Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Ted Bundy spent ten years on death row making absolutely sure of one thing: that the country would never get the why. The Chi Omega trial in Miami, summer 1979 — the first criminal trial broadcast nationally on American television — was his stage. He fired his attorneys. He rehired them. He fired them again. He cross-examined witnesses, including Nita Neary, the woman who had seen him on the stair...

Eye rolls during victim impact statements. Smirks while therapists read her children's words. Then tears — real tears — when her own family called her the glue of the family. Pain aimed at her: contempt. Praise aimed at her: emotion. That behavioral split tells you everything about the wiring we've been breaking down in this series. And then she spoke. For forty-five minutes. To three boys who'd a...

Natalie Shirilla called the Russo family "evil people" on a recorded prison line. Steve Shirilla's teaching contract was not renewed after he appeared on a Netflix documentary defending a convicted killer — his daughter. Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis examines what this family is doing to Mackenzie Shirilla's case from the outside. Mackenzie Shirilla was convicted in 2023 of ki...

Thirty-six conduct violations. Guilty on thirty-two. Recorded calls where she refuses rehabilitation, calls herself the third victim, and tells her mother she plans to become a life coach. Mackenzie Shirilla's institutional file at the Ohio Reformatory for Women is growing — and defense attorney Eric Faddis says the parole board will read every page of it. Shirilla was convicted in 2023 of killing...

A federal judge just found Josh Duggar’s sworn testimony not credible — for the second time. The first time, it was Jim Bob on the stand. Same judge. Same courtroom. Same word: not credible. Josh Duggar’s motion to vacate his conviction was denied on June 1 after Judge Timothy Brooks ruled that Josh’s account of how he mailed his appeal was “something akin to a magic bullet theory.” But the mailin...

The prosecution asked whether Mackenzie Shirilla intended to kill her boyfriend and his friend. A judge said yes. But a psychotherapist who has spent thirty years inside the minds of people who commit violence says the real question was never asked — and the answer might be something the legal system has no category for. Shavaun Scott, author of The Minds of Mass Killers, sits down for a full thre...

Blanca Simpson testified for three hours in 2023. The jury convicted Alex Murdaugh in three hours. A court clerk's misconduct erased all of it. And now Blanca is preparing to do something almost nobody in true crime history has had to do — go back to the stand with three additional years of knowledge, perspective, and clarity about what she saw. This three-part exclusive is the most comprehensive...

Dominic Russo's father says he needs the truth so he can grieve. But what if the truth he needs isn't the truth the evidence supports? What if grief has so completely fused with certainty that the family can't distinguish between what happened and what they need to believe happened? Mackenzie Shirilla says she has no memory of the crash that killed Dominic and Davion Flanagan. The families say she...

Florida had no Ted Bundy file. Florida had no idea he was coming. He arrived in Tallahassee on January 8, 1978, under the name Chris Hagen, with stolen credit cards and a room at a boarding house six blocks from the Chi Omega sorority at Florida State University. He spent a week at the disco next door. Sorority sisters reportedly noticed a man staring at them from the bar. Nobody thought anything...

Guilty on all counts. Unanimous. Three hours of deliberation for a case that took three weeks to present. And the defendant showed almost no reaction. A juror called her "like a statue."This episode examines the psychology behind that absence of emotion. Not stoicism. Not strategy. A system in overload — the circuit breaker that trips when a mind built on narrative control is forced into sustained...

The prosecution's version of the Mackenzie Shirilla case depends on a simple dynamic — she was the aggressor, Dominic Russo was trying to leave, and the crash was her final act of control. Netflix's The Crash leans into that framing. But psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, who has spent decades in domestic violence work, says the clinical reality of relationships like this one is almost never that neat...

The text messages Mackenzie Shirilla sent Dominic Russo were controlling, threatening, and ugly. The TikTok persona was image-obsessed. The arrest behavior was bizarre. Everything about her personality fed a narrative that she was cold enough to plan a murder at seventeen. A judge agreed. But a psychotherapist who has treated both victims and perpetrators of violence for over thirty years reads th...

