Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Every person charged alongside Keith Raniere took a deal. Every single one. When they learned what was on his hard drive, the plea agreements came fast. He was the only one who maintained nothing was wrong. NXIVM operated for two decades out of suburban Albany, New York, disguised as a self-improvement company called Executive Success Programs. Members paid thousands for courses, wore colored sash...

There's a reason Sheriff Chris Nanos keeps using the phrase "getting closer." The Nancy Guthrie investigation is sitting on top of two specific bodies of evidence that — if processed right — could end this case. Whether the office actually has the capacity and the strategy to deliver on that potential is a different conversation. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer joins Tony Brueski t...

Something has shifted in the Nancy Guthrie investigation, and Sheriff Chris Nanos isn't pretending otherwise. He's confirmed he's no longer talking directly with Nancy's family — Savannah Guthrie, her siblings, none of them. Every family conversation now routes through the FBI. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer sits down with Tony Brueski to read this development the way only someone...

Five days after the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously overturned Alex Murdaugh's murder convictions, his defense team filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Becky Hill. Seventeen pages. Section 1983. Six hundred thousand dollars in damages directed to the receivership. Jim Griffin said publicly the money isn't the point — the subpoena power is. Depositions. Sworn testimony. The abilit...

The defense asked for additional time to file a motion for a new trial and indicated they need to retain an expert. The appellate lanes are identifiable: alleged prosecutorial monitoring of attorney-client jail calls, the Crozier recantation, the venue challenge, and sufficiency of the evidence. Defense attorney and former felony prosecutor Eric Faddis examines each one and separates what has genu...

The contrast at the center of the Reiner case right now is almost impossible to reconcile. Jake Reiner published a raw Substack essay about losing both parents — milestones stolen, a career Rob and Michele won't get to see, grief that doesn't quiet down. From inside Twin Towers Correctional Facility, his brother Nick is reportedly planning something very different: a tell-all designed to name name...

A conservation officer interviewed Richard Allen two days after Abby Williams and Libby German were found murdered. Allen said he'd been on the trail. He gave his name. He answered every question. And then his report was misfiled under the wrong name and sat in a box for five and a half years. That one clerical failure cost the investigation half a decade — time that was spent, according to the de...

Three separate grand juries heard testimony from friends, managers, and family members of David Anthony Burke — people allegedly close enough to what prosecutors describe that they were questioned under oath. The alleged murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez is the center of this case. The alleged failures surrounding it are what make it a systemic story. According to prosecutors, Celeste was fourteen...

The defense in the Anna Kepner case moved faster than virtually any federal team facing two life sentences. Waived the transfer hearing. Requested adult prosecution. Pushed toward a June 1 trial date with roughly three and a half months from first discovery to jury selection. Then eighteen days out, they asked for ninety more. Document 74 — an Unopposed Motion to Continue Trial — cited the governm...

Jim Griffin confirmed at the defense press conference that unknown male DNA was recovered from under Maggie Murdaugh's fingernails and never run through CODIS. Physical evidence from the person who was fatally shot, documented in the investigation, sitting unmatched in an evidence file. The defense has plans for it at retrial. That revelation sits alongside a catalog of alleged SLED investigative...

The defense team didn't file this lawsuit just to hold Becky Hill accountable. They filed it to investigate her. Civil discovery gives them tools the state never used — subpoenas, depositions, sworn testimony under penalty of perjury — and the complaint makes clear they intend to use every one of them. The Section 1983 claim alleges Hill deprived Alex Murdaugh of his constitutional right to a fair...

The sentencing memo in the Kouri Richins case reads like an operational log. Prosecutors documented what they describe as a sustained campaign from inside a jail cell targeting every person connected to the prosecution — and it didn't stop until sentencing day. A fake dating profile created for the lead detective and posted online. What prosecutors characterize as false DCFS reports filed against...

Strip away twelve hours of stolen-money testimony and the Alex Murdaugh case has to stand on its physical evidence for the first time. What's left is a crime scene that sat in the rain, family members who walked through it, no recovered weapon, no DNA on the defendant, and an investigative lead that reportedly went nowhere. Blanca Simpson, the Murdaugh housekeeper, told investigators about a suspi...

