Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

The defense asked for a laptop so Alex Murdaugh could review discovery from prison. The judge denied it after the warden said no inmate gets one. The compromise leaves Murdaugh dependent on his attorneys to bring their own devices to a conference room. With a trial date set for April 2027 and the defense claiming they need six months just to get eight new expert witnesses up to speed, the logistic...

The second note sent after Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping said she died shortly after being taken. Investigators called it a legitimate communication from the actual kidnappers. Not a hoax. Not one of the fakes that the FBI has been arresting people for. If that assessment holds, the people who took an 84-year-old grandmother from her home left behind a written admission that she died in their custody...

Everyone who watches the Taylor Parker interrogation in Maternal Instinct comes away unsettled, and most of them can't quite say why. This part of the series names it: it's not what she does on the tape. It's the thing you never see her do, across the entire interrogation. Look at the situation she's in. A young pregnant woman is dead. A baby is gone. Parker is in a hospital, surrounded by police,...

Three cases the audience has been fighting about. Three details nobody’s giving a straight answer on. Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke cover them all in one full-length discussion — Nancy Guthrie, Nick Reiner, and Alex Murdaugh — and challenge the conclusions the comments have already reached. The Guthrie sheriff only “thinks” the FBI arrested people for fake notes — he doesn’t know. The Reiner case...

The Bryan Kohberger case cost more than eight million dollars in public money. He confessed. There was no trial. And the people who paid for it have never been shown the full bill. This is the story of what happens when real money gets treated like it belongs to nobody. Nearly five and a half million went to his defense — attorneys, experts, investigators — all on the public dime after he was rule...

The South Carolina Supreme Court threw out Alex Murdaugh’s double-murder conviction after ruling that court clerk Becky Hill tampered with the jury. Now the defense is building the retrial around a piece of evidence the state never fully processed: DNA from an unknown male found under Maggie Murdaugh’s fingernails. Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke work through the audience’s hardest questions. Murdau...

Ask people what disturbs them about the Taylor Parker interrogation in Maternal Instinct, and most will reach for something she said. But the truly unsettling thing on that tape isn't the words. It's the way she carries herself while the words come out. Consider the moment she's living through. A young pregnant woman is dead. A baby is gone. Parker is in a hospital surrounded by police, the center...

Nick Reiner has been charged with stabbing his parents, director Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, to death in their Brentwood home. He has pleaded not guilty. And from his jail cell, he has filed a petition demanding over a million dollars from the trust his murdered parents established — money he says he needs to hire private defense counsel. Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke sit down to take ap...

Sheriff Nanos told a local radio host that he thinks the FBI has made “a number of arrests” for fake ransom notes in the Nancy Guthrie case. The word that matters is “thinks.” The lead investigator is not certain what the FBI has done inside his own case. Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke take apart what that uncertainty reveals about the state of this investigation. Nanos dismissed the TMZ emailer as...

Most coverage of the Taylor Parker case jumps straight to the hospital. But the Taylor Parker interrogation in Maternal Instinct can't really be understood without the year that came first. For months before any of this, Parker had been telling the people closest to her that she was pregnant — and none of it was true. Keeping a lie like that running takes a specific kind of person. You have to mai...

The Nancy Guthrie case pulls in two directions at once. The notes contradict each other. One set of reporting says the investigation is stuck; another says an arrest is near. Both can't be true. In this full conversation, retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer works through all three fronts. The notes: a message reportedly saying the 84-year-old is "buried with nature," a separate TMZ tip...

Days before Alex Murdaugh returns to court for the first hearing of his retrial, his defense team filed three motions. Two are the kind of thing you'd expect. One could matter more than anything else in the case. The first asks to move the trial out of the entire Fourteenth Judicial Circuit — five South Carolina counties where, the defense argues, the Murdaugh name has been tied to the legal syste...

For months the Nancy Guthrie case looked stalled — until a retired FBI agent claimed it's about to break. On Megyn Kelly's show, Maureen O'Connell said her sources indicate investigators are closing in on "porch guy," the masked man filmed outside the 84-year-old's home the night she vanished. She put her confidence at 75 percent and said an arrest would open the floodgates. Retired FBI Special Ag...

