Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Step back from any single case and look at the full picture. Chandler in 1993: settled for millions. Arvizo in 2005: acquitted, family destroyed on the stand. Francia: initially denied abuse, then changed his story, family settled. Robson and Safechuck: defended Jackson under oath, reversed after death, suing for hundreds of millions. Cascios: defended him publicly for decades, accepted millions i...

The central allegation in "Broken Plea" is that the Ka-Bar knife sheath — the prosecution's key piece of physical evidence linking Bryan Kohberger to the murders through DNA — allegedly had chain of custody problems serious enough to be challenged at trial. It's the kind of claim that sounds explosive on a book jacket. There's one problem: the expert making it didn't include it in his own filed re...

A Yemassee police chief named Greg Alexander was at the Moselle crime scene the night Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were killed. One month later, Alex Murdaugh wrote him a personal check for $5,000 and backdated it to March. The chief said it was a loan for his parents. He never explained the backdating. He did post on his reelection Facebook page: "I'm not a cat. I don't cover up no doo-doo." That's o...

For years, Bryan Kohberger gave the world nothing. He sat silent through court hearings. He showed zero emotion while the families of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin confronted him at sentencing. When the judge asked if he wanted to speak, he said three words — "I respectfully decline." Then, from a maximum security cell, he finally opened up. Not to a reporter. No...

Prosecutors announced they allegedly found a significant amount of child sexual abuse material on David Burke's phone — and terabytes of iCloud data are still reportedly being downloaded and analyzed. That discovery sits on top of charges of first-degree murder with special circumstances, continuous sexual abuse of a child under fourteen, and unlawful mutilation of human remains. And it introduces...

People with no involvement in the investigation have allegedly fabricated claims, implied motive, and named cleared Guthrie family members as suspects — turning an 84-year-old woman's disappearance into content. The family has been fully cleared by law enforcement. The accusations kept coming anyway. Nancy Guthrie has been missing from her Tucson-area home for over three months. Blood confirmed as...

She Googled “luxury prisons for the rich in america” while the investigation into her husband’s death was still open. She searched her own name and net worth. She checked whether deleted texts could be recovered and whether the FBI gets involved in cases like hers. And then she published a children’s book about grief, went on local television to promote it, and performed the role of devastated wid...

Two of the most psychologically complex cases in recent true crime converge in a single episode — with a psychotherapist who studies the minds behind extreme violence analyzing both. Bryan Kohberger's guilty plea closed the Idaho murders case. But three never-before-published letters from jail have opened a window into his psychological state that the trial process never did. Written to his dog, h...

The mothers are the part nobody talks about enough. Joy Robson moved her family to Los Angeles because Michael Jackson told her to. She left her seven-year-old son alone with the most famous adult on earth and felt lucky about it. If Robson is telling the truth, that mother has to live with the knowledge that she handed her child to someone who was hurting him and smiled while she did it. That kin...

Three separate grand juries. Friends, managers, family members — all subpoenaed. That is the scope of the orbit prosecutors examined in the case against David Anthony Burke, known as D4vd, now charged with the first-degree murder of fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. Burke has pleaded not guilty and maintains his innocence. But the question this part of the case forces is not about guilt o...

Bryan Kohberger is serving four consecutive life sentences for the Idaho murders. He pled guilty to all counts. And now a book called “Broken Plea” is asking you to question everything about his case. We read the entire book. We traced every claim about Kohberger back to its source. And we found something the book does not want you to notice: nearly every explosive revelation comes from defense ex...

This is the full conversation. No cuts, no breaks — the complete story of Greater Grace World Outreach told by two people who lived inside it and survived. Elita Galvin didn't choose Greater Grace. She was born into the original location in southern Maine at four months old. Her father was violent. Church leaders knew and responded with pastoral shuffling and scripture-backed silence. She grew up,...

Prosecutors describe an alleged pattern in the D4vd case that goes far beyond a single act of violence. David Anthony Burke allegedly made contact with Celeste Rivas Hernandez when she was eleven. The relationship allegedly became sexual when she was thirteen and he was eighteen. By the time prosecutors allege he killed her, she was fourteen — reportedly living in his home, traveling with him, and...

