Nick Reiner and the Slayer Statute, the Commonwealth Rests Against Lindsay Clancy, Opening Statements for Tupac, Murdaugh Changes Counties

A Los Angeles County grand jury has indicted Nick Reiner on two counts of first-degree murder in the December 2025 stabbing deaths of his parents, filmmaker Rob Reiner, 78, and photographer Michele Singer Reiner, 70, adding special circumstance allegations of multiple murder and murder by lying in wait — allegations that make the case death-penalty eligible. Reiner, 32, has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent; District Attorney Nathan Hochman's office has not said whether it will seek death. Separately, the fiduciary overseeing a $1.5 million trust his parents opened for him has invoked California's slayer statute to block his access, which he sought in order to rehire private counsel. Also: in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Judge William Sullivan told jurors the Commonwealth would rest its case against Lindsay Clancy after roughly three weeks and some seventy witnesses; the defense case, built on postpartum psychosis, is next. In Las Vegas, opening statements began in the murder trial of Duane Davis in the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur. And in South Carolina, Judge Debra McCaslin ruled Alex Murdaugh's April 2027 retrial cannot be held anywhere in the 14th Judicial Circuit, with a new venue to be set later.

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Speaker 1: Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is daily Crime Injustice

from Calaroga Shark Media powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fischer.

Today is Tuesday, August eighteenth, twenty twenty six. Four cases today,

and three of them turned a corner in the same

twenty four hours. Let me set the table. In Los Angeles,

Nick Reiner is now under a grand jury indictment for

the stabbing deaths of his parents, and prosecutors have added

an allegation that changes the entire shape of the case

that he was lying in wait. At the same time,

in a completely different courthouse, a professional fiduciary is arguing

that Reiner should not be allowed to touch a single

dollar of the trust fund his parents open for him

when he was a baby, not because he's been convicted

of anything, because of what he's accused of. In Plymouth

message Us, the judge told the jury Monday morning that

the Commonwealth was going to rest its case against Lindsey

Clancy roughly three weeks around seventy witnesses, and now the

burden shifts to a defense that has never once denied

that she killed her three children in Las Vegas thirty

years late. Opening statements finally began in the murder of

Tupac Shakur and in South Carolina, a judge listened to

prosecutors argue that Alex Murdau's retrial shouldn't be moved to

Charleston because of traffic, parking, flooding, and Masters week. Then

she moved the trial anyway, just not to Charleston. Yet. Look,

I'm gonna be honest with you. Two of these stories

are about people fighting over where a trial happens and

who pays for it. And I understand why that sounds

like paperwork, But where a trial happens and who's sitting

at the defense table are not side issues. They are

frequently the whole ballgame. So we're going to take them seriously.

We'll start in Los Angeles The Slayer Statute. On the

night of December fourteenth, twenty twenty five, Rob Reiner and

Michelle Singer Reiner were stabbed to death inside their home

in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Rob Reiner was

seventy eight. Most of you know the work, even if

you never thought about the name attached to it. He

played Michael Stavick on All in the Family, the character

everyone called meadhead. Then he went behind the camera and

directed this is spinal tap stand by me the Princess Bride.

When Harry met Sally and a few good men. That

is not a career. That is a shelf in the

American living room. Michelle Singer Reiner was seventy a photographer

and a producer, married to Rob for more than three decades.

She co founded work that put underprivileged kids into college classrooms.

She was not a footnote in somebody else's biography. And

I want to be careful about that, because in a

case with this much wattage attached to it, the famous

name tends to eat the room. Their son, Nick was

a rested within hours. He was thirty two. He has

pleaded not guilty, and he is presumed innocent. Here's what's new.

On July twentieth, a Los Angeles County grand jury meeting

in secret, returned an indictment. It was unsealed on Wednesday

the twelfth, and Nick Reiner was brought into a thirteenth

floor courtroom at the Criminal Courts Building downtown to enter

a plea not guilty. Again. The indictment charges two counts

of murder. It carries special circumstance allegations of multiple murder

and of murder by means of lying in wait, plus

a special allegation that he personally used a deadly and

dangerous weapon a knife. Lying in wait is the one

to pay attention to. In California, it means a person

waited or concealed himself in order to ambush as an allegation.

