Daily Crime and Justice | True Crime, Trial Coverage, and Murder Cases

Sandra Birchmore joined the Stoughton Police Explorers program as a young teenager. Prosecutors say Matthew Farwell, one of the officers who ran it, began a sexual relationship with her when she was 15 and he was 27, and that nearly a decade later, when she was 23 and pregnant and a friend had reported the relationship to his own department, he strangled her and staged it as a suicide. Farwell has pleaded not guilty; the defence says she took her own life after he ended the affair. Before closing arguments Friday, Garret Fisher lays out the whole case: the messages, the baby-name list...

The jury in Russell Brand’s trial retired at Southwark Crown Court just before 2:50 p.m. on Tuesday, after Mr Justice Bennathan finished summing up more than three weeks of evidence. “I can only accept a verdict from all 12 of you that is a unanimous verdict,” he told the eight men and four women, directing them to a bundle of photographs and diagrams and telling them to take their time — they would not be criticised for taking too long. Brand, 51, denies three counts of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault, involving six women between 1999 and 2009; the judg...

Ian Winter KC closed the defence case for Russell Brand at Southwark Crown Court on Monday, opening with an 1864 passage from John Henry Newman and telling jurors that 2023 media reporting had “poisoned the wells” of justice by prompting the complainants to come forward — that they did not make the “independent decision” to speak out. He said Brand is not a psychopath who rapes people and thinks it’s normal, that he respects it when a woman says no, and that “living a highly promiscuous life is entirely lawful however morally distasteful you may find it.” His question to the jury: can you be sure...

Riel Karmy-Jones KC closed the prosecution case against Russell Brand at Southwark Crown Court on Friday, telling jurors he treated women as a disposable commodity and a means to an end, that he exercised control and felt disdain toward them, and that “women as a whole were disposable who didn’t matter to him — he didn’t even need to know their names.” She ended: “We invite you to find him guilty on all counts.” Earlier, Mr Justice Bennathan gave the jury 19 pages of written legal directions, including that delay does not make a complaint untrue but may have seriously disadvantaged...

Laura Brand gave evidence for her husband at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, telling jurors he is caring and kind, a wonderful father, and that she feels very seen by him. She was 19 and he was 31 when they met at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006; she said she had had one previous partner, that on their first date she did not want to have full sex and he did not push, and that she felt entirely cared for. She also told the court he slept with other women while they dated, which is why they split in 2007. When defence barrister Ian...

Russell Brand gave evidence for more than four hours at Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday, denying each of the seven charges in turn and telling jurors that consent is “fundamental, essential, necessary and indeed more important than sex itself.” He said the 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches programme had a devastating effect, that he could not find a single friend or former colleague willing to give evidence for him, and that he had been barred from staying with his son after the boy’s open-heart surgery. He admitted he had been wrong to use his fame in pursuit of sex and had dedicated much o...

Mr Justice Bennathan directed the jury in Russell Brand’s trial on Tuesday to return a not guilty verdict on count two, indecent assault, telling them: “In respect of count two, I have reached the decision that there is insufficient evidence of indecent assault. That is my decision, not yours.” A male juror was selected to deliver the verdict formally. The judge then added a lesser charge arising from the same 2001 allegation — attempted indecent assault — calling it a slightly artificial process; Brand has pleaded not guilty to it. He now faces three counts of rape, three of sexual assault and one of att...

Chris Brown, 37, was sentenced Monday at Southwark Crown Court to eight months in prison, suspended for 12 months, after pleading guilty in July to affray over a February 2023 attack on music producer Abraham “Abe” Diaw at Tape nightclub in Mayfair. Judge Tony Baumgartner called it serious public violence and said the repeated use of a glass bottle aimed at the head was plainly dangerous; CCTV played in court showed Brown striking Diaw four times with what prosecutor Heidi Stonecliffe KC described as a heavy, square-shaped tequila bottle. Vocal coach Omololu Akinlolu, 40, who performs as Hoody Baby, received four months, also suspended. In t...