Federal agents had names before the ships docked. Operation Tidal Wave targeted 27 crew members across eight cruise ships in San Diego based on intelligence from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. CBP and HSI coordinated the boarding. Every one of the 27 was detained. Every one was deported. Not a single charge was filed. KPBS confirmed federal prosecutors in both San Diego an...

Three boys wrote impact statements describing locked bedrooms, animals dying from neglect, a sibling sneaking meals to a brother who'd been shut away, and a childhood defined by fear. Their therapists read the words in open court because the children cannot be in the same room with Kouri Richins. Every one of them asked the judge to keep her locked up forever. They said they finally feel safe. Kou...

 Buster Murdaugh testified for the defense at his father's murder trial and told a jury Alex wasn't capable of killing Maggie and Paul. Then Alex was convicted, and Buster disappeared. Three years of near-silence. Barely any prison calls. A quiet marriage. A life built at distance. Now the South Carolina Supreme Court has reversed the convictions, the retrial is approaching, and sources say Buster...

Three licensed therapists read statements in open court that Kouri Richins' children wrote by hand. The boys are too young to stand at a podium and face the woman a jury says took their father. So they put it on paper. The details are specific. One child woke to sirens and felt powerless. Another took on the role of caretaker — getting his younger brother to the bus, making sure he had food. The y...

Two threads of the Murdaugh case worth pulling on — what was already in motion before June 7, 2021, and what the prosecution may not get to use at a second trial. Maggie Murdaugh had reportedly retained a divorce attorney. She was living apart from Alex. June 7 was a day she did not want to spend at Moselle, and two witnesses testified to exactly that. She went anyway. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scot...

Becky Hill didn’t just make careless comments to Murdaugh’s jury — the Supreme Court found she fabricated evidence to remove a juror she believed favored the defense. But was she the only one pulling strings? I’ve been digging into the financial trail and the network of connections that surrounded this verdict, and the lone-wolf explanation is getting harder to defend. Hill was planning a book dea...

In Utah, a woman convicted of poisoning her husband with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl stands at sentencing, promises her sons she'll overturn the conviction, and has already written from jail that the people who prosecuted her "picked the wrong one." In South Carolina, a disbarred attorney whose murder convictions were just thrown out by the Supreme Court responds by suing the court cler...

The FBI’s former Deputy Director walked out of federal service and into Royal Caribbean within days. A former Coast Guard officer joined CLIA as their regulatory chief. The industry has spent an estimated $70 million lobbying Congress. This is how the rules stay the way they are. Foreign-flag registration shields the industry from U.S. taxes and jurisdiction simultaneously. The CVSSA created a rep...

Alex Murdaugh's defense team filed a seventeen-page Section 1983 civil rights complaint against former Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill in federal court in Charleston — five days after the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously overturned his murder convictions based on what the justices called "shocking jury interference." The complaint seeks six hundred thousand dollars in compensator...

The question people keep asking has a simple answer. Yes, Alex Murdaugh is serving 40 years federal. Yes, he’ll die in prison regardless of what happens in a retrial. And no, that is not a reason to walk away from the murders of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. Tony Brueski makes the case for why the retrial isn’t a choice — it’s the only path to justice. Maggie was 52 years old. Paul was 22. They were k...

Jane Whaley’s 2004 assault conviction was the only time the legal system came close to holding her personally accountable. Five years of appeals later, it was overturned. And according to former members, the church learned it could outlast the courts. The pattern repeated across decades. More than forty former members testified to investigators in the 1990s — no charges. Inside Edition aired an in...

The prosecution's sentencing memo included a message Kouri Richins wrote before the judge even ruled. She said she'd "expose this county, the prosecution, the judge, the Richins, the investigation." She wrote "they picked the wrong one" and "they haven't seen anything yet." This isn't speculation about what she might do — it's what she already put in writing from a jail cell. Eric Faddis breaks do...