Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Thirty-six conduct violations. Guilty on thirty-two. Recorded calls where she refuses rehabilitation, calls herself the third victim, and tells her mother she plans to become a life coach. Mackenzie Shirilla's institutional file at the Ohio Reformatory for Women is growing — and defense attorney Eric Faddis says the parole board will read every page of it.

Shirilla was convicted in 2023 of killing Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan after deliberately driving her car into a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio, at roughly a hundred miles an hour. She's serving two concurrent sentences of fifteen years to life, with parole eligibility in September 2037.

Her conduct record since entering the facility has been relentless. Unauthorized medication that wasn't prescribed to her. Altered clothing. Contraband. Refusing work assignments. And the one that stands apart from the rest — more than a hundred video visits with a released former inmate using another person's identity. She pleaded guilty and took a thirty-day electronics restriction.

On recorded calls she knows are monitored, Shirilla describes herself as the third victim of what she still calls an accident. She's expressed zero interest in the rehabilitation programs available to her. She's told her mother she plans to be a life coach when she gets out.

Faddis, a criminal defense attorney and former felony prosecutor, breaks down what this institutional record actually means when the parole board convenes. He explains how violations are weighed, whether refusal to acknowledge the crime carries specific consequences, and whether an inmate's own recorded words can be used against them at a hearing. He also answers the question nobody around Shirilla appears to be asking: what would a defense attorney tell her to do differently starting now?

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A federal judge just found Josh Duggar’s sworn testimony not credible — for the second time. The first time, it was Jim Bob on the stand. Same judge. Same courtroom. Same word: not credible.

Josh Duggar’s motion to vacate his conviction was denied on June 1 after Judge Timothy Brooks ruled that Josh’s account of how he mailed his appeal was “something akin to a magic bullet theory.” But the mailing failure is just the latest in a pattern that stretches back decades. Contraband phone in prison. Three sentence extensions. Kicked out of honors housing. Multiple rounds of solitary confinement. And four separate courts — including the United States Supreme Court — telling him his conviction stands.

The pattern isn’t random. It’s architectural. Josh grew up inside the IBLP, where children were subjected to blanket training from infancy — a technique designed to break a child’s will through physical compliance. The system taught obedience to authority, not personal responsibility. It taught confession as a closed loop: tell your father, tell your pastor, tell God, and the cycle resets. No outside authority needed. No therapist. No court. When Josh confessed to harming his sisters as a teenager, Jim Bob’s response was church elders, a conversation with a state trooper friend, and an IBLP facility — not licensed treatment, not law enforcement, not accountability.

Josh has now been transferred from minimum security to the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth. His release date sits at February 2033. He is thirty-eight years old and still operating on the system his parents installed: confess, cry, wait for someone to make it go away. Federal judges don’t reset when you say you’re sorry. And the Bureau of Prisons doesn’t care who your father is.

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The prosecution asked whether Mackenzie Shirilla intended to kill her boyfriend and his friend. A judge said yes. But a psychotherapist who has spent thirty years inside the minds of people who commit violence says the real question was never asked — and the answer might be something the legal system has no category for.

Shavaun Scott, author of The Minds of Mass Killers, sits down for a full three-part psychological examination of the Shirilla case. She examines the personality the prosecution used as evidence — the narcissism that clinically signals fragility rather than calculation, the self-obsession that masks instability, and the volatility that could be personality disorder or could be a teenage brain that isn't finished developing. She unpacks the relationship the trial presented as one-sided — the mutual escalation, the competing accounts of a violent incident on I-71, the self-harm threats, and what happens psychologically when someone built around control faces abandonment. And she confronts the aftermath the documentary only scratches — the clinical legitimacy of Mackenzie's memory claim, how grief drives the families toward a certainty the evidence doesn't fully support, and a devastating possibility nobody in this case wants to consider.

Shirilla was convicted of four counts of murder for the Strongsville, Ohio crash that killed Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. She was seventeen. She's serving fifteen years to life. Everyone picked a side. This conversation asks whether either side understood what they were actually looking at — and whether the question the trial answered is the question that should have been asked.