A Durham County jury convicted Miguel Salguero-Olivares, 33, on Friday of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, first-degree sexual offense and first-degree burglary in the 2012 killing of Faith Hedgepeth, a 19-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill sophomore and citizen of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, found beaten to death in her Chapel Hill apartment. The case went unsolved for nine years until a 2021 traffic stop produced a DNA sample that matched the scene. Superior Court Judge Keith Gregory sentenced him to life without parole plus consecutive terms; he is appealing. His defense questioned the forensics and presented no evidence. Also: after two weeks of prosecution evidence at Southwark...

The prosecution in Russell Brand’s trial called the people the fifth complainant says she told — her parents, a sexual health nurse who treated her in 2009, her then-manager, friends and a former boyfriend — in what English courts allow as evidence of a consistent account. The defence used the same witnesses to probe inconsistencies: a message she sent years later saying she was young and stupid and probably as much to blame, a police statement in which her ex-boyfriend said she had “come round” to it, and a best friend’s acknowledgment that the word rape wasn’t used the first time. The jury...

The fifth complainant in Russell Brand’s trial was cross-examined at Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday, completing the evidence of all six women. Ian Winter KC put to her that she had been a massive fan, that she went to Brand’s home knowing sex would happen, that she agreed to what took place, and that Brand “had pushed you and probably had treated you like an animal, but he didn’t rape you.” She replied that she did not consent to what happened to her, and told the court: “We are not here to discuss my morality.” She said she had carrie...

All six complainants have now given evidence in the trial of Russell Brand, 51, at Southwark Crown Court. On Tuesday the jury heard from the fourth complainant, who alleges he assaulted her at a London radio station in the mid-2000s in front of his entourage; from the sixth, who worked at Channel 4 in 2009 and says colleagues suggested she give him a massage before he put his head in her lap, and who told the jury she reported it to her line manager at the time; and from the fifth, whose recorded police interview was played, alleging rape at his London...

Sandra Birchmore was 23, roughly eight to ten weeks pregnant, and found dead in her Canton, Massachusetts apartment in February 2021, hanging from a duffel bag strap. The state medical examiner ruled it a suicide. Testimony began Oct. 13 in the federal trial of former Stoughton police detective Matthew Farwell, 38, charged with killing a witness — prosecutors allege he began sexually abusing Birchmore when she was 15 and he was 27, through a police Explorers program, and strangled her when she became pregnant and he feared exposure. He faces a mandatory life sentence if convicted and has pleaded not guilty. Defense attorney Kimberley Stevens told jurors Fa...

A New Mexico judge threw out the indictment against actor and director Timothy Busfield on Friday, finding the prosecution failed to act in a fair and impartial manner before the grand jury. Judge Joseph Montano ruled that grand jurors asked three times to hear from additional witnesses — who were waiting in the hallway — and that the prosecutor used an unexplained procedure and an incomplete explanation of the subpoena rules, with the practical effect of unilaterally withholding them. Only two witnesses appeared before that grand jury: Busfield and an Albuquerque police detective. Busfield, indicted in February on four counts of criminal sexu...

Duane "Keffe D" Davis, 63, was sentenced Tuesday in Las Vegas to 40 years to life for the Sept. 7, 1996, murder of Tupac Shakur, who was 25. Clark County District Judge Carli Kierny told Davis that saying he had changed fell short, and that he does not get to take a man from his family — especially when that man is Tupac Shakur. Davis, a former Southside Compton Crips leader convicted Aug. 31 of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon, was never accused of firing the shots; prosecutors have never named the gunman, and much of the case rested on Davis's own public accounts an...

Colleen Slemmer was nineteen. She grew up in Orange Park, Florida, went shrimping before dawn with her stepfather, gave up her lunch break to feed classmates who needed help, and loved computers enough that her grandfather told her to make a career of it. That's what brought her to a Job Corps center in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1995. She never came home.

On January 12, 1995, Christa Gail Pike, 18, and two other students lured Colleen to a secluded spot near the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus and killed her. Pike was sentenced to death in March 1996, becoming the youngest woman sentenced...

Actress Selma Blair, 54, pleaded not guilty Monday in Queens Criminal Court to two counts of second-degree assault under New York Penal Law 120.05(3), after an incident on Delta Flight 938 from Los Angeles to JFK on Sunday night. According to charging documents, a Port Authority officer securing Blair to a stretcher said she freed a leg and kicked her repeatedly, and a nurse at Jamaica Hospital said Blair kicked her in the chest — the state charges concern what happened after the flight, not during it. Law enforcement sources told CBS and CNN that Blair tried to open a cabin door and that tw...

Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle has set the execution of Nidal Hasan, 56, for Dec. 3 at 1 p.m. at Fort Hood, Texas — the same post where he killed 13 people and wounded 32 in November 2009, and close to the hour the shooting began. It would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the Army's first firing squad since 1945. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said this week the public will be able to watch, and the Pentagon confirmed Thursday it will be livestreamed, without saying where it would be hosted or what viewers would see. The plan has drawn bipartisan objection, and Army Re...

Bryan Kohberger, 31, who pleaded guilty in July 2025 to murdering University of Idaho students Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin and is serving four consecutive life sentences, now says he was convinced to falsely confess and that his court-appointed lawyers failed him. On Oct. 15 at 1:30 p.m., Judge Steven Hippler will hear a motion asking him to disqualify himself from the post-conviction case, filed Aug. 27 by Kohberger's new court-appointed attorney Greg Rauch, which argues Hippler's sentencing remarks — calling Kohberger a faceless coward and saying he could find nothing good or intrinsically human about him — show bias. Prosecutors answered Oct...

Christa Gail Pike's attorneys believed she was brain dead Monday night and expected her to be taken off life support Tuesday. Instead, attorney Randy Spivey said, she woke up and began talking — "to the shock of everyone," including her medical team. She has pneumonia, a blood clot, and no function in either arm, remains handcuffed and shackled, and her lawyers say there could be permanent damage. On Wednesday, Davidson County Chancellor I'Ashea Myles ordered Tennessee to preserve all evidence from the Sept. 30 failed execution — IV lines, needles, drugs, records, 911 calls, log books, communications and anything concerning deviations from protocol — declining to rel...

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed Attorney General Letitia James special prosecutor on Oct. 1 in the Cornell University case, saying she had lost faith in Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten's handling of it. A former student identified in court papers as Jane Doe has filed a civil suit against seven then-members of Chi Phi, the university, the national fraternity and others, alleging she was pressured into taking ketamine and assaulted over several hours in October 2024. All seven deny wrongdoing; no one has been charged with a crime. Van Houten, who declined to bring charges in 2024 based on a...

The Pentagon announced Monday night that President Trump approved Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's recommendation to execute former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, 56, by Army firing squad for the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that killed 13 people and wounded 32. The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place; it would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the Army's first firing squad since 1945. No date has been set, and presidential approval does not guarantee an execution — Ronald Gray's was approved in 2008 and halted in federal court. In Ohio, Judge Jeannine Pratt sentenced Caleb Flynn, 40, to life without parole plus additional ti...

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles granted parole Thursday to Amber Guyger, 38, the former Dallas officer convicted of murdering Botham Jean, 26, in his own apartment in September 2018 — seven years to the day after her conviction, and seven years into a ten-year sentence. The board cited the absence of a documented pattern of violent arrests or convictions, a satisfactory institutional adjustment, and completed programming; no release date has been set, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice will determine timing. Jean's family has opposed her release since her first parole review in 2024. In Florida, the First District Court of Appeal ov...

Christa Gail Pike is unconscious, intubated and breathing through a ventilator at a Nashville-area hospital five days after Tennessee failed to execute her, her attorneys said in a Friday emergency motion. Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen of Federal Defender Services of East Tennessee wrote that the execution team used at least seven needles, that one bent, that Pike herself suggested an access site, and that no one on the team appeared to realize the IV lines were misplaced and the veins had blown before a second set of syringes was administered. The motion asks a judge to order the Department...

Christa Gail Pike remains hospitalized two days after Tennessee failed to execute her, and her attorneys say they still have not been told her condition. Dr. Mark Walton Fowler, the contract physician who publicly confirmed he would oversee her execution, was also the physician involved in Tennessee's halted execution of Tony Carruthers in May; Carruthers's sister has filed a Department of Health complaint alleging malpractice, and no disciplinary action has been announced. The state's written protocol directs a second set of syringes if the first fails but says nothing about what happens if the second fails too. Robin Maher of...

