True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews

More than a month after Lynette Hooker disappeared off a dinghy in the Bahamas, the U.S. Coast Guard Investigative Service has gone public with a request that tells you exactly where this case actually is. They are looking for the owner of a different sailboat — one that was moored near the Hookers’ yacht Soulmate in Aunt Pat’s Bay on the night Lynette vanished. They have grainy photographs. They...

The legal dimensions of the Joseph Duggar case extend beyond the Florida charges into recorded communications that may carry evidentiary weight. Joseph faces charges of lewd and lascivious behavior on a child under twelve in Bay County, Florida. His bond was set at six hundred thousand dollars. He has pleaded not guilty and was ordered to have no unsupervised contact with minors. But the jail call...

The Austin yogurt shop murders investigation was compromised from the start. The detective who ran early interrogations, Hector Polanco, was implicated in at least seven false confessions across multiple cases. His most notorious failure: extracting a false confession from Christopher Ochoa in the 1988 Nancy DePriest murder, leading to the wrongful conviction of both Ochoa and Richard Danziger. Da...

The Twelve Tribes — the group behind the Yellow Deli restaurant chain — has faced allegations of systematic child discipline across three continents and five decades. Former members describe a community where a rod was kept above every door, where children were allegedly struck for crying, and where a 267-page manual reportedly codified exactly how to deliver pain in the name of love. The manual w...

The procedural failures alleged in the Nancy Guthrie investigation reflect how institutional friction can compound across an active missing persons case. Three months after the eighty-four-year-old mother of NBC's Savannah Guthrie was reportedly abducted from her Tucson-area home, questions about evidence processing remain unanswered. DNA evidence from the scene was reportedly confirmed as Nancy's...

The alleged conduct described in court filings against David Burke, known as D4VD, crosses state lines and international borders — yet the prosecution is proceeding on state charges in Los Angeles County. He currently faces first-degree murder with special circumstances, continuous sexual abuse of a child under fourteen, and mutilation of human remains. The legal complexity runs deeper than one co...

A new book is reframing everything about the Murdaugh case — and it starts with the patterns nobody was paying attention to. James Lasdun's The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh spent years tracing Alex's behavior through original interviews and evidence that never made it to trial. The picture it paints isn't of a man who snapped. It's of a man who had been rehearsing. The b...

Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer breaks the Nancy Guthrie case open across three conversations that challenge the public’s understanding from the ground up. She starts with the offender. The behavioral profile doesn’t add up: enough preparation to conceal identity and target the surveillance system, but enough sloppiness to leave behind a forensic footprint investigators could follo...

Anna Duggar knew what her husband Josh admitted to doing to four of his sisters. She sat through his federal trial and heard an agent describe the material on his computer as among the worst he had ever seen. And according to People magazine, she was sending him private photos and personal messages from the Washington County Detention Center the same month he was sentenced. He asked for photos. Sh...

The Nancy Guthrie case has generated an extraordinary amount of noise. Ransom letters sent to media outlets. Internet theories. National speculation. False leads. And every piece of it pulls investigative attention away from the behavioral evidence that actually matters. Jennifer Coffindaffer, retired FBI Special Agent, sits down to separate signal from noise. She starts with the ransom communicat...

The 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders remain one of the most significant criminal cases in Texas history — not just for the brutality of the crime itself, but for the catastrophic investigative failures that followed. Four teenage girls were killed inside I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt on West Anderson Lane. The building was deliberately set on fire to eliminate evidence. And for 34 years, the wrong pe...

A restaurant chain with thirty-three locations, glowing reviews, and zero paid employees. That is the Yellow Deli — and according to former members and investigators, it is allegedly the front door to one of the longest-running cult operations in America. The Twelve Tribes, classified by the SPLC as a Christian fundamentalist cult, has reportedly operated for over fifty years across four continent...