Its job is to establish premeditation, and if a jury

finds it true alongside a murder conviction, it opens the

door to life without the possibility of parole, and it

makes the case death penalty eligible. District Attorney Nathan Hackman's

office has not announced whether it will actually seek death.

Hawkman described the case as a profound betrayal by someone

who was loved and trusted. There's a second thing the

indictment does, and it's the part I'd want to explain

to me if I were following this from the outside.

In California, prosecutors can take a case to trial through

a public preliminary hearing, where a judge hears evidence in

open court and the press writes it all down, or

they can go to a grand jury behind closed doors.

Reiner's case had been headed toward a preliminary hearing in

the fall that's gone now. The indictment replaces the original

case and skips that step entirely, So a proceeding that

was going to be public isn't. The autopsy reports are

under a court order and have not been released. The

Los Angeles County Chief Medical Examiner has said publicly that

he'd like to make them public and can't, And the

unsealed indictment itself does not explain how or why prosecutors

say Reiner was lying in wait, I'm not accusing anybody

of hiding the ball. Grand juries are lawful, and they're

used all the time. Los Angeles did the same thing

in the Harvey Weinstein prosecution. But you should understand what

it costs. The public's window into this case just narrowed considerably,

and the next time most of us see the evidence,

it will be at a jury trial. Now, the money.

When Nick Reiner was a baby, his parents opened a

trust for him. Three decades later, it holds more than

one and a half million dollars. In June, Reiner filed

a probate petition asking to unlock some of it. His

reason was straightforward. He wants to rehire Alan Jackson, the

private defense attorney who had started on the case and

withdrew in January when the money didn't come. Reiner has

been represented by a Los Angeles County Deputy public defender

ever since. The professional fiduciary now overseeing the trust, Jody

Pace Montgomery, has said no, and the legal basis she

is using is one most people have never heard of.

It's called the slayer statute. In California, it lives in

Probate Code Section two fifty. The language is blunt. A

person who feloniously and intentionally kills the decedent cannot inherit

under that person's will or under a trust created by

or for that person. You don't get to profit from

killing the person you'd have inherited from. Most states have

some version of this. It is not controversial as a principle.

The complication is timing. Reiner hasn't been convicted of anything.

Montgomery's attorney argued in the filing that California law contains

no exception allowing a killer's inheritance to be spent on

his own criminal defense, that the money would otherwise pass

to Reiner's siblings Romy and Jake, to whom the fiduciary

also owes duties, and that while Reiner is presumed in it,

handing over the funds now would be irreversible. Reiner's civil attorney,

Anita Wu, put the counter argument about as cleanly as

it can be put. The slayer statute requires a determination,

not a mere accusation, and she's right about the text.

Under Probate Code Section two fifty four, a final murder

conviction settles it conclusively. But if there's no final conviction,

a probate court may make its own determination by a

preponderance of the evidence about whether the killing was felonious

and intentional. Sit with that for a second preponderance of

the evidence more likely than not. That is the civil

standard not beyond a reasonable doubt, which means a probate

judge could, in theory reach a conclusion about whether Nick

Reiner killed his parents on a far lower burden than

the one the criminal jury will be held to and

do it first. Look, I'm going to be honest with you,

This one is genuinely hard, and I'm not going to

pretend otherwise for the sake of a cleaner segment. The

fiduciary's position is not cruelty. She has obligations to two

other children who lost both parents that night, and if

the money is spent, it is gone. But the other

side of it is that a man facing a death

eligible charge is asking to pay for the lawyer of

his choice with his own money, and the answer coming

back is essentially not until we decide whether you did it.

That is a real problem and the sixth Amendment does

not have a lot of patience for it. There is

also a prior trustee in this story who refused to

release funds while raising doubts about Reiner's ability to manage money.

