Hidden Killers Live! Daily True Crime News & Breakdowns

Eric Richins saw the threat. He called his sister from overseas and told her Kouri Richins had tried to harm him. He consulted a divorce attorney. He restructured his estate. He told family members if anything happened to him, Kouri was responsible. And he stayed. His sister Katie testified at sentencing that Eric made the decision to remain because he was afraid of what would happen to his boys i...

Prosecutors decoded calls where Mackenzie Shirilla and her mother Natalie spoke in a private made-up language to evade prison monitoring. In one decoded exchange, Mackenzie allegedly asked if they could tell police she had a seizure before the crash. Those calls were introduced as evidence during the trial that convicted her of killing Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. That decoded conversation s...

Somewhere in Los Angeles, a meeting is being arranged that could shape the entire Nick Reiner trust fund war: the incoming trustee — Jodi Montgomery, the fiduciary who spent years as Britney Spears' conservator — has reportedly asked to sit down with Nick in custody. What gets asked in that room, and how Nick answers, may matter as much as anything filed in court. Eric Faddis — former felony prose...

The single biggest unknown in the Alex Murdaugh retrial isn't a witness, a weapon, or a verdict — it's a ruling that hasn't happened yet. The first jury sat through hours upon hours of testimony about Murdaugh's financial crimes, the stolen client money, the gathering storm the State built its motive on. The South Carolina Supreme Court said that went too far, and ordered any retrial to sharply li...

Buried in the Nick Reiner trust fund fight is a detail that tells you how the people who actually control the Reiner money see this case: the much larger family trusts — where Nick is reportedly a full and equal beneficiary alongside his siblings — have already been frozen until the criminal case is over. Locked. Untouchable. So why is the smaller trust, the one his parents built just for him, the...

There's a procedural detail in the Nick Reiner trust fund battle that almost nobody is talking about — and it could end this fight before it starts. According to one legal expert, if no one formally opposes Nick's probate petition, a judge could grant it without ever holding a hearing. No arguments. No testimony. More than $1.5 million, released to a man awaiting trial for his parents' killings. E...

Every view validates the behavior. Every click fuels the compulsion. Every headline — including the outraged ones, including the ones calling him a fraud — gives Jesse Ridgway’s brain exactly what it’s looking for. He has spent twenty years fabricating crises for attention and every year the stunts get darker because the brain builds a tolerance. Staged family violence. A failed platform. Now a pr...

The complete three-part conversation, all in one extended sit-down. Christine Marie — the cult psychologist who walked into Samuel Bateman's FLDS world with a camera and a hidden agenda — sits down with me to tell the whole story from start to finish. Christine and her husband Tolga moved to Short Creek in 2016 with a completely different project in mind. Then Samuel Bateman rose out of the post-W...

Every click validates the behavior. Every comment fuels the next stunt. Every share tells Jesse Ridgway’s brain that what he’s doing is working. Seventeen million people saw his pregnancy announcement. If Jesse is sick, the audience is the IV drip. Research shows that expressing outrage online fires the same dopamine reward pathways as direct social validation — and like any drug, you build a tole...

Staged family violence. A failed platform. Now a pregnancy crisis involving a Down syndrome baby. Each stunt Jesse Ridgway pulls pushes further into territory the last one didn’t reach. That’s how tolerance works — the brain needs a bigger dose to feel the same thing. And with 4.3 million subscribers validating every escalation, the feedback loop has no off switch. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott lo...

On a livestream, Jesse Ridgway said, “I’m glad my dad didn’t terminate me, but I’m normal.” That sentence — delivered in the middle of a firestorm about his unborn child — tells a psychotherapist something very specific. Jesse Ridgway has staged events for attention his entire career. Four years of fake family violence. A platform that burned through a million users. And now a pregnancy announceme...

“Appearance of a coverup.” “So egregious.” Those are a judge’s words in a signed order. And they didn’t just end a murder case. They cracked open questions about an entire county’s law enforcement apparatus. This three-part conversation with an outside legal analyst covers the ruling, the sheriff’s race, and the institutional pattern that made this case inevitable. Judge Wilson’s 19-page order is...

