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Before the arrest. Before the trial. Before the conviction. Before the life sentence. There was one man pulling the threads that law enforcement hadn't found — and he wasn't a cop.
Todd Gabler was a career defense investigator brought in for a civil matter. What he uncovered over the next year — through phone records, GPS tracking, nearly 50 interviews, and a days-long search of the Richins home — became the evidentiary backbone of the prosecution's case against Kouri Richins. He identified the connection between Kouri and the woman prosecutors say sourced the fentanyl. He fed evidence to a stalled Sheriff's Office. He documented everything with body cameras and turned over two hard drives to the county attorney. And when the defense came at him on cross-examination, he didn't budge.
In this complete interview, Gabler takes Tony Brueski through every phase of the investigation — what he thought going in, what the evidence showed him, what the police missed, what the family endured, and what the case did to a man who'd never sat on the prosecution's side of a courtroom until this one put him there.
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The pretrial record in the Sandra Birchmore prosecution has broken almost uniformly against the defendant, former Stoughton police officer Matthew Farwell. We review the procedural developments with an attorney and legal analyst.
Birchmore, twenty-three and pregnant, was found dead in her Canton apartment in 2021. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner initially classified the death as a suicide. Federal prosecutors subsequently charged Farwell with the killing of a witness or victim, later adding a count under federal law protecting an unborn child, alleging he staged the scene to conceal a relationship that began when Birchmore was a minor.
Recent rulings have compounded the defense's difficulties. The medical examiner amended the death certificate, revising the manner of death to undetermined and the cause to asphyxia — a change forensic authorities characterize as highly unusual. A motion to dismiss and a motion for change of venue were denied. The court then denied pretrial release, with the magistrate judge finding the evidence very strong, if not overwhelming, and the trial court signaled disinclination toward the defense's request for an evidentiary hearing on the investigation.
We address the procedural significance of each development: the evidentiary weight of the amended certificate, the standard governing pretrial detention in a capital-eligible case, the contested DNA attribution, and the strategic posture of a defense preserving issues for appellate review. Our guest offers a precise assessment heading into the coming trial.
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The defense tried to show the jury Blair's 10-out-of-10 sketch of a man who looked nothing like Allen. Excluded. Tried to call an expert to challenge the bullet science the State told the jury was never wrong. Excluded. Tried to play the audio that would show what Allen sounded like while confessing in psychosis. Excluded. Tried to present an expert who would have explained the crime scene as a pagan ritual rather than a lone attack. Excluded. Tried to introduce evidence about suspects who practiced those rituals, were connected to the victim, and whose interviews were lost or destroyed. Excluded. The defense even tried to present evidence about the quality of the investigation itself. Excluded. What the jury did hear: a State phone expert who Googled whether water damage could mimic headphones during the trial and was allowed to testify about what he found on anonymous forums — over the defense's hearsay objection. According to the defense's appellate filings, every meaningful avenue for challenging the prosecution's narrative was closed by the trial court. Allen was convicted in November 2024 and sentenced to 130 years. The State's position on every exclusion is the same: harmless error. The appeal is pending.
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Clare Bronfman was released from federal custody in June 2025 after serving six years and nine months. She reportedly still supports Keith Raniere. His release date is 2120. She was the only NXIVM co-defendant who never turned on him — and she paid the steepest price for it.
This episode maps every co-defendant’s outcome. Bronfman was shackled in the courtroom at sentencing — unusual for a nonviolent case. Allison Mack cooperated with prosecutors and served roughly two years before her release in 2023. Nancy Salzman, NXIVM’s co-founder, received three and a half years after expressing remorse. Lauren Salzman testified against Raniere and received five years probation with no prison time. Kathy Russell received two years probation for visa fraud.
Meanwhile, a federal civil RICO lawsuit filed by seventy former members continues to work through the courts. The active defendants are Clare Bronfman, Sara Bronfman, and Danielle Roberts. More than thirty plaintiffs withdrew when ordered to identify themselves. A trial before late 2026 is unlikely, and any adverse judgment would likely be appealed.
