Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

This episode is about the machinery. The subpoenas, the indictment, the pretrial legal battles, and the courtroom moments that shaped this case before a single juror was seated. The prosecution subpoenaed the FBI Lab at Quantico, the Ohio BCI, Apple, Verizon, WhatsApp, Meta, Google, Microsoft, social media platforms, financial institutions, and software companies. They filed motions to compel comp...

Mopreme Shakur filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of the estate of Mutulu Shakur, naming Keffe D and up to one hundred unnamed John Doe co-conspirators in the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur. The complaint alleges a conspiracy that extends far beyond the occupants of the white Cadillac that pulled alongside Tupac's car near the Las Vegas Strip on September 7, 1996. ...

His daughter says she carried the lye. His wife's re-autopsy reportedly revealed a possible defensive wound. And an alleged accomplice has reportedly broken years of silence. The case of Donald Dean Studey and Green Hollow keeps getting harder to ignore.  Lucy Studey-McKiddy alleges her father killed dozens of women over decades in the remote hills near Thurman, Iowa — Fremont County, about forty...

Her father stopped her math education at fractions. His law degree couldn’t be used in his own state. She had the test scores for scholarships but no transcript the real world recognized. The Wisdom Booklets — the Duggar family curriculum — produced a generation of adults who are now rebuilding from scratch. Filling in academic gaps. Unlearning trained self-blame. Teaching their own children the t...

Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead from multiple stab wounds inside their Brentwood home on December 14, 2025. Their son Nick was arrested hours later and has been held without bail at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility ever since, charged with two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances — making him eligible for the death penalty under California law.  This week, the case...

Bryan Kohberger pled guilty and is serving four consecutive life sentences for the murders of four University of Idaho students. No trial. No cross-examination. No jury verdict. And now, the forensic expert his own defense hired is alleging that the knife sheath — the only physical evidence tying Kohberger to the crime scene through DNA — had a chain of custody so flawed it could have been challen...

Within one hour of finding Sandra Birchmore’s body, officers told the medical examiner there had been no foul play. That call shaped everything. The medical examiner never visited the scene. Canton police misidentified the murder weapon as a scarf. Investigators never compelled a DNA sample from the man seen on surveillance entering Sandra’s building the night she was last seen alive. They let him...

Three perspectives. One serial killer. And a family that will never be the same. The Peacock documentary on Rex Heuermann gave us access that no trial, no courtroom, no press conference ever could have — the private moments when a wife and a daughter learned the full scope of what the man they loved had done. Asa Ellerup's story is one of a woman whose entire life before Rex was defined by trauma...

In every case like this, there's a risk that the victim becomes a footnote in someone else's story. This episode makes sure that doesn't happen to Ashley Flynn. She graduated from Tippecanoe High School and Lee University. She came home to Tipp City and never left. She taught elementary school, substituted across the district, coached seventh-grade girls volleyball, and taught bible lessons at Lif...

Some filings lay out a theory. This one lays out an alleged horror. Tony Brueski reads through the People's Brief against David Anthony Burke — the nine-page prosecution roadmap that the defense tried to seal and the judge made public. What Deputy DA Beth Silverman put on the record describes an alleged sexual relationship with a child that started at thirteen, a murder prosecutors say was driven...

Rex Heuermann killed women in the same room where he grew up. The same room where he went through puberty. The same room where, according to the FBI's John Douglas, the violent fantasies that would eventually consume him first took root. He never left that room — not psychologically, not physically. He converted his childhood bedroom into a space his own wife was forbidden to enter, filled it with...

Bill Gothard reduced the French Revolution to a lesson about disobedience. The Wisdom Booklets — the Duggar family’s curriculum — taught children that all authority is divine, that questioning it invites destruction, and that the separation of church and state is rebellion against God. The law sections framed Old Testament codes as binding civil law. The Character First program carried Gothard’s i...

Ten feet. That's the distance between where Victoria Heuermann sat as a child watching television and playing video games, and the room where her father strangled, murdered, and dismembered women over the course of nearly two decades. Ten feet between a normal childhood and a crime scene. She didn't know it then. She knows it now. And she went back to that house, walked into that basement room, li...

