Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Nick Reiner case — a trust document written for an infant in 1993 is now reportedly the reason a judge may release more than $1.5 million in the middle of a murder case. And nobody updated it for thirty-two years. Rob and Michele Reiner allegedly created individual trusts for each of their children, funded separately from the larger family estate. The terms for Nick's trust reportedly required man...

By 1988, the LAPD had the ballistics. They had the pattern. Same .25 caliber weapon. Same ten-block radius in South LA. Same profile of women being killed. They knew a serial killer was responsible. They told nobody. Not the public. Not the families. Not Enietra Washington — the only woman who survived an encounter with Lonnie Franklin Jr. and could have identified him. For twenty-five years, mult...

Over a million dollars. That is what Asa Ellerup reportedly earned from a Peacock documentary about her ex-husband — the man who pleaded guilty to killing eight women, seven of them inside the house they shared for twenty-seven years. The families of those women are suing her. Valerie Mack’s son filed a wrongful death lawsuit naming Asa, her daughter Victoria, and Rex Heuermann. The claim is civil...

She answered the phone and heard the voice of the man who had just killed her sister. Melissa Barthelemy’s sister told a Suffolk County courtroom that Rex Heuermann called her from Melissa’s phone and described what he had done. That detail sat buried in the sentencing coverage. It should not have. Rex Heuermann’s Gilgo Beach sentencing delivered the scene the families had waited for: three consec...

Mackenzie Shirilla was thirteen years old when she started dating a sixteen-year-old. Her parents allowed it. No conditions, no conversations about what that meant for a freshman in high school. By seventeen she had moved into her boyfriend’s family home. Each line the Shirilla household refused to draw became the starting point for the next boundary that didn’t exist. The assistant prosecutor des...

Victoria Heuermann says she believes her father most likely killed eight women. Asa Ellerup's attorney says Asa may never believe it. Same confession. Same evidence. Same house — a house Asa refuses to leave, where she rebuilt the basement and moved into the room where Heuermann told her seven of the murders took place. This is the full three-part conversation between psychotherapist Shavaun Scott...

Nobody else in the Murdaugh case occupies Eric Bland's position. He's the attorney who built the financial crimes case that became the prosecution's motive theory. He represents the Satterfield family whose testimony the Supreme Court just called prejudicial. He represents Sandy Smith in the Stephen Smith investigation. And he's been inside this machinery since before the first trial began. In thi...

She did. Asa Ellerup gutted the basement where Rex Heuermann confessed to killing seven women — new floor, new walls, new doors — and moved into it. She sleeps where investigators believe the killings happened. She told a documentary crew the nightmares are constant and permanent. She chose not to attend sentencing. Valerie Mack's son, who was six when his mother was killed, has filed a lawsuit al...

The person who took Nancy Guthrie from her Tucson home has not been identified. And right now, the internet is making that job harder. Every viral theory that circulates — every fabricated lead, every comment-section accusation, every “gait analysis” from a grainy nighttime doorbell clip — generates tips that investigators are obligated to process. Tens of thousands of them. That’s tens of thousan...

Cindy Paulson gave Anchorage police everything. A name. An address. A vehicle. An airplane. The specific parking spot at Merrill Field. She was still wearing Robert Hansen's handcuffs when she told them. A security guard at the airfield independently confirmed her story. The evidence was verifiable, specific, and actionable. They didn't believe her. Hansen had a bakery and a reputation. Cindy was...

A huge sense of relief. That is how Rex Heuermann's defense attorney described what his client felt after pleading guilty to killing eight women over seventeen years. Not remorse. Not grief. Relief. Heuermann stood in a Suffolk County courtroom and answered every question from the DA in one or two words. Strangulation. Yes. Eight. He never elaborated. He never looked at the gallery. He planned eve...

Victoria Heuermann told the producers of the Peacock documentary that she now believes her father most likely committed the Gilgo Beach murders. She said on camera that while the family was on vacation, he was home killing and dismembering women in the basement. She arrived at that conclusion and said it out loud. Her mother has not arrived there. Asa Ellerup's attorney has said publicly that even...

