Hidden Killers Live! Daily True Crime News & Breakdowns

He did. In a supervised jailhouse visit, Rex Heuermann told his ex-wife Asa Ellerup that he killed eight women — and that seven of them died in the basement of the Massapequa Park house where they raised their children. He timed the killings for when the family was away on vacation. Asa's reaction to the confession is captured in the Peacock documentary The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets. Sh...

Adam Montgomery’s murder retrial in the Harmony Montgomery case will look nothing like the first trial. The assault evidence is out. The independent witnesses who corroborated the pattern are excluded. What’s left is a murder charge that depends on Kayla Montgomery — a witness who did prison time for lying to investigators — and a cover-up timeline that the Supreme Court says only proves what happ...

Eric Bland has represented Sandy Smith since 2023 and has been publicly careful about what he shares regarding her son's unsolved death. But he's also dropped specific claims that suggest he knows more than he's saying. He told this show that the Murdaugh family may have known something about Stephen's death. He's hinted at relationships Stephen may have had with someone powerful. And he's been pr...

Adam Montgomery will die in prison. The math is done. Over forty-three years on the convictions that survived the Supreme Court reversal, plus thirty-two and a half years on firearms charges. The murder retrial won’t add meaningful time. So why does the Harmony Montgomery case demand a second trial? Because the murder conviction was supposed to be the one that said what happened to a five-year-old...

The prosecution got its conviction the first time — the jury took less than a day. The Supreme Court said the conviction couldn’t hold because of how the trial was structured. So what changes? The Harmony Montgomery murder retrial will look fundamentally different from the first trial, and the prosecution has to build a case that survives on its own. The assault evidence and its independent witnes...

People hear “conviction overturned” and assume Adam Montgomery beat the system. That’s wrong — but understanding why requires walking through the legal mechanics that most coverage skips entirely. The Harmony Montgomery case update has left families and followers furious, and they deserve an explanation that respects their intelligence. The New Hampshire Supreme Court reversed the second-degree mu...

Pima County has acknowledged it has never dealt with a wrench attack. If the crypto kidnapping theory is correct, the investigation has been structured for a conventional crime while the actual architecture — overseas handlers, encrypted recruitment, disposable operatives, cryptocurrency — operates on a level that local law enforcement has no experience with. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Cof...

During the appeal, Murdaugh's defense had limited tools. They could argue the record. They could point to Becky Hill. But they couldn't compel new documents or force new testimony. That's over. At retrial, Harpootlian and Griffin walk in with full subpoena power — and they've already signaled they intend to use it. Eric Bland has been in discovery on the financial side of this case for years. He's...

Anna Kepner’s ex-boyfriend says her brother told him she was scared of Timothy Hudson. That she would sleep at friends’ houses to avoid being near him. If that’s true, and the parents knew, the cabin arrangement on the Carnival Horizon looks different than a simple vacation decision. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer joins Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke to examine the central question...

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department says it learned about a cross-border search for Nancy Guthrie from media reports. Not from Mexican authorities. Not from the FBI’s legal attaché office in Mexico City. Not from the Hermosillo suboffice. From the news. An anonymous caller reached a volunteer search collective in Nogales, Mexico, and claimed Nancy’s remains were buried in the Mariposa area near t...

Thirty-four verified crypto kidnappings in four months. A 41 percent increase. Roughly $101 million in losses. Handlers overseas directing disposable operatives through encrypted apps to force their way into homes and extract digital currency. The model has a name — a wrench attack — and a blockchain security firm has put Nancy Guthrie’s case on its official list. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennife...

It’s the question nobody can answer and everybody’s asking. An anonymous caller told a Mexican volunteer group that what happened to Nancy Guthrie ended in the Mariposa arroyos — a stretch of desert near the Arizona border where clandestine graves have been found before. He said her body is there. He described where to dig. The Nancy Guthrie case now stretches across an international border, and t...

Retired FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program Chief Robin Dreeke joins Tony Brueski for the complete session testing every major theory about Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance. Robin identifies a behavioral pattern that runs through the Mexico tip, the insider theory, and the staging claim — and it changes how you read all of them. The anonymous caller who contacted a Mexican volunteer c...

