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Lindsay Clancy's murder trial opened Monday, July 27, in Plymouth Superior Court, with her ex-husband Patrick Clancy as the Commonwealth's first witness. Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the January 24, 2023 deaths of her children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — at the family's Duxbury, Massachusetts home. She does not dispute that she caused their deaths; the contested question is criminal responsibility. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington argues postpartum psychosis; Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham told jurors Clancy acted deliberately. Judge William Sullivan is presiding, and Patrick Clancy's testimony resumes Wednesday. Also: in M...

A three-case roundup. In Los Angeles, David Anthony Burke — the singer known as D4vd — completed a week of preliminary-hearing testimony in the death of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, whose body was found in a vehicle at a Hollywood tow yard in September 2025, a year after she was reported missing. Burke has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14, and unlawful mutilation of human remains; prosecutors laid out physical, digital, and financial evidence, the defense attacked the investigation, and Judge Charlaine Olmedo will decide whether the case goes to trial. The DA has not said...

A three-case roundup. In Winder, Georgia, 16-year-old Colt Gray pleaded guilty to all 55 counts, including four counts of malice murder, for the September 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School that killed teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie and 14-year-olds Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and injured nine others. The plea was non-negotiated; Gray faces a minimum of life, and Judge Nicholas Primm alone will decide parole eligibility at a sentencing hearing that began this week. Prosecutors showed a notebook in which Gray had mapped a classroom and planned the attack in advance, contradicting his earlier claim it was spontaneous; survivors and...

The finale of the five-part series Summer of Fear. In May, David Berkowitz declined to attend his own parole hearing — his thirteenth since becoming eligible in 2002 — and emailed the New York Post to say he is already free, and that his home is in heaven, not in the Bronx. Robert Violante, who was twenty when Berkowitz shot him in the head and who has almost no sight left, was asked what he made of that, and he answered. Garret Fisher closes the week with the demon dog Berkowitz later admitted he invented, the Carr brothers who both died young, the repo...

Three hundred detectives. The largest manhunt in the history of New York City. None of it caught him. In Part 4 of the five-part series Summer of Fear: on July 30, 1977, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, both twenty, go on a first date in Bath Beach, Brooklyn — the one borough nobody was watching, because the police had flooded Queens and the Bronx, and the killer read the papers too. Stacy died. Robert Violante survived, blinded. And what finally ended the largest manhunt in the city's history was a $25 summons for parking too close to a fire hydrant, a forty-nine-year-old woman named Cacilia Da...

In Part 3 of the five-part series Summer of Fear, the killer gets a stage. In late May 1977, a handwritten letter arrives at the New York Daily News addressed to columnist Jimmy Breslin, and when the paper prints it, the name Son of Sam belongs to eight million people. Women across New York cut off their long dark hair by the tens of thousands. The discos empty. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and the Daily News go to war over a serial killer and sell papers by the million. In Bayside, Queens, seventeen-year-old Judy Placido is sitting in a parked car...

In Part 2 of the five-part series Summer of Fear, the city finds out. On January 30, 1977, Christine Freund, twenty-six, and her fiancé John Diel leave a screening of Rocky in Forest Hills and never make it to the dance; Christine dies that morning, weeks after their engagement. Thirty-seven days later and half a block away, a nineteen-year-old Barnard College honor student named Virginia Voskerichian is killed walking home from the train with her books in her arms. Then a technician in a police ballistics lab lays two bullets side by side — one from Virginia, one taken from Donna Lauria in the Bro...

Fifty years ago this month, New York City was broke, burning, and about to meet the .44 caliber killer. In Part 1 of the five-part series Summer of Fear, Garret Fisher walks into the New York of 1976: a bankrupt city $14 billion in debt, five thousand police officers laid off, a police union handing out a survival pamphlet titled "Welcome to Fear City," the South Bronx going up in insurance fires, and six million people crowding the harbor to watch the tall ships sail in for the Bicentennial. Twenty-five days after those ships sailed, on July 29, 1976, eighteen-year-old EMT Donna Lauria was shot dead...

A three-case roundup. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, a jury convicted Isaac Apodaca, 30, of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the 2022 death of 21-year-old Grace Jennings, who was killed with a sword in a detached garage after asking to stay the night. Nobody disputed Apodaca swung nothing; his girlfriend Kiara McCulley pleaded guilty and testified that he manipulated her into it over months. Apodaca was remanded into custody; sentencing has not been scheduled, and first-degree murder carries a life sentence in New Mexico. In Saratoga County, New York, Timothy Besaw, 35, was sentenced to 12½ to 25 years — the maximum und...