His lawyers pointed out that no court and no doctor

had ever found him incompetent. A hearing on the trust

was set for Monday in Los Angeles. As of this recording,

we do not have a ruling, and when we do,

you'll hear it here. He is due back in criminal

court in September. Rob Reiner, Michelle Singer Reiner. Someone has

to say their names, and it shouldn't only be in

a sentence about money. We'll be right back with where

two of the biggest murder trials in the country stand

as of Monday. Welcome back two trials are running right

now that a lot of you are following day to day,

and both of them moved Monday. I want to give

you an honest picture of where each one stands with

the caveat that we record before the gavel comes down

at the end of the day. So what you're getting

is the state of play as of Monday morning and

midday start. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, Core Clancy was five, Dawson

Clancy was three, Callan Clancy was eight months old. On

January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, in the family's home

in Duxbury, they were strangled. Their mother, Lindsey Clancy, then

went out a second story window and survived with injuries

that left her paralyzed from the waist down. She is

charged with three counts of first degree murder and has

pleaded not guilty. Her defense has never disputed that she

killed her children. What the defense disputes is whether she

can be held criminally responsible, arguing she was over medicated

and in the grip of postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors Jennifer Sprague

and Shane and Buckingham argue she knew exactly what she

was doing, planned it, and staged what followed. On Monday morning,

Judge William Sullivan told the jury the Commonwealth would rest

its case later that day. That is the hinge of

this trial. Roughly three weeks, somewhere around seventy witnesses, doctors

and nurses who treated her, dozens of law enforcement officers,

first responders, psychiatrists, family members, including her former husband and

her former father in law. Monday's witness was a digital

forensics expert named Ian Wiffin from the company Celebrate. Some

of you will recognize that name because he testified in

both Karen Reid trials. He walked jurors through an extraction

from Clancy's iPhone, the health data on the phone and

watch her heart rate, flights of stairs climbed at three

minutes past five and again at thirty three minutes past five,

the last time the phone was unlocked at thirteen minutes

past five, an incoming call from Patrick Clancy at thirty

three minutes past five that went unanswered, an outgoing call

about a minute later that lasted fourteen seconds, and another

unanswered call after six Web history stretching back two weeks

more than thirteen hundred records, including searches about how quickly

an antidepressant takes effect, about ketamine for suicidal thoughts, and

five days before about the symptoms of postpartum psychosis. Then

the defense got up. Kevin Reddington's cross examination went straight

at reliability. He pointed out that Wwiffin himself had written

publicly about accuracy problems with that health data. He noted

the watch stop recording at twenty three minutes past five,

and both devices stopped at thirty eight minutes past. As

Reddington put it, after that point, it's pretty much blackout.

And he made the obvious point that devices also stop

recording when somebody takes them off or puts them down.

That exchanges the whole trial. In miniature, the prosecution builds

a timeline out of data. The defense asks what the

data can actually prove about a mind? So what happens now?

The defense case is expected to lean heavily on psychiatric experts,

and the fight will be over postpartum psychosis, what it is,

how rare it is, whether the people treating her should

have seen it, and whether she was capable of appreciating

the wrongfulness of what she did. Prosecutors have already asked

the defense to disclose how often one of its likely

experts has been visiting Clancy in the courtroom, which tells

you how sharp elbowed this phase is going to get.

Legal analysts watching this have not agreed on much. One

has said the Commonwealth spent a lot of its case

going after the jury's emotions without assembling a coherent theory

of first degree murder. Another has said prosecutors made their

most important point effectively, which is that not one clinician

who saw Lindsay Clancy in those months came away thinking

she was psychotic. Both things can be true. That's what

makes this trial genuinely difficult, rather than merely upsetting one thing.

I want to make sure you understand because it gets

misreported constantly. If this jury returns a verdict of not

guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, Lindsey Clancy

does not walk out of that courthouse. She would be

committed to a state psychiatric hospital, subject to periodic review

to determine whether she could ever safely live in the community.

She has been held at Tewkesbury State Hospital this entire time.