She was adopted and never felt wanted. Assaulted at sixteen. Attempted to take her own life before she was out of her teens. And then a man named Rex Heuermann showed up and said move in, I'll handle everything. For a woman who had never once felt safe in her own skin, that offer wasn't romance — it was survival. And it sealed her fate for the next three decades. The Peacock documentary on Rex Heu...

At 9:27 PM on February 1, 2021, Matthew Farwell entered Sandra Birchmore’s apartment building. At 9:56 PM, he left. Twenty-nine minutes. Sandra was never seen alive again. When her body was found three days later, she was wearing the same clothes. Federal prosecutors allege that inside those twenty-nine minutes, Farwell strangled Sandra and her unborn son, then staged the scene. The forensic evide...

This is the story Bob Motta has been waiting three years to tell — and he's telling it here first. The criminal defense attorney and Defense Diaries podcast host spent sixteen months investigating the Don Studey case on the ground in Iowa. He made contact with Lucy Studey-McKiddy, the daughter who alleges her father was the Green Hollow Killer, and spent over a hundred hours vetting her claims.  H...

Before the arrest, before the 911 call, before the charges  --  there was a man with a guitar and a public image built on faith, family, and music. Caleb Flynn grew up as a pastor's son in Braham, Minnesota. He drummed in his father's praise band as a child, played on state championship basketball teams, studied music ministry at Lee University, and spent over a decade leading worship at churches...

Over a hundred hours of phone calls. Sixteen months of investigation. Boots on the ground in Green Hollow. And one question that still doesn't have a clean answer — is Lucy Studey-McKiddy telling the truth about the alleged Green Hollow Killer? Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta approached the Don Studey case the way he approaches every case — looking for the lie.  He probed Lucy's stories for re...

From inside solitary, Joseph Duggar has been performing the role of a man reborn. Bible readings. Hours of prayer. A new translation because the old one didn’t work anymore. He found the Book of Ruth and told Kendra it encouraged him — the story of an outcast restored by grace. He has cast himself as the character who deserves mercy. He never opened Matthew 18. The chapter where Jesus places a chi...

A five-year-old girl sits in front of Wisdom Booklet 36. She can’t fully read it yet. But the framework is already being installed: if something happens to you, the first question is what did you do wrong. The Duggar family curriculum taught girls that male lust was their fault to manage. Eye trap quizzes. Modesty frameworks built on Old Testament law. Biblical victims rewritten as cautionary tale...

Parents in rural Iowa warned their children for decades — don't go back into the hollow, stay away from Don Studey. He was the boogeyman of Green Hollow. And when criminal defense attorney Bob Motta went into the small towns of Tabor and Thurman to start interviewing locals about the alleged Green Hollow Killer, he found out the legend ran deeper than anyone knew.  A deputy on the fence line at th...

He wasn't invited. He drove six hours anyway. And he ended up closer to the Green Hollow dig than most of the local cops who were actually assigned to be there. Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta had spent months investigating the allegations that Donald Dean Studey — the alleged Green Hollow Killer — buried dozens of women in wells on a remote Iowa property near Thurman in Fremont County. He'd b...

Sandra Birchmore believed Matthew Farwell was coming around. He brought ginger ale to her apartment. She texted a friend that things were getting better. She was pregnant, making plans, contacting lawyers, preparing for a future she would never see. Farwell was making different plans entirely. According to federal prosecutors, Farwell told one person that if Sandra didn’t end the pregnancy, he wou...

Three cases. All of them active. All of them moving fast. And all of them driven by the same fundamental failure: the people closest to the victims are allegedly the ones responsible for the harm. Nick Reiner is being held without bail on two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances after allegedly stabbing his parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, inside their Brentwood home. He’s pled...

On February 16, 2026, a 911 call came in from a quiet cul-de-sac in Tipp City, Ohio. A man, barely able to speak through sobs, reported that someone had broken into his home and shot his wife. She was in bed with two gunshot wounds to the head. Their two young daughters were asleep in another room. He said the garage door was wide open. He said he didn't know if the intruder was still there. What...