Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

A children's book called "Are You With Me?" with a father in angel wings on the cover. Published one year after Eric Richins' death. Promoted on local television by the woman convicted of killing him. The prosecution called it deflection. And it was. But this episode argues it was something far more psychologically complex: Kouri Richins building the version of reality she needed to inhabit. Not a...

The case against Mackenzie Shirilla was prosecuted as murder. Not manslaughter. Not reckless homicide. Four counts of murder for a car crash. That charging decision carries enormous weight — it's the difference between a reckless teenager who caused a catastrophe and a calculated killer who executed a plan. And the evidence has to clear a much higher bar. Shirilla drove her Toyota Camry into a bui...

Mackenzie Shirilla's text messages were ugly. "My way or the highway — watch your back, your house, your car, your life." She was controlling, explosive, and by every account a difficult person to be in a relationship with. But ugly texts and a bad personality aren't the same thing as premeditated murder — and the question nobody in Netflix's The Crash fully confronts is where that line actually f...

For months, almost everything about the death of eighteen-year-old Anna Kepner aboard a Carnival cruise was locked behind a sealed court file. Now that file is open — and what’s inside is chilling. On this episode of Hidden Killers, we dig into the evidence prosecutors unveiled against Anna’s sixteen-year-old stepbrother, now charged as an adult in her death. The centerpiece, for me, is the phone....

What does the evidence actually show in three of the most talked-about cases in the country right now? Tony Brueski brings in former FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer to go case by case through the physical and digital trails in the Nancy Guthrie disappearance, the Anna Kepner cruise-ship death, and the reopened Alex Murdaugh murder case. In the Guthrie case, the evidence is mostly machine-m...

The South Carolina Supreme Court erased Alex Murdaugh's murder conviction, and Blanca Simpson didn't pick up her phone. She drove to Maggie's grave and sat in silence. For twenty years, Blanca wasn't just cleaning the Murdaugh house — she was holding its secrets. She was the person Maggie trusted enough to pull into a room and shut the door. The person who heard Maggie say she'd give everything sh...

Here's a fact in the Alex Murdaugh case that never stops being strange: the two guns used to kill Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were never recovered. Not the shotgun. Not the rifle. Two weapons, two victims at the family's dog kennels, and to this day neither one has been found. With the South Carolina Supreme Court having overturned Murdaugh's convictions and ordered a new trial, every piece of physic...

Before the country learned his name, before the trials, before the cameras — there was a year in Seattle where young women kept disappearing and nobody could connect them to each other. Karen Sparks, beaten in her own bed with a metal rod from the bed frame, survived with brain damage and no memory of the man who did it. Lynda Healy vanished from a basement bedroom that somebody had quietly made u...

Valentine's Day 2022. Kouri Richins gave her husband a fentanyl-laced sandwich. He got violently sick. He called friends and told them he thought he was dying. He survived. Seventeen days later, she put five times the lethal dose in a Moscow Mule. He didn't survive. Most people can't get past the horror of the act itself. But the seventeen-day window between the first attempt and the second is the...

The Anna Kepner case has a detail that sounds almost too clean to be true: the phone that may help convict her accused killer is the same phone he allegedly tried to make disappear. According to unsealed court records, after the 18-year-old was found dead aboard the Carnival Horizon, her phone was carried out of the cabin — pinging the ship's Wi-Fi the entire way — before it turned up smashed in a...

The Nancy Guthrie case has a piece of evidence the public still hasn't been allowed to hear: the 911 call that started everything. The family walked into her Tucson home around midday, realized she was gone, and was on the phone with dispatch within minutes. That recording is the front edge of the entire investigation — and to this day it's still locked away. Former FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coff...

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott has spent more than thirty years in forensic mental health. She doesn't start with the crime prosecutors allege. She starts with the trajectory — and traces every system that allegedly broke down along the way. David Anthony Burke was homeschooled in Houston. The only music allowed in his home was gospel until he was thirteen. His mother was his teacher, his entire so...