Raniere’s legal options have narrowed substantially. His direct appeal and first Supreme Court petition were denied. His evidence-tampering claim was rejected at every level. A second cert petition is pending. A habeas petition remains on hold. Every court that has reviewed his case has reached the same conclusion: the conviction stands.
The final episode of a four-part Hidden Killers investigation into NXIVM and Keith Raniere.
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The Dan Markel prosecution has secured five convictions, yet two individuals the state has formally identified as unindicted co-conspirators — Wendi Adelson and Harvey Adelson — remain uncharged. We examine the legal and strategic posture with a defense attorney and former prosecutor.
Markel, a Florida State University law professor, was killed in 2014 amid protracted post-dissolution litigation with Wendi Adelson concerning custody and relocation. Prosecutors have maintained that the conspiracy was motivated by the family's desire to move Wendi and the children to South Florida after a court denied relocation. Convictions have followed against the two gunmen, the intermediary, Charlie Adelson, and Donna Adelson, who was sentenced to life.
Following Donna Adelson's conviction, the State Attorney indicated charging decisions would be made within weeks. No indictment, grand jury action, or public announcement has issued in the interval. We address the questions that follow: the evidentiary burden of pursuing a perjury theory against a witness who testified under limited immunity; whether the proof previously deemed insufficient as to Harvey Adelson has materially changed; and how the pending appellate proceedings — oral arguments in Charlie Adelson's appeal have been heard, with Donna Adelson's appeal also pending — bear on prosecutorial timing.
Our guest offers a disciplined assessment of what the continued silence signals and at what point a decision not to charge becomes, in effect, a decision to decline.
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The pretrial detention question in Anna Kepner's case turns on a genuine legal conflict — and it explains why the accused remains at liberty while awaiting a federal trial. We examine the procedural posture with a criminal defense attorney.
Anna, eighteen, was found dead aboard the Carnival Horizon during a family cruise. Because the death occurred in international waters, federal jurisdiction attached. The defendant, sixteen, was initially processed under the Juvenile Delinquency Act and released to a relative under electronic monitoring. After a grand jury returned an adult indictment, prosecutors moved to revoke that release under the federal Bail Reform Act, arguing the prior juvenile order no longer governs.
The defense countered that any reconsideration belongs before the judge who granted the original release — a dispute over which framework controls that is far from academic. At the hearing, the court conceded that an adult defendant facing identical charges would presumptively be detained, yet declined to rule, instead pausing to consult the U.S. Marshals Service about the feasibility of detention in central Florida rather than the Southern District where trial is set.
We work through the questions that matter: whether compliance with release conditions carries weight when the defendant was unaware charges were forthcoming, how the elevated sentencing exposure of adult prosecution bears on flight risk, and what the court's request to the Marshals suggests about where this is heading.
Our guest, a defense attorney and former prosecutor, offers a measured read on the competing legal standards and the likely basis for the forthcoming ruling.
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The families needed Mackenzie Shirilla to be a monster. The prosecutor built a narrative that confirmed it. A judge agreed. But what if the truth is messier than any version anyone in this case is willing to accept — and what if the one piece of evidence that could have proven it was never heard?
Seventeen-year-old Shirilla drove her Toyota Camry into a building in Strongsville, Ohio at close to a hundred miles per hour in July 2022, killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo and their friend Davion Flanagan. She was convicted in a bench trial of four counts of murder after prosecutors argued the crash was an intentional act fueled by a deteriorating relationship. The judge called it a mission executed with precision. Shirilla, now twenty-one, says she has no memory of the crash.
Everyone in this story is telling themselves a version of the truth that helps them survive. The families grieve by casting Shirilla as a villain — because if she's not, there's no one to blame and no narrative to make sense of the loss. Shirilla tells herself she doesn't remember. The prosecutor tells himself the surveillance footage proves intent. But the footage shows a car — not the mind of the driver. And the medical evidence that might have complicated the conviction — a neurologist's conclusion that her symptoms were consistent with a seizure episode — was blocked from court because a legal filing arrived one day after Ohio's deadline.
