Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

This week in Hidden Killers' Week in Review, the Laken Snelling case gets the examination it demands. The University of Kentucky cheerleader has been indicted on first-degree manslaughter after her newborn son was found dead — wrapped in a towel inside a black trash bag in her closet — hours after she gave birth alone at 4 a.m. on August 27, 2025. The Kentucky Medical Examiner confirmed the baby was born alive. Cause of death: asphyxia by undetermined means.

What separates this case from most neonaticide prosecutions is what investigators found on her phone: deleted labor photos, week-by-week pregnancy tracking, and months of documented concealment running alongside a public life that included competing at the April 2025 national cheerleading championship and posting a TikTok listing "be a mom" as a life goal. Tony Brueski walks through the full record — the roommates kept in the dark, the 4 a.m. group chat, the whimper she admitted she heard, and the former White Pine, Tennessee classmates whose accounts form a consistent portrait of who she was before any of this.

Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer and behavioral analyst Robin Dreeke then break down where this case is strong and where it's exposed. Coffindaffer examines whether the evidence sustains a first-degree manslaughter charge through trial, what the single word "guessed" is going to mean for the prosecution, and how the roommates' acceptance of "I fainted" factors into the evidentiary picture. Dreeke treats the phone record as a behavioral document — months of active parallel concealment versus simple denial — and what that distinction means for a case built on conscious disregard. Laken Snelling has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

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This week in Hidden Killers' Week in Review, we revisit the decision that, in retrospect, may have sealed the outcome. On Day 13 of the Kouri Richins murder trial, the defense rested without calling a single witness. Three were reportedly available. After a one-hour recess following the judge's denial of a directed verdict motion, the defense chose silence. Three hours of jury deliberation later, Kouri Richins was found guilty on all counts.

Tony Brueski walks through Day 13 in full — the final cross-examination of Detective Jeff O'Driscoll, the legal framework that cornered the defense, and what that recess may have actually been about. Then Eric Faddis, defense attorney and former felony prosecutor, examines the three central pressure points of this trial with the precision of someone who has argued from both chairs.

The drug use theory was dismantled on three fronts: a judicial ruling, testimony from Eric's own circle, and the toxicology record. The immunity witnesses — both of whom changed their stories — represented genuine prosecution vulnerability. A detective's recorded statements were turned against the state mid-trial. Faddis named every real problem the prosecution had. But the deception record was the thing the defense could never neutralize. Phone searches. Memes. A jailhouse letter written as a destruction instruction that became state's evidence. A forged insurance signature. Texts sent three days after Eric died asking for more fentanyl.

The jury saw all of it. Three hours. Guilty on all counts. This is the breakdown of how the defense got there and why it wasn't enough.

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This week in Hidden Killers' Week in Review, the Walk the Dog letter gets treated the way the legal record demands — as evidence. Tony Brueski breaks it down section by section: the Ronney narrative and the degree of scripted witness instruction embedded in it, the airport drug story constructed as a pre-emptive defense mechanism rather than genuine recollection, the GMA media coordination complete with assigned speaking lines, the Lotto suppression request, the Katie section and how casually it's framed, and the Crest whitening strips passage — which, when read closely, functions as one of the most revealing details in the entire document.

Because a letter this calculated doesn't come from nowhere, the conversation also examines the documented instability in Kouri Richins' background alongside psychotherapist Shavaun Scott and former FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke — and asks what, if anything, it explains about the alleged behavior now in front of a jury. The forensic behavioral research on children exposed to a parent's alleged criminal conduct at this level of public scrutiny is also addressed directly.

What the evidence actually says. What the people qualified to analyze it actually think. Kouri Richins has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

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Kouri Richins is watching her story collapse. Every day in Utah, another witness. Another text. Another crack in the foundation.

This is Part 5 of The Perfect Wife — examining why long cons always end. Not through brilliant investigation. Through simple math: eventually, someone's survival matters more than the secret.

Denise Williams held hers together for seventeen years.

Mike Williams disappeared December 2000. Duck hunting trip. Drowned, eaten by alligators — official story.

Denise collected $1.75 million. Married Mike's best friend Brian Winchester five years later. The man who shot Mike and buried him.

They raised Mike's daughter together. Built a normal life on top of what they'd done.

Mike's mother Cheryl spent seventeen years being called paranoid. She kept fighting.

She was right.

Brian cracked in 2016. Divorce. Kidnapping charges. His survival mattered more. He confessed. Led them to Mike's body.

Every long con requires silence forever. Forever is a very long time.

Kouri's witnesses are talking now. The friend. The boyfriend. The housekeeper.

They always do.

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A murder conviction that closed a trial but opened new questions about immunity, justice, and what happens to the people left behind. A disappearance now in its seventh week with no arrest, a mountain of leads, and a single piece of doorbell footage still doing all the heavy lifting. A cop-on-cop shooting where the officer who was shot is the defendant — and her trial starts in days with a judge deciding everything. In this extended listener Q&A, Tony Brueski and retired FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke work through what followers of all three cases have been asking and not getting answered. No summaries, no recaps — just the questions with teeth, taken seriously, by two people with the experience to give them real treatment. Kouri Richins, Nancy Guthrie, Kelsey Fitzsimmons. All three, all in.

