True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews

The pretrial record in the Sandra Birchmore prosecution has broken almost uniformly against the defendant, former Stoughton police officer Matthew Farwell. We review the procedural developments with an attorney and legal analyst. Birchmore, twenty-three and pregnant, was found dead in her Canton apartment in 2021. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner initially classified the death as a suicide...

The defense tried to show the jury Blair's 10-out-of-10 sketch of a man who looked nothing like Allen. Excluded. Tried to call an expert to challenge the bullet science the State told the jury was never wrong. Excluded. Tried to play the audio that would show what Allen sounded like while confessing in psychosis. Excluded. Tried to present an expert who would have explained the crime scene as a pa...

Clare Bronfman was released from federal custody in June 2025 after serving six years and nine months. She reportedly still supports Keith Raniere. His release date is 2120. She was the only NXIVM co-defendant who never turned on him — and she paid the steepest price for it. This episode maps every co-defendant’s outcome. Bronfman was shackled in the courtroom at sentencing — unusual for a nonviol...

The Dan Markel prosecution has secured five convictions, yet two individuals the state has formally identified as unindicted co-conspirators — Wendi Adelson and Harvey Adelson — remain uncharged. We examine the legal and strategic posture with a defense attorney and former prosecutor. Markel, a Florida State University law professor, was killed in 2014 amid protracted post-dissolution litigation w...

The pretrial detention question in Anna Kepner's case turns on a genuine legal conflict — and it explains why the accused remains at liberty while awaiting a federal trial. We examine the procedural posture with a criminal defense attorney. Anna, eighteen, was found dead aboard the Carnival Horizon during a family cruise. Because the death occurred in international waters, federal jurisdiction att...

The families needed Mackenzie Shirilla to be a monster. The prosecutor built a narrative that confirmed it. A judge agreed. But what if the truth is messier than any version anyone in this case is willing to accept — and what if the one piece of evidence that could have proven it was never heard? Seventeen-year-old Shirilla drove her Toyota Camry into a building in Strongsville, Ohio at close to a...

Three active criminal matters. Three distinct jurisdictions. One forensic psychotherapist identifying the systemic failures that allegedly allowed each to occur. The Nancy Guthrie disappearance remains unsolved months after the eighty-four-year-old was allegedly abducted from her Tucson home. Unknown DNA is under analysis at the FBI laboratory in Quantico, and genetic genealogy is reportedly being...

Under three hours. That's how long the jury deliberated before convicting Kouri Richins on all counts — aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, forgery, insurance fraud. Judge Mrazik sentenced her to life without parole and told the courtroom she's "simply too dangerous to ever be free." For Todd Gabler, the man who spent over a year building the evidentiary foundation that helped make tha...

David Anthony Burke, known professionally as D4VD, faces first-degree murder charges with special circumstances in the death of fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. Prosecutors in Los Angeles County have alleged murder for financial gain and murder of a witness, charges that make Burke eligible for the death penalty. He has pleaded not guilty. The People’s filing alleges Burke killed Rivas H...

On the day of his arrest, Richard Allen sat through an aggressive interrogation. According to the defense filings, Detective Holeman lied about witnesses and evidence, even used Allen's wife as a tool. Allen said: "I am not going to say something I did not do." Then they sent him to the most restrictive solitary cell in Westville — a maximum-security unit for the "worst of the worst." He was the f...

Mexican authorities broke down the door of a Puerto Vallarta villa in March 2018. Keith Raniere, the man who required followers to call him Vanguard, was found hiding in a closet. His follower Lauren Salzman tried to stop the agents. He stayed hidden. The arrest came months after the New York Times exposed the existence of a secret inner circle within NXIVM. The FBI investigated. Raniere fled to M...

The federal prosecution of Timothy Hudson for the first-degree murder of his stepsister Anna Kepner is proceeding in the Southern District of Florida, where Hudson has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial. But in a Brevard County family court, a parallel custody battle between Hudson’s biological parents is producing a record that illuminates the family dynamics behind the criminal case. Thomas Hud...

