True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews

On August 30, 2023, Ruby Franke was arrested. Her son had escaped through a window. The performance was over.

For her six children — raised as content, filmed for millions — the work was just beginning.

Part 5 of "The Good Mother" examines recovery after narcissistic family abuse. What happens when you finally get out. Who you become when the show ends.

Shari Franke, 22, published a memoir and testified before Utah legislators. She advocates for child influencer laws, builds a life on her own terms.

Chad Franke, 20, reads his 2023 diaries on TikTok. Entries written while under Jodi's influence — goals about eliminating "lust," being pure enough. He calls it being "brainwashed."

Ruby writes letters from prison. Chad doesn't respond. "I don't think I'm interested in talking right now."

Kevin Franke divorced Ruby in March 2025. He remarried in December 2025. He says he still loves Ruby — but is "as angry as can be." Communication from Ruby is blocked.

The four minor children heal privately. Russell and Eve — the children found bound and starving — have their identities protected for the first time. Faces blurred. Names redacted.

Recovery isn't linear. Getting out is the beginning, not the end. The work is figuring out which beliefs were really yours. Learning whether you can forgive — or whether you even want to. Building an identity that isn't defined by the performance.

Ruby's first parole hearing is December 2026.

Her children are still here. Still becoming whoever they decide to be.

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Three issues define the Kouri Richins murder trial right now — and each one tells you something different about how this verdict could go.

The defense argued the fentanyl in Eric Richins' system may not have come from Kouri. The judge blocked their key evidence. The forensics pointed to street-grade fentanyl. The victim's closest friend said the drug-user the defense described wasn't anyone he recognized.

The prosecution's case rests on two witnesses who both got immunity deals. Both changed their stories. One contradicted himself on video. A detective's own recorded words were played for the jury as evidence of improper influence.

And then there is Kouri's own record. Phone searches for fentanyl poisoning. Deleted memes accessed minutes after first responders left. A jailhouse letter coaching family members. A signature on a life insurance policy that wasn't Eric's. Drug purchases three days after his death, paid for with a disguised check.

True Crime Today brings you the full picture with Eric Faddis — a former prosecutor who now defends the accused — and Tony Brueski. This is the Kouri Richins trial analysis built for people who want to understand the case, not just follow it.

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In October 2024, Colby Ryan posted a recording of a prison call with his mother.

She told him she'd be exonerated. That Jesus showed her. That everything was according to Chad Daybell's plan.

His siblings are dead. His mother killed them. And she still believes she was right.

This is Part 5 of "The Chosen Ones," our final episode examining the psychology of spiritual abuse and religious trauma through the Vallow-Daybell case. Today we focus on what happens after — the long, painful work of rebuilding identity when everything you believed has collapsed.

For Colby Ryan, it means loving a mother he can no longer reach.

For Melanie Gibb, it means living with the question of why she didn't see sooner.

For everyone who has left a high control religion, it means carrying a question that never fully goes away: How did I believe this?

This episode is for survivors. The answer isn't that you're stupid. The answer is that you're human. Someone exploited your best impulses — your desire for meaning, belonging, purpose.

Religious Trauma Syndrome is real. Dr. Marlene Winell coined the term to describe the complex PTSD that results from authoritarian religious environments.

The apocalypse Chad Daybell promised never came. But you're still here. And that matters.

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In true crime, the most damaging evidence is often the kind the defendant created herself. In the Kouri Richins murder trial, the jury has seen phone searches for "fentanyl poisoning" and instructions on deleting messages. They've seen a jailhouse letter where Kouri allegedly tells family members what to say and how to say it. They've heard testimony that the signature on a life insurance policy taken out a month before Eric died likely wasn't his.

And they know that minutes after first responders left the house where Eric lay dead, Kouri's phone accessed deleted memes — one captioned "I'm really rich."

True Crime Today takes a hard look at what that kind of behavioral and digital record does to a defendant in front of a jury. Tony Brueski and Eric Faddis examine the deception pattern the prosecution has built, what it proves legally, and the impossible choice Kouri now faces — testify and try to explain it, or stay silent and let it speak for itself.

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Forty days. No suspect. No arrest. The cadaver dogs have been stood down, the DNA has dead-ended twice, and the Sonoran Desert doesn't give things back.

True Crime Today takes the Nancy Guthrie case out of the cable news cycle and into the hard statistical reality of what happens to missing persons cases that don't close in the first thirty days. The answer isn't comfortable — but it's what the evidence supports.

After forty days with no viable DNA match, no identified suspect, and no clothing ID on the masked figure from the doorbell footage, the investigation has hit a structural ceiling. The glove DNA traced back to a restaurant worker with no case connection. The mixed crime scene DNA is too complex for a clean extraction. CODIS returned nothing. The FBI is still canvassing neighbors about internet disruptions from the night she disappeared — six weeks later. The unidentified vehicle on the Ring camera remains unidentified.

Every year, roughly 600,000 people go missing in America. About 87 percent of those cases close within 30 days. Cases that don't close in that window enter a different statistical universe — one the reward money and the task force and the national press coverage cannot change. The FBI reported over 97,000 unresolved missing persons cases in a single year alone. In 2024, only 293 entries nationwide were coded as stranger abductions. True stranger abductions are the hardest cases in law enforcement — no shared history, no connection to triangulate, no thread to pull.