This episode doesn't absolve Mackenzie Shirilla. It doesn't condemn her either. It examines the gap between what we can prove and what we want to believe, and why those two things are so far apart in this case. Two families are shattered. A young woman won't see a parole hearing until 2037. And the question at the center of all of it — what was she thinking at five-thirty in the morning on July 31st, 2022 — is one that nobody can answer. Not even her.
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Three active criminal matters. Three distinct jurisdictions. One forensic psychotherapist identifying the systemic failures that allegedly allowed each to occur. The Nancy Guthrie disappearance remains unsolved months after the eighty-four-year-old was allegedly abducted from her Tucson home. Unknown DNA is under analysis at the FBI laboratory in Quantico, and genetic genealogy is reportedly being applied. More than fifty thousand tips have been submitted. The investigation continues without a named suspect. In the Anna Kepner case, Timothy Hudson has been charged as an adult in the Southern District of Florida with first-degree murder in connection with his stepsister’s death on a Carnival cruise ship. He has pleaded not guilty. Parallel custody proceedings in Brevard County have produced a record of family collapse — parental expulsion, alleged alignment against the accused, and an emergency custody petition filed by the defendant’s biological father. In the D4VD case, David Anthony Burke faces first-degree murder charges with special circumstances in Los Angeles County in the alleged killing of fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. Prosecutors have alleged murder for financial gain and murder of a witness. Burke has pleaded not guilty. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, with more than three decades in forensic practice, joins True Crime Today to conduct a cross-case analysis examining perpetrator psychology in the Guthrie investigation, the clinical dynamics of family disintegration in the Kepner proceedings, and the developmental trajectory — from religious restriction through industry enmeshment — that allegedly preceded the D4VD charges.
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Under three hours. That's how long the jury deliberated before convicting Kouri Richins on all counts — aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, forgery, insurance fraud. Judge Mrazik sentenced her to life without parole and told the courtroom she's "simply too dangerous to ever be free."
For Todd Gabler, the man who spent over a year building the evidentiary foundation that helped make that conviction possible, the verdict wasn't just a legal outcome. It was the end of a case that pulled him across a line he'd never crossed in 34 years. Every homicide he'd ever worked was for the defense. This was the first time his evidence became the prosecution's weapon. And when it was over — when the verdict dropped and the sentence came down — Gabler had to reckon with what the case had done to him.
In the final part of this three-part interview, Gabler tells Tony Brueski what hit him first when the jury came back, who Eric Richins became to him after a year of reconstructing a dead man's life, and whether this is the kind of case a PI walks away from — or the kind that walks with him.
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David Anthony Burke, known professionally as D4VD, faces first-degree murder charges with special circumstances in the death of fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. Prosecutors in Los Angeles County have alleged murder for financial gain and murder of a witness, charges that make Burke eligible for the death penalty. He has pleaded not guilty. The People’s filing alleges Burke killed Rivas Hernandez to prevent her from revealing information that would have jeopardized his career. But the psychological and developmental dimensions of this case extend well beyond the alleged criminal act. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, with more than thirty years of forensic mental health practice, joins True Crime Today to examine the conditions that allegedly preceded the charges. Burke was raised in a strictly religious household in Houston where the only permitted music was gospel. He was homeschooled by his mother, who reportedly served as his sole educator and social structure and who allegedly suggested he begin making music. By seventeen, Burke was signed to Darkroom and Interscope Records. He was touring internationally, generating significant income, and operating within an inner circle that consisted entirely of industry professionals whose financial interests were allegedly tied to his output. Scott addresses the clinical significance of that trajectory — religious restriction followed by unrestricted digital and cultural immersion with no intermediary, parental enmeshment followed by industry enmeshment, and the total alleged absence of peer relationships or adult oversight positioned to provide accountability rather than profit from his continued production.
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