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The Murdaugh dynasty is over. The law firm dissolved. The property liquidated. The name ruined.

But the wreckage keeps spreading.

Part 5 of "The Name" explores the aftermath. Gloria Satterfield's sons, robbed twice. Mallory Beach's family, still fighting. Every client Alex stole from, still living with the damage.

And Buster Murdaugh, carrying a name that now means murder.

This episode is about what remains when a family system collapses. The victims who'll never be made whole. The survivors trying to figure out who they are.

If you've ever tried to break free from your family's patterns — this is for you.

The inheritance isn't destiny. But figuring out what to do with it is the work of a lifetime.

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She was a police officer. She had a baby. She was hospitalized for postpartum depression. She surrendered her weapons. And then, months later, her own colleagues showed up at her door to take her son and serve a restraining order obtained by the man she was engaged to — and one of them shot her. Now she's the defendant. Kelsey Fitzsimmons goes to trial March 23 in Lawrence, Massachusetts — and as of today, she's waived her right to a jury. A single judge will decide her fate. In this listener Q&A, Tony Brueski and retired FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke take on the questions this case demands: how does someone end up shot in their own home by a colleague during a mental health crisis and come out of it as the person charged with a crime? What does the decision to go judge-only tell you about her defense strategy? And what does Robin make of the systemic failures that put everyone in that situation on June 30th, 2025 — because whatever the truth is about who the gun was pointed at, something went deeply wrong long before that moment.

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The Kelsey Fitzsimmons trial opens Monday in Lawrence Superior Court. No jury. Judge Jeffrey Karp decides alone. And this week the full text exchange between Fitzsimmons and Justin Aylaian was unsealed, admitted into evidence, and made public.

On Hidden Killers, Tony Brueski goes through those texts as a behavioral document — not a he-said-she-said, a document — and asks the question this case has been waiting for someone to ask directly.

If every single one of those messages had come from him — the dismissal of her abuse allegation in four words, the child used as leverage every time she tried to hold a boundary, the financial levers, the control of her movement, the attacks on everyone who believed her — what would we call that?

We wouldn't be debating context. We wouldn't be weighing mental health nuance. We would be reading from the domestic violence playbook and calling the restraining order brave. The gender of the sender is the only variable that changes how we read it.

That doesn't make her guilty. It doesn't erase her diagnosis. It asks an honest question about a double standard that shapes how cases like this get covered before a single piece of evidence is heard.

This episode also breaks down the bench trial decision — the strategic logic that makes it the right call and the risk the defense accepted by making it. The prior professional relationship between Judge Karp and defense attorney Bradl that's now on the official record. The "far far away" line — what it means in the affidavit versus what it means in the actual texts. And the system that had every piece of information it needed before June 30th and sent three officers with paperwork and no plan.

She was not well. He was not safe. Both of those things are true. The verdict will answer the legal question. This episode asks the one it won't.

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In April 2022, OnlyFans model Courtney Clenney stabbed her boyfriend Christian Obumseli in their Miami high-rise apartment. That is the only fact both sides fully agree on. Everything else — who was the aggressor, what the wound proves, what the investigation was worth — is in dispute. Violently, documentably, and with evidence on both sides.

Obumseli secretly recorded Clenney calling him racial slurs, screaming at him, demanding to hit him. Surveillance cameras caught her striking him in their building elevator months before he died. And yet Clenney's defense has its own documented record: an independent witness who told investigators Obumseli hit her when he believed no one was around. Police records from two days before the stabbing showing she asked officers for a restraining order against him. A security guard who said Obumseli came charging toward her in the building lobby that same day.

Then there's the medical examiner's finding — that the three-inch fatal wound required a forceful downward thrust inconsistent with Clenney's claim that she threw the knife from ten feet away. And the defense's answer to that: a pioneering expert in battered woman syndrome who argues that a person acting in genuine terror moves faster than their own memory can track.

And underneath all of it: allegations that prosecutors accessed privileged defense communications, that evidence was destroyed, that a witness was withheld. A circuit judge ruled the state violated attorney-client privilege. The case moved forward anyway.

Trial begins April 27, 2026. Hidden Killers is covering it from day one. This episode is the foundation — everything you need before the first witness takes the stand.

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It has been over six weeks since Nancy Guthrie was taken from her home in Tucson in the middle of the night. There has been no press conference in over a month. No named suspect. No arrest. And this week, newly recovered camera footage from her own property showed nothing. In this listener Q&A, Tony Brueski and retired FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke cut through what the official silence means — and what it doesn't. Investigators are asking neighbors about specific dates weeks before Nancy disappeared. The sheriff believes the home was targeted and says he thinks he knows why — but won't say. Ransom notes were sent to news outlets with deadlines that came and went without consequence. A damaged utility box around the corner may have knocked out Wi-Fi in the neighborhood the night she was taken. CeCe Moore just went on record saying she'd re-swab parts of that house — that a single rootless hair could crack this case open. Robin and Tony work through what all of it means for where this investigation actually stands — and answer the question that nobody is saying plainly.

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