Bryan Kohberger's guilty plea closed the criminal case. It did not close the questions about who he is. A new book on the Idaho murders has published, for the first time, three letters Kohberger wrote from the Latah County Jail in October 2023 — to his dog, his sister, and his family. The content is striking not for what it says, but for what is entirely absent: any connection to reality. He claim...

The body was barely cold and Kouri Richins was already executing the next phase. The morning after her husband died, she signed closing papers on a multimillion-dollar mansion he’d argued against buying. Two days later, she drilled open his safe to get at the cash inside. And then came the moment she learned Eric had outsmarted her from beyond the grave — he’d cut her from his will, his life insur...

A man who reportedly had a documented history of violence and multiple wives — several of whom died under unexplained circumstances. A daughter who has been alleging for nearly two decades that he killed dozens of women and buried them in wells on the family property. An FBI investigation that lasted parts of three days. And now a documentary that reportedly features an alleged accomplice speaking...

Michael Jackson walked out of a California courthouse a free man. Then he left the country. Then he never set foot in Neverland again. Whatever the verdict meant legally, it cost him something no jury could return. This episode is the 2005 criminal trial in full. The Martin Bashir documentary where Jackson held a boy’s hand on camera and told the world that sharing his bed with children wasn’t sex...

A daughter's allegations. A community's reported silence. A failed investigation. And now, reportedly, an alleged accomplice speaking on camera for the first time. The Paramount+ documentary My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders represents the most comprehensive public examination of the case against Donald Dean Studey — a man his daughter Lucy alleges killed dozens of women in rural Iowa ove...

Forget what you think you know about the Tupac Shakur case. The narrative just shifted. Mopreme Shakur has filed a wrongful death lawsuit that treats the 1996 Las Vegas shooting not as a solved crime with a single suspect — but as a conspiracy with participants who have never been identified, never been questioned under oath, and never been held accountable. The lawsuit targets Keffe D, who faces...

What do you do when you hire investigators to look into your own organization and they come back saying your top leadership needs to go? If you're Greater Grace World Outreach, apparently, you publish the report and then do as little as possible about it. The GRACE investigation was 172 pages. It named four leaders who should be removed. It described an authoritarian culture rooted in fear-based m...

Four cadaver dog alerts. A property that reportedly spans over 400 acres. Numerous wells — some wet, some dry, many filled in over the decades. And the FBI spent parts of three days there before announcing they found nothing and walking away. That's the 2022 Green Hollow investigation in a nutshell — and it's the investigation that  Lucy Studey-McKiddy says was doomed from the start because they a...

She carried the bags of lye. She was a child. And she says she knew exactly what was at the bottom of that well. Lucy Studey-McKiddy has spent nearly two decades alleging that her father, Donald Dean Studey, was responsible for the deaths of dozens of women in rural Iowa. The alleged killings reportedly stretched back to the 1970s, centered on a remote wooded area called Green Hollow near Thurman...

Eric Richins called his business partner on Valentine’s Day 2022 with fear in his voice. He’d just eaten a sandwich his wife made him and couldn’t breathe. He broke out in hives. He grabbed his son’s EpiPen. And he told his friend what he believed was happening: his wife was trying to end his life. Two weeks later, he was dead. In part two of our five-part definitive series, we dissect the plan be...

The evidentiary landscape across these three cases reveals patterns that your questions have been tracking with precision. From forensic trace analysis in the D4VD case to chain of custody disputes in Idaho to excluded alternative suspect evidence in Delphi, the investigative details expose alleged systemic gaps at every level. In the D4VD case, prosecutors say LAPD’s Trace Analysis Unit found pla...

The twenty-three million dollar settlement is the single most-cited fact in the Michael Jackson saga. His defenders say it proves nothing except that his team wanted the circus to end. His accusers say no innocent person signs that check. Both arguments have weight. And neither one settles the question. This episode takes you through the 1993 Chandler case with the kind of detail that forces you t...