Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Ruby Franke was arrested. The performance ended. But for her six children — raised as content for years — the work was just beginning.

Part 5 of "The Good Mother" examines what comes after escape. The psychology of recovery. Who are you when the show is finally over?

Shari Franke posted "Finally" when her mother was arrested. She wrote a memoir, testified before Utah legislators, advocates for child influencer protections. She's building a life on her own terms.

Chad Franke reads his 2023 diaries on TikTok — entries written while under Jodi's influence, trying to be "pure enough." He calls it being "brainwashed." His mother writes letters from prison. He doesn't respond.

"I don't think I'm interested in talking right now."

Kevin Franke divorced Ruby in March 2025. He says he still loves her — but is "as angry as can be." He blocked any communication from Ruby to him or the children.

The four minor children — including Russell and Eve, who were found bound and starving — heal in private. Faces blurred in documentaries. Names redacted. For the first time, they are not content.

Recovery after narcissistic family abuse isn't a straight line. Getting out is just the beginning. The work is figuring out which thoughts are really yours. Learning whether you can love someone who harmed you. Building an identity that isn't defined by what happened.

Ruby sits in prison, serving four to thirty years. First parole hearing: December 2026.

Her children are still here. Still growing. Still figuring out who they are now that the cameras are off.

That's the work. Not survival — they already did that. The work of becoming.

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Defense attorney and former felony prosecutor Eric Faddis sits down with Tony Brueski for an extended Hidden Killers conversation that goes deeper into the Kouri Richins murder trial than anything you'll hear in a standard legal segment.

Three issues. Three conversations. Each one with real stakes.

The defense's drug use theory has been gutted by a judicial ruling, contradicted by the people who knew Eric best, and undermined by forensic toxicology. Is there anything left — or is this a strategy built on hope?

The prosecution's key witnesses both have immunity deals. Both changed their stories. A detective's recorded words were turned against the state mid-trial. Can a murder conviction survive a drug chain where every link had something to gain?

And the deception record. Phone searches. Memes. A jailhouse letter. A forged signature. Three days after Eric died, Kouri was texting for more drugs. How does a defense attorney walk a jury back from a client who left a paper trail like this?

Eric Faddis answers every one of these questions with the clarity of someone who's done this job — from both chairs.

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Lori Vallow still believes she's chosen.

In a 2025 Dateline interview, she maintained her innocence. She claimed Jesus showed her she'd be exonerated. She showed no remorse.

Meanwhile, her surviving son Colby is trying to figure out how to live in the aftermath of something that can never be fixed.

This is Part 5 of "The Chosen Ones," Hidden Killers' final episode examining the psychology of spiritual abuse and religious trauma through the Vallow-Daybell case. Today we focus on the survivors — and on everyone who has ever walked out of a high control religion and had to rebuild from nothing.

This episode is for you if you've ever asked: How did I believe this?

The answer isn't stupidity. The answer is that you're human. Belief systems that promise meaning, identity, and belonging are designed to be compelling. They target seekers. They target the faithful. They catch good people.

The shame you carry was put there by the system. You can put it down.

Sometimes the person who hurt you never wakes up. Sometimes the apology never comes. You have to heal anyway.

The apocalypse Chad Daybell predicted never came. But you're still here. And being here matters.

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Before the Kouri Richins jury ever decides whether she murdered her husband, they've already learned who she is. Phone searches for "fentanyl poisoning." Deleted memes accessed minutes after first responders left — one saying "I'm really rich." A jailhouse letter coaching family on testimony. A forged signature on a life insurance policy a month before Eric died. And three days after his death, a text to her alleged drug source asking if she still had her connection.

That's the deception pattern the prosecution has laid in front of the jury. And now Kouri has to either take the stand and explain it — or stay silent and let the jury sit with all of it.

On Hidden Killers, Tony Brueski and Eric Faddis examine what a documented pattern of deception actually does in a criminal trial. Eric has prosecuted defendants whose behavior told the story against them, and he's defended clients who had to fight through records that made them look guilty. His read on where Kouri stands right now is worth hearing.

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Forty days. No suspect. No arrest. Cadaver dogs stood down. The DNA has dead-ended twice. And the desert keeps its secrets.

This isn't pessimism — it's the evidence. After forty days with no named suspect, no viable DNA profile, and a biological clock that has long since run out for an 84-year-old woman with a cardiac condition, the Hidden Killers monologue goes where the cable coverage won't: straight into what the facts are actually saying.

The glove DNA traced back to an unconnected restaurant worker. The mixed crime scene DNA is too complex to extract a usable profile. Nothing in CODIS matched. Six weeks in, investigators cannot identify the masked suspect's clothing. The unidentified car on the Ring camera 2.5 miles away is being reviewed alongside, in the sheriff's own words, hundreds of thousands of other vehicles. The FBI is still knocking on doors asking about internet disruptions from the night she disappeared.

And then there's the number that reframes everything: 600,000. That's how many people go missing in America every year. Roughly 87 percent of those cases close within 30 days. Nancy Guthrie is past 40. She is statistically inside the universe of cases that don't resolve — high profile or not. The FBI carried over 97,000 unresolved missing persons cases in a single year. Those weren't household names. Fame doesn't change the math. It just changes the audience watching the math happen.

In 2024, only 293 missing persons entries were coded as stranger abductions nationwide. They are the hardest cases to crack — because there's no connection between victim and perpetrator to triangulate. No shared history. No thread.

