Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

For more than a decade, the Dan Markel case has produced conviction after conviction. What it has not produced is a charge against the two people prosecutors have repeatedly named as part of the conspiracy: Wendi Adelson and her father, Harvey. We dig into why.

Markel, an FSU law professor, was shot in his Tallahassee garage in 2014 amid a bitter post-divorce battle with Wendi over their two sons and her thwarted attempt to relocate to South Florida. The state's theory has always been that the family wanted that move badly enough to kill for it. Two hitmen, a go-between, Wendi's brother Charlie, and her mother Donna have all been convicted.

The evidentiary record around the two who remain uncharged is its own story. Wendi has testified across multiple trials, each time under limited immunity — protection that evaporates only if she lied under oath. Harvey has never taken the stand, but cell records introduced at trial reportedly showed contact between a phone connected to him and a phone tied to one of the hitmen, and he was beside Donna at the airport with one-way tickets to a non-extradition country when she was arrested.

After Donna's conviction, the State Attorney signaled decisions within weeks. Months on, nothing has surfaced. Our guest — a defense attorney and former prosecutor — walks through what that delay typically means, how a perjury theory against an immunized witness would actually have to be proven, and whether the evidence on Harvey ever crossed the threshold prosecutors said it hadn't.

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The defendant in Anna Kepner's death has now been indicted as an adult — and that single procedural shift was supposed to change everything about whether he stays free before trial. Instead, a federal judge heard the prosecution's case for detention and walked away without a ruling.

Here's what the record shows. Anna, eighteen, was traveling with her blended family aboard the Carnival Horizon when she was found dead in a shared room, her body concealed. The case moved to federal court because the death occurred in international waters. After a grand jury indicted the sixteen-year-old as an adult, prosecutors moved to revoke his release and hold him until trial, arguing the seriousness of the charges alone makes him a danger.

The judge didn't disagree on the merits. He acknowledged on the record that a twenty-year-old facing identical allegations would likely be detained. What he kept circling back to was age — and the logistics of where this defendant would be held if he ordered detention. He paused the hearing specifically to consult with the U.S. Marshals about housing the teen in central Florida, closer to family, rather than in the Miami area where the trial sits.

That's the thread we pull on here: the conditions of release, the prosecution's argument that compliance means little when the defendant didn't even know charges were coming, and the question of whether the judge is quietly building toward detention — or genuinely undecided about locking him up at all.

A criminal defense attorney joins us to read the room inside that courtroom and explain what the next ruling likely turns on.

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Mackenzie Shirilla's texts were controlling. Her threats were documented. Her TikTok persona screamed narcissism. Everything about her personality made people want to believe she was capable of murder. But since when does being a difficult person prove premeditated intent beyond a reasonable doubt?

In the early morning of July 31st, 2022, Shirilla drove her car into a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio at close to a hundred miles per hour, killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo, twenty, and their friend Davion Flanagan, nineteen. Prosecutors pulled the ugliest messages from ninety-three thousand texts, pointed to a prior incident where she reportedly threatened to crash her car during an argument, and argued the crash was a calculated act to end a relationship she couldn't control. A judge — no jury — convicted her and called her "hell on wheels."

But there's a difference between being volatile and being a calculated killer. And the evidence in this case doesn't land as cleanly on one side as the conviction suggests. Surveillance footage shows the car accelerating, but it can't show what was happening in the driver's mind. Black box data proves no braking — but that's also consistent with loss of consciousness. A medical condition that could explain the crash was raised at trial but never properly presented. The expert who later examined her records and found evidence consistent with a seizure was never heard by the court because her post-conviction petition arrived one day too late.

This episode separates what we know from what we assume. It examines how personality gets treated as evidence, how grief shapes the stories families tell themselves, and what happens when the legal system forecloses on a question it never actually answered. Mackenzie Shirilla is serving fifteen years to life. Maybe the sentence fits. But is it for the right reasons? That's the question this episode sits with — and leaves with you.