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Blanca Simpson testified for three hours in 2023. The jury convicted Alex Murdaugh in three hours. A court clerk's misconduct erased all of it. And now Blanca is preparing to do something almost nobody in true crime history has had to do — go back to the stand with three additional years of knowledge, perspective, and clarity about what she saw.This three-part exclusive is the most comprehensive conversation Blanca has had since the conviction was overturned. She starts at Maggie's gravesite, where she drove the moment the ruling came down. She talks about the impossible tension between believing Alex killed her friend and believing the legal process has to be respected even when it produces results she doesn't want.She moves into the evidence. What she noticed the morning after the murders that nobody in the legal system ever asked her about. What the Supreme Court's guidance on limiting financial crimes testimony means for a retrial that will need to lean harder on physical and behavioral evidence — the kind of evidence she carries. What the loss of Moselle means for a new jury.And she finishes with her theory about whether Alex acted alone. She believes he had a plan that involved other people. She lays out the foundation for that belief. And she confronts the defense team's opposite claim — that "third parties" committed the murders — with the authority of someone who watched Alex recruit, manipulate, and use people for twenty years.Three parts. Three distinct angles. One witness who's been holding more than anyone knew.A Hidden Killers exclusive.

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Dominic Russo's father says he needs the truth so he can grieve. But what if the truth he needs isn't the truth the evidence supports? What if grief has so completely fused with certainty that the family can't distinguish between what happened and what they need to believe happened?

Mackenzie Shirilla says she has no memory of the crash that killed Dominic and Davion Flanagan. The families say she's calculated and cold. A fellow inmate says the remorseful woman in the documentary is performance. The judge who convicted her also denied her post-conviction petition. Everyone in this case has landed on a version — and nobody's open to reconsidering.

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott has spent over thirty years helping people navigate trauma and loss. She's worked with grieving families, with perpetrators of violence, and with people trapped between versions of reality they can't reconcile. She examines the psychology driving every side of the Mackenzie Shirilla case — the clinical reality of trauma-induced memory loss, how grief creates a need for a clear villain, whether remorse and performance can coexist in the same person, and the devastating question the system may be unable to process.

This conversation doesn't take sides. It examines how everyone involved in this case — the families, the prosecution, the defense, Mackenzie herself — has constructed a version of truth shaped by what they need it to be. And it asks what happens to justice when nobody in the room is seeing the evidence without a filter.

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Florida had no Ted Bundy file. Florida had no idea he was coming.

He arrived in Tallahassee on January 8, 1978, under the name Chris Hagen, with stolen credit cards and a room at a boarding house six blocks from the Chi Omega sorority at Florida State University. He spent a week at the disco next door. Sorority sisters reportedly noticed a man staring at them from the bar. Nobody thought anything of it.

January 15, 3:00 AM. Nita Neary, returning from a date, sees a masked man on the stairs carrying an oak log. He runs. She runs upstairs. Margaret Bowman, twenty-one. Lisa Levy, twenty. Both killed. Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler, both severely injured. Then four blocks to Dunwoody Street — Cheryl Thomas, twenty-one, attacked in her apartment, deafened for life. A neighbor heard the noise and called police.

Tallahassee had a crime scene nobody had ever seen before. The investigators photographed the bite mark on Lisa Levy. They did not yet know whose teeth made it.

Three weeks later, he approached a fourteen-year-old girl in Jacksonville. Her brother wrote his plate on his palm and called it in. The next morning, twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach walked across a school yard to get her purse and was seen speaking to a man near a white van. She was not seen alive again.

February 15, 1:34 AM. Pensacola. Officer David Lee ran a stolen plate on an orange VW. The driver fought. Two warning shots. The most wanted man in America was in a Pensacola holding cell, and nobody knew it until he said his own name two days later.

This is the fourth of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The three weeks he was anonymous again — and what they cost.

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Guilty on all counts. Unanimous. Three hours of deliberation for a case that took three weeks to present. And the defendant showed almost no reaction. A juror called her "like a statue."This episode examines the psychology behind that absence of emotion. Not stoicism. Not strategy. A system in overload — the circuit breaker that trips when a mind built on narrative control is forced into sustained silence while its constructed reality is dismantled in public.Three weeks of witnesses from Kouri Richins' own life stepping outside her narrative and telling a different story. Her housekeeper. Her boyfriend. Her friends. A forensic accountant who turned the projected image of success inside out. And through all of it, Kouri sat in mandated silence, unable to do the one thing her psychology has always relied on to survive: produce a story.Part four of a five-part series examining the broken psychology behind every phase of this case. What happens when you take away the one tool this kind of mind depends on — and the three-hour verdict that followed.