An acquittal here is not a door opening, It is

a different door. Cora Dawson callan three children who should

be eight six and three years old. This year someone

has to say their names, and it should be more

often than once. A segment Las Vegas thirty years late

now to Nevada where something happened Monday that a lot

of people had stopped believing would ever happen. At half

past nine in the morning, in a courtroom at the

Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas, opening statements began in

the murder trial of Dwayne Keith Davis. Tupacamar Shakur was

twenty five years old. He was born in Harlem in

June of nineteen seventy one, raised by his mother, af

Fenni Shakour, a former Black panther, and moved as a

kid to Baltimore, where he enrolled at the Baltimore School

for the Arts, then to Marin City, California. He considered

Oakland home. His recording career lasted about five years and

produced eleven platinum albums, four while he was alive and

seven after he acted in films. He was inducted into

the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in twenty seventeen.

This past June, he received a star on the Hollywood

Walk of Fame. The twenty seven hundred and fifty eighth.

On the night of September seventh, nineteen ninety six, he

was in a car near the Las Vegas Strip with

Marion Knight, the head of death Row records the man

everyone calls Sooge. A white Cadillac pulled up alongside them

at a light. Shots were fired into the passenger side.

Shakur died six days later on September thirteenth. September marks

thirty years. For twenty seven of those years, nobody was charged. Nobody.

Dwayne Davis, who is sixty three and goes by Keffi

d was indicted in twenty twenty three. He faces one

count of murder with a deadly weapon with intent to promote,

further or assist a criminal gang. He is pleaded not guilty.

If he is convicted, he faces up to life in prison.

He is presumed innocent, and I want that stated plainly

because in a case this loaded, the presumption is the

first thing people throw overboard. Prosecutors are not claiming Davis

fired the shots. Chief Deputy District attorneys Mark Didjiacomo and

Binupalal argue he was the shot caller, that he obtained

the gun, handed it over and gave the order in

retaliation for a beating his nephew, Orlando Anderson, took inside

the MGM Grand hours earlier. That same night. Defense attorney

Michael Samft has the option of giving his opening now

or waiting until the state rests. Judge Carly Kearney is presiding.

The jury is twelve people plus four alternates, ten women

and six men, pulled from a pool of more than

one hundred Clark County residents who were questioned about gangs, guns,

rap music, and how memory works. Davis waived his right

to be sentenced by a jury, so if he's convicted,

the judge decides the sentence. Here's what makes this trial unusual,

and I mean genuinely unusual, not marketing unusual. The strongest

evidence against Dwayne Davis appears to be Dwayne Davis. Twenty nineteen,

he published a memoir called Compton Street Legend, which opens

in Las Vegas on the night of the shooting and

walks the reader through the plan he gave interviews he

talked to police under a profer. Judge Kearney has ruled

that jurors can hear the book and the media interviews,

finding that the profer agreement did not cover public statements,

and she also allowed the police proffer statements while noting

concerns about them. Davis now says he did not write

the book. In a jailhouse interview last year, he said,

I'm innocent. I ain't kill nobody. The three other men

said to have been in that cadillac, Orlando Anderson, Terrence Brown,

and DeAndre Smith, were all named as co conspirators in

the indictment. All three are dead. Souge Knight is alive,

serving time in California on an unrelated conviction, and he

is on the witness list. He has said he has

no intention of testifying and has made clear he regards

cooperating as beneath him. So a jury is being asked

to resolve a thirty year old homicide in which which

the only surviving participants are the defendant and a man

who says he won't talk. There's a playbook for this,

and you've seen it before. A case goes cold, the

witnesses die or scatter, and the thing that finally cracks

it open is somebody's mouth. Whether that's enough is exactly

what these next weeks are for. And I'm not gonna

prejudge it. What I will say is this Tupac Shakur's

family sat in that courtroom Monday. His stepbrother was there.

Thirty years is a long time to wait for a

room to be called to order. Whatever this jury decides,

they were owed this a very long time ago. When

we come back, a South Carolina judge decides where Alex

Murdock gets tried, and it will not be Colleton County.

Colleton County is poison. Welcome back. On June seventh, twenty

twenty one, Maggie Murdaw and her son Paul Murdall were

shot to death at the family's property in rural South Carolina.