Add the Sonoran Desert. Add forty days.

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The evidentiary phase of the Kouri Richins murder trial is over. The defense rested Thursday without calling a single witness — and Kouri Richins used her only moment to address the court to confirm she would not be testifying.

This episode covers the full story of Day 13: Detective Jeff O'Driscoll's final cross-examination, the directed verdict motion, and the extraordinary legal moment where the defense was warned that one line of questioning would blow open previously suppressed evidence against their own client. The judge called it high-stakes poker. The defense folded.

Then we examine the question underneath all of it. What really happened in that hour-long recess? The legal strategy argument is real — but there's a human story here that deserves the same scrutiny. When a defendant has spent years managing a carefully constructed image and a courtroom spends three weeks dismantling it in public, the decision to stop the bleeding isn't always purely tactical. We break down the pattern, what it looks like in cases like this one, and what it may tell us about where Kouri Richins' head was on Thursday afternoon.

We also go somewhere this coverage rarely goes — the attorneys. Three weeks of a high-profile, live-streamed trial takes a toll on everyone sitting at that defense table. We talk about what sustained public pressure does to people who also have professional identities and reputations on the line.

Closing arguments Monday. Deliberations to follow. This one is almost done.

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In the Kouri Richins murder trial, the prosecution's drug supply chain runs through two witnesses — and both of them have immunity deals. Both of their stories shifted. One recanted on the stand. The other changed her account of what drug she bought after federal charges appeared on the horizon.

It's the kind of evidentiary situation that keeps defense attorneys up at night — and gives them ammunition in closing arguments.

On Hidden Killers, Tony Brueski sits down with Eric Faddis — defense attorney and former felony prosecutor — to dissect the structural problem at the heart of the prosecution's case. Not just the credibility of each individual witness, but the combined weight of two compromised testimonies holding up a first-degree murder charge.

Eric breaks down what an immunity deal actually requires, where witness preparation ends and improper influence begins, and what a defense attorney does in front of a jury when the prosecution's own detective was caught on tape saying things that don't help the state's case.

This is a conversation about how the justice system actually works — and where it can go sideways.

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When you don't have much, do you blame the victim? That's the question at the center of the Kouri Richins defense strategy — and it's one that Eric Faddis, a former prosecutor turned defense attorney, has seen play out in courtrooms more times than he can count.

The defense suggested Eric Richins had a drug history. They wanted to show a jury evidence of his alleged high school pill use. The judge said no. What they're left with is a theory built around uncertainty — maybe the fentanyl came from somewhere else, maybe Eric had habits no one knew about, maybe nothing is as simple as the prosecution claims.

The problem? Eric's own business partner said he never saw anything. The toxicologist found a forensic marker proving the fentanyl was street-grade. And the judge cut off the defense's most specific evidence before they could even make their case.

On this episode of Hidden Killers, Tony Brueski sits down with Eric Faddis to break down whether this defense theory was ever viable — or whether it was always a last resort dressed up as a strategy. They also get into the open marriage angle, the risk of alienating a jury by attacking a dead man, and what a defense attorney actually does when the evidence isn't on your side.

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CPS visited the Franke home in 2020. They investigated. They closed the case.

Three years later, Ruby's children were found bound and starving in Jodi Hildebrandt's house.

Part 4 of "The Good Mother" examines what happens when you see abuse, report it, and nothing changes. Why systems designed to protect children fail until the damage is catastrophic.

The Franke case wasn't hidden. Ruby documented her parenting publicly for 2.5 million subscribers. The warning signs were on YouTube — a teenager sleeping on a beanbag for seven months, a child denied lunch, public humiliation as content.

Viewers reported. A petition was launched. Ruby's own family tried to intervene — her parents, siblings, husband. All were cut off.

Shari Franke posted one word when her mother was arrested: "Finally."

She elaborated: "We've been trying to tell the police and CPS for years."

This episode examines why systems fail. CPS is overwhelmed. The threshold for intervention is physical evidence of severe harm — not patterns, not escalation, not warning signs.

The Frankes performed normalcy when it counted. Educated, affluent, religious. They knew what to say. The children had been trained to perform too.

By the time CPS showed up, the house probably looked fine. The children probably said what they'd been taught to say.

That's how children fall through cracks.

If you reported something and nothing happened, that doesn't mean you were wrong. The system failing doesn't mean you failed.

Keep seeing. Keep reporting. You can't know which report will be the one that matters.

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The Kouri Richins trial has built a case fact by fact, witness by witness. But the behavioral picture underneath it — how someone allegedly operates this way for years across an entire social world, what it does to the people who love them, and where it all starts — that takes a different kind of analysis.

Tony Brueski brings psychotherapist Shavaun Scott and retired FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke into three complete panel conversations examining the full psychological scope of this case.

The first conversation tackles the alleged exploitation the trial has documented in granular detail — every person prosecutors say was used and what they lost, and the psychological mechanics that allegedly made it invisible until it was too late. The second examines the Richins family's experience — the instinct they carried, the years of fighting to be believed, and the specific psychological weight of grief that confirms what you always feared was true. The third goes to the root: Kouri's own history, what a chaotic upbringing does to someone's decision-making decades down the road, and what five children are now inheriting from all of it.

This is the psychological portrait the case demands — and the conversation most coverage is still not having.

Kouri Richins has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

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