The South Carolina Supreme Court overturned Alex Murdaugh's double murder convictions in a unanimous ruling — then told prosecutors their use of financial crimes evidence went too far. Attorney Eric Bland built that financial crimes case. His clients were the ones on the witness stand. And the court just told them some of their testimony was legally worthless. Bland represented the Satterfield son...

Retired FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program Chief Robin Dreeke joins Tony Brueski to do something most coverage of the Nancy Guthrie case refuses to do: take the staging claim seriously enough to test it. The theory says the masked man was placed on the porch, the blood was planted, and the FBI-authenticated doorbell footage is part of the arrangement. It has zero precedent — no do...

Retired FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program Chief Robin Dreeke joins Tony Brueski to test the theory that someone already inside Nancy Guthrie’s life either took her or sent the person who did. The theory has more former law enforcement voices behind it than any other explanation circulating in this case. Nancy was eighty-four, lived alone, and had a world full of people moving thr...

Retired FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program Chief Robin Dreeke joins Tony Brueski to decode the behavioral signature of the anonymous caller who told a Mexican volunteer group he knew where Nancy Guthrie was buried. The call came on Mother’s Day. He described clothing, landmarks, a specific spot in the Mariposa arroyos near the border. Fifteen volunteers searched. Nothing. Then he...

Nancy Guthrie was 84 years old, medically vulnerable, and required daily medication. Speed mattered more in her case than almost any other variable. And speed is exactly what institutional friction destroys first. Jennifer Coffindaffer spent 28 years at the FBI. She explains what happens to an investigation when the lead local agency and the federal agency aren't aligned — not in theory, but opera...

The legal case is closed. Samuel Bateman is serving fifty years. Every co-defendant was convicted. And Short Creek is still standing — same theology, same isolation, same obedience structure that produced both Warren Jeffs and Bateman. The machine didn't break. It just lost its current operator. Robin Dreeke and Shavaun Scott examine why the FLDS survives when other cults collapsed after their lea...

His wife went through a real medical procedure she described as the worst experience of her life. Within 48 hours, Jesse Ridgway was on national television. She was at home recovering. He was on his fourth camera in five days. A normal person can turn the camera off. A normal person can grieve privately. Jesse Ridgway cannot do either of those things. The off switch does not exist. That inability...

Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. had a choice of words. He chose "intentional." Not negligent. Not careless. Not unfortunate. He found bad faith, a pattern of policy violations, "the appearance of a coverup," and a due process violation under both the federal and Arkansas state constitutions. Then he dismissed the murder charge against Aaron Spencer. Two days later, the detective was fired. The nineteen-pag...

The girls who were rescued from Samuel Bateman's FLDS cult sat across from trained forensic interviewers and said nothing about what happened to them. Their journals — seized by the FBI — were full of it. Dates. Details. Names. Written in their own handwriting. They could put it on paper but they physically could not speak it. Robin Dreeke and psychotherapist Shavaun Scott examine that gap — what...

Robin Dreeke ran the FBI's Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. He's spent decades studying how people manipulate, recruit, and control. Samuel Bateman's playbook is one he recognizes — and the behavioral fingerprints are visible in every move the self-proclaimed prophet made on his way to fifty years in federal prison. Bateman targeted a community still fractured from Warren Jeffs' im...

Mackenzie Shirilla and her mother Natalie communicated on monitored prison lines in a private coded language. Investigators cracked it. According to prosecutors, the decoded calls revealed Shirilla asking whether they could tell police she'd had a seizure before the crash — a claim that became the centerpiece of the defense theory at trial. Robin Dreeke spent over two decades at the FBI evaluating...

The DNA odds pointing at Timothy Hudson are 120 sextillion to one. An FBI agent admitted on the record he is unaware of any DNA directly connecting Hudson to what killed Anna Kepner. That's not a contradiction — it's a gap. And it's the gap where the September trial will be won or lost. The judge overseeing the case said from the bench he would not call the government's case strong. He used the wo...