Most people know the Taylor Parker story from the headlines. The version captured on the hospital bodycams in Maternal Instinct is so much worse. This breakdown starts at the beginning of that footage: the moment Parker arrives at the ER cradling a newborn and telling everyone she'd just given birth on the side of the road. She'd made the same claim minutes earlier on a 911 call, sobbing that she...

The uncomfortable possibility in the Nancy Guthrie case is that nobody is close to anything. Howard Blum's reporting in Air Mail describes investigators who privately fear an early mistake already cost them the case — suspects cleared one after another, leads drying up, the task force forced back to the ransom notes for lack of anything better. Brian Entin's sources say the same: the person who to...

There is no single note in the Nancy Guthrie case. There's a contradicting pile of them. A message reportedly tied to the man who took the 84-year-old from her Tucson home claims she's "buried with nature." A separate sender was telling TMZ "time is no longer of the essence." And whether the kidnapper ever apologized depends entirely on which outlet you trust. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Co...

A caller provided information about what Nancy Guthrie was wearing. That detail narrows the universe of possible sources dramatically. Someone who knows what an abduction victim was wearing either saw her after she was taken, received a description from someone who did, or was part of the operation. The FBI has been fielding tips since February. This one carries a different weight. Separately, Nan...

The Duggar family built a brand on the image of wholesome Christian parenting. Joseph and Kendra presented themselves as the clean branch — the ones who stayed out of the headlines, who smiled through depositions, who begged judges to seal documents. But their children are now describing what life looked like inside the household, and it maps directly onto the IBLP doctrine the family has never pu...

Prosecutors asked Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson about the shirt, the towel, the pajamas. Three hours on the stand. But Blanca had been inside that household for twenty years. She knew things about the Murdaugh home that no crime scene technician could learn in a walkthrough — which drawers Maggie opened, how Alex’s routine shifted, what the house felt like when something was wrong. In her first extend...

The kennel video destroyed Alex Murdaugh’s alibi at the first trial. Audio placed him at the dog kennels minutes before Maggie and Paul were shot. Multiple witnesses identified his voice. He admitted he lied. The jury convicted in three hours. Now Dick Harpootlian says his team has a strategy to counter it — and he won’t say what it is. On the prosecution side, the Supreme Court has ordered the fi...

An anonymous tip pointed investigators toward a shallow grave south of the border. Nancy Guthrie’s home is less than seventy miles from Mexico. She was reportedly taken from her bed, without shoes or medication, in the middle of the night. The logistics required to move an eighty-four-year-old woman across an international border suggest planning, vehicles, and a destination — not a random crime....

Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty to eight Gilgo Beach murders. Three consecutive life sentences. A hundred years stacked on top. No appeal. The case is closed — in New York. But the judge who sentenced him said “eight that we know of,” and South Carolina and Nevada both have death penalty statutes and both have properties connected to Heuermann where women disappeared. Before the sentence, Heuermann a...

Rob and Michele Reiner built a trust for their son when he was a baby. They wrote the terms. They chose the language — “mandatory and unconditional.” Half at thirty, the rest at thirty-five. No conditions. No discretion. No off switch. Nick turned thirty in September 2023. The money reportedly never came. Twenty-seven months later, his parents were dead. The 136-page probate petition his lawyers f...

Judge Edwin Torres released Timothy Hudson four months ago. He called the government’s case “a much closer call” and said he would not characterize it as strong. Then on June 10th, the same judge reversed himself, ordered Hudson detained, and said from the bench that he could “snap at any time” and that no conditions of release can protect the community. That reversal tells you something changed b...

Two theories are converging on the same conclusion: Nancy Guthrie may not have been the intended target. Her neighbor has maintained a walk-in vault of rare gems at his property for more than four decades. His biggest annual exhibition event coincided with the week Nancy disappeared. The Jewelers’ Security Alliance issued a crime alert citing the Guthrie family’s industry connections. Google Maps...