A retired Pima County detective has raised the possibility that more than one person may have been involved in the alleged abduction of Nancy Guthrie from her Tucson home — potentially part of a theft group that encountered a situation that went catastrophically beyond the original plan. Months into this investigation, with unknown DNA at the FBI crime lab in Quantico and more than fifty thousand...

Before the arrest. Before the charges. Before Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s name entered the conversation. D4VD sat in front of cameras and told the world exactly who he was — and everybody heard a success story. He said he lived “vicariously through other people.” He said he’d never experienced the feelings in his own music. He said he invented emotional scenarios and performed them so convincingly t...

Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta provides legal analysis across three active criminal matters in a single session. In the Nancy Guthrie disappearance, no arrest has been made and no suspect has been publicly identified. The Pima County Board of Supervisors referred perjury allegations against Sheriff Nanos to the Arizona Attorney General. The sheriff's deputies voted unanimously in a no-confide...

When Todd Gabler took the stand, the defense came at him with everything they had. Attorney Kathy Nester spent her entire cross-examination trying to reframe his investigation as something corrupt — accusing him of being an extension of the Sheriff's Office, a rogue actor operating without the legal constraints that bind law enforcement. The implication was clear: if the jury believed Gabler was w...

Aaron Spencer faces second-degree murder charges with a firearm enhancement in the October 2024 shooting death of Michael Fosler in Lonoke County, Arkansas. The trial is scheduled to commence June 22nd before Circuit Judge Ralph Wilson, who was assigned after the Arkansas Supreme Court stayed proceedings and Judge Barbara Elmore was removed from the case. The defense filed a motion to dismiss base...

The search warrant for Richard Allen's home, car, and electronics is the foundation of the State's case. Without it, there is no gun, no bullet comparison, no arrest, and no confessions from solitary confinement. According to the appellant's brief, the affidavit that secured that warrant contained statements and omissions that painted a misleading picture. Betsy Blair — the only witness who saw Br...

The people best trained to recognize what NXIVM was doing were the people Keith Raniere reportedly made sure never got inside the organization. Licensed therapists were kept out. That wasn’t an accident. NXIVM’s recruitment model was built on a framework Raniere refined after his first MLM, Consumers’ Buyline, was shut down as a pyramid scheme by the New York attorney general in 1996. The courses...

Timothy Hudson, sixteen, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated sexual abuse in connection with the death of Anna Kepner aboard the Carnival Horizon on November 7, 2025. The cause of death was determined to be mechanical asphyxiation. Hudson's trial was initially scheduled for June 1st and has been continued to September 8th in the Southern Distr...

No arrest has been made in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie from her residence in Tucson's Catalina Foothills community. DNA evidence recovered from the scene was transferred from a private laboratory in Florida to the FBI for advanced analysis. The Pima County Board of Supervisors referred perjury allegations against Sheriff Chris Nanos to the Arizona Attorney General but declined to exercise t...

Nearly two hundred pastors, youth leaders, and church officials were accused or convicted of crimes against children in 2025 alone. A megachurch founder who served on a presidential evangelical advisory board pleaded guilty to five felony counts involving a twelve-year-old — and got six months. A state legislator who won an award for “protecting children” was distributing CSAM. And now Joseph Dugg...

When the lead sheriff in a high-profile case stops talking directly to the victim's family more than 100 days in, hands family communication entirely to the FBI, and keeps using vague phrases like "getting closer" without backing them up — that is not a routine moment. That is an inflection point. Tony Brueski takes the full picture of the Nancy Guthrie investigation to retired FBI Special Agent J...

The Summit County Sheriff's Office had the case. But they didn't have the phone records — not the way Todd Gabler got them. Because Eric Richins' business paid for the family's phones, Gabler obtained the billing data directly through Eric's business partner. No warrant. No judge. Different rules for a private investigator. What those records revealed was a communication pattern nobody had flagged...

In FBI and digital forensic circles, the term "Wrench Attack" refers to a specific kind of organized crime operation — networks that target wealthy individuals or their family members for cryptocurrency ransom, recruit disposable operatives to carry out violent home invasions, and protect the architects behind multiple layers of cutouts that are extraordinarily difficult to trace. Some people watc...