True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews

“Nick loved his parents, and he is devastated by their deaths.” That is a direct quote from a probate petition filed by the man accused of stabbing Rob and Michele Reiner to death. The next line says the facts of their murders “are not at issue.” That is the legal strategy. That is the framing. And that is what makes this petition one of the most brazen court filings Tony Brueski has ever covered....

In a typewritten question left for the Wichita Police Department in January of 2005, Dennis Rader asked the cops, in writing, whether a floppy disk could be traced back to him. The question was inside an empty cereal box he had left for them in the bed of a pickup truck at a Home Depot parking lot. He signed it with his self-given initials. He asked them to be honest. The Wichita Police Department...

The question at the center of this Nick Reiner trial development is older than the case itself: can a person accused of killing benefit financially from the death? California's answer is the slayer statute — and in this episode, defense attorney and former felony prosecutor Eric Faddis explains how that law actually functions inside a live probate dispute, not how most people assume it does. The c...

The latest Nick Reiner trial development arrived in the form of a probate petition — 136 pages requesting the release of more than $1.5 million in trust assets, and, in the same filing, modest distributions so the petitioner can purchase socks and personal hygiene items at the jail commissary, where spending is capped at $300. That juxtaposition is deliberate, and in this episode, defense attorney...

A BOLO for a 40-year-old woman wanted for kidnapping near Tucson became the biggest Nancy Guthrie headline in weeks — even though authorities have said plainly that the two cases aren’t connected. That gap between the facts and the reaction is the story worth telling. Coral Michelle Smith is wanted for kidnapping and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after a May 29th incident at the intersec...

Staged family violence for four years. A billion views. Over a thousand 911 calls from people who thought it was real. A creator platform that collapsed and got sold as an NFT. And now Jesse Ridgway announces a pregnancy, a Down syndrome diagnosis, and a termination to 4.3 million followers — and the world debates how he handled it instead of asking whether any of it happened. Jesse Ridgway’s enti...

Staged family violence that fooled a thousand people into calling the police. A creator platform that burned through a million users and got sold as an NFT. And now a pregnancy announcement involving a Down syndrome diagnosis that may or may not be real, from a man who has built his entire career on making people believe things that never happened. Jesse Ridgway has been escalating for twenty year...

The Netflix docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet introduced the world to Christine Marie — the cult psychologist and survivor who walked into Samuel Bateman's FLDS inner circle, gathered the evidence the FBI used to put him in federal prison for fifty years, and is still living in Short Creek today. The documentary couldn't tell you everything. This conversation can. This is the complete extende...

Seventeen million views. People with real bills, real health problems, real crises in their own families stopped what they were doing to be outraged about a YouTuber they’ve never met. Not because Jesse Ridgway’s story is more important than their own lives. Because their brains are built to respond to outrage faster than reason. Research shows moral outrage triggers dopamine — the same reward pat...

One of Eric and Kouri Richins’ sons remembers the night his father died. He was put to bed early without a bath — unusual for the family. When he tried to go into his parents’ bedroom, his mother yelled at him to go away. He later told investigators that Kouri didn’t sleep in his room that night, contradicting what she told police. A child, catching the seams in his mother’s story on the night he...

In August of 2023, the Osage County Sheriff's Office in Oklahoma released a journal entry written in Dennis Rader's own handwriting. The entry described a fantasy of taking a young woman from a laundromat. Rader had a title for it. He had written it on the page. "Bad Wash Day." The reason that journal entry was released matters. On June 23, 1976, a sixteen-year-old Pawhuska, Oklahoma, cheerleader...

TMZ booked Jesse Ridgway within 48 hours of his pregnancy announcement. The LA Times interviewed him. News outlets ran the story for days. If Jesse Ridgway is doing this for attention, the entire media infrastructure gave him exactly what he wanted faster than he could have planned it. Is Jesse the sickness, or is he a symptom of something bigger? Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott examines the full ec...

Ashley Ridgway went through a real medical procedure. She called it the most traumatic experience of her life. She was at home recovering. And within 48 hours, her husband Jesse was on TMZ Live telling a national audience he’s sleeping next to a gun. Not because she asked for it. Because Jesse Ridgway cannot stop turning other people’s pain into something the world watches. The off switch does not...