A three-case roundup. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the murder and conspiracy trial of Isaac Apodaca, 30, neared its end as the state's key witness took the stand: Kiara McCulley, 23, who has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and conspiracy in the 2022 sword killing of 21-year-old Grace Jennings, and who testified under a plea agreement requiring her cooperation. Nobody disputes McCulley swung the sword; prosecutors say Apodaca was the architect who manipulated her into it. Apodaca has pleaded not guilty; his defense argues McCulley was the driver and Apodaca the gullible one. A verdict may have been returned since recording. In Albany...

A three-case roundup. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy nears, with jury selection set for July 20th. Clancy, 35, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the January 2023 strangulation deaths of her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 7 months; her defense concedes she caused their deaths but argues she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and not criminally responsible. Judge William Sullivan has barred the defense from calling other women who survived postpartum psychosis (ruling they can't speak to Clancy's state of mind), denied jury sequestration, and plans to seat eighteen jurors. The children's father, Pa...

A three-case roundup. In Lee County, Florida, eighteen-year-old Thomas Stein was sentenced to life in prison plus 45 years after a jury convicted him of first-degree felony murder in the 2024 shooting death of fifteen-year-old Kayla Rincon-Miller, who was walking to get food with two friends after a movie when prosecutors say Stein and a co-defendant stopped to rob them; because Stein was sixteen at the time, the life sentence carries a review after fifteen years. Whether Stein fired the fatal shot is disputed — he maintains he did not — but Florida's felony murder law does not require it. In Jacksonville, Shanna Gardner and...

A three-case roundup. In San Diego, a jury convicted Larry Millete, 44, of first-degree murder in the death of his wife, Maya Millete, a Chula Vista mother who vanished in January 2021 and whose body has never been found; prosecutors built the case partly on messages Millete allegedly sent to online spellcasters before she disappeared, and jurors convicted in under a day without agreeing on the method of killing. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the first-degree murder trial of Isaac Apodaca, 30, is underway in the 2022 sword killing of 21-year-old Grace Jennings; prosecutors say Apodaca never held the weapon but spent months manipulating...

A four-case roundup. In Provo, Utah, the preliminary hearing for Tyler Robinson — charged with aggravated murder in the September 2025 shooting of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk — reaches its final scheduled day, and Judge Tony Graf may rule on whether the case proceeds to trial. Garret Fisher explains why the widely circulated "95% DNA match" headline misdescribes FBI examiner Amanda Bakker's testimony: 95% was a mixture ratio, not a probability of identification, and the actual likelihood ratio reported from the courtroom is orders of magnitude larger. Robinson has not entered a plea; the state is seeking the death penalty. In Los Angeles, Davi...

A three-case roundup. In London, the High Court dismissed all 97 claims that Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, and six other claimants — including Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John, David Furnish, Sadie Frost, and Liz Hurley — brought against Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, accusing its journalists of phone hacking and unlawful information-gathering; Mr. Justice Nicklin accepted the publisher's evidence, and a key claimant witness disowned his own statement in court. Harry and Baroness Lawrence called the ruling a whitewash; the publisher called it a vindication, and costs remain to be decided. In Collin County, Texas, a new pro bono...

A three-case roundup. In Provo, Utah, the preliminary hearing for Tyler Robinson — the 23-year-old charged in the September assassination of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk — opened with Judge Tony Graf rejecting a state video exhibit that had been enhanced, zoomed, and circled by the prosecutor's office, because no one who made the edits was called to authenticate them. Robinson has not entered a plea; the hearing decides only whether the case proceeds to trial, not guilt. In Lake County, Florida, Julie Sulpizio — charged in the 2024 shooting death of Master Deputy Bradley Michael Link during what prosecutors call a planned attack...

A Nashville jury has convicted former Tennessee Titans scout Blaise Taylor, 30, of murder in the cocaine-poisoning deaths of his pregnant girlfriend, Jade Benning, and her unborn daughter, Ivy. Prosecutors said Taylor — who didn't want to be a father — slipped a lethal dose of cocaine into a drink Benning sipped in February 2023; the baby died days later and Benning died on March 6, her 25th birthday. Jurors found him guilty of second-degree murder in Benning's death, first-degree premeditated murder of the unborn child, and two counts of felony murder, and recommended life; formal sentencing is Sept. 9. Taylor maintains his innocence and plans to a...

