Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

In every case like this, there's a risk that the victim becomes a footnote in someone else's story. This episode makes sure that doesn't happen to Ashley Flynn.

She graduated from Tippecanoe High School and Lee University. She came home to Tipp City and never left. She taught elementary school, substituted across the district, coached seventh-grade girls volleyball, and taught bible lessons at LifeWise Academy. The school district said she was known for her warmth, her kindness, and the impact she had on everyone around her. She was 37 years old and eight days from her birthday when she was killed.

What happened after her death says as much about Ashley as anything from her life. Over $175,000 raised for her daughters. A church forced to cancel a public memorial because the man accused of killing her had stood at the front of that sanctuary leading worship. A family that retained lawyers and went to court to protect two little girls before the criminal case even had a trial date.

Part 3 of four. Ashley Flynn was a person before she was a case. This episode is about making sure that's never forgotten.

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Some filings lay out a theory. This one lays out an alleged horror.

Tony Brueski reads through the People's Brief against David Anthony Burke — the nine-page prosecution roadmap that the defense tried to seal and the judge made public. What Deputy DA Beth Silverman put on the record describes an alleged sexual relationship with a child that started at thirteen, a murder prosecutors say was driven by career preservation, and a cover-up so detailed that prosecutors say it included staged text messages to a dead girl's phone, Amazon orders under a fake name, three separate trips to a remote disposal site, and a teenage girl's dismembered body allegedly left in a Tesla for months.

The forensic evidence prosecutors describe is devastating — DNA in the garage, plastic fragments embedded in Celeste Rivas Hernandez's remains matched to materials from Burke's home, and Celeste's own text messages now being used to build the case.

No guests. No filter. Just the filing, read in full, with Tony breaking down what every allegation and every piece of evidence means heading into the May 26 preliminary hearing.

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Rex Heuermann killed women in the same room where he grew up. The same room where he went through puberty. The same room where, according to the FBI's John Douglas, the violent fantasies that would eventually consume him first took root. He never left that room — not psychologically, not physically. He converted his childhood bedroom into a space his own wife was forbidden to enter, filled it with his childhood belongings, and used it to carry out the most brutal acts imaginable over the course of nearly two decades. 

That overlap is not a coincidence. The Peacock documentary gave us unprecedented access to what was happening inside Rex Heuermann's mind — through the therapist who sat with him for months inside the jail, through his own words, and through the assessment of John Douglas, the criminal profiler who literally invented the FBI's behavioral analysis of serial killers. Rex described dark thoughts beginning in high school. He consumed books about death and mutilation. Sex and violence merged in his mind during adolescence and never separated. He said he couldn't put the brakes on it — that one thought fed another fed another, deeper and darker until it consumed him. He said his outlet was to kill. 

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins me to analyze everything the documentary exposed about Rex Heuermann's psychology — the significance of the kill room being his childhood bedroom, what the ritualized four-day cycle reveals about what was actually driving him, and whether the man who says he can't connect himself to the crime scene photos is experiencing genuine dissociation or performing control for one more audience.

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Bill Gothard reduced the French Revolution to a lesson about disobedience. The Wisdom Booklets — the Duggar family’s curriculum — taught children that all authority is divine, that questioning it invites destruction, and that the separation of church and state is rebellion against God. The law sections framed Old Testament codes as binding civil law. The Character First program carried Gothard’s ideology into public schools without disclosure. Arkansas prisons adopted his teachings. And the man who built a system demanding absolute submission was accountable to no one. We go inside the history the Wisdom Booklets taught — and the authority structure they were designed to protect.

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Ten feet. That's the distance between where Victoria Heuermann sat as a child watching television and playing video games, and the room where her father strangled, murdered, and dismembered women over the course of nearly two decades. Ten feet between a normal childhood and a crime scene. She didn't know it then. She knows it now. And she went back to that house, walked into that basement room, lit sage, and tried to cleanse the space where Rex Heuermann carried out the worst acts imaginable — acts she now has to reconcile with every memory she has of growing up in that home. The Peacock documentary captured Victoria Heuermann in a way that no true crime series has ever captured the child of a serial killer. Raw. Unfiltered. Cycling between anger and grief and a kind of eerie composure that comes from spending two years mentally preparing for a truth you already suspected but couldn't say out loud. She listed her ages against each murder. She was three, six, ten, twelve, thirteen. She mapped her childhood milestones against her father's kill timeline. And then she forgave him. 

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins me to go deep on Victoria Heuermann's psychological experience — the weight of carrying a serial killer's identity, the impossible act of rewriting childhood memories, and what happens when a young woman's only path forward requires forgiving the unforgivable.

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She was adopted and never felt wanted. Assaulted at sixteen. Attempted to take her own life before she was out of her teens. And then a man named Rex Heuermann showed up and said move in, I'll handle everything. For a woman who had never once felt safe in her own skin, that offer wasn't romance — it was survival. And it sealed her fate for the next three decades. The Peacock documentary on Rex Heuermann gave us something the courtroom never would have — a raw, unfiltered look at the woman standing behind the Gilgo Beach Killer. 

Asa Ellerup didn't just live with a serial killer. She built her entire identity around him. The family therapist said it plainly: as long as Rex told Asa he was innocent, there was no reaching her. His words overwrote reality itself. So what happens when reality finally breaks through? What happens when the man who was your entire foundation looks you in the eye and says he killed eight women — some of them in your home? 