Tennessee failed to execute Christa Gail Pike on Wednesday night. After the Sixth Circuit stayed her execution an hour before its scheduled 10 a.m. start and the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that stay hours later, the state administered two doses of pentobarbital — the maximum its protocol allows — and Pike, 50, remained alive. Media witnesses reported she was still breathing more than 40 minutes later. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital, and her attorneys say they still have not been told her condition. Gov. Bill Lee has paused the state's remaining 2026 executions and called for a comprehensive third-party review. Pike was...

A Miami County, Ohio, jury convicted Caleb Flynn, 40, on Tuesday of aggravated murder and every other count in the February shooting death of his wife, Ashley Flynn, 37, a middle school volleyball coach and mother of two. Jurors deliberated under three hours after a trial that began Sept. 18 and heard from more than 40 witnesses. Prosecutors argued Flynn shot his wife as she slept and staged the scene as a burglary, pointing to a garage door damaged only from the inside, his own missing handgun, phone activity during the hours he told police he was asleep, and more than 100,000 messages with a...

Plastic surgeon Tomasz Kosowski, 47, was convicted of first-degree murder last Wednesday in the 2023 killing of Largo attorney Steven Cozzi, 41, after representing himself, waiving his right to a jury, and putting on no defense. Judge Joseph Bulone deliberated about 15 minutes. Kosowski then declined counsel for the penalty phase and said he will present no mitigating evidence; a Spencer hearing is set for Oct. 8, after which Bulone alone will decide between life without parole and death. In Ohio, Alleigha Botner, 24, testified for two days in the trial of Caleb Flynn, 40, the former American Idol contestant charged in the February shooting death of...

Mary Kellerman was twelve years old when her parents gave her an Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule on the morning of September 29, 1982. She died that morning. Within three days, six more people in the Chicago area were dead: Adam, Stanley and Theresa Janus, Mary McFarland, Paula Prince and Mary Reiner. Seven people, poisoned by potassium cyanide packed into capsules on a drugstore shelf, and no one has ever been charged. The foil seal on every bottle in every American medicine cabinet exists because of them. Forty-four years later, a sheriff's office in Idaho has identified the "Unknown Wanderer," a man who died...

Harvey Weinstein, 74, was sentenced Wednesday in Manhattan to 15 years in prison for the 2006 sexual assault of production assistant Miriam Haley, followed by five years of supervised release and sex-offender registration. Judge Curtis Farber told him he took what he wanted by force and had never accepted responsibility; Haley, in her victim impact statement, said it is a life sentence for her. Weinstein, who denies the allegations, has now been through two trials, a reversal and two hung juries on the Jessica Mann count since his 2020 conviction. In Massachusetts, lawyers for Lindsay Clancy — charged in the deaths of her children Cora, 5, Da...

Caleb Flynn, 40, the former music pastor and American Idol contestant on trial in Miami County, Ohio, for the February shooting death of his wife, Ashley Flynn, 37, heard her family testify against him this week. Ashley's sister, Kayla Keyt, and her father, Todd Smith, described the family business Ashley was set to inherit and the break-in story they never believed — Smith told jurors the family's dogs would have barked. On cross-examination, a Tipp City police captain testified that the woman identified in court as Flynn's mistress lost her work laptop and phone on a trip in January, before investigators ever examined th...

Richard Allen, convicted in 2024 of murdering Abigail "Abby" Williams, 13, and Liberty "Libby" German, 14, near the Monon High Bridge in Delphi, Indiana, asked the Indiana Court of Appeals for a new trial on Monday. His lawyers argue that the more than 60 incriminating statements prosecutors say he made were produced by psychosis during months of pretrial solitary confinement at Westville Correctional Facility. The state says his key confessions came while he was lucid. One judge on the panel replied, "You protected him into psychosis." No ruling has been issued. In Tipp City, Ohio, former American Idol contestant Caleb Flynn, 40, is on trial...

