True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews

Brendan Banfield’s defense attorney refused to handle his appeal. Another lawyer called the chances of overturning the verdict a 99-yard field goal. And the motion Banfield’s team filed the day before sentencing — built on three separate arguments — was denied across the board by Judge Penney Azcarate. So while Banfield has signaled he intends to fight his life-without-parole sentence, everything...

Kevin Bright was nineteen years old when Dennis Rader shot him twice and left him for dead in his sister Kathryn's house in Wichita on April 4, 1974. Kevin survived. His sister did not. Before Kevin went into surgery, with one of Rader's bullets still inside his head, he gave Wichita detectives a description of the man who had attacked them. A police sketch artist drew the face. On April 23, 1974,...

On September 7, 2024, a man preparing his private property for hunting season found skeletal remains in a wooded area with heavy underbrush near a quarry and the entrance to Camp Manitou — a Girl Scout camp roughly three miles from Jesse Vang’s apartment in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The area had been searched before. Multiple times. DNA testing confirmed the remains belonged to three-year-old Elijah...

Elijah Vue’s biological father was in prison. The man his mother chose to care for him had a felony for harming a child, trafficking charges, and a federal drug conviction. His mother had once told police that the same man had trafficked her — and then, years later, placed her three-year-old in his apartment for “disciplinary reasons.” There was nowhere safe for this child to land. And no one inte...

When Michael Proctor took the stand during the first Karen Read trial, he called his own messages about the woman he was investigating “juvenile” and “unprofessional” and insisted they had “zero impact” on the investigation. When Robert Devine was confronted by the POST Commission about his alleged conduct with Sandra Birchmore, he allegedly said she “lied about everything.” When the state police...

The Aaron Spencer murder prosecution was dismissed after a court found that law enforcement conduct, including the loss of a critical dashcam SD card, was "so egregious" that it constituted a due process violation. The court's order specifically cited "the appearance of a coverup." Spencer was the Republican nominee for Lonoke County sheriff, running against the incumbent whose department handled...

The Netflix docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet introduced the world to the woman who took Samuel Bateman down from the inside. But the documentary couldn't tell the whole story. There's a conversation behind that footage — about what it actually took to walk into a self-proclaimed prophet's house every day, lie about why you were there, and quietly build a case that would put him in federal pr...

The federal prosecution of Timothy Hudson in the death of Anna Kepner aboard the Carnival Horizon rests on DNA evidence with a statistical match of 120 sextillion to one, surveillance footage establishing a cabin timeline, cellphone location data, and autopsy findings of mechanical asphyxia with bilateral ruptured tympanic membranes consistent with sustained physical force. Hudson, sixteen, is cha...

A thirteen-year-old girl was found in the truck of the man charged with crimes against her — after midnight, while he was on bond with a no-contact order. Her father found her. Stopped the man. Called 911 himself. And the system that failed to protect that child turned around and charged her father with second-degree murder. That case is now over. Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. dismissed it after finding...

For half a century, the BTK Killer story has been told the way Dennis Rader wanted it told. Factor X. The Minotaur. The BTK brand. Every term that has anchored his mythology came from a typewriter in his own kitchen in Park City, Kansas. Every term was his. In this first chapter of a five-part investigation from True Crime Today, host Tony Brueski sets the version of Dennis Rader that documentarie...

Mackenzie Shirilla was convicted of four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault, and two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide in a bench trial that turned almost entirely on physical and digital evidence. She never spoke to investigators. She never testified. The prosecution's case was built on what was recovered from the wreckage, the surveillance footage, and the digital record sh...

Aaron Spencer killed the man who was accused of hurting his daughter. The system charged him with murder. And now a judge has found that the people investigating him may have destroyed the one piece of evidence that could have told the whole story. The dashcam SD card from Michael Fosler's truck was most likely recording when Spencer pulled that trigger. It could have shown exactly what happened —...

