Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

A burner phone traveled from Massapequa Park to Midtown Manhattan on July 12, 2009 — the exact route between Rex Heuermann's home and his office. Hours later, Melissa Barthelemy's phone traveled that same route in reverse. Melissa had told a friend she was meeting a man. She never came back. For the next five weeks, someone used her phone to call her 15-year-old sister Amanda — describing the killing in graphic detail. Always under three minutes. Always from crowded Manhattan locations. Always targeting the teenager, never the mother.

Melissa was 24. She'd graduated cosmetology school in Buffalo, earned her license, and moved to New York to build a career. The salon job was slow. The city was expensive. She ended up working escort ads on Craigslist from a basement apartment in the Bronx — a temporary solution that became permanent. Prosecutors allege Heuermann also searched online for images of the victims' families after their deaths — their sisters, their children.

While those calls were being made to a teenager, Heuermann was going home to his own family. Asa Ellerup, his now ex-wife, sat in the last row of a Suffolk County courtroom as he admitted to eight killings. She once called him her hero. She walked out into a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the son of victim Valerie Mack, alleging the family profited from a documentary and demonstrated disregard for the victims. Their daughter Victoria has publicly stated she believes her father most likely committed the killings. Asa's attorney has called the lawsuit's claims reckless.

This week's coverage examines Melissa's story and the phone evidence that anchors the prosecution's timeline, the wrongful death suit and its legal theory, and what the family fracture reveals. Robin Dreeke and Eric Faddis provide behavioral and legal analysis on the taunting calls, the civil exposure facing the Heuermann family, and how compartmentalization functions at this scale.

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#RexHeuermann #GilgoBeach #MelissaBarthelemy #AsaEllerup #LISK #TauntingCalls #GilgoFour #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #BehavioralAnalysis

Investigators followed Rex Heuermann for months through Manhattan before a discarded pizza crust gave them everything. That abandoned sample — recovered legally from public garbage — produced a DNA match to a male hair found wrapped in burlap around Megan Waterman's remains on Ocean Parkway. One connection. That match generated the warrants for Heuermann's home, his devices, and the digital trove prosecutors say reveals the most meticulously documented serial killing case investigators have encountered.

Megan was 22, a mother from Scarborough, Maine, who called her three-year-old daughter every day without exception. When those calls stopped in June 2010, her family filed a missing persons report within two days. Surveillance footage from a Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge shows her walking out the door at 1:15 a.m. She was found six months later alongside the rest of the Gilgo Four.

Heuermann stood in a Suffolk County courtroom and pleaded guilty to seven murders — Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello, Sandra Costilla, Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor, and Megan Waterman — spanning seventeen years from 1993 to 2010. He admitted to intentionally causing the death of an eighth victim, Karen Vergata, whose case was folded into the plea agreement. Prosecutors allege every killing occurred when Heuermann's wife and children were out of state, and that his devices contained checklists, methodology notes, and instructions for destroying evidence.

His defense attorney framed the plea as "relief." The FBI cooperation agreement — requiring Heuermann to sit for behavioral analysis interviews — is built directly into the deal. Retired FBI behavioral expert Robin Dreeke and defense attorney Eric Faddis break down what the documented methodology reveals, what the defense traded in the plea, and why the courtroom moment matters far less than what investigators found on those devices.

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Two active federal-adjacent cases are moving through courtrooms on opposite coasts, and in both, the evidentiary record is reshaping what accountability looks like for the people standing closest to the accused.

In the Anna Kepner case, unsealed federal records reveal that the accused — her sixteen-year-old stepbrother — signed a written waiver requesting adult prosecution on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated sexual abuse. His defense counsel co-signed. Ship surveillance reportedly shows no one else entering or exiting the stateroom. The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner determined the cause of death to be mechanical asphyxiation. The accused’s mother has confirmed in a separate custody proceeding that he missed his insomnia medication for two consecutive nights aboard the Carnival Horizon. Federal prosecutors are seeking to revoke his release.

In the Heuermann civil case, the evidentiary landscape shifted the moment Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty to eight murders on April 8. Benjamin Torres, the son of victim Valerie Mack, has filed a wrongful death suit naming Heuermann, his ex-wife Asa Ellerup, and their daughter Victoria. The willful blindness claim against Ellerup rests on decades of proximity inside a roughly 1,300-square-foot home, hair evidence on multiple victims, and public statements she made before the confession that dismissed the prosecution’s theory. The unjust enrichment claim targets the reported million-dollar documentary payment.

Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis examines the physical evidence, the defense strategy in both cases, and the legal questions that will determine how each of these stories ends.

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Maricris Drouaillet stood in a Chula Vista courtroom on January 28, 2026, and told Judge Enrique Camarena that her parents wake up every morning still waiting for justice for their daughter. She begged him not to grant another continuance. The defense cited personal family losses. The judge granted it. Again.This is Episode 5 of a five-part Hidden Killers series on the Larry Millete case. It covers every delay between the October 2021 arrest and the current trial date of May 11, 2026 — the competency freeze, the financial disputes, the defense team change, the venue change denial, and the chain of postponements that has pushed this case past the five-year mark without a single juror being seated.The therapy records from Maya's marriage counselor have finally been ordered released — unlocked by the five-year presumption-of-death threshold. Larry has told a reporter he will not accept a plea deal. The prosecution is ready. The family is ready. The evidence has been waiting in boxes since 2023.The system isn't broken in the way people usually mean. Every individual component is working as designed. The result just looks a lot like the opposite of justice. May 11. If it holds.

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The civil lawsuit filed against Asa Ellerup does not accuse her of murder. It accuses her of something a jury may find just as difficult to forgive: choosing not to know.

Benjamin Torres — who was six years old when his mother Valerie Mack was allegedly killed and dismembered by Rex Heuermann in 2000 — has filed a wrongful death complaint naming Heuermann, Ellerup, and their daughter Victoria. The suit alleges that one or both women knew of, concealed, or deliberately avoided learning material facts about the murders. It further alleges unjust enrichment from a Peacock documentary for which the family reportedly received over a million dollars.

The evidentiary foundation of the willful blindness claim rests on specific details. Ellerup shared a home of roughly 1,300 square feet with a secured basement room that featured a metal door. Prosecutors have said the killings occurred while she was away. Her hair was found on multiple victims. Before the guilty plea, she publicly dismissed the prosecution’s evidence and called Heuermann her savior. After the plea, she told reporters her thoughts and prayers were with the victims.

Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis examines the strength of the willful blindness argument against a spouse who prosecutors themselves say was absent during the crimes, the legal weight of statements she made before the confession, and whether the Peacock documentary money transforms a sympathetic figure into one a jury cannot forgive.

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There were two people in the room when the Jesse Butler plea was finalized. Butler's defense team. And the Payne County DA's office.

Everyone else — the victim, her mother, her attorney, a tribal victim services advocate assigned to the case — was outside the wall. And this week, over three days of sworn testimony in a Stillwater evidentiary hearing, every one of them took the stand to say it.

Jesse Butler pleaded no contest to eleven felony counts last year — among them attempted rape, rape by instrumentation, strangulation, and violation of a protective order. A sworn police affidavit describes him allegedly strangling a sixteen-year-old girl, his then-girlfriend, until she lost consciousness. A medical professional later told her she'd been roughly thirty seconds from death. Butler walked out of his plea hearing with no prison time, youthful offender status, and a countdown clock to the nineteenth birthday this August that will legally erase the entire record.

This week, the victim's attorney tried to temporarily withdraw a constitutional challenge against the DA's office. The DA's office objected. Demanded the hearing proceed. Demanded a judge make a finding — on paper — that they followed the law. Because once Butler's birthday hits, any ruling in the state's favor is the only shield that stands between this office and every lawsuit, documentary, or voter question coming for the next decade.

This is the story of what it looks like when every actor in a criminal case — the defense, the prosecutor, the judge who granted youthful offender status — moves in the same direction, and the only people pulling the other way are two teenage girls who ran out of time.