Rebecca Haro maintained her innocence for months. She told investigators a stranger had taken her seven-month-old son from a parking lot in Yucaipa. She gave television interviews with a visible black eye. She begged on camera for her baby to come home. After she was arrested and charged with murder, she pleaded not guilty. She sat in custody at the Robert Presley Jail on a million dollars bail an...

Her defense attorney failed to call the one expert who might have changed the verdict. The prosecution charged murder when the evidence arguably supported a lesser charge. The post-conviction system shut the door on new evidence over a single missed day. And then Mackenzie Shirilla herself made the decision to appear in a Netflix documentary that may have cemented the public perception the prosecu...

different things. Alex Murdaugh's attorneys told national television they have new information about other potential suspects. They're building a retrial strategy that points the finger away from Alex. Meanwhile, the woman who spent twenty years inside that household has her own theory about other people being involved — and it points directly back at him. Blanca believes Alex had a Plan A. Someon...

The Netflix documentary was supposed to be Mackenzie Shirilla's moment. The first time the public heard her voice since the conviction. A chance to tell her side. Instead, it may have been the worst decision she's made since the crash itself. She sat in front of cameras, composed and remorseful, maintaining she has no memory. A fellow inmate immediately contradicted her — described a different Mac...

The State of Utah convicted Ted Bundy of kidnapping in March 1976. One count. Colorado charged him with one murder. That is what the system believed it was holding: a kidnapper and a single-count defendant. The actual man had killed at minimum sixteen women across five states by the end of 1975. That gap — between who the charge sheet said he was and who he actually was — is the reason he was able...

Most people, when arrested for murder, let their attorneys handle the case. Kouri Richins wrote a six-page letter hidden in an LSAT prep book with scripted testimony for her brother. She read other inmates' letters to her mother over recorded phone lines. She held up documents on video calls for her mother to photograph. And when the letter was found, she told her mother on a recorded call that it...

The prosecution's case against Mackenzie Shirilla sounds devastating in a headline — surveillance footage, black box data showing full throttle and no braking, threatening texts, a prior incident treated as a rehearsal. But a criminal defense attorney who has spent his career cross-examining prosecution evidence sees something different: a case with real vulnerabilities that was never properly cha...

A medical condition that could explain loss of consciousness — raised at trial but never supported with expert testimony. A post-conviction petition containing a neurologist's opinion — filed one day late. A key prosecution witness whose account was contradicted by text messages — never challenged by the defense. At what point does a defense stop being a defense? Mackenzie Shirilla was convicted o...

On May 5, FBI Director Kash Patel went on a national podcast and said the Pima County Sheriff's Department did not initially cooperate with the bureau in the Nancy Guthrie investigation in the way the FBI expected. Sheriff Chris Nanos has publicly disputed Patel's characterization of the relationship between the two agencies. That on-record split has become one of the defining moments of the case....

The distance between "Mackenzie Shirilla did something catastrophically reckless that killed two people" and "Mackenzie Shirilla executed a premeditated mission of death" is enormous. The verdict says it was murder. The evidence lives somewhere between those two conclusions — and this conversation is about figuring out where. Shirilla was convicted of four counts of murder for the Strongsville, Oh...

Twelve and a half hours. That's how long prosecutors spent putting on financial crimes testimony in Alex Murdaugh's first trial. The Supreme Court said it was too much. Way too much. They told the state to cut it back in round two. Blanca Simpson testified for three hours. She covered the shirt, the towel, the pajamas, the car. But anyone who's listened to Blanca talk about that household knows th...

One of the fathers in Netflix's The Crash says something that stays with you. He says he needs the truth so he can grieve properly. It's a gut-level statement from a man who lost his child, and you feel it immediately. But it raises a question the documentary doesn't fully explore: what happens when someone's need for a specific answer becomes stronger than what the evidence actually supports? Mac...

Ted Bundy crossed a state line in September 1974 and became a new person. Washington had his name. Washington had his composite. Washington had two hundred thousand tips. None of it followed him to Utah. He arrived in Salt Lake City as a first-year law student with clean plates and a clean record. Between October 1974 and August 1975, he moved across Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. Nancy Wilcox, sixtee...