The evidentiary timeline in the Nancy Guthrie disappearance is anchored by three machine-generated timestamps that are not subject to interpretation. The residence's doorbell camera system disconnected at approximately 1:47 a.m. At approximately 2:12 a.m., the system's software detected a person at the front door. At 2:28 a.m., the pacemaker monitoring Nancy Guthrie's cardiac rhythm lost its signa...

During a medical episode, deputies searched Kouri Richins' jail cell and recovered a six-page letter concealed inside an LSAT preparation book. The letter scripted testimony for her brother. When confronted, the defendant did not deny authorship. She characterized the document as part of a fictional novel set in a Mexican prison. The psychological pattern documented across the pre-trial and trial...

Mackenzie Shirilla has consistently maintained she has no memory of the Strongsville crash that killed Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. The prosecution rejected the claim. The victims' families dispute it. A fellow inmate provided a characterization of Shirilla's behavior in custody that contradicts her on-camera presentation in Netflix's The Crash. The public discourse has largely treated the m...

The prosecution presented Mackenzie Shirilla's text messages and threatening statements as evidence of premeditated intent. The trial court characterized her as "hell on wheels" and convicted her on four counts of murder. No clinical or psychological expert testimony was presented to provide an alternative framework for interpreting the defendant's behavior — specifically, whether a seventeen-year...

The South Carolina Supreme Court's ruling sharply limits the financial crimes testimony that consumed twelve and a half hours of the original trial. The prosecution's evidentiary framework for retrial must compensate for that loss. One category of evidence that received limited examination the first time — granular household testimony from the person with the most sustained access to the Murdaugh...

Mackenzie Shirilla's defense counsel identified a medical condition during the proceedings that could have provided an alternative explanation for the Strongsville crash. No expert was called to testify. No medical records were entered into evidence. The prosecution's intent theory — that surveillance footage proved prior calculation and design — went unchallenged on the specific point most likely...

The South Carolina Supreme Court's unanimous reversal of Alex Murdaugh's murder convictions reset the legal record — and with it, the evidentiary question that a second jury will have to answer without twelve hours of financial crimes testimony supporting the prosecution's narrative. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer approaches that question as a clean-slate exercise: strip the name...

The psychological profile that emerges from the Kouri Richins case presents a specific form of compartmentalization that forensic professionals have documented but rarely encounter at this operational duration. For approximately fourteen months following Eric Richins' death, the defendant maintained a constructed identity — grieving mother, children's book author, television interview subject — th...

At the detention hearing in the Anna Kepner case, the presiding judge acknowledged that if Timothy Hudson were an adult facing the same charges under the same evidentiary circumstances, he would almost certainly be detained pending trial. The judge characterized the case as "a different animal." He then concluded the hearing without issuing a ruling on detention — and the defendant, a sixteen-year...

Wendi Adelson testified under limited immunity at every trial connected to the murder of Dan Markel. That immunity holds only if she told the truth. If prosecutors can establish that she provided false testimony under oath, the agreement is voidable — and everything she said on the stand becomes potential evidence against her rather than a shield protecting her. Five individuals have been convicte...

Prosecutors hired a team to decode phone calls between Mackenzie Shirilla and her mother Natalie — calls where the two spoke in a private language built to hide what they were saying on monitored lines. What they found became evidence at trial. The coded communication is one piece of a larger pattern now laid bare by recorded prison calls and institutional records released in the wake of the Netfl...

Two cases raising different questions about how the system processes evidence — one institutional, one forensic. Mackenzie Shirilla's family is generating a growing record on monitored prison calls that defense attorney Eric Faddis says the parole board will scrutinize. In the Anna Kepner cruise ship case, a federal judge stated the prosecution's evidence is not as strong as it appears, despite DN...

The night before Jesse Vang called 911 to report three-year-old Elijah Vue missing, surveillance cameras in Two Rivers, Wisconsin captured him driving a borrowed Nissan Altima through town. His phone was sitting at his apartment, playing a Netflix movie — building what prosecutors allege was a false alibi. On camera, Vang pulled up to the donation door at a St. Vincent de Paul store and dropped of...