Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Before Alex Murdaugh ever opened his mouth to testify, the Colleton County Clerk of Court had already told the jury what to think. Don’t be fooled. Watch his movements. Don’t let the defense confuse you. The South Carolina Supreme Court just ruled that those words — spoken by an officer of the court with a financial motive for conviction — destroyed the integrity of the verdict.The unanimous ruling reverses Murdaugh’s murder convictions and vacates his life sentences, finding that former Clerk Becky Hill made a series of improper comments that went to the heart of the case...

Inside the Twelve Tribes, adultery was reportedly the worst sin a member could commit. Punishable by banishment. No exceptions. Except one.When founder Gene Spriggs allegedly discovered his wife Marsha had affairs with young male disciples, he did not apply the rules he had enforced on everyone else. He reportedly ordered the transgressions covered up and privately forgave her. Families had been expelled for far less. When the truth emerged around 2008, hundreds walked out.In this episode, Tony Brueski profiles the man behind the Twelve Tribes and the Yellow Deli empire. Spriggs was a carnival...

Richard Allen walked into Westville Correctional Facility weighing 180 pounds. By April 2023, he weighed 135 pounds. He had been in solitary confinement the entire time. He was not under sentence. He had not yet been to trial. He was a pretrial detainee in a maximum-security prison's most restrictive housing — and the documented evidence is that he was losing his mind.He tore up his legal mail. He drank from the toilet. He ate his Bible. He hit his head against the cell door. He asked his own father, on a phone call, how much longer he could stay lucid. An...

Indiana's response brief in the Richard Allen appeal does not read like the work of a State that's confident in its conviction. It reads like the work of a State that's worried about its record.The defense brought specifics. A van timeline contradicted by FBI cell data and surveillance footage. A confession from Richard Allen claiming he shot Abby Williams and Libby German, when the medical examiner concluded the girls were killed with a blade. An alternative suspect whose interview was allegedly recorded over by Indiana investigators, whose firearm was never collected, whose phone was never searched.<...

Part 2 of our interview with James Lasdun, author of The Family Man, digs into the night of the murders — and what the jury at Alex Murdaugh's trial was never shown.The full SLED timeline from June 7th included calls and texts between Alex and men with criminal records just hours before the killings. Alex had deleted his entire call log from that week. The next morning, Cousin Eddie texted him three words: "at fishing hole." Prosecutors stripped all of it from the timeline they presented to jurors.The book also reveals what the defense wanted to...

The evidence across the D4VD case, Nancy Guthrie's alleged abduction, and the Duggar family allegations shares something uncomfortable in common — each allegedly involves a system designed to protect people that reportedly failed the people who needed it most. Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke work through the most pressing questions across all three cases.The D4VD evidence demands accountability for every adult who allegedly had proximity to the relationship between David Burke and fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. The alleged chainsaw purchases, the reported international travel with a minor using fake identification, and the three missing persons re...

Two years before Lynette Hooker disappeared off a dinghy in the Bahamas, she sent messages to a friend that read, in hindsight, like a flashing light. She had walked away from her husband Brian. She had walked away from the boat. She told her friend, in her own words, it was real bad — that she could not be out there with him. A month later, the messages show, she was back. Two years later, she was gone.This episode introduces the full Lynette Hooker case to anyone just catching up. The 55-year-old Michigan woman who vanished on Ap...

The recorded jail calls between Joseph and Kendra Duggar allegedly tell a story the family probably never intended the public to hear. Kendra's alleged repeated question about whether Joseph still loves her. The warnings about recorded lines. The instruction to save case details for attorney meetings. And then Jim Bob's email arrived in the public record — "terrible decisions" followed by an alleged pivot to getting Kendra's charges dropped and reassurance that God has already forgiven.Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke dig into what this evidence allegedly reveals about the generational pattern. Joseph Duggar faces charges of lewd an...

When a community spends eight years with an open wound, it stops looking for the right answer and starts looking for any answer. That’s what happened in Austin after the yogurt shop murders. Four teenagers were pulled into the investigation in 1991, released for lack of evidence, and then pulled back in eight years later by new detectives who found their names in an old file and decided they were worth another shot.The detective who shaped the early investigation, Hector Polanco, had already been found responsible for at least seven false confessions in other cases. One of...

Former members of the Twelve Tribes describe a childhood defined by a single object: a thin, reed-like rod kept above the door in every room of every home in every community. It was reportedly always within reach because, according to the people who grew up inside, it was always in use.In this episode, Tony Brueski builds the case from the ground up. The group’s own published teachings defend corporal punishment as an act of love. Their internal Child Training Manual, reportedly running 267 pages, allegedly instructs parents to make it hurt enough to produce the desired re...