Before solitary, Richard Allen wouldn't break. According to defense filings, Detective Holeman lied to him for over an hour during the arrest interrogation. Allen's response: "I am not going to say something I did not do." Five months in the most restrictive solitary cell in a maximum-security prison changed that. IDOC's own policy imposed a thirty-day limit for inmates with Allen's mental health...

A wrench attack is an organized crypto-extortion operation. The networks running them recruit disposable operatives, use cryptocurrency payment channels that are nearly impossible to trace, and protect the architects behind layers of cutouts. They've been documented in cases across the country. CertiK, a leading blockchain security firm, placed Nancy Guthrie's name on its official 2026 wrench atta...

Law enforcement released the Richins home and moved on. Todd Gabler went in with body cameras and stayed for days. The 34-year defense investigator hired by Eric's family on a civil matter had already crossed a line he'd never crossed before — and what he documented inside that house added to a growing body of evidence the Sheriff's Office didn't have. By fall 2022, the criminal investigation had...

Anna Kepner's ex-boyfriend's father has publicly claimed he tried to warn the family. Timothy Hudson was allegedly fixated on Anna. He reportedly wanted to date her despite being her stepbrother. He was allegedly seen climbing on top of her while she slept during a FaceTime call. He reportedly always carried a large knife. Anna's aunt said Anna didn't want to go on the cruise. Anna was afraid of h...

The search warrant that launched the entire case against Richard Allen rested on a probable cause affidavit written by Detective Tony Liggett. According to the appellant's brief, that affidavit allegedly misrepresented what witnesses told investigators and omitted the details that would have undermined the connection between Allen and Bridge Guy. Betsy Blair described the man on the bridge as youn...

 Law enforcement released the Richins home and moved on. Todd Gabler went in with body cameras and stayed for days. The 34-year defense investigator hired by Eric's family on a civil matter had already crossed a line he'd never crossed before — and what he documented inside that house added to a growing body of evidence the Sheriff's Office didn't have. By fall 2022, the criminal investigation had...

Unknown DNA from an unidentified contributor was recovered from inside Nancy Guthrie's home. That sample has been routed through multiple federal and state labs instead of going directly to the FBI's laboratory at Quantico. Jennifer Coffindaffer spent 28 years as an FBI Special Agent and knows how lab routing decisions affect timelines — and she walks through whether this one is helping or hurting...

The FBI Director says his agency was locked out of the Nancy Guthrie investigation for four days. The Pima County Sheriff says federal agents were there from the start. An 84-year-old woman has been missing for over three months — and the agencies responsible for finding her are publicly tearing each other apart. Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her Tucson-area home, allegedly taken against her will...

Todd Gabler spent 34 years as a private investigator working exclusively for the defense. He had never taken a case on the prosecution's side. Then Eric Richins' family contacted him about a civil matter, and the phone records he pulled in the first few weeks redirected the entire case. The billing records documented constant contact between Kouri Richins and a housekeeper with a criminal record w...

CertiK tracks crypto-related kidnappings and home invasions across the globe. In their 2026 report, they added a name that stopped people in their tracks — Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Savannah Guthrie who vanished from her Tucson-area home. They classified her disappearance alongside verified wrench attacks in France, the UK, and a Scottsdale home invasion that happened the same day s...

Put three cases on the table and a pattern emerges about how the system decides who it holds and who it releases. We examine all three with a defense attorney and former prosecutor. In the Anna Kepner case, the eighteen-year-old's death aboard a cruise is being prosecuted in federal court. The sixteen-year-old defendant, indicted as an adult, remains free after a judge acknowledged a comparable ad...

The Summit County Sheriff's Office had the case. Todd Gabler had a cane, a laptop, and different rules. By the time he was done — over a year of independent investigation, nearly 50 interviews, GPS surveillance, phone record analysis, and a multi-day search of the Richins home — Gabler had assembled the evidence that helped break open a criminal case law enforcement hadn't been able to move. This...

The evidence file in Sandra Birchmore's case has reached a tipping point, and a judge just said so in writing. In denying bail to former Stoughton officer Matthew Farwell, the court described the evidence against him as very strong, if not overwhelming. We examine what's actually in that file. Birchmore, twenty-three and pregnant, was found dead in her Canton apartment in 2021. The state initially...