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The prosecution's version of the Mackenzie Shirilla case depends on a simple dynamic — she was the aggressor, Dominic Russo was trying to leave, and the crash was her final act of control. Netflix's The Crash leans into that framing. But psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, who has spent decades in domestic violence work, says the clinical reality of relationships like this one is almost never that neat.

The couple broke up and got back together constantly. Family members described explosive fights. Mackenzie sent threatening texts. But she also sent messages about wanting to hurt herself during arguments. And two weeks before the crash, there was an incident on I-71 that the prosecution presented as a rehearsal — a friend heard Mackenzie say "I will crash this car." But text messages show a different story. Mackenzie told Dominic's mother it was Dom who grabbed the steering wheel. Two versions. Only one made it to trial.

Shavaun Scott examines what that competing evidence actually tells a clinician about the relationship — the power dynamics, the attachment patterns, the mutual escalation that the trial's one-sided narrative erased. She looks at what keeps two young people locked in a destructive cycle, what abandonment does to someone with Mackenzie's fragility, and how self-harm threats inside a volatile relationship read very differently to a psychotherapist than they do to a prosecutor.

The relationship was the foundation of the prosecution's case. The question is whether the prosecution understood what it was actually looking at — or whether it saw what it needed to see.

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The text messages Mackenzie Shirilla sent Dominic Russo were controlling, threatening, and ugly. The TikTok persona was image-obsessed. The arrest behavior was bizarre. Everything about her personality fed a narrative that she was cold enough to plan a murder at seventeen. A judge agreed. But a psychotherapist who has treated both victims and perpetrators of violence for over thirty years reads the same evidence and sees a completely different clinical picture.

Shirilla was convicted of four counts of murder for the Strongsville, Ohio crash that killed Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. Netflix's The Crash has reignited the debate over whether this was premeditated or something else entirely. But the psychological dimension — the question of what's actually happening inside someone who behaves the way Mackenzie did — barely gets examined.

Shavaun Scott, author of The Minds of Mass Killers, brings three decades of clinical experience to the personality profile that convicted Mackenzie Shirilla. The narcissism the public sees as proof of coldness? Clinically, it almost always signals the opposite — someone with no stable sense of self, terrified of abandonment, constructing an identity out of image because there's nothing solid underneath. The ultimatums and threats? Driven by desperation, not calculation. The volatility? Possibly personality disorder, possibly a teenage brain that hasn't finished developing. The distinction between those two things matters enormously — and the trial never explored it.

This conversation goes where the documentary and the courtroom didn't — inside the clinical reality of who Mackenzie Shirilla actually is, not who the prosecution needed her to be.

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Rebecca Haro maintained her innocence for months. She told investigators a stranger had taken her seven-month-old son from a parking lot in Yucaipa. She gave television interviews with a visible black eye. She begged on camera for her baby to come home. After she was arrested and charged with murder, she pleaded not guilty. She sat in custody at the Robert Presley Jail on a million dollars bail and prepared to take her case to twelve jurors.

The morning of her preliminary hearing, with prosecutors about to put their evidence in front of a judge for the first time, she folded.

In this episode, Tony breaks down what happened in that courtroom. The plea deal that made the murder charge go away. The plea deal that made the false police report charge go away. The series of yes, Your Honor answers Rebecca Haro gave Judge Jerry Yang as she accepted twelve years and eight months in state prison for what the Riverside County District Attorney's Office called her sins of parental omission.

But omission is the wrong word. Omission is too clean for what Rebecca Haro did to baby Emmanuel.

Tony also revisits the documented child cruelty conviction Rebecca knew about when she had a baby with Jake Haro. The injuries the forensic pediatric specialist saw documented across the months of Emmanuel's short life. The two-year-old sibling Riverside County Child Protective Services removed from the family home the day his parents were arrested. The body of seven-month-old Emmanuel Haro that has never been found and, according to prosecutors, never will be.

Jake Haro, the man who actually killed Emmanuel, is doing thirty-two years to life and will, in all likelihood, die in state prison. Rebecca walks out in her mid-fifties with decades of life left.

Listen to the full story.

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