Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Bill Wegerle was a suspect in his own wife's murder for eighteen years. From the day Vicki Wegerle was killed in their Wichita home in September of 1986 until the day in March of 2004 when the actual killer mailed her stolen driver's license to a local newspaper, Bill Wegerle lived under suspicion of a crime he did not commit. His two children grew up under that shadow. The man who killed Vicki We...

Surveillance cameras in Two Rivers, Wisconsin captured Jesse Vang pulling up to the donation door of a St. Vincent de Paul store on February 19, 2024 and dropping off a dark-colored suitcase. He’d borrowed a neighbor’s Nissan Altima. He’d left his phone at home playing a Netflix movie. When investigators tracked down and tested that suitcase, the Wisconsin State Crime Lab found one DNA profile ins...

Jesse Vang had a felony conviction for harming a child when he was seventeen. He’d been charged with human trafficking. He’d done federal time for a drug conspiracy. And when he was released in 2022, he was placed on supervised release through 2025. By February 2024, Katrina Baur was dropping off her three-year-old son at Vang’s apartment in Two Rivers, Wisconsin for what she described as “discipl...

Every case Michael Proctor ever investigated now carries a question mark — and that question mark just got a lot bigger. According to a lawsuit filed against the Town of Canton and Massachusetts State Police, the fired state police trooper who led the investigation into John O’Keefe’s death had been exchanging messages with Canton Sgt. Sean Goode for more than a decade. Messages that, according to...

In Lonoke County, Arkansas, a judge found that investigators' handling of evidence in Aaron Spencer's murder case was "so egregious" the prosecution had to be dismissed. The dashcam SD card that could have told the whole story was handled in violation of department policy and lost. Spencer, who killed the man accused of crimes against his daughter, was running for sheriff against the incumbent who...

A man who trusted almost no outsiders sat down across from Christine Marie and handed her the access that would eventually put him in federal prison for fifty years. He didn't know what she was. He didn't know her history. He didn't know what she could see. When Christine and her husband Tolga first moved to Short Creek — that quiet stretch of FLDS country along the Utah-Arizona border — they came...

The FBI built its case against Timothy Hudson on DNA evidence, surveillance footage, cellphone data, and a cabin timeline aboard the Carnival Horizon. DNA recovered from Anna Kepner's body points to her stepbrother with a probability prosecutors called 120 sextillion to one. The injuries Anna sustained were severe enough to rupture both eardrums. Her body was found hidden under the bed in the stat...

When a judge uses the word "coverup" in a written order, he's not guessing. Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. looked at how Lonoke County handled the Aaron Spencer murder prosecution and found a pattern — not a mistake, not an oversight, but a pattern of policy violations that gave "the appearance of a coverup." Then he threw the entire case out. Aaron Spencer's thirteen-year-old daughter was found in the tr...

Dennis Rader was the BTK Killer. He was also the man who named himself the BTK Killer. He typed the name onto an envelope and mailed it to the Wichita Eagle in October of 1974, and the city has been calling him by that name ever since. In the first chapter of a new five-part investigation, Hidden Killers host Tony Brueski takes apart the mythology Dennis Rader built around his own crimes. Factor X...

The data recorder inside Mackenzie Shirilla's Toyota Camry captured a story she never told anyone. The accelerator was at full capacity. There was no attempt to brake. The car was aimed in a straight line at a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio, traveling close to a hundred miles per hour. Dominic Russo, twenty, and Davion Flanagan, nineteen, were dead when first responders arrived. Shirilla sur...

A dashcam SD card that was most likely recording during the final moments of the Aaron Spencer case disappeared from police custody. Investigators handled it in violation of their own department's procedures. A judge reviewed the evidence — or what was left of it — and concluded the pattern of failures gave "the appearance of a coverup." That language came from the court, not the defense. Special...

Three machine timestamps anchor the Nancy Guthrie disappearance in facts that can't be disputed. Her doorbell camera disconnected at 1:47 a.m. Twenty-five minutes later, the software detected a person at the door. At 2:28 a.m., the pacemaker monitoring her heart lost its signal — with her phone still inside the house she never re-entered. Forty-one minutes. That's the window. The FBI released the...