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Bill Gothard didn't build a church. He built an infrastructure for political and cultural influence — and it's still functioning.His plan was called the Joshua Generation. Take the best children from his homeschool network, train them inside his system from birth, and deploy them into government to reshape America. This wasn't aspirational. It was operational. Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, and Sonny Perdue all appeared at IBLP events or publicly supported Gothard. A congressman chaired his board. An Indianapolis mayor sold him a city building for a dollar — and minors from IBLP's training center worked on that mayor's political campaign.The financial scale was massive. Approximately sixty-three million in reported earnings as of 2006. A Texas campus provided by Hobby Lobby's David Green. A Michigan retreat on three thousand acres. International operations in over a dozen countries.IBLP is still a registered nonprofit operating from Big Sandy, Texas. Gothard's seminar recordings are still available. The teachings have not been renounced. The legal protections that shielded IBLP families from educational oversight remain in place.In 2025, the Texas Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit alleging IBLP's teachings were designed to enable abuse to proceed. In March 2026, Joseph Duggar was arrested on Florida felony charges alleging misconduct with a minor. He is presumed innocent.Gothard is ninety-one. He has never been criminally charged. The survivors are still waiting. And the system he built is still operational.This is Part 5 — the final episode of our IBLP series. The machine didn't stop. The question is what happens next.

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David Anthony Burke — the TikTok star and recording artist known as D4VD — was arrested on April 16 by LAPD Robbery-Homicide for the alleged murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez. He's being held without bail. No indictment. No criminal complaint. A probable cause warrant signed by a judge before the DA ever weighed in.

For seven months, the case stalled on one question: how did she die? Celeste's remains were found in the front trunk of a Tesla registered to Burke — decomposed, placed in cadaver bags, and in a condition that made determining cause of death extraordinarily difficult. According to ABC News, investigators now say they've solved that problem. They believe they can prove this was murder.

I break down the full arc — from a 13-year-old reported missing three times in Lake Elsinore to the tracking data that placed D4VD in a remote area of Santa Barbara County in the middle of the night, to the sealed medical examiner report the ME's own office fought against, to the defense team's first public statement and what it does and doesn't deny.

I explain what a Ramey warrant is and why LAPD used one instead of waiting for the grand jury. I walk through the Discord evidence allegedly going back to 2022, the reports that D4VD's friends believed Celeste was a 19-year-old college student, the burn cage found at his rental, and the evidence boxes detectives carried out the night of the arrest.

The DA reviews the case Monday. If charges are filed, this becomes a murder prosecution. If not, Burke walks out of jail. Three layers of secrecy. Zero formal charges. One child who was missing for 17 months and only found because a car got a parking ticket.

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The evidentiary picture in Anna Kepner’s case is narrow and deeply specific. Ship surveillance reportedly shows no one other than the accused entering or exiting the cabin. Anna’s body was allegedly found concealed under a bed, wrapped in a blanket, covered with life jackets. The alleged concealment itself is a significant evidentiary detail — it suggests awareness of what had occurred and a deliberate attempt to delay discovery.

Prosecutors have framed this as a crime that emerged without warning. No prior conflict between Anna and her stepbrother. No documented behavioral concerns. A blended family that appeared, by all accounts, to be functioning normally aboard a family vacation. The government’s position is that the absence of motive strengthens their case rather than weakening it — because the physical evidence speaks for itself.

The defense will have to contend with testimony from the accused’s own mother, who confirmed in a separate custody hearing that her son had not taken his insomnia medication for two consecutive nights on the cruise. That medication detail may become central to whatever theory the defense ultimately advances. Meanwhile, three teenagers shared that cabin the night Anna died — including a fourteen-year-old half-sibling whose account has not been publicly disclosed. Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis breaks down the weight of the physical evidence, whether a medication argument can reach the charges as filed, and what federal sentencing looks like for a minor convicted as an adult.

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The federal case against Anna Kepner’s sixteen-year-old stepbrother is now unsealed — and the details inside those records raise questions that go well beyond what happened in that cruise ship cabin.

A federal grand jury indicted the accused as an adult on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated sexual abuse. Court documents confirm that the accused signed a written waiver requesting adult prosecution. His defense team co-signed it. That is not a routine move. Defense attorneys do not let a minor volunteer for adult court unless the juvenile alternative carries risks they are unwilling to take. That calculation alone tells you something about the defense’s read on the evidence.

The accused was reportedly admitted to a medical facility after the Carnival Horizon docked in Miami. Text messages from his mother, released through a separate custody proceeding, indicate he repeatedly told her he could not remember anything. His mother also confirmed in court that he takes medication for ADHD and insomnia and had not taken his insomnia medication for two nights on the cruise, including the night Anna was allegedly killed.

Prosecutors are now seeking to revoke his release, calling the charged offenses the most serious crimes one person can inflict on another. Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis examines what the defense waiver signals, whether the memory claim is a foundation or a liability, and how a family torn apart by this case could shape the trial itself.

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