Hidden Killers Live! Daily True Crime News & Breakdowns

In mid-May, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos confirmed in a People magazine interview that his department is no longer communicating directly with Nancy Guthrie's family. The FBI is now the sole liaison between the investigation and the Guthries. The same sheriff who stood at his podium in February and told the family he wasn't giving up is, three months later, not in direct contact with them at al...

A defense attorney who never called the key medical expert. A post-conviction petition filed one day late. A bench trial where one judge made every decision. A neurologist's opinion that was never weighed on its merits. The Mackenzie Shirilla case isn't just about whether she intended to drive her car into that building — it's about how many things in the process broke along the way. Shirilla was...

A fellow inmate who spent six months with Mackenzie Shirilla says the woman in Netflix's The Crash — the one speaking softly from prison, expressing remorse, insisting she has no memory — isn't the person she lived with behind bars. She described someone doing her makeup, navigating the prison social hierarchy, performing a version of herself. So which Mackenzie is real? The documentary Mackenzie...

One judge. No jury. No deliberation room. No twelve people wrestling with reasonable doubt. The Mackenzie Shirilla murder conviction was decided by a single person in a bench trial — and in a case with evidence this ambiguous, that raises a question the system doesn't want to answer. Judge Nancy Margaret Russo heard the surveillance footage evidence, the black box data, the text messages, and the...

At her arrest, Mackenzie Shirilla asked the officers to be careful with her bracelets — gifts from Dominic Russo, the boyfriend who'd been killed in her car three months earlier. The prosecution called it evidence of someone cold enough to plan a murder. But is that really what that moment tells you — or is it telling you something else entirely about a seventeen-year-old in shock? That gap — betw...

What kind of person does each of these cases point to? That's the behavioral question two FBI veterans take on in this long-form segment. Tony Brueski is joined by retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer — with former FBI Counterintelligence chief Robin Dreeke's behavioral lens in the room — to read the people at the center of three very different stories. There's the masked figure who app...

Could one person really have killed both Maggie and Paul Murdaugh by himself? That's the question two FBI veterans take apart in this segment — and one of them carried a weapon on FBI SWAT for two decades, so she knows exactly what firing a shotgun at close range does to the person pulling the trigger. With Alex Murdaugh's convictions overturned and a new trial ordered, the original defense theory...

Two FBI veterans watched the same cruise-ship footage everyone's now read about, and what they see is a person behaving like someone with something to hide. In the Anna Kepner case, unsealed records describe the 18-year-old's stepbrother on camera the night she died — cracking the cabin door, checking the hallway in both directions before slipping out. Later, when Anna's younger brother tried to c...

Two former FBI agents look at the same forty-one minutes and see something most people miss. In the Nancy Guthrie case, a masked figure approached the front door of an 84-year-old woman's Tucson home in the dead of night and appeared to tamper with her camera. At 1:47 a.m. the doorbell feed died. At 2:12 the software still caught a person there. By 2:28, the pacemaker inside her chest had lost its...

Shavaun Scott doesn't start where most people start with this case. She starts in a closet in Houston — where a homeschooled teenager with no peer socialization and no music in the house except gospel was recording tracks that would reach millions. She works forward from there because the forensic psychology question isn't what allegedly happened to Celeste Rivas Hernandez. It's what allegedly mad...

The behavioral shift is the center of the Delphi appeal. Before solitary confinement, Richard Allen sat across from Detective Holeman during the arrest interrogation and — according to defense filings — was lied to for over an hour. Allen's answer: "I am not going to say something I did not do." That was the man who walked into Westville. Thirteen months later, he was a different person. IDOC's ow...

Jennifer Coffindaffer has 28 years of FBI experience and has worked the kinds of organized crime operations that wrench attack proponents believe may explain what happened to Nancy Guthrie. She takes the theory seriously enough to examine it honestly — and seriously enough to name where the evidence stops. A wrench attack is a physically violent crypto-extortion operation run by organized networks...

