom that Rex Heuermann called her from Melissa’s phone and described what he had done.

That detail sat buried in the sentencing coverage. It should not have.

Rex Heuermann’s Gilgo Beach sentencing delivered the scene the families had waited for: three consecutive life sentences, a hundred years added on top, a judge who called him disgusting and ordered officers to remove him. But underneath the spectacle is a plea a...

Mackenzie Shirilla was thirteen years old when she started dating a sixteen-year-old. Her parents allowed it. No conditions, no conversations about what that meant for a freshman in high school. By seventeen she had moved into her boyfriend’s family home. Each line the Shirilla household refused to draw became the starting point for the next boundary that didn’t exist.

The assistant prosecutor described what the school records revealed: incident after incident of disrespect toward teachers and other students. A clear picture of someone without meaningful adult oversight. The school raised flags — bullying allegations, discipline problems, a docu...

Victoria Heuermann says she believes her father most likely killed eight women. Asa Ellerup's attorney says Asa may never believe it. Same confession. Same evidence. Same house — a house Asa refuses to leave, where she rebuilt the basement and moved into the room where Heuermann told her seven of the murders took place.This is the full three-part conversation between psychotherapist Shavaun Scott and Tony Brueski. It covers the jailhouse confession — how Asa called him Mr. Heuermann and he said eight without pausing. It covers the double life — seventeen years of murders planned around the family vacation calendar, the fl...

Nobody else in the Murdaugh case occupies Eric Bland's position. He's the attorney who built the financial crimes case that became the prosecution's motive theory. He represents the Satterfield family whose testimony the Supreme Court just called prejudicial. He represents Sandy Smith in the Stephen Smith investigation. And he's been inside this machinery since before the first trial began.

In this full interview, Bland takes on the Supreme Court ruling, the retrial landscape, and the Stephen Smith cold case — in that order. He explains what the ruling actually cost his clients, whether the prosecution can still win wi...

She did. Asa Ellerup gutted the basement where Rex Heuermann confessed to killing seven women — new floor, new walls, new doors — and moved into it. She sleeps where investigators believe the killings happened. She told a documentary crew the nightmares are constant and permanent.She chose not to attend sentencing. Valerie Mack's son, who was six when his mother was killed, has filed a lawsuit alleging Asa and her daughter Victoria either knew about the crimes or deliberately avoided knowing — and profited from a Peacock documentary to the tune of over a million dollars. The neighborhood wants the house...

The person who took Nancy Guthrie from her Tucson home has not been identified. And right now, the internet is making that job harder. Every viral theory that circulates — every fabricated lead, every comment-section accusation, every “gait analysis” from a grainy nighttime doorbell clip — generates tips that investigators are obligated to process. Tens of thousands of them. That’s tens of thousands of hours spent on noise while the actual forensic trail — the DNA, the backpack sales records, the cell tower data — grinds forward with finite resources.In this episode, Tony Brueski examines the four biggest theories circulating in the case and m...

Cindy Paulson gave Anchorage police everything. A name. An address. A vehicle. An airplane. The specific parking spot at Merrill Field. She was still wearing Robert Hansen's handcuffs when she told them. A security guard at the airfield independently confirmed her story. The evidence was verifiable, specific, and actionable.

They didn't believe her. Hansen had a bakery and a reputation. Cindy was a teenager on the streets of Anchorage. They shelved the case. Hansen kept killing. His method — flying women into the Alaskan bush and hunting them with a rifle — continued uninterrupted because the institution that had ever...

A huge sense of relief. That is how Rex Heuermann's defense attorney described what his client felt after pleading guilty to killing eight women over seventeen years. Not remorse. Not grief. Relief.Heuermann stood in a Suffolk County courtroom and answered every question from the DA in one or two words. Strangulation. Yes. Eight. He never elaborated. He never looked at the gallery. He planned every murder around his family's vacation schedule and maintained an architecture career, a marriage, and a household the entire time. People who knew him said he was respectful and trustworthy. Every woman he...