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On the surface, these three cases share nothing. Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance from her Tucson home is an unsolved kidnapping with DNA at the FBI lab and more than fifty thousand tips under review. The Anna Kepner case is a federal murder prosecution stemming from a death on a Carnival cruise ship, with the accused — her sixteen-year-old stepbrother Timothy Hudson — pleading not guilty and a family tearing itself apart in custody filings. The D4VD case is a death-eligible murder charge in Los Angeles County, with prosecutors alleging the musician killed fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez to protect his career. Burke has pleaded not guilty. But psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, with more than thirty years in forensic mental health, finds the same failure underneath all three. In the Guthrie case, she traces what months of post-crime silence and the looming threat of genetic genealogy do to a perpetrator’s mind. In the Kepner case, she dissects a family structure where a biological mother allegedly chose self-preservation over her own child, leaving every minor in the household exposed. In the D4VD case, she follows a developmental trajectory from religious restriction through unrestricted digital immersion to an industry that allegedly handed a teenager fame and wealth with no one positioned to provide accountability. The connecting thread is systems — families, communities, institutions, industries — that were supposed to catch what was wrong before it became irreversible. Scott examines why they allegedly didn’t and what that means for how we understand each of these cases.

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Todd Gabler never met Eric Richins. But he might know him better than almost anyone outside the family. Over the course of a year-long investigation, Gabler went through Eric's phone records, walked through his home, interviewed dozens of people who knew him, and pieced together the reality of a marriage and a life that ended in a way nobody should have to die.

That kind of immersion changes an investigator. Especially one who's spent 34 years on the defense side — the side that challenges, pokes holes, fights for the accused. For the first time in his career, Gabler's evidence became the prosecution's case. And when the jury convicted Kouri Richins on all counts in under three hours, he was sitting in a seat he'd never occupied before.

In Part 3, Gabler tells Tony what Eric Richins became to him through the investigation, what it was like to testify six weeks after surgery because he refused to miss his day in court, and whether 34 years of doing this work prepared him for what this particular case did to him as a person.

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Prosecutors allege David Anthony Burke — the musician known as D4VD — killed fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez and attempted to conceal the evidence for months. They’ve filed special circumstance allegations including murder for financial gain. Burke has pleaded not guilty. But the evidentiary question of what allegedly happened leads to a deeper one — what allegedly created the conditions for it to happen? Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Hidden Killers to trace the psychological trajectory that reportedly brought Burke from a strictly religious Houston household to a death-eligible murder charge in Los Angeles. Burke was homeschooled by his mother in a home where the only permitted music was gospel until age thirteen. She reportedly suggested he start making music. She was his teacher, his social structure, his entire framework. Then the internet provided unrestricted access to a world he had no preparation for. By seventeen, he was signed to major labels, touring internationally, surrounded by an inner circle that consisted entirely of people whose livelihoods allegedly depended on his continued output. Scott examines what happens when religious restriction gives way to digital immersion without any intermediary to help a developing mind process the transition. She addresses the psychological impact of sudden fame and wealth on a teenager with no peer foundation, and she dissects the specific danger of an inner circle where every person allegedly benefits from you and no person is positioned to tell you no. The question isn’t just what Burke allegedly did. It’s who was supposed to be watching.

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IDOC's own policy caps solitary confinement at thirty days for inmates with serious mental illness. Richard Allen had a diagnosed major depressive disorder and a history of suicidal ideation. According to the defense filings, he was held in the most restrictive solitary cell at Westville for thirteen months — the first pretrial safekeeper anyone could remember being placed there. Within two weeks, he told his wife he was broken. By five months, he weighed 135 pounds, was psychotic, gravely disabled, confusing nightmares with reality. He confessed to shooting the girls — they were killed with a blade. He confessed to acts there is no forensic evidence of. Before solitary, Allen endured a confrontational interrogation and refused to break, telling investigators: "I am not going to say something I did not do." Solitary changed that. The prosecutor waited nine days to respond to the defense's emergency transfer motion — while investigators monitored Allen's confession calls — then called the defense's concerns "colorful" on the same day IDOC found Allen gravely disabled. Dr. Wala, who controlled Allen's privileges, noted after one confession that she "needed more consistency." A 127-page forensic evaluation ruled out malingering and attributed the psychosis to solitary. The jury heard the confessions. They never heard the audio, the expert testimony, or the context.