Four men who ambushed and killed Jacksonville rapper Julio Foolio — born Charles Jones, shot dead at 26 in Tampa in June 2024 — have been sentenced to life without parole: a jury convicted Isaiah Chance, Sean Gathright, and brothers Rashad and Davion Murphy of first-degree murder and declined to recommend death (Davion Murphy maintains his innocence), and co-defendant Alicia Andrews was earlier convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years. Also this week: Detroit Lions cornerback Terrion Arnold, the 2024 first-round pick, pleaded not guilty to kidnapping, armed robbery, and conspiracy charges after prosecutors alleged he directed the interrogation of three men — whom they say had no...

The finale of CROWN V COLONY, and on the eve of Independence Day, Garret Fisher ends the week with a bang — literally. In 1605, a band of English Catholics packed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder into a cellar beneath the House of Lords, planning to blow King James I and the entire British government to splinters at the State Opening of Parliament. The man left to light the fuse was a Yorkshire soldier named Guy Fawkes — not the ringleader (that was Robert Catesby), but the explosives man, and the one caught red-handed in the cellar at midnight. This episode traces the desperation behi...

Day four of CROWN V COLONY, and the story turns. Garret Fisher leaves the killers behind for a young man who killed no one at all. On a Croydon rooftop in November 1952, 19-year-old Derek Bentley — illiterate, epileptic, with a reading age assessed at around four and a half — was already restrained by police when his 16-year-old friend Christopher Craig shot and killed Police Constable Sidney Miles, 42, a husband and father. Craig, as a juvenile, was too young to hang. Bentley was not. On the strength of five disputed words — "Let him have it, Chris," which the defense argued meant hand over t...

Day three of CROWN V COLONY. Garret Fisher trades the House of Horrors for something quieter and somehow worse: a soft-spoken Scottish civil servant in a north London attic. Between 1978 and 1983, Dennis Nilsen — the "Muswell Hill Murderer" — lured at least fifteen lonely young men back to his flat and killed them, he said, so they could never leave him. He kept the remains at home. He got away with it for five years for one reason: he hunted men the world wasn't watching — the homeless, the drifting, the marginalized — and when survivors escaped and tried to report him, a homophobic era refu...

Day two of CROWN V COLONY. Garret Fisher leaves the gaslight of Whitechapel for something more modern and somehow darker: an ordinary terraced house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, where Fred and Rose West murdered at least twelve women and girls across twenty years — including their own daughter Heather, 16, and Fred's stepdaughter Charmaine, 8. The bodies were found beneath the cellar, the bathroom, and the garden. A grim family joke about being "buried under the patio" is what finally brought police to dig in 1994. This episode traces how the Wests targeted vulnerable young women nobody was reliably watching, the 1972 warning the system fi...

Independence Day week begins where the whole genre began. Garret Fisher launches CROWN V COLONY — five days of the United Kingdom's most notorious crimes — in the gaslit fog of Whitechapel, 1888. Over roughly ten weeks of terror, a killer the newspapers christened Jack the Ripper murdered five women in London's East End: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly — the "canonical five." This episode walks through the Autumn of Terror, the split-jurisdiction investigation led by Inspector Frederick Abberline, the taunting "Dear Boss" and "From Hell" letters most experts now believe were hoaxes, the bloody Goulston Street...

Part two of the centennial investigation goes into the deep water. If Marilyn Monroe's 1962 death wasn't the simple suicide the coroner signed off on, then what was it? Garret Fisher walks through the theories the new Fox/TMZ special leans into — the rumored affairs with President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the heavily redacted FBI surveillance files investigator Paul Holes wants unsealed, J. Edgar Hoover, the organized-crime theories, and the claim that Monroe may not have even died at home — and labels each one honestly as unproven rumor. But the thread that actually holds up requires no c...