Aaron Spencer was charged with murder. A judge threw it out after finding “egregious” conduct by the detective who investigated him. Now Spencer is on track to become the sheriff of the county that charged him. And the questions that ruling raised go far beyond one case. This is a three-part conversation with an outside legal analyst covering every angle. First, the ruling. Judge Wilson’s 19-page...

Samuel Bateman is in federal prison, serving fifty years, and his hold on his followers has not loosened. Some of his adult wives still call him their prophet. Some of the women Christine Marie risked her life to pull out of his house have returned to him on their own. He picks up the phone from his cell every day and the indoctrination keeps flowing right into their ears. In this third and final...

One county. One department. Over a decade. And every time the evidence matters most, it’s not there. The Aaron Spencer case ended with a judge writing “appearance of a coverup” in a signed court order. But the pattern in Lonoke County predates Spencer by years. In 2021, Deputy Michael Davis shot and killed seventeen-year-old Hunter Brittain during a traffic stop. Brittain was unarmed. The body cam...

Christine Russo watched her brother’s killer become a social media sensation. Mackenzie Shirilla — convicted of murdering Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan in a deliberate high-speed crash in Strongsville, Ohio — has gained tens of thousands of followers since Netflix released “The Crash.” Her accounts are managed by a “support team.” In jail calls, her mother floats book deals. Shirilla talks abo...

Mary Capps worked as the only other compliance officer in Park City, Kansas, for more than six years. She reported directly to Dennis Rader. She would later tell the Wichita Eagle that he had never paid her a compliment in six years. That he discriminated against her because she was a woman. That he had created a hostile workplace she could not endure. After Rader's arrest in February of 2005, Mar...

Lonoke County charged Aaron Spencer with second-degree murder. A judge threw it out. And now Spencer is on track to run the department that investigated him. He won the Republican primary in March with 53.5 percent, beating incumbent Sheriff John Staley — the man whose office made the arrest — and a third candidate outright. No runoff. Lonoke County is deep red. Democrat Brian Mitchell Sr. faces s...

One detective. Eleven documented policy violations. A dashcam SD card that could have recorded everything — gone. And a judge who said the only appropriate response was to throw out the entire case. That’s the core of Judge Ralph Wilson’s 19-page order dismissing the second-degree murder charge against Aaron Spencer. Spencer — an Arkansas father and Army veteran — shot and killed Michael Fosler af...

A dashcam was mounted on the windshield of Michael Fosler's truck — dual cameras, recording forward and inside the cab. It was the only device that could have objectively captured the final encounter between Aaron Spencer and the man facing forty-three criminal counts involving Spencer's thirteen-year-old daughter. What the prosecution called murder, the defense called a father protecting his chil...

Elijah Vue was three years old. His father was in prison. His mother sent him to live with a convicted felon who was still on federal supervised release — a man she had once told police had trafficked her. The criminal complaint describes what happened inside that Two Rivers apartment as a coordinated campaign: standing punishments, cold water, text messages between Baur and Vang about making a to...

He answered for eight murders. He did not answer for Karen Vergata’s — even though he confessed to it in the same courtroom. He did not answer for the civil conspiracy his ex-wife now faces. And he did not answer for the women who disappeared near his properties in states that can execute him. Rex Heuermann’s sentencing gave the Gilgo Beach families a moment they earned. Three consecutive life sen...

The Netflix docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet shows Christine Marie repeatedly bringing footage to the local police on the Utah-Arizona border — and the local police repeatedly sending her home. In this second part of a three-part conversation, Christine tells Tony what was really happening on the other side of that door. Short Creek had spent decades teaching itself to look away from its own...

Jesse Vang faces life in prison. Katrina Baur faces sixty years. Both are charged in the death of Baur’s three-year-old son Elijah Vue. Both have pleaded not guilty. And both are heading toward separate trials in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. The question hovering over every pretrial hearing: will one of them cooperate against the other? The evidence already creates pressure. Text messages between...