Victoria Heuermann told the producers of the Peacock documentary that she now believes her father most likely committed the Gilgo Beach murders. She said on camera that while the family was on vacation, he was home killing and dismembering women in the basement. She arrived at that conclusion and said it out loud.Her mother has not arrived there. Asa Ellerup's attorney has said publicly that even after a guilty plea, he does not know whether Asa will ever believe the man she knew was capable of this. Asa sat across from Heuermann in a jailhouse visit where he...

Three of Mickey Stines’ deputies are named in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Judge Kevin Mullins’ widow. According to the suit, they saw their boss deteriorating — and they never warned the man he allegedly killed. The lawsuit says they had a legal duty to act. They didn’t.

But it wasn’t just the deputies. Attorneys who sat across from Stines during a four-hour deposition three days before the shooting reportedly watched a sitting sheriff fall apart in real time. He took ten breaks. He told people in the room he was having an episode. A fellow att...

The evidence that helped convict Adam Montgomery of murder the first time — multiple independent witnesses to a pattern of violence against Harmony, documented injuries nobody disputed — has been excluded from the retrial. The New Hampshire Supreme Court’s ruling severing the assault and murder charges means the prosecution walks into the Harmony Montgomery retrial without the material that made the first conviction feel certain.

What remains: Kayla Montgomery’s testimony, the cover-up evidence, and a defense team ready to argue that Kayla killed Harmony and Adam hid the body. The first jury took less than a day. The seco...

SLED reopened Stephen Smith's case in 2021 because of something they found while investigating the Murdaugh murders. They've never said what it was. Eric Bland represents Sandy Smith and has been pushing for that answer since he took the case. He's also the attorney who represented the Satterfield sons and helped dismantle Murdaugh's financial empire. He sits at the intersection of both investigations — and he's watching the Murdaugh retrial create new discovery opportunities that could theoretically touch Stephen's case.

In this interview, Bland addresses the sealed second autopsy results, Kenny Kinsey's independent investigation into Stephen's death, and the Mu...

Adam Montgomery is facing over forty-three years in prison without the murder conviction, plus another thirty-two and a half on firearms charges. He will die behind bars. And he still will not tell anyone where he put his daughter. The Harmony Montgomery case has reached the point where the legal system’s tools are running out and the one person with the answer has decided to keep it.

The retrial is coming. The state intends to try the murder charge again, separately this time. But the outcome won’t change Montgomery’s sentence in any meaningful way — he’s alr...

Timothy Hudson met every condition of his release for months. No violations. Total compliance. And a federal judge just said none of it mattered — not against what he was reading. Anna Kepner’s accused killer is behind bars.

Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres had released Hudson in February and held the line through prosecution pressure and public outcry. As recently as May 27, Torres kept him free after a hearing. The defense’s argument was simple and, on paper, true: Hudson had done everything right. Then on June 8, prosecutors filed sealed supplemental evidence. Two days later, Torres wrote an order...

Two hundred yards. Two football fields. With a shattered jaw, a fractured eye socket, stab wounds, and lacerations across her face and head. Holly Dunn could not call for help — her jaw was destroyed. She could barely see. But she could make out the shape of a house in the distance, and she walked toward it because lying down on railroad tracks in Kentucky at twenty years old was not how her story was going to end.

The man who left her there was Angel Maturino Reséndiz — the Railroad Killer, who traveled by freight train and kille...

Adam Montgomery’s defense has a theory, and the retrial is where it gets tested: Kayla Montgomery killed Harmony on December 7, 2019, while Adam was out. He came back, found his daughter dead, and spent months covering it up. That’s the story they intend to put in front of a new jury in the Harmony Montgomery murder case.

The theory has one thing going for it: Kayla is the only witness to the fatal night, and her credibility is damaged. She went to prison for lying to investigators. She cut a deal. And with the assault evidence now...