Deputies found a six-page letter inside an LSAT prep book in Kouri Richins' jail cell while she was being treated for a medical episode. The letter scripted her brother's testimony. When confronted, she didn't deny writing it. She said it was part of a fictional novel about a Mexican prison. That explanation is the psychology in miniature. Every threat Kouri Richins faced produced a story. Not a c...

The prosecution built its case on a breakup — Dominic Russo was leaving, Mackenzie Shirilla couldn't handle it, and she drove into a building at nearly a hundred miles per hour. Netflix's The Crash reinforced that framing. But a psychotherapist who has spent three decades in domestic violence and forensic mental health says the relationship between Mackenzie and Dominic was far more complicated th...

The prosecution called Mackenzie Shirilla cold and calculated. A judge called her "hell on wheels." The public split into two camps after Netflix's The Crash — she's a monster or she's innocent. But a psychotherapist who has spent three decades inside the minds of people who harm others sees a clinical picture that's messier than either side wants it to be. Shavaun Scott is a licensed psychotherap...

The South Carolina Supreme Court stripped away twelve and a half hours of financial crimes testimony. What fills that gap at retrial may depend on the kind of evidence that didn't get its full day in court the first time — and Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson has had three years to sit with what she saw versus what prosecutors actually asked her about. She testified for three hours in 2023. The jury hear...

The defense raised a medical condition that could have explained the Strongsville crash. Then they never called an expert to testify about it. No medical records entered. No testimony. The prosecution's intent narrative went unchallenged on the point that could have introduced reasonable doubt — and a jury never heard an alternative explanation for why the car hit that building at nearly a hundred...

Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson spent twenty years inside the Murdaugh household. She fixed Alex's collar the morning of June 7th, 2021. She remembered the shirt. She found the wet towel by the shower the next day. She was the person Maggie cried to when Alex's finances were collapsing and nobody would explain why. She told all of it to a jury that convicted him in three hours. Then the Supreme Court er...

The Valentine's Day attempt failed. Eric Richins survived — gasping for air, reaching for his son's EpiPen. He told friends he believed his wife was trying to end his life. And for seventeen days, Kouri Richins lived inside the same house, shared meals with the same children, and arrived at a second plan with five times the lethal dose. The psychological architecture behind that seventeen-day gap...

Unsealed court records in the Anna Kepner case lay out what the FBI has assembled: security footage tracking the defendant's movements aboard the Carnival Horizon the night Anna was killed, a phone that ended up smashed in a trash bin, and DNA testing that reportedly points in one direction. Anna was found beneath a bed in the cabin she shared with her stepbrother — concealed on a ship in internat...

After Donna Adelson was convicted, the State Attorney told reporters that decisions regarding additional charges in the Dan Markel conspiracy were coming in the coming weeks. Months have passed. No charges. No grand jury announcement. No public movement of any kind. For a case where prosecutors have repeatedly labeled Wendi Adelson and her father Harvey as unindicted co-conspirators — in open cour...

Mackenzie Shirilla has been found guilty of thirty-two out of thirty-six conduct violations inside the Ohio Reformatory for Women — and in every phone call home, she still insists she had a car accident. The record starts quiet. Months without a single citation after arriving in August 2023. Then a steady escalation: unauthorized medication belonging to another inmate, photographs depicting drug u...

Two cases. Two different kinds of evidence problems. Mackenzie Shirilla's own family is building the record against her on monitored prison calls — while in the Anna Kepner cruise ship case, the DNA points one direction and a federal judge just said the prosecution's case isn't strong enough. Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis examines where both cases stand. Shirilla has thirty-si...

Jesse Vang had a felony conviction for harming a child when he was seventeen. He’d been charged with conspiracy to commit human trafficking — with the alleged victim being the same woman who later placed her three-year-old son in his care. He had a federal drug conviction. He was still on supervised release when Katrina Baur drove her son Elijah Vue two and a half hours across Wisconsin and left h...

The DNA odds are 120 sextillion to one pointing at Timothy Hudson. But an FBI agent admitted on the record that he is unaware of any DNA evidence directly connecting Hudson to Anna Kepner's cause of death. That admission — buried inside a hundred and forty-five pages of unsealed transcript — may be the single most important sentence heading into a September trial. Defense attorney Eric Faddis brea...