Part one of a two-part centennial investigation. Marilyn Monroe — born Norma Jeane Mortenson 100 years ago this month — was found dead in her Brentwood home on August 4, 1962, and within hours the most famous woman in the world was ruled a "probable suicide" by barbiturate overdose. Garret Fisher walks through the night: the housekeeper, the hours that vanished before police were called at 4:30 a.m., the first officer who thought the body looked too composed, and Thomas Noguchi's autopsy. Then to 2026, where a new Fox/TMZ special, Celebrity Crime Scene: Marilyn Monroe, uses AI to rebuild the barely-photographed death scene — and retired cold-c...

Garret Fisher covers three cases. In Miami, a six-person jury has found George Pino not guilty of manslaughter and vessel homicide in the 2022 Biscayne Bay boat crash that killed 17-year-old Luciana "Lucy" Fernandez and left passenger Katerina "Katy" Puig, now 21, permanently disabled; the jury deliberated under two hours. Pino is legally acquitted on both counts — and the Puig family and State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle both pointed to the same lasting problem: Pino was never given a sobriety test or blood draw the night of the crash, a failure the family says compromised the case from the start. In Douglas Co...

Garret Fisher covers three cases. In Nashville, jury selection has begun in the first-degree and felony murder trial of Blaise Taylor, a former Tennessee Titans pro scout accused of secretly poisoning his pregnant girlfriend, Jade Benning, in February 2023; Benning's unborn daughter died days later, and Benning herself died on March 6 — her 25th birthday. He has pleaded not guilty, the defense is contesting the forensic evidence, and the state is seeking life without parole. In Cape Coral, Florida, Thomas Stein — convicted of felony murder and three counts of attempted murder in the 2024 shooting death of 15-year-old Kayla Rincon-Miller during an attempted robb...

Garret Fisher covers three cases, each turning on a warning that came first. In Miami, the manslaughter and vessel-homicide trial of George Pino, 55, goes to the jury today after both sides rested — Pino is accused of recklessly piloting his boat into a Biscayne Bay channel marker in 2022, killing 17-year-old Luciana "Lucy" Fernandez and severely injuring another teen, Katerina "Katy" Puig, during his daughter's birthday celebration. He has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent, maintaining the crash was an accident. In Essex, Vermont, Janna Campbell, 43, has pleaded not guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the March death of her 76-year-old father, St...

Garret Fisher runs through four updates. In New York, a federal judge has dismissed singer Dawn Richard's civil suit against Sean "Diddy" Combs — not on the merits, but because the statute of limitations had run out; Judge Katherine Polk Failla called the alleged conduct "indisputably odious" while ruling 17 of 18 claims time-barred, leaving one gender-motivated-violence claim that Richard may refile in state court. Combs remains imprisoned on his prostitution-transportation convictions and is appealing. In the Anna Kepner case, a federal magistrate judge has ordered her 16-year-old stepbrother, Timothy Hudson — charged as an adult with first-degree murder and aggravated sexual abuse in the...

Garret Fisher closes the book on Gilgo Beach. After nearly three years of silence, Rex Heuermann — the 62-year-old Long Island architect who murdered eight women between 1993 and 2010 — was sentenced Wednesday in a Suffolk County courtroom to three consecutive life sentences without parole, followed by four more consecutive terms of 25 years to life. There is no parole anywhere in the sentence; he will die in prison. Judge Timothy Mazzei called him "a disgusting and small man," and District Attorney Ray Tierney dismissed his remorse as self-serving — "he is very sorry he got caught." But the day belonged to the families of Sandra...

Garret Fisher covers three cases. In Provo, Utah, Tracey Grist, 61, has been sentenced to consecutive terms — which the judge said should keep her imprisoned for life — after being convicted of masterminding the "family trap" killing of her son-in-law, Matthew Restelli, 42, who was lured to her home and shot by her son under the pretense of picking up his wife and children. In Waukesha, Wisconsin, Kevin "Conrad" Lychwick, 63, who represented himself and kept handwritten "operations" naming his victim, has been convicted of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse in the death of his neighbor, Carlos Maldonado, 56 — the jury deliberated under an hou...

Garret Fisher covers three cases involving child victims, all defendants presumed innocent. In Idaho, the first-degree murder and kidnapping case against Stacey Wondra, 33, in the 2021 disappearance of 5-year-old Michael "Monkey" Vaughan — whose body has never been found — has been moved from Payette County to Canyon County, with trial set for September 14. In Indianapolis, Toni McClure, 31, is set to stand trial June 22 on charges of murder, criminal confinement, and battery in the death of her 5-year-old daughter, Kinsleigh Welty, who died in April 2024; her boyfriend and her mother have already pleaded guilty to neglect resulting in death. And in Tampa, Brianna Moor...