Matthew Exton, 43, a former attorney convicted of attempting to shoot his ex-wife at the opening night of Sabira restaurant in Toledo, was sentenced Monday by Lucas County Judge Gary Cook. Exton tried to fire his attorney the morning of the hearing, then told the court that pointing a loaded gun at his ex-wife was not harm because it did not fire. Cook played the surveillance video, saying it showed Exton trying to disengage the safety after the gun failed — the moment that "cements the intent." Exton says he will appeal. Also: Judge Paul Wong denied Dr. Gerhardt Konig's motion for a...

The holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy's murder trial has been publicly identified, had his address and phone number posted online, received death threats, and is now in an undisclosed location in rural northern New England with counsel. In a statement to NewsNation, Michael P. Desronvil disputed his fellow jurors' accounts: "I didn't have any doubts," and said he believed from the evidence that Clancy "knew exactly what she was doing and planned" it — a direct contradiction of foreperson Roni Carlson, who told NBC10 Boston he had admitted reasonable doubt and whose note prompted the defense to seek his removal. Judge Wi...

A secret documentary about Elizabeth Holmes premiered at Telluride on September 6. "You Can See Everything", directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, distributed by A24, filmed over three years beginning 34 days before she reported to federal prison. It screens at the New York Film Festival on September 30 and opens theatrically in October. Meanwhile, Holmes's X account, revived in August 2025 after a decade of silence and reportedly run by her partner Billy Evans, has been posting frequently and protesting her innocence. And a clemency petition asking the President to commute her sentence remains listed as pending with the Justice Department's Office...

Former Massachusetts State Police trooper Michael Proctor invoked his Fifth Amendment right rather than answer questions at a hearing in a Milton murder case he led — the 2021 killing of 25-year-old Marquis Simmons. Judge Peter Krupp allowed it after a sidebar his defense counsel was barred from joining. Defense attorney Rosemary Scapicchio, who is seeking dismissal of charges against Myles Omari King, 26, said Proctor's lawyer had twice indicated he would testify. Proctor was dishonorably discharged over messages found on his phone during the Karen Read prosecution; he has not been charged with any crime, and invoking the Fifth is not evidence of...

Tomasz Kosowski, representing himself in a capital murder trial in Pinellas County, Florida, gave no opening statement and cross-examined none of the state's witnesses on the first day. Assistant State Attorney Alexandra Spadaro told Judge Joseph Bulone that attorney Steven Cozzi, 41, was killed in his firm's bathroom and moved out by wagon — that "his coffin was a dumpster" and his remains lie in the Collier County landfill, where a three-day search found nothing. Kosowski has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent; he has dismissed four sets of attorneys, waived a jury for both phases, and withdrawn his prior counsel's su...

Judge London Kite has refused to step aside from Shanna Gardner's murder case after both prosecutors and Kirsten Bridegan — the widow of victim Jared Bridegan — filed motions asking her to disqualify herself. Kite ruled both legally insufficient without addressing the factual allegations. The dispute began when Gardner's defense sought Kirsten Bridegan's cellphone; Kite initially denied the request, then ordered her to surrender it after an ex parte meeting with Gardner's attorneys that neither prosecutors nor Bridegan's lawyers attended. When she refused, Kite initiated indirect criminal contempt proceedings during Mario Fernandez Saldana's trial. The Fifth District Court of Appeal has stayed the...

Tomasz Kosowski, 47, goes on trial Monday in Pinellas County, Florida, for the first-degree murder of attorney Steven Cozzi, 41, who vanished from his Largo office bathroom in March 2023 and has never been found. Kosowski has dismissed multiple defense teams, is representing himself, withdrew his prior counsel's motions to suppress evidence and their challenges to the death penalty, and waived a jury for both the guilt and penalty phases — a dual waiver attorneys describe as exceptionally rare. Asked by Judge Joseph Bulone why he didn't want a jury, he replied, "I really have to answer that?" He has pleaded not guilty and is...

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, no one has been tried for them. A military judge set a June 2028 trial date last month for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants at Guantanamo Bay — twenty years after they were first charged — following two decades of litigation driven largely by the CIA's treatment of the defendants in secret custody, which the government has acknowledged and which rendered one co-defendant unfit to stand trial. Plea agreements signed in 2024 were withdrawn by the Defense Secretary, reinstated by a military judge, then vacated on appeal; the death penalty is back on the table. Meanwhile roughly 9,000 deat...