True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews

Nick Reiner trust payout — his trust reportedly had no clause to stop a distribution after a murder charge. Does your family's trust have one? Most don't. The probate petition filed in the Nick Reiner case exposes something that goes well beyond one family. The trust Rob and Michele Reiner established for their son in 1993 allegedly used the most common settings in estate planning — mandatory dist...

Lonnie Franklin Jr. was not a criminal mastermind. He used the same .25 caliber handgun for every killing. He operated within a ten-block radius in South Los Angeles for over two decades. At least six of those he killed were found blocks from his own home. He once worked as a mechanic for the LAPD. And the LAPD knew about him by 1988 and chose to tell nobody. The women Franklin targeted were young...

The number is reportedly over a million dollars. That is what Asa Ellerup earned from a Peacock documentary about the Gilgo Beach case — her ex-husband’s case. The case where he pleaded guilty to killing eight women. Now the families want the money back. And more. Valerie Mack’s son has filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging civil conspiracy. The suit names Asa Ellerup, her daughter Victoria, and...

It is on the record. Melissa Barthelemy’s sister stood up in a Suffolk County courtroom during Rex Heuermann’s sentencing and told the court he called her from Melissa’s phone after he killed her — and described what he had done. The sentencing itself delivered what everyone expected: three consecutive life terms plus a hundred years, a judge who called Heuermann disgusting, families who cheered w...

The people watching the Mackenzie Shirilla case have a theory. They call it the Parental Architect theory, and the argument is blunt: Steve and Natalie Shirilla didn’t just fail to stop what their daughter became. They built it. Not intentionally. Not with malice. They built it by spending seventeen years choosing comfort over conflict — and the person who emerged from that household believed, at...

Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty to murdering eight women over seventeen years. His ex-wife sat across from him in a jailhouse visit and asked how many. He said the number without hesitating. His daughter told documentary producers she believes he most likely did it. His ex-wife still lives in the house — in the rebuilt basement where he told her the killings happened. This is the full three-part conv...

Every legal analyst in the country has an opinion on the Murdaugh retrial. Very few of them built the case the prosecution used. Eric Bland did. He exposed the financial crimes that became the state's motive theory, represented the victims who testified, and watched the Supreme Court tell prosecutors they overdid it. He also represents Sandy Smith in the Stephen Smith investigation — the cold case...

Benjamin Torres was six years old when his mother Valerie Mack disappeared. Her partial remains were found the same year in Manorville. It took two decades to identify them. Rex Heuermann has now pleaded guilty to her murder. Torres has filed a wrongful death lawsuit naming Heuermann, his ex-wife Asa Ellerup, and their daughter Victoria. The complaint alleges Asa and Victoria knew of or deliberate...

On June 9th, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department officially reclassified the Nancy Guthrie case from a missing persons investigation to a homicide. The FBI did not push back. And yet, in comment sections across the internet, one of the most popular theories about Nancy’s disappearance is that she’s alive and in FBI protective custody — that the whole thing was staged as part of an intelligence ex...

In June 1983, Cindy Paulson ran barefoot across an Anchorage airfield in handcuffs after escaping from Robert Hansen. She told police his name, his address, his car, and his plane. A security guard backed her up. Police investigated — and chose to believe the baker over the teenager. Robert Hansen confessed to killing seventeen women. He flew them into the Alaskan wilderness in his private Cessna...

Every woman Rex Heuermann killed was someone the system had already overlooked. Women whose disappearances did not generate search parties or news coverage or sustained pressure on investigators. He selected them and then he went home to a wife and children who thought he was a boring architect with a long commute. That is two realities held inside one person for seventeen years. He timed the kill...

Asa Ellerup filed for divorce from Rex Heuermann after his arrest. Then she kept visiting him. She showed up to court appearances. She participated in a Peacock documentary. She sat across from him in a supervised jailhouse visit and asked him directly how many women he killed. He said eight. From the outside that looks like a contradiction — you leave a person legally and then keep showing up. Bu...

