True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews

David Pascoe says he’d convict Murdaugh in two weeks. Stephen Goldfinch took a swipe at Pascoe’s ties to the defense while pledging his own retrial. Alan Wilson is leading the governor’s race and just said the death penalty is on the table. South Carolina’s entire political class is building their campaigns around one defendant. Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke work through the listener questions tha...

Prosecutors’ sentencing memo in the Kouri Richins case reveals a pattern of retaliation that went far beyond the courtroom — and every target was someone connected to her children, her case, or the man she was convicted of killing. According to the memo, Kouri filed what prosecutors describe as false DCFS reports against her sister-in-law Katie Benson while Katie was raising Kouri’s three sons. Sh...

Two cases where the people left behind are still fighting to be heard. Buster Murdaugh sat behind his father at the first trial and told a jury Alex wasn’t capable of this. Three years of silence later, sources say he’s furious about the retrial. He reportedly called Alex a “selfish old man.” Jennifer Coffindaffer and retired FBI Special Agent Robin Dreeke break down what that means for both legal...

A family’s personal dining host on the Disney Magic served them breakfast, then was loaded into a federal van in handcuffs forty-five minutes later. The passenger who filmed it had no idea what was happening — and neither did anyone else for two weeks. According to CBP, Operation Tidal Wave detained 27 crew members across eight cruise ships in San Diego, all allegedly connected to exploitation mat...

Her children had therapists read their words because they couldn’t be in the room with her. They described locked doors, dead animals, a brother sneaking food to a sibling confined to his bedroom. They described fear. All of them asked for the same thing: keep her away. Kouri Richins stood up after hearing all of that and didn’t address one word of it. She announced an appeal. She told the judge t...

Alex Murdaugh’s murder convictions were overturned unanimously by the SC Supreme Court — and the ruling didn’t just vacate the verdict. It told the prosecution exactly where their case went wrong. The court said weeks of financial crimes testimony was excessive, prejudicial, and unnecessary to prove motive. That testimony was the engine of the first conviction. Without it, the state has to rebuild...

Jane Whaley had no seminary degree, no ordination, and no formal ministry credentials. She was a former high school math teacher from rural North Carolina. And according to former members of the Word of Faith Fellowship, she allegedly controlled which of her followers could date, marry, have intimate relations with their own spouses, and have children. The church reportedly started in a converted...

The first jury heard twelve hours of financial crimes testimony before they ever weighed the physical evidence. Three-hour conviction. The Supreme Court just said that can’t happen again. Round two is a fundamentally different trial. Creighton Waters has to convict on what SLED actually found — and what they didn’t find. No weapon. No DNA on Alex Murdaugh. A crime scene degraded by weather and con...

He was the loyal son. He sat in the courtroom, testified for the defense, told a jury his father wasn’t the man prosecutors claimed. Then Alex Murdaugh got convicted, and Buster disappeared. Three years of near-silence, almost no prison visits, and a life rebuilt at arm’s length from the Murdaugh name. Now the conviction is gone, the retrial is coming, and Buster reportedly isn’t relieved. He’s fu...

Former Chief Justice Jean Toal sat individual jurors down and asked them whether Becky Hill's comments changed their votes. The South Carolina Supreme Court said she had no right to do that. Rule 606(b) protects the privacy of jury deliberations — you can ask whether external contact happened, but you cannot ask jurors how they voted or why. Toal crossed that line, and the Supreme Court corrected...

Former Chief Justice Jean Toal denied Alex Murdaugh's motion for a new trial by requiring him to prove the Clerk's comments actually harmed his case. The South Carolina Supreme Court just ruled unanimously that she had it backwards. Under federal law, the burden falls on the State to prove there is no reasonable possibility the verdict was influenced. All five justices found the State couldn't mee...

Kouri Richins stood up in a Park City courtroom and spoke for forty minutes. She looked at her three sons and told them to "be like your dad." Eric Richins. The man she was convicted of poisoning with a lethal dose of fentanyl. The man whose forty-fourth birthday fell on the same day the judge sentenced her to life without the possibility of parole. She told her boys to emulate the father she took...