Adam Montgomery’s defense team asked for both charges — murder and assault — to be tried together. Then they tried to undo it. The trial judge said no. The New Hampshire Supreme Court said yes. And the Adam Montgomery murder conviction in the Harmony Montgomery case is now reversed.

The ruling hinges on a concept the audience deserves to hear explained by someone who has actually litigated it: prejudicial joinder. When the overwhelming assault evidence — multiple witnesses, documented bruises, no dispute — sat alongside a murder charge that depended almost entirely on Kayla Montgomery’s testimony, the court found the jury cou...

Everybody knows the slayer statute, even if they don’t know the name — it’s the law that kept the Menendez brothers from ever touching their parents’ fortune. So when word broke about what happened to Nick Reiner’s trust fund — a petition demanding more than a million and a half dollars from a trust his parents built — the internet ruled in one sentence: case closed, he gets nothing. This episode is about why California Probate Code 250 does not work the way most people think it does.

Two surprises, and they cut in opposite directions. First, the statute can hi...

A blockchain security firm says this looks like a crypto hit. An anonymous tip crosses the border and nobody tells the sheriff. The crime scene evidence — weeds on the camera, a thirty-dollar backpack, an improvised forced entry — doesn’t match the prepared operations in the wrench attack database. And yet the theory keeps checking boxes.

Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer delivers a complete analysis of the Guthrie investigation — the crypto theory, the Mexico search, the communication breakdown, and what it means if local law enforcement has been structured for a crime that didn’t happen. She puts the w...

Strip away the twelve and a half hours of financial crimes testimony that dominated the first trial. Take out the emotional victim impact that the Supreme Court just called prejudicial. What's left is a circumstantial murder case built on a cell phone video and a lie about being at the kennels. Eric Bland says that might be enough. He also says it might not.

Bland built the financial crimes case the prosecution leaned on. He knows which pieces were essential to motive and which were emotional padding. In this interview, he does something nobody's asked him to...

Hudson’s step-grandmother went on national television and said what the public has been demanding for months: charge the parents. She called the cruise “a recipe for disaster.” She said the family knew the situation and put those kids together anyway.

That’s not a stranger with an opinion. That’s a family member — someone who knows the dynamics inside that household — publicly breaking rank during an active federal murder case. And the detail she’s not the only one raising: Anna’s ex-boyfriend says Anna was scared of Hudson and would sleep at friends’ houses just to avoid being aroun...

Lynette Hooker disappearance: On the night Lynette Hooker went missing in the Bahamas, the Soulmate’s AIS tracking system — the transponder that broadcasts a vessel’s position to other boats and to authorities — stopped transmitting for eleven hours. It went dark. Then it came back on.

If it had failed permanently, you’d assume a hardware malfunction. But shutting off and restarting is what happens when someone disables the system and turns it back on later. A maritime expert quoted in reporting on the investigation called the shutoff “highly suspicious.” There were three additional blackout periods in the days that...

She testified in one of the most significant criminal trials in American history. She pointed at Richard Speck and said "This is the man." Then Corazon Amurao went home to the Philippines, married, had children, and turned down every interview, every book deal, and every media request for the rest of her life.

On the night of July 13, 1966, Speck entered a Chicago townhouse and killed eight student nurses over five hours. Corazon survived by rolling under a bed and staying motionless until morning. She is reportedly alive, in her eighties, still private.

This episode of...

Tucson is sixty miles from the Nogales border crossing. If the person who took Nancy Guthrie had even basic knowledge of the border corridor, the window to move her across was measured in hours, not days. And four months later, investigators have not publicly stated whether they’ve ruled that possibility out.

An anonymous caller recently directed a volunteer group in Nogales, Mexico, to an area near the Mariposa corridor where they claimed Nancy’s remains were buried. The group found nothing connected to her. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department says it learned about the search from m...