Mickey Stines made someone help put a bulletproof vest on his wife. Per defense filings, he’d lost forty pounds in two weeks. He reportedly told a staffer that someone demanded he end his own life or “they” would harm his family. Weeks later, the former Letcher County sheriff allegedly walked into Judge Kevin Mullins’ chambers and shot him. Stines hadn’t slept in seven days. He was calling family...

Massachusetts gave Adam Montgomery custody of his five-year-old daughter despite twenty-one criminal cases on his record. New Hampshire’s child protection system saw the bruises, documented them, and emailed police that everything was fine. Two states failed Harmony Montgomery while she was alive. Now the legal system is asking for a second chance to convict the man who, according to prosecutors,...

Here's what we know. SLED reopened Stephen Smith's case in 2021 because of information found during the Murdaugh murder investigation. In 2023, SLED officially reclassified Stephen's death as a homicide. His body was exhumed. A second autopsy was performed. Those results are sealed. Kenny Kinsey — the prosecution's star forensic witness from the Murdaugh murder trial — is now independently investi...

A civil court ordered Adam Montgomery to pay fifteen and a half million dollars for the wrongful death of his daughter Harmony. He will never pay a single dollar. But the judgment sits in the record as a measure of what one court believes Harmony’s life was worth — a number that stands even as the criminal murder conviction has been reversed. The Harmony Montgomery case now occupies a legal no-man...

Something arrived under seal in the Anna Kepner case — and within two days, the judge who’d been defending Timothy Hudson’s freedom for four months reversed himself and ordered him detained. The question everyone should be asking: what was in that filing? Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres had released Hudson in February under juvenile rules. He’d called the government’s case “a much closer call” with...

Angel Maturino Reséndiz killed at least fifteen people across six states, riding freight trains from Texas to Kentucky to California. He landed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Holly Dunn was the only person across every one of his confirmed encounters who survived — and she survived with injuries that should have killed her. But this episode isn't about the Railroad Killer. It's about Chris Mai...

Adam Montgomery walked into jury selection for his own murder trial smiling, tongue out. Then he refused to show up for most of the proceedings, choosing to stay in his cell. The jury convicted in under a day. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction. And now the Harmony Montgomery case is headed for a second murder trial where everything about this man’s behavior will be on display again. The re...

It wasn’t a split decision. All five justices on the New Hampshire Supreme Court agreed: Adam Montgomery’s second-degree murder conviction in the Harmony Montgomery case could not stand. The ruling, authored by Associate Justice Bryan Gould, found that trying the murder and assault charges together prejudiced the jury against Montgomery — the airtight assault evidence propped up a murder case that...

On paper, Nick Reiner is the sole beneficiary of a trust worth more than $1.5 million. In reality, the newest filing in the Nick Reiner trust fund fight says he petitioned a judge partly so he can buy socks. This one starts with the smallest number in the file — the $300 cap on a jail commissary account at Twin Towers that, per the petition, was promised funding and never received a single deposit...

If the wrench attack theory is correct, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department has spent four months investigating a conventional kidnapping while the actual crime involved a cryptocurrency-motivated targeting pipeline with overseas handlers and disposable operatives. If the Mexico tip represents a genuine lead, the investigation lacks a functioning cross-border channel to pursue it. And if both of...

The prosecution won the first trial in under three hours of jury deliberation. The second trial might not go the same way. The Supreme Court limited the financial crimes evidence. The defense has new evidence and subpoena power. The jury pool has spent three years watching documentaries and forming opinions. And the AG just complicated everything by putting the death penalty on the table. Eric Bla...

The public demand for criminal charges against the parents of the teenagers aboard the Carnival Horizon has intensified since Hudson’s step-grandmother publicly called for prosecution. But the legal path to charging them faces a jurisdictional obstacle that may be insurmountable. The Carnival Horizon is a Panamanian-flagged vessel. The incident occurred in international waters. There is no federal...

What happened to Lynette Hooker: Brian Hooker says his wife had the ignition key when she fell from their dinghy in the Bahamas. But Lynette’s daughter says Brian was always the one driving — and her mother having the key doesn’t add up. That inconsistency is one of several that have turned a reported boating accident into a federal criminal investigation. On April 4, Brian and Lynette Hooker left...