The person on Nancy Guthrie's porch allegedly tried to conceal the doorbell camera using foliage ripped from her own yard. Not professional equipment. Not a signal jammer. Weeds from the garden. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer says that detail tells you more about who this person is than almost anything else in the case — someone who understood enough to try, but not enough to succ...

Maggie Murdaugh’s pajamas were laid out in the laundry room doorway when Blanca Simpson walked into the house twelve hours after the murders. Underclothes were set out with them. Blanca knew immediately — Maggie never wore underclothes to bed. In fifteen years of cleaning that home, washing those clothes, knowing that routine inside and out, Blanca says she recognized the setup for what it was. So...

In a recorded jailhouse call, Richard Allen asked his own father how much longer he could stay lucid. That call was excluded from trial. The jury that convicted him on a 130-year sentence never heard it. But three judges at the Indiana Court of Appeals are now reading the full record — including the calls the jury didn't get and the confessions that don't match the forensic evidence. Allen told a...

Researchers have identified a type of family annihilator called "anomic" — men who see their families as symbols of their own success and destroy them when the facade collapses. James Lasdun's new book The Family Man places Alex Murdaugh alongside documented cases that mirror his almost exactly. The most disturbing constant: in every single one, the people closest to the killer described him as a...

Anna Duggar used the monitored jail system to send Josh private photos and messages while he served a federal sentence for possessing child sexual abuse material a Homeland Security agent described as among the worst he'd examined. He asked for more. She engaged. Days before sentencing, he was allegedly writing about "taking things up a notch." She never left. She never confronted anyone publicly....

Nancy Guthrie is 84 years old, medically vulnerable, and requires medication. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer says she is not a rational target for a kidnapping-for-profit operation — the risk-to-reward math doesn't work. The ransom communications that surfaced after her disappearance from her Tucson home are what Hidden Killers has consistently called opportunistic noise: someone...

Paul Murdaugh kept Mallory Beach’s obituary tucked into the door frame of his truck. Every time he climbed in, it was right there. Blanca Simpson saw it because she’d been inside the Murdaugh home for fifteen years and knew things about that family the cameras and courtrooms never captured. In this interview with Tony Brueski, Blanca tells the story of who the Murdaughs actually were behind the fr...

Her children begged a judge to keep her locked away forever. Kouri Richins responded by telling them she’s coming home — and everything she said in between is worse than you think. Minutes after therapists read the handwritten words of three boys into the court record — words describing locked rooms, neglect, dead animals, and a childhood spent in fear — Kouri stood and delivered a fifteen-minute...

The South Carolina Supreme Court threw out Alex Murdaugh’s murder convictions, restricted the evidence that dominated his first trial, and rewrote the legal standard for jury tampering claims in the state. Eric Faddis — a former prosecutor who now practices defense — provides the full analysis. The ruling: Toal placed the burden on Murdaugh, violated evidence rules by questioning jurors about thei...

The courtroom heard from three boys who still can’t stand in front of Kouri Richins and speak. Their therapists did it for them — reading handwritten words about a childhood prosecutors say was defined by neglect, fear, locked doors, and a father taken by fentanyl. One child wrote about being forced to parent his younger siblings while the woman in the house disappeared with neighbors or stayed in...

Three years between the verdict and the reversal. In that time, the defense picked up a perjury conviction against the clerk who tampered with the jury and a Supreme Court opinion restricting the financial evidence that dominated the first trial. The prosecution picked up a complete transcript of Murdaugh’s testimony and additional time to refine its forensic case. Eric Faddis weighs the advantage...

In late September 2025, the Austin Police Department announced a forensic breakthrough in the 1991 yogurt shop murders. Cold case detective Dan Jackson, who took over the investigation in 2022, resubmitted a .380 shell casing recovered from a floor drain at the crime scene to the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network. Improved software produced a match to an unsolved 1998 homicide in K...

There may be one in your town. A charming restaurant with handcrafted furniture, homemade bread, and staff who seem unusually warm and attentive. There are at least thirty-three Yellow Deli locations worldwide, and every one of them is reportedly run by unpaid members of the Twelve Tribes — a group the SPLC classifies as a Christian fundamentalist cult. In this episode, Tony Brueski asks why the T...