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

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 B...

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...

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...

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 birth...

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 co...

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 sol...

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 Mile...

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 wi...

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 ba...

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 Mar...

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...

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....

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 At...

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...

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...

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 ref...

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...

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,...

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 se...

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...

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 reje...

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 pe...

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...

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 Ras...

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, Offi...