Deputy Jayme Woody acknowledged on the stand that the criminal investigation into Eric Richins' death had stalled by fall 2022. Meanwhile, Todd Gabler — a private investigator with 34 years exclusively on the defense side — was already ahead of the people with badges. Gabler had identified the woman prosecutors say sourced the fentanyl. He'd flagged her criminal history. He was handing evidence to...

Prosecutors say Timothy Hudson killed Anna Kepner "without any warning." Jennifer Coffindaffer spent 28 years at the FBI and wants to know why they'd use that language when the public record suggests something very different. Anna's ex-boyfriend reportedly told investigators Hudson tried to climb on top of her during a FaceTime call. He was allegedly fixated on her. He reportedly wanted to date he...

According to the defense's appellate filings, an ISP Trooper found "concerning similarity" between the Delphi murders and a suspect who had been flagged repeatedly by tipsters for posting images of dead girls with sticks over their bodies on social media. He pushed for further investigation. His superiors said no. This same suspect, according to the filings, sat across from investigators four days...

 Deputy Jayme Woody acknowledged on the stand that the criminal investigation into Eric Richins' death had stalled by fall 2022. Meanwhile, Todd Gabler — a private investigator with 34 years exclusively on the defense side — was already ahead of the people with badges. Gabler had identified the woman prosecutors say sourced the fentanyl. He'd flagged her criminal history. He was handing evidence t...

An 84-year-old woman allegedly stolen from her own bed in the middle of the night — and almost immediately, the investigation meant to find her started falling apart from the inside. The crime scene was released too early. A thermal imaging plane sat grounded because its pilot had been reassigned over a personal grudge. The lead sergeant on the initial response reportedly had no homicide experienc...

In 28 years at the FBI, Jennifer Coffindaffer has seen what happens between local sheriffs and the Bureau when an investigation is running well — and what happens when something has broken down. The communication shift in the Nancy Guthrie case tells her something specific. Sheriff Chris Nanos confirmed he's no longer speaking directly with Nancy Guthrie's family. The FBI is now the sole point of...

Todd Gabler had spent 34 years working one side of the courtroom — every case for the defense. Then Eric Richins' family called about a civil matter and the phone records pulled in the first few weeks made staying in that lane impossible. Constant contact between Kouri Richins and a housekeeper with a criminal record and active drug court failures — in the months surrounding Eric's death. Law enfo...

What does it take for the justice system to actually hold someone — and why does that bar seem to move from case to case? We put three of the most talked-about cases in true crime in front of a defense attorney and former prosecutor and asked him to connect them. In Anna Kepner's case, our guest explains how a judge can concede that an adult would be jailed and still leave a young defendant free,...

The Sheriff's Office investigation stalled. Todd Gabler's didn't. While law enforcement sat on a case that wasn't moving, Gabler was the one pulling phone records before they knew where to look. He was the one tracking vehicles while the investigation gathered dust. He was the one searching the home for days after police released it. And he did all of it while operating under rules that gave him a...

When a defense team loses every major motion before trial even starts, what does that tell you about where the case is headed? In the prosecution of former Stoughton officer Matthew Farwell, we asked an attorney and legal analyst to read the signs. Sandra Birchmore, twenty-three and pregnant, was found dead in 2021 in a death first ruled a suicide. Prosecutors say Farwell killed her and staged it,...

Wendi Adelson took the stand in the Dan Markel murder case more than once, and every time she did, she had a safety net: limited immunity. So could the very testimony meant to protect her become the thing that finally exposes her? We asked a defense attorney and former prosecutor to break it down. The Markel case is one of the most-watched murder-for-hire sagas in the country. An FSU law professor...

What does it actually take to convince a court that a defendant is too dangerous to be free? In Anna Kepner's case, a federal judge said out loud that an adult facing these charges would almost certainly be jailed — and then declined to order it. We brought in a criminal defense attorney to explain what that contradiction really signals. Anna, eighteen, died aboard a Carnival cruise while travelin...

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott has spent more than thirty years in forensic mental health studying what creates the conditions for violence — not just the act, but the accumulation of failures that allegedly precede it. On Hidden Killers Live, she applies that expertise to three cases simultaneously. In the Nancy Guthrie disappearance, she examines the perpetrator’s mind — what months of silence, t...