Garret Fisher covers three cases. In New Hampshire, the state Supreme Court has reversed Adam Montgomery's second-degree murder conviction in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony Montgomery, ruling the trial judge improperly joined the murder charge with a separate assault charge — a procedural reversal, not a finding of innocence. Montgomery remains incarcerated on his other convictions (second-degree assault, abuse of a corpse, falsifying evidence, witness tampering) plus prior weapons charges, and the state may retry him. In San Diego, Larry Millete, 44, is on trial for the first-degree murder of his wife, Maya Millete, 39, who vanished in January 2021 and has ne...

Garret Fisher covers three cases. In Wisconsin, a Dodge County jury has convicted Zachariah Rasch, 44, of first-degree intentional homicide and a corpse-related count in the death of his estranged wife, Crystal Rasch, 37 — the case known as the "tooth in the ashes," after a tooth and skull fragments matched to her were found in a burn pit on his property. He claimed she shot herself; the jury rejected it in about two hours. Sentencing is set for July 21. In Vista, California, OnlyFans creator Michaela Rylaarsdam has been sentenced to four years in county jail after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter in th...

Three cases today, and money runs through all of them. In Los Angeles, Nick Reiner — the thirty-two-year-old charged with stabbing his own parents to death, the filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michele — has gone to court asking a judge to hand him more than a million and a half dollars from a trust fund, so he can pay for the lawyer he wants to defend him against the charge that he killed the people who set that trust up for him. Also back in the news from behind bars: Sean Combs, the rapper known as Diddy, hit this week with...

A full-episode deep dive. On Tuesday, a Collin County jury found nineteen-year-old Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder for fatally stabbing seventeen-year-old Austin Metcalf at a 2025 high school track meet in Frisco, Texas — rejecting his claim of self-defense after deliberating less than three hours, then sentencing him to 35 years in prison after rejecting his "sudden passion" claim. Garret Fisher walks through the verdict, the rainy afternoon under the team tent that ended Austin Metcalf's life, the medical testimony that made jurors gasp, and the sentencing that now sends Anthony to prison with parole possible after roughly seventeen years. He also takes on...

Here's where things stand this morning. In Fairfax County, Virginia, Brendan Banfield — the former federal agent convicted of murdering his wife, Christine, and a man named Joseph Ryan — has been sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. In Juneau, Wisconsin, the trial they're calling the tooth in the ashes is now in its second week, and the forensic evidence against Zachariah Rasch is stacking up. And just outside Boston, a former police officer accused of killing a young woman named Sandra Birchmore has been told he will stay behind bars until his trial this fall. Three cases.

Three stories today, and all three of them put a badge in the frame. In Lonoke County, Arkansas, a judge has dismissed the second-degree murder charge against Aaron Spencer — a father, and a candidate for sheriff — who admitted to shooting and killing the man accused of abusing his daughter. The case fell apart not on the facts, but because law enforcement lost a piece of evidence. In Boston, Officer Nicholas O'Malley has pleaded not guilty to killing a carjacking suspect named Stephenson King Jr. — and the attorney defending him is the same lawyer who defended Karen Read. And Karen Read hersel...

A Georgia father, William McCue, is on trial in Lawrenceville on felony-murder and child-cruelty charges after prosecutors say he and his wife trapped their children inside a home with no plumbing, buckets for toilets, and a child sleeping on plywood over a bathtub — a daughter, ten-year-old Zowey McCue, died in a fire her teenage brother set to escape.

Garret Fisher covers three cases this Friday. In Las Vegas, twenty-year-old Allysandra Blea has pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and kidnapping in the shooting death of twenty-three-year-old Mark Gaughan during a costume photo shoot — a case in which dete...

Here's where things stand this morning. In Columbia, South Carolina, a jury has found gas station owner Rick Chow not guilty of murder in the shooting death of fourteen-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton. In Juneau, Wisconsin, Zachariah Rasch is standing trial, accused of killing his estranged wife, Crystal Rasch, and burning her body in a pit on their property. And in Salt Lake City, Utah, reality star Taylor Frankie Paul has won back unsupervised time with her young son. Three cases.

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