Add the Sonoran Desert. Add the border corridor. Add an 84-year-old woman with a cardiac condition and forty days without medication.

The evidence is saying something. This episode says it plainly.

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In one of the most watched murder trials in the country right now, the defense just walked away from the table. No witnesses. No counter-evidence. An hour-long recess, and then two words: the defense rests.

Kouri Richins, the Utah mother charged with fatally poisoning her husband Eric Richins with fentanyl in 2022, sat through three weeks of prosecution testimony — 42 witnesses, forged documents, alleged insurance fraud, a housekeeper who prosecutors say obtained the drugs, and a lead investigator who confirmed a lethal dose of fentanyl was found in Eric's stomach despite none being recovered anywhere in the home. When it was her turn, she waived her right to testify. That was the only time she spoke directly to the court.

In today's breakdown, we walk through everything that happened on the final day of testimony — including the legal trap the defense nearly walked into that would have blown open previously suppressed evidence, and the moment the judge told counsel they were playing high-stakes poker. Then we dig into the harder question: is this legal strategy, or is something else going on? What does it mean when a defendant who has been publicly exposed for three weeks chooses silence over defense? And what about the attorneys — the human beings on that side of the table who have also been ground up by three weeks of live-streamed public scrutiny?

Closing arguments are Monday. The jury gets it after that.

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In true crime cases, immunity deals are common. But the Kouri Richins murder trial has a problem that goes beyond any single witness — the prosecution's entire drug supply chain is made up of people who traded their testimony for their freedom.

Carmen Lauber, the housekeeper at the center of the case, had her story expand to include fentanyl after detectives told her she was facing serious federal charges. Robert Crozier, the alleged drug supplier, told investigators he sold fentanyl — then told a different story on the stand. A detective's recorded statements, played for the jury by the defense, raised questions about whether investigators shaped the testimony they needed.

True Crime Today examines what happens when a murder case depends on witnesses whose motivations are anything but clean. Tony Brueski sits down with Eric Faddis — a former prosecutor who now defends the accused — to break down how immunity deals actually function, what the Richins prosecution is facing in closing arguments, and whether a jury can trust a drug chain where every link had something to gain.

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In the Kouri Richins murder case, the defense isn't just arguing Kouri is innocent — they're arguing the man she's accused of killing may have contributed to his own death. It's a strategy that shows up in true crime cases more than most people realize, and it almost always carries serious risk.

Eric Richins' best friend and business partner testified he never saw Eric use drugs in their entire relationship. A toxicologist identified a forensic marker in Eric's system proving the fentanyl was street-grade, not pharmaceutical. And the judge blocked the defense's most direct drug use evidence before the jury ever heard it.

On True Crime Today, Tony Brueski sits down with defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis to examine this strategy from both sides — what the defense is trying to accomplish, why it's dangerous, and whether any part of it creates the reasonable doubt Kouri needs.

They also dig into the open marriage angle, what it means legally, and the central question this whole theory creates: when a jury has already grown to respect a victim, what happens when you start attacking who he was?

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In June 2020, CPS visited the Franke home after another report about 8 Passengers. They investigated. They closed the case.

Three years later, two Franke children were found bound and starving. Ruby is now serving four to thirty years for aggravated child abuse.

Part 4 of "The Good Mother" examines why systems designed to protect children fail — and what the Franke case reveals about the gap between warning signs and intervention.

The abuse wasn't hidden. Ruby documented her parenting for 2.5 million subscribers. A teenager sleeping on a beanbag for seven months was on camera. A six-year-old denied lunch was on camera. Public humiliation was content.

Viewers reported. A Change.org petition was launched. Ruby's own family — parents, siblings, husband — all tried to intervene after Jodi Hildebrandt entered the picture. All were cut off.

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

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

For years.

CPS is overwhelmed. The threshold for intervention is physical evidence of severe harm. Patterns of escalation don't trigger action until someone ends up in a hospital.

The Frankes performed normalcy when investigators visited. Educated, affluent, religious. The children had been trained to perform too.

By the time CPS showed up, everything probably looked fine.

That's how children fall through cracks.

If you reported something and nothing happened, that doesn't mean you were wrong. Keep seeing. Keep reporting. Sometimes a report is the one that tips a case. You can't know in advance.

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Most coverage of the Kouri Richins trial has focused on the evidence. This series focuses on the behavior — and brings in two of the most credentialed voices in behavioral science to work through what the evidence actually describes.

Tony Brueski sits down with psychotherapist Shavaun Scott and retired FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke for three complete conversations examining the psychological dimensions the courtroom record raises but can't fully answer on its own.

The first conversation examines the alleged pattern of exploitation across the full witness list — what it looks like to allegedly view every person in your life as a resource to be managed, how it sustains itself across years and relationships, and why the people inside it are almost always the last to see it. The second examines what it cost the Richins family to know something was wrong and spend years fighting to be taken seriously — the instinct, the helplessness, and the specific trauma of grief that is also confirmation. The third confronts the question nobody wants to sit with: where does someone like Kouri Richins come from, what does that history do to a person's decision-making and relationship with truth, and what are five children now inheriting from all of it?

Explicable isn't forgivable. But understanding how people end up here is the only tool anyone has for recognizing it before the damage is done.

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

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