True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews

She was supposed to be neutral. Instead, she told jurors not to be fooled by the defense, coached them to scrutinize the defendant’s body language, and wanted a guilty verdict to sell her book. The South Carolina Supreme Court has unanimously reversed Alex Murdaugh’s convictions for killing his wife Maggie and son Paul, finding that former Colleton County Clerk Becky Hill’s interference denied him a fair trial.The court’s language is extraordinary. They called Hill’s conduct “breathtaking and disgraceful” and “unprecedented in South Carolina.” They found she was “attracted by the siren call of celebrity” a...

Gene Spriggs built the Twelve Tribes into a movement spanning four continents, approximately forty communities, and at least thirty-three Yellow Deli locations. He reportedly controlled what his followers ate, wore, read, and believed. He assigned marriages and forbade divorce. His teachings on race have been documented by the SPLC as white supremacist.And then his wife allegedly broke the one rule the community considered unforgivable.In this episode, Tony Brueski traces Spriggs’ arc from carnival worker to cult founder to the scandal that should have ended the Twelve Tribes — and the death that should have ende...

Indiana has a theory for why Richard Allen confessed to the Delphi murders while sitting in solitary confinement at Westville. According to the State's appellate brief, Richard Allen found religion in his cell. He had a spiritual awakening. He decided to come clean.What the defense has documented is something else entirely. A man who lost 45 pounds in solitary. A man who tore up his legal mail. A man who ate his Bible. A man who drank from the toilet. A man who asked his own father, on a recorded phone call, how much longer he was...

According to Richard Allen's reply brief, Indiana investigators interviewed an alternative suspect in the Delphi murders, then allegedly recorded over the tape of that interview. His weapon was never collected. His phone was never searched. And at trial, the judge ruled that presenting him as an alternative suspect was speculative.The defense's response to that ruling is a question. How is anything speculative if nobody bothered to investigate it?That is one of three factual problems sitting inside the appellate record that Indiana's response brief refuses to engage with directly. The other two are a...

The jury convicted Alex Murdaugh. But they never saw the full picture. James Lasdun's The Family Man reveals evidence that prosecutors chose not to present — and it raises questions that still don't have answers.The complete SLED timeline from June 7th shows Alex in phone contact with men with criminal records hours before the murders. He deleted his call log from that entire week. Cousin Eddie texted him the next morning with just three words. Prosecutors cut all of it from the version they showed the jury.The book goes further. Defense attorney Jim Griffin re...

The procedural and legal questions across the D4VD, Nancy Guthrie, and Duggar cases reveal how alleged institutional failures compound regardless of the type of case. Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke address the legal complexity, the alleged investigative missteps, and the systemic patterns that connect all three.The D4VD segment addresses federal jurisdiction questions — alleged interstate transport of a minor, the potential applicability of trafficking statutes, and why the Los Angeles County prosecution is proceeding on state charges including first-degree murder with special circumstances while alleged federal angles remain unaddressed. Robin provides context on parallel investigations an...

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 want whoever was on that boat to come forward.In other words: investigators are no longer just retracing the dinghy route Brian Hooker said he and his wife t...

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 calls and emails obtained through FOIA requests allegedly reveal communications that defense attorneys typically advise against.Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke address the legal and institutional dimensions. The IBLP — the Institute in Ba...

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. Danziger suffered permanent brain damage from a prison assault. Austin settled for $14.5 million.Despite this documented track record, Polanco interrogated suspects in the yogurt shop case during the early 1990s. He was eventually removed from the task force, but the...

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 was written by founder Gene Spriggs. He and his wife had no children together. He reportedly never raised a child inside the community. But the instructions he allegedly wrote governed how thousands of parents trea...

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 blood. A private forensics lab in Florida reportedly sent crime scene DNA samples to the FBI, and a Northern California forensics lab — the same one that reportedly helped identify the Gilgo Beach victims — is also allegedly now involved. But the alleged chain of custody between Pima...

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 courtroom.Tony Brueski and retired FBI behavioral analysis chief Robin Dreeke address the procedural and legal dimensions. The alleged use of fake identification for a minor. The reported travel to Las Vegas, London, and Texas. The alleged Ub...

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 book reveals that the night of the boat crash — years before the murders — Alex showed up at the hospital and immediately began trying to control the narrat...

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 follow. The calm, unhurried approach suggests someone familiar with the area or the victim — not a stranger operating on impulse. And the victimology undermines the kidnapping narrative entirely. An 84-year-old woman with medical needs and mobility limitations is the most i...

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. She sent them. He asked for more. She was engaging with him through a system she knew was monitored — the same system she later walked Joseph Duggar through step by st...

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 communications — which were directed at media, not the family, and which the behavioral evidence has consistently identified as opportunistic exploitation by parties unconnected to the actual crime. Those notes didn’t come from whoever took Nancy. But they successfully hijacked the...

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 people paid for it.In Part 1 of this five-part series, we go back to the night of December 6, 1991. Eliza Thomas, 17. Jennifer Harbison, 17. Sarah Harbison, 15. Amy Ayers, 13. Restrained with their own clothing, shot execut...

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 continents. Their Yellow Deli restaurants are staffed by members who allegedly surrendered their savings, their legal names, and their family relationships when they joined. The group now maintains approximately forty communities in sixteen states and ten countries....

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 Special Agent, explains the operational mechanics behind that kind of institutional conflict. She breaks down the difference between notification and control, between forensic processing on a federal timeline and evidence routed through a local chain of comman...

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 followed — which we’ve long identified as opportunistic noise from unconnected parties — created a fog that obscured the real offender’s behavior.Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer examines what it means when a suspect’s preparation doesn’t match their comp...