Three of Mickey Stines’ deputies are named in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Judge Kevin Mullins’ widow. According to the suit, they saw their boss deteriorating — and they never warned the man he allegedly killed. The lawsuit says they had a legal duty to act. They didn’t. But it wasn’t just the deputies. Attorneys who sat across from Stines during a four-hour deposition three days before the...

The evidence that helped convict Adam Montgomery of murder the first time — multiple independent witnesses to a pattern of violence against Harmony, documented injuries nobody disputed — has been excluded from the retrial. The New Hampshire Supreme Court’s ruling severing the assault and murder charges means the prosecution walks into the Harmony Montgomery retrial without the material that made t...

SLED reopened Stephen Smith's case in 2021 because of something they found while investigating the Murdaugh murders. They've never said what it was. Eric Bland represents Sandy Smith and has been pushing for that answer since he took the case. He's also the attorney who represented the Satterfield sons and helped dismantle Murdaugh's financial empire. He sits at the intersection of both investigat...

Adam Montgomery is facing over forty-three years in prison without the murder conviction, plus another thirty-two and a half on firearms charges. He will die behind bars. And he still will not tell anyone where he put his daughter. The Harmony Montgomery case has reached the point where the legal system’s tools are running out and the one person with the answer has decided to keep it. The retrial...

Timothy Hudson met every condition of his release for months. No violations. Total compliance. And a federal judge just said none of it mattered — not against what he was reading. Anna Kepner’s accused killer is behind bars. Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres had released Hudson in February and held the line through prosecution pressure and public outcry. As recently as May 27, Torres kept him free aft...

Two hundred yards. Two football fields. With a shattered jaw, a fractured eye socket, stab wounds, and lacerations across her face and head. Holly Dunn could not call for help — her jaw was destroyed. She could barely see. But she could make out the shape of a house in the distance, and she walked toward it because lying down on railroad tracks in Kentucky at twenty years old was not how her story...

Adam Montgomery’s defense has a theory, and the retrial is where it gets tested: Kayla Montgomery killed Harmony on December 7, 2019, while Adam was out. He came back, found his daughter dead, and spent months covering it up. That’s the story they intend to put in front of a new jury in the Harmony Montgomery murder case. The theory has one thing going for it: Kayla is the only witness to the fata...

Adam Montgomery’s defense team asked for both charges — murder and assault — to be tried together. Then they tried to undo it. The trial judge said no. The New Hampshire Supreme Court said yes. And the Adam Montgomery murder conviction in the Harmony Montgomery case is now reversed. The ruling hinges on a concept the audience deserves to hear explained by someone who has actually litigated it: pre...

Everybody knows the slayer statute, even if they don’t know the name — it’s the law that kept the Menendez brothers from ever touching their parents’ fortune. So when word broke about what happened to Nick Reiner’s trust fund — a petition demanding more than a million and a half dollars from a trust his parents built — the internet ruled in one sentence: case closed, he gets nothing. This episode...

A blockchain security firm says this looks like a crypto hit. An anonymous tip crosses the border and nobody tells the sheriff. The crime scene evidence — weeds on the camera, a thirty-dollar backpack, an improvised forced entry — doesn’t match the prepared operations in the wrench attack database. And yet the theory keeps checking boxes. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer delivers a...

Strip away the twelve and a half hours of financial crimes testimony that dominated the first trial. Take out the emotional victim impact that the Supreme Court just called prejudicial. What's left is a circumstantial murder case built on a cell phone video and a lie about being at the kennels. Eric Bland says that might be enough. He also says it might not. Bland built the financial crimes case t...

Hudson’s step-grandmother went on national television and said what the public has been demanding for months: charge the parents. She called the cruise “a recipe for disaster.” She said the family knew the situation and put those kids together anyway. That’s not a stranger with an opinion. That’s a family member — someone who knows the dynamics inside that household — publicly breaking rank during...

Lynette Hooker disappearance: On the night Lynette Hooker went missing in the Bahamas, the Soulmate’s AIS tracking system — the transponder that broadcasts a vessel’s position to other boats and to authorities — stopped transmitting for eleven hours. It went dark. Then it came back on. If it had failed permanently, you’d assume a hardware malfunction. But shutting off and restarting is what happen...