Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Everyone covering the Alex Murdaugh retrial is fixated on one half of Judge Debra McCaslin's story — her reported history with defense attorney Dick Harpootlian. This episode digs into the other half, and it's the half that should worry the defense. Before the South Carolina Supreme Court handed McCaslin exclusive control of the Murdaugh case — the motions, the evidentiary fights, and the retrial...

A hundred and thirty-six pages. That is the length of the probate petition Nick Reiner just filed to force the release of over $1.5 million from the trust fund Rob and Michele Reiner created for their children. He wants the money for a high-powered defense attorney. He wants it for soap and socks. And he wants it before a conviction can trigger the one law designed to stop him. California’s slayer...

On January 8, 2005, the Wichita Police Department received a typewritten question from the BTK Killer. Dennis Rader had left it inside an empty cereal box in the bed of a pickup truck at a Home Depot parking lot. He wanted the police to tell him, in writing, whether a floppy disk could be traced back to his computer. He asked them to be honest. They lied. In the fifth and final chapter of host Ton...

In the latest Nick Reiner case update, the fight over Rob and Michele Reiner's money turns on a document older than the internet: a trust established for Nick when he was an infant. That document is now the center of a probate war. According to Nick's petition, his parents didn't leave the payouts to anyone's discretion — they wrote "mandatory and unconditional" distributions into the trust itself...

Coral Michelle Smith has been in and out of the Pima County criminal justice system for fifteen years — prison four times, probation revoked twice, a kidnapping charge dismissed through a plea deal — and on May 29th she was allegedly free to kidnap someone and commit aggravated assault with a deadly weapon at an intersection less than seven miles from Nancy Guthrie’s Tucson home. That proximity ma...

His fans cared enough to call the police a thousand times. He was never in danger. He let them worry for four years because it was making him rich. His creators trusted him enough to build on his platform. It collapsed and he sold it for parts. His wife went through the worst week of her life and he was on TMZ before she finished recovering. Every person who gets close to Jesse Ridgway becomes som...

All three parts of our interview with Christine Marie, woven together into one extended conversation — the cult psychologist and survivor who walked into Samuel Bateman's FLDS inner circle, fed the FBI the evidence that ended his freedom for fifty years, and is still living in Short Creek today doing the work nobody else will. She wasn't even supposed to be there for him. She and her husband Tolga...

A lot of the women listening to this have survived a relationship with someone like Jesse Ridgway. The manipulator. The performer. The partner who takes your worst day and makes it about them. And when a man like that shows up on your feed doing exactly the things the person in your life used to do, something in your brain says: I need to see this named. I need to watch someone call it what it is....

Eric Richins told his sister Katie that Kouri Richins was the most evil person he had ever met. He told her he would live through hell every single day until his youngest son turned eighteen rather than risk a family court giving Kouri equal custody. Katie begged him to leave. His other sister Amy begged him to leave. He had already sat down with a divorce attorney. He had the legal groundwork and...

In 2023, an Oklahoma sheriff named Eddie Virden announced a multi-state task force to investigate cold cases potentially connected to Dennis Rader during the years Rader was officially considered inactive. In August of that year, deputies excavated a property near Rader's former Park City, Kansas, home using cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar. In March of 2024, Missouri authorities official...

The Psycho Series hit a billion views. The pregnancy announcement got seventeen million views on X alone. The outrage pays. But is the paycheck the engine, or is it something the paycheck can’t explain? Jesse Ridgway has been escalating for twenty years. Each stunt darker, each one pushing further into territory a normal person wouldn’t touch. That pattern — needing more extreme material to genera...

Ashley Ridgway is either a participant in a staged hoax or a real woman whose husband turned the worst week of her life into a media tour. Either way, a psychotherapist has something to say about the dynamic she’s living in. Jesse Ridgway has spent twenty years fabricating events and presenting them as real — staged family violence that generated a billion views and over a thousand 911 calls, a cr...

Every woman listening to this knows this man. The partner who takes your worst day and makes it about them. The guy who starts every fire and tells everyone you’re the one who’s crazy. The person who backs you into a corner and acts stunned when you swing. Jesse Ridgway has been this person for twenty years. The faces change. The move never does. His fans cared about him enough to call the police...