Federal agencies don’t publicly criticize local investigations without reason. When the FBI director went on record about how the Nancy Guthrie case was handled, that wasn’t posturing. That was an institution signaling that something went wrong during the most critical window of the investigation — and the normal channels to fix it had already been exhausted. Jennifer Coffindaffer, retired FBI Spe...

Every investigation builds a profile. And in the Nancy Guthrie case, the profile doesn’t add up. The person who allegedly approached her Tucson home showed partial preparation — concealment, a weapon, interference with the surveillance camera. But the execution was riddled with exposure. The digital trail allegedly survived. The forensic footprint was enormous. And the ransom communications that f...

Criminologist Brent Turvey is the primary source behind "Broken Plea," the new book on the Idaho murders case. He has now been publicly disavowed by the defense team that hired him. Attorneys Ann Taylor, Elisa Massoth, and Bicka Barlow stated they are "appalled" by his media appearances and that he is violating his confidentiality agreement. They specified he was hired solely for crime scene analy...

Kouri Richins was $7.5 million in debt. Her prenup made divorce financially devastating. And without Eric's knowledge, she took steps to ensure his death would be the most profitable outcome available to her. The financial and forensic evidence presented at trial mapped a murder that was months in the making, and in this Hidden Killers Week in Review, Tony Brueski walks through two episodes coveri...

According to prosecutors, David Anthony Burke allegedly fatally stabbed Celeste Rivas Hernandez in his Hollywood Hills garage, then drove over a hundred miles to a remote location to allegedly dispose of evidence. The following morning, he reportedly gave a radio interview to promote his album. In the days and weeks that followed, prosecutors allege he ordered chainsaws, a body bag, and an inflata...

Michael Jackson voluntarily submitted to a strip search in 1993. Investigators photographed him to compare against a description Jordan Chandler had allegedly provided. More than thirty years later, both prosecution advocates and Jackson defenders insist those photographs support their position — and neither side has been able to definitively prove the other wrong. This Hidden Killers Week in Revi...

Christopher Whitcomb's book on the Idaho student murders presents itself as an investigation into unresolved evidence questions. When each major claim is checked against on-the-record responses from law enforcement, prosecutors, and the defense team itself, the foundation doesn't hold. This week's True Crime Today review examines the most consequential Kohberger case developments — a point-by-poin...

The People's Brief filed in the case of David Anthony Burke — the musician known as D4VD — lays out a prosecution theory of premeditation and post-offense conduct that extends well beyond the alleged killing of fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. Prosecutors allege Burke texted the victim's phone after she was allegedly already dead. They allege he purchased disposal materials including cha...

ATI — the educational arm of Bill Gothard's IBLP — shut down in 2021. The organization that spent decades providing curriculum to homeschooling families including the Duggars ceased operations without remediation, without outreach to former students, and without any institutional acknowledgment of the educational gaps it created. The adults it produced are still rebuilding. This week's True Crime...

Nick Reiner is being held without bail on two counts of first-degree murder with death penalty eligibility. His parents Rob and Michele Reiner were found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home. He was arrested the same day. And the case has effectively stalled — because the autopsy reports on both victims remain incomplete more than four months after their deaths. This week's True Crime Today re...

Bryan Kohberger entered guilty pleas to four counts of first-degree murder. He waived appellate rights. He is serving four consecutive life sentences without parole. The criminal case is resolved. The public conversation that has erupted since is not — and the substance of it doesn't hold up the way its authors want it to. This week's True Crime Today review examines the most significant Idaho mur...

Rex Heuermann's guilty plea resolved eight murder charges in one proceeding. But the structure of the deal itself raises questions that go beyond the confession. During a confidential session with prosecutors, Heuermann raised the name Karen Vergata — a woman he was never charged with killing. Her case was absorbed into the plea agreement, effectively closing it without a separate prosecution or p...

Three hours. That’s how long a jury of eight took to convict Kouri Richins on every single charge — aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, forgery, and two counts of insurance fraud. In the final installment of our definitive series, we examine what made the prosecution’s circumstantial case so overwhelming that the defense rested without a single witness. No medical expert. No financial...