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He called himself Vanguard. He claimed to be a once-in-a-generation intellect. When authorities came for him, Keith Raniere was crouched in a closet in Mexico while his follower confronted armed agents on his behalf.

The investigation began after a 2017 exposé brought the secret inner circle into public view. The FBI raided NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman’s home. Raniere had already fled to Mexico. On March 26, 2018, he was arrested in Puerto Vallarta and extradited to Brooklyn, where a federal judge denied bail and designated him a flight risk.

The six-week trial in 2019 built a methodical case through cooperating witnesses, financial records, and digital evidence. Lauren Salzman testified in detail about the hierarchy, the control, and the arrest. The jury convicted Raniere on all seven counts. He was sentenced to 120 years after fifteen women delivered impact statements to the court.

Every legal challenge since has failed. The Second Circuit denied his direct appeal. The Supreme Court denied certiorari. His claim that the FBI manufactured evidence was rejected by the trial judge and unanimously upheld on appeal. As of early 2026, a second cert petition is before the Supreme Court and a habeas petition remains on hold.

He has been told no at every level. He keeps filing.

Part three of a four-part Hidden Killers investigation into NXIVM and Keith Raniere.

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The federal murder charge against Timothy Hudson in the death of his stepsister Anna Kepner has dominated coverage. But the filings in a separate custody battle between Timothy’s biological parents tell a story the criminal case never will. Shauntel Hudson is Timothy’s biological mother. She married Anna’s father, Christopher Kepner. After Anna was found dead on a Carnival cruise ship, court filings show Shauntel and Christopher expelled Timothy from their home. His biological father, Thomas Hudson, placed a text exchange into the record alleging Shauntel told him she couldn’t risk her marriage to support her son. In the first forty-eight hours, Shauntel was relaying Timothy’s condition from a medical facility and telling his father she’d said “I love him.” Weeks later, filings allege she wanted him “buried.” Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, with more than thirty years in forensic mental health and trauma recovery, joins Hidden Killers to dissect the family dynamics at the center of this case. She examines the impossible position Shauntel occupies — biological mother of the accused, stepmother of the deceased, wife of the grieving father — and whether one of those identities always wins or whether a person simply breaks trying to hold all three. Scott addresses whether Christopher Kepner’s public statements may be setting the conditions for Shauntel’s alignment, and what a nine-year-old stepsister is absorbing about loyalty in a household that expelled her brother.

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More than fifty thousand tips have been submitted in the Nancy Guthrie disappearance. A retired Pima County detective believes the suspect’s name is probably already in that pile — investigators just haven’t reached it yet. DNA recovered from Nancy’s Tucson home has been shipped to the FBI crime lab at Quantico, where genetic genealogy analysis is reportedly ongoing. No arrest. No named suspect. And the person allegedly responsible has had months to make decisions — what to do with evidence, who to avoid, whether to stay or disappear. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Hidden Killers to examine what those months have done to the mind behind this alleged crime. Scott has spent more than thirty years in forensic settings studying not just what drives someone to violence, but the psychological machinery that either holds or breaks in the aftermath. She dissects the post-crime decision cascade — how each choice to conceal, each near-miss with the investigation, and each day of silence deepens the psychological burden. She explains what the specific threat of genetic genealogy does to someone compared to traditional investigative pressure — a scientific process working toward identification on a timeline nobody can predict. And she addresses whether the presence of a co-conspirator stabilizes someone or creates mutual paranoia where the fear of the other person talking first becomes its own form of psychological siege.

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