A father charged with murder. A case thrown out by a judge who found a “coverup.” A sheriff’s race won by the defendant. And a county that may not be done answering for what happened. This is the full three-part conversation with an outside legal analyst covering every dimension of the Aaron Spencer case after the dismissal. The ruling is the foundation. Judge Ralph Wilson spent 19 pages explainin...

The end of the Samuel Bateman story isn't the end. He's behind bars for fifty years and the women he claimed as wives are doing something almost nobody wants to talk about — going back to him. Not all of them. But enough of them that the question stops being a fluke and starts being a pattern. In this third and final part of our three-part conversation with Christine Marie, we get into the truth t...

The dashcam SD card in Aaron Spencer’s case didn’t vanish in a vacuum. It disappeared inside a department with a documented history of evidence problems stretching back over a decade. In 2021, a seventeen-year-old named Hunter Brittain was shot and killed by a Lonoke County deputy during a traffic stop. Brittain was unarmed. He was carrying an antifreeze container. The deputy’s body camera was not...

Mackenzie Shirilla is behind bars for driving a hundred miles per hour into a brick wall and killing Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. She was seventeen. A judge called her actions controlled, methodical, and purposeful. She’s serving life with parole eligibility in 2037. And since Netflix put her case back in the spotlight, her social media presence has exploded — tens of thousands of followers,...

Dennis Rader was the council president of Christ Lutheran Church in Park City, Kansas, on the morning of February 25, 2005. The Wichita Police Department was, at the same moment, on its way to arrest him. The thing that had identified him as BTK was a metadata trace from a Microsoft Word document he had saved to a church computer in his role as council president. He had volunteered for the council...

The front door of the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office is about to open for Aaron Spencer — not as a defendant, but as the boss. Spencer beat incumbent Sheriff John Staley by double digits in a three-way Republican primary. The county tilts hard Republican. Brian Mitchell Sr., the Democratic candidate, faces an uphill climb. Spencer’s path to the sheriff’s badge runs through a general election that...

Eleven failures. One detective. One missing SD card. One 19-page order from a judge who chose the most extreme remedy available — full dismissal. Judge Ralph Wilson’s ruling in the Aaron Spencer case didn’t stop at identifying problems. He catalogued a pattern: no photographs of the dashcam’s position in Fosler’s truck, no documentation in the incident report, no chain-of-custody record, no eviden...

The detective was fired. The prosecutor is retiring. The county clerk resigned months ago citing persecution. And at the center of it all is a nineteen-page judicial order that documents — in constitutional detail — how the most critical evidence in the Aaron Spencer murder case was mishandled, lost, and never accounted for. Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. found that Detective Robbie McCain violated the Lo...

The evidence in the Elijah Vue case tells one story. The two people charged in his death allegedly tried to tell another. Three-year-old Elijah was reported missing from a Two Rivers, Wisconsin apartment in February 2024. His mother’s boyfriend Jesse Vang said the boy wandered off during a nap. His mother Katrina Baur, 150 miles away, sent Vang a message within sixty seconds telling him what to sa...

Samuel Bateman wasn't hiding. He was operating in the open, on a street where the local police knew his name, in a town where the sheriff drove past his house every day. The most disturbing question about his case isn't how he got away with it. It's why everyone around him let him. In this second part of a three-part conversation with Christine Marie, we get into the wall that almost saved him. Sh...

Jesse Vang faces harm to a child through repeated acts causing death — a charge that carries life in prison, filed with repeater enhancers because of his extensive criminal history. Katrina Baur faces chronic neglect of a child with consequence of death — up to sixty years, but structured around a fundamentally different theory of responsibility. Vang is charged as the direct actor. Baur is charge...

Christine Banfield’s sister looked Brendan Banfield in the eye at his sentencing and told him she never truly knew him. Nobody did. Joseph Ryan’s mother reminded a Fairfax County courtroom that her son had a face, a name, and a life full of meaning — and Banfield shot his face, soiled his name, and treated his life as garbage. Two families. Two lives destroyed. And the man responsible sat in front...