Psychotherapist and author Shavaun Scott breaks down every layer of Asa Ellerup's psychology in this conversation. We get into the trauma history that made her vulnerable, the specific mechanisms Rex used to maintain control without her ever recognizing it, and the question the therapist raised that haunts this entire case — whether Asa will ever truly let Rex go, even now that she knows exactly what he is. This is one of the most psychologically complex figures in modern true crime. 

Shavaun doesn't flinch from any of it.

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At 9:27 PM on February 1, 2021, Matthew Farwell entered Sandra Birchmore’s apartment building. At 9:56 PM, he left. Twenty-nine minutes. Sandra was never seen alive again. When her body was found three days later, she was wearing the same clothes. Federal prosecutors allege that inside those twenty-nine minutes, Farwell strangled Sandra and her unborn son, then staged the scene.

The forensic evidence prosecutors have assembled is devastating. Farwell’s DNA was found on the duffel bag strap used to strangle Sandra. His sperm cells were found in her underwear, contradicting his claim that he hadn’t been intimate with her in months. Sandra’s right clavicle showed an injury that occurred while she was alive, matching the buckle behind her head — evidence prosecutors say proves she could not have died in the position she was found. A broken pink flamingo necklace Sandra regularly wore was discovered tangled with her hair on the bedroom floor. Her phone recorded its final movements while Farwell was still inside the apartment.

Then there’s the reenactment. At a private gathering after Sandra’s death, an inebriated Farwell demonstrated how she supposedly died, positioning himself beneath a doorknob. The details he described had not been publicly revealed. He knew because, prosecutors allege, he staged the scene himself.

DNA testing later confirmed Farwell was not the biological father of Sandra’s unborn son. But both he and Sandra believed he was — and prosecutors say that belief is what drove him to kill her. Every piece of physical evidence points to homicide. And yet, for years, it was ruled something else entirely.

This is Part 3 of a five-part series on the Sandra Birchmore case.

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This is the story Bob Motta has been waiting three years to tell — and he's telling it here first. The criminal defense attorney and Defense Diaries podcast host spent sixteen months investigating the Don Studey case on the ground in Iowa. He made contact with Lucy Studey-McKiddy, the daughter who alleges her father was the Green Hollow Killer, and spent over a hundred hours vetting her claims. 

He drove to Green Hollow when the FBI moved on the property, arrived in the middle of the night, and started documenting everything on TikTok — going viral in real time. The next morning he talked his way past a federal checkpoint in a rental car that looked like a cop cruiser and watched from the fence line as agents core-drilled a well to eighty-five feet. 

A deputy on the fence line dropped a bombshell — Gacy's first victim Tim McCoy was from Green Hollow and related to the Studey family. Bob had just finished thirty-six episodes on Gacy. Lucy never mentioned the connection. In the small towns around Green Hollow, everybody wanted to talk. 

Don was the boogeyman — the man parents warned children about for decades. Bob uncovered alleged ties to the Kansas City mob and an unsolved supper club robbery. Lucy's sister Susan drunk-texted Bob throughout calling Lucy a liar. Retired FBI Special Agent Robin Drake weighs in on trauma memory, credibility, and whether the numbers add up. The feds closed the case after three days. Lucy says they drilled the wrong well. The full conversation — first time anywhere.

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Before the arrest, before the 911 call, before the charges  --  there was a man with a guitar and a public image built on faith, family, and music. Caleb Flynn grew up as a pastor's son in Braham, Minnesota. He drummed in his father's praise band as a child, played on state championship basketball teams, studied music ministry at Lee University, and spent over a decade leading worship at churches in Ohio and South Carolina.

Then the trajectory shifted. He left ministry. Spent less than a year selling life insurance. And ended up as VP of Sales at his wife's family's business  --  a commercial flooring company in Tipp City. His LinkedIn profile still features his American Idol photo.

After his arrest, Ashley's family went to court. Their filings revealed Caleb was listed as the primary beneficiary on a life insurance policy. They sought access to financial records and asked the court to freeze assets, calling him someone with "the motive, opportunity, and means" to dissipate what was left. A judge raised his bond to $3.5 million and barred all contact with his daughters.

Part 2 of our four-part series maps the full arc of who Caleb Flynn was  --  and the gap between the man on stage and the man the prosecution describes.

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Over a hundred hours of phone calls. Sixteen months of investigation. Boots on the ground in Green Hollow. And one question that still doesn't have a clean answer — is Lucy Studey-McKiddy telling the truth about the alleged Green Hollow Killer? Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta approached the Don Studey case the way he approaches every case — looking for the lie. 

He probed Lucy's stories for red flags. He looked for inconsistencies. He pushed for details that didn't match. What he found was a woman whose accounts were repetitive but locked in — always the same stories told the same way with the same details. 

Meanwhile, Lucy's sister Susan was drunk-texting Bob during his time in Green Hollow insisting their father wasn't a killer. Two daughters. Opposite stories. No clean resolution. Retired FBI Special Agent Robin Drake brings a behavioral lens — Lucy clearly experienced trauma, and the fact that her outcry started in childhood gives it significant weight. 

But trauma can also produce exaggerated or distorted memories. Robin notes that serial killers statistically almost never involve family members, making Lucy's account of helping dispose of bodies an outlier. And there's a data gap that can't be ignored — nobody has come forward as the family of a missing person connected to Don Studey, and searches of missing persons databases haven't produced matches. Lucy arrived at her estimate of fifty victims by calculating roughly two a year over twenty-five years. 

The number may be lower. The truth may be somewhere between what Lucy says and what Susan denies. Part three of the conversation.

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