He's locked up. He's still calling. And his wives are still picking up. In this third and final part of a three-part interview, Christine Marie walks me through the part of the Samuel Bateman story that doesn't fit on a true crime documentary's ending card. The arrest didn't free those women. The fifty-year sentence didn't free them. The conviction didn't free them. A number of the people Christin...

The detective got fired. The sheriff issued a statement. The prosecutor’s office went quiet. And the question hanging over all of it is whether any of these people will face real consequences for what a judge described as “egregious” conduct. Judge Wilson’s ruling focused on one detective and one piece of evidence. But the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office’s problems with evidence didn’t start with A...

Aaron Spencer is about to become the sheriff of Lonoke County. The same county that charged him with murder. The same department whose detective lost the evidence that got the case thrown out. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the trajectory. Spencer won the Republican primary with 53.5 percent of the vote in a three-way race, beating the thirteen-year incumbent whose office investigated him. The...

A circuit court judge just called law enforcement’s conduct “so egregious” that he threw out the murder case against an Arkansas father. That language doesn’t show up in rulings often. When it does, it means something went profoundly wrong. Judge Ralph Wilson’s 19-page order found that Detective Robbie McCain — the lead investigator on the Aaron Spencer case — committed eleven separate violations...

On February 20, 2024, Jesse Vang called 911 and reported that three-year-old Elijah Vue had walked away from his Two Rivers, Wisconsin apartment. What started as a missing child case became a homicide investigation that uncovered surveillance footage, deleted photographs, coordinated text messages, DNA evidence inside a donated suitcase, and forensic findings of injuries that had been happening fo...

Late 2021. Christine Marie's camera was rolling. Samuel Bateman started talking. And what he said in his own voice on that recording finally became the thing the FBI couldn't ignore. In this second part of our three-part interview, Christine tells the story of building a case against a man the local police would not touch. Short Creek — the FLDS community on the Utah-Arizona border where Bateman b...

When three-year-old Elijah Vue’s remains were found in a wooded area three miles from Jesse Vang’s Two Rivers, Wisconsin apartment, investigators noted something about the material found near the remains. Sand and gravel recovered at the site reportedly matched sand and gravel found in buckets near Vang’s home. The defense is now challenging that evidence — and a hearing is pending that could dete...

For seven months, the city of Two Rivers, Wisconsin searched for a three-year-old boy named Elijah Vue. The FBI came. The Wisconsin Department of Justice came. Hundreds of community volunteers showed up with flashlights and search dogs. They combed through landfills, dove into storm drains and the West Twin River, and searched private property across Manitowoc County. Volunteers even searched the...

When investigators interviewed Katrina Baur about the adults in her son’s life, she used a word that stopped them: “structure.” She described Elijah’s biological father, Jimmy Vue, as “the alpha” over Jesse Vang. Jimmy Vue was incarcerated at the time. Vang was the man Baur placed her three-year-old with — a convicted felon still on federal supervised release. And Baur had once told police that Va...

Sean Goode resigned from the Canton Police Department amid an internal affairs investigation. Michael Proctor was fired from the Massachusetts State Police. Four officers connected to the Sandra Birchmore case have been decertified or permanently barred from law enforcement. And a lawsuit alleges that the documented record of misconduct between Proctor and Goode stretches back more than ten years...

Three active cases. Three different kinds of evidence failures. And the same underlying question: when investigators lose evidence, fail to collect it, or mishandle it, what are the real consequences — for the cases and for the system? In the Aaron Spencer case, a dashcam SD card was handled inconsistently with every other piece of evidence at the scene, in violation of department policy, and lost...

Christine Marie watched Samuel Bateman every single day for years. She sat at his table. She filmed his sermons. She listened to his wives recite their devotion to him. And she has an answer to the question true crime listeners keep asking about him — was he a true believer, or did he know, deep down, that he was a fraud? She's the one outsider who got close enough to actually know. Christine and...

From a forensic investigation standpoint, the Anna Kepner case has one of the strongest statistical DNA matches in recent federal prosecution — 120 sextillion to one, pointing to stepbrother Timothy Hudson. The injuries Anna sustained during the alleged attack ruptured both eardrums. The surveillance timeline aboard the Carnival Horizon places Hudson in the stateroom during the window when Anna di...