A masked figure allegedly stood on Nancy Guthrie's porch at 1:47 a.m., carrying a backpack, wearing ill-fitting gloves, and reportedly grabbing foliage to block the doorbell camera. The FBI released two images from the Nest camera. Three months later, nobody has been identified — and the alleged institutional breakdown between Pima County and federal investigators may be the reason.Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke work through what the evidence allegedly reveals and what it allegedly conceals. The blood confirmed as Nancy's near the front door. The back door reportedly propped open. The cryptocurrency ransom demands that allegedly went no...

The alleged methodical cover-up in the D4VD case is what separates it from panic — prosecutors say the disposal unfolded over weeks with calculated precision. A shovel allegedly ordered the day after the killing. Two chainsaws a week later. A body bag and inflatable pool twelve days after, all under the fake name "Victoria Mendez." A burn cage two months later. Meanwhile, D4VD allegedly texted Celeste's phone as if she were still alive. The question that follows is obvious: did someone else allegedly know?Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke work through what the evidence allegedly reveals ab...

Before the murders at Moselle, before the 911 call, before any of it — there was a pattern. And James Lasdun's new book The Family Man traces it through original interviews and evidence that never made it into the trial.The night of the boat crash that killed Mallory Beach, Alex Murdaugh was already running the playbook. He showed up at the hospital and started working the hallways — trying to get into rooms where passengers were being treated, cornering Connor Cook and telling him to keep quiet, attempting to reach Morgan Doughty even after she begged nurses to keep him...

Three separate failures converge in the Nancy Guthrie case, and retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer addresses each one across a three-part series.The offender’s behavior doesn’t fit a clean profile. Prepared enough to arrive concealed and interfere with surveillance. Not competent enough to avoid massive forensic exposure. Coffindaffer examines the contradiction: the calm approach that suggests familiarity, the partial technical knowledge that suggests someone just dangerous enough to act but not disciplined enough to vanish. The victimology — an 84-year-old woman with medical vulnerabilities — collapses the ransom narrative on its own.The investigation then fra...

Anna Duggar sat through her husband's trial. She heard a federal agent describe the material on Josh Duggar's computer as among the worst he had ever examined. She knows what Josh admitted to doing to four of his sisters when they were children. And according to emails obtained by People magazine, she was sending Josh private photos and personal messages from a monitored jail system the same month he was sentenced. He asked for photos. She did. He requested more. She engaged through the same monitored channels she later told Joseph Duggar were recorded and turned over to prosecutors.<...

From the moment ransom communications surfaced in the Nancy Guthrie case, the public narrative locked into “kidnapping for profit.” It’s the frame that got repeated most and questioned least. But the ransom notes were sent to media outlets — not to the family, not through private channels — and the behavioral evidence has consistently pointed to opportunists entirely unconnected to the actual crime.Jennifer Coffindaffer, retired FBI Special Agent, examines what the case looks like with the ransom noise stripped away. Without that financial motive assumption, the offender behavior tells a different story: camera interference that may have been perfo...

December 6, 1991. Four teenage girls walk into a yogurt shop in Austin, Texas. By midnight, all four are dead, and the building is on fire. What investigators find in the wreckage is almost nothing — a crime scene deliberately torched to erase every trace of the killer. Almost every trace.Amy Ayers was 13. Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas were 17. Sarah Harbison was 15. They were employees and friends gathered at the shop on an ordinary Friday night. The crime committed against them was methodical, violent, and calculated in a way that experienced investigators recognized immediately — this was not the work of i...

There are at least thirty-three Yellow Deli locations worldwide. The reviews are glowing. The atmosphere is warm. And according to former members, cult researchers, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, every single one of them is allegedly a recruitment center for the Twelve Tribes — a group classified as a Christian fundamentalist cult.In this episode, Tony Brueski pulls back the curtain on the Yellow Deli pipeline. Former members describe a process that starts with a sandwich and ends with total surrender — your savings, your name, your family, your autonomy. The warmth is real. The strategy behind it, acco...

The Nancy Guthrie investigation didn’t just face an unknown offender. It faced internal conflict between the agencies responsible for solving it. The FBI director went on record with public criticism of how the case was handled — an extraordinary step that signals the kind of frustration that doesn’t develop over minor procedural disagreements.Jennifer Coffindaffer, retired FBI Special Agent, breaks down the operational reality behind that public conflict. There’s a critical difference between a federal agency being notified about a case and that agency having the authority to run it. In the early hours of an activ...

There’s a behavioral gap in the Nancy Guthrie case that doesn’t get talked about enough. The suspect allegedly arrived at her Tucson home with concealment, a weapon, and enough awareness to interfere with the doorbell camera. That’s not a crime of pure opportunity. But the same person apparently left behind massive forensic and digital exposure — the kind of trail that suggests someone who thought they were smarter than the evidence.Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer sits down to dissect what that contradiction means for the investigation. She walks through the behavioral middle ground: not a ra...