Maggie was fifty two, Paul was twenty two. Alex Murdall

was convicted of both murders in twenty twenty three and

sentenced to two life terms. Earlier this year, the South

Carolina Supreme Court threw that conviction out, finding that the

clerk of court at his trial made improper comments to

the jury. So he gets a new trial, currently scheduled

for April of twenty twenty seven, and he is again

presumed innocent. I want to be blunt about that because

I know how it lands The reason there's a retrial

is not new evidence and not some clever appellate maneuver.

It's that a court official talked to a jury in

a way she wasn't supposed to. A family lost a

mother and a son. A state spent six weeks proving

a case, and the whole thing was undone by conduct

inside the courthouse. That's not a mistake. That's a choice

somebody made. Do better. On Friday, Murda appeared in a

Lexington County courtroom in a suit and tie in front

of Judge Deborah McCaslin for the first pre trial hearing

since the reversal. Three things happened Worth your time. First venue,

The defense wants Charleston. Their argument, and it's a decent one,

is that coll Itton County doesn't just know about this case,

it lives inside it. The murdaf family produced the chief

prosecuting officer for that area from nineteen twenty until two

thousand and six. During the first trial, they had to

take a portrait of his grandfather down off the courthouse wall.

Prosecutors initially signaled they agreed the trial should move, then

they reversed and opposed it, and their filing is something

to behold. They wrote about downtown Charleston, traffic, parking, heavy

spring storms, and king tides that flood the historic district,

and the fact that the trial would begin during Masters

week when people head to Charleston to vake. I read

that filing twice to make sure I wasn't being unfair

to it, and look, logistics are real. Housing. A trial

of this size is a genuine burden on a county.

But when a double homicide retrial is in front of you,

and your written objection leads with golf, tourism and parking availability,

you should expect people to notice. Solicitor creighton Waters actual

argument underneath all that is narrower and stronger, that the

defense refused to consider any county but Charleston, which he

called the most expensive and most difficult option in the state,

and that Charleston may not even be a lawful destination

since it adjoins Collington County and is its media market.

Dick Carputlian answered for the defense with four words, Colleton

County is poison. Mccaslyn ruled from the bench the trial

moves out of the fourteenth Judicial Circuit entirely, which takes

Coleton off the table along with Allendale, Beaufort, Hampton, and

jas for counties where it lands. She'll decide later. Second DNA.

The defense won access to untested DNA in the case

over the state's objection. The state wanted its own lab

to quantify the sample. First, Harpootlean said he doesn't trust

that lab, citing how a bloody T shirt was handled

before the first trial, and argued it was consumed in

processing and that the results came late. The judge ordered

the material turned over for the defense to test and

told them they'd be paying for it. Third, and this

is the one I'd watch. Defense attorney Jim Griffin accused

prosecutors of having secret agreements with Curtis Smith, a man

he described as a distant cousin of Murdaw's, and the

man Murdaw was accused of hiring to shoot him in

a botched suicide for higher scheme. Griffin's point was arithmetic.

Smith was indicted in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty

two on charges including money laundering, and years later those

cases still haven't been resolve while everything else has. Waters

answered flatly, there are no secret agreements, he said. A

proffer is not a cooperation agreement, and that no deal

with Smith has ever existed. Whether Griffin is right or not,

that's the kind of thread appellate lawyers pull on for

a decade, and this case has already been undone. Once

the parties are back in court in November, trial is

set for April twenty twenty seven, which will be nearly

six years after Maggie and Paul Murdall were killed. Maggie Murdall,

Paul Murdall. Six years, two trials and still no settled answer.

They deserved better from the system that was supposed to

deliver one. That's the show. Four cases, and if there's

a thread running through them, it's this. The machinery around

a criminal case is not neutral. Who pays for your lawyer,

which county you're tried in, whether the evidence gets aired

in public or behind a grand jury door, whether a

courthouse official keeps her mouth shut. None of that is

the crime. All of it shapes the outcome. Accountability doesn't

have a legal department, but it sure has a lot

of procedure in front of it. If today's episode was

useful to you, do me a favor. Don't share it

with everybody. Share it with one person, somebody specific who

you know follows one of these cases, or who would

want to understand why a trial gets moved, or why

a probate judge might weigh in on a murder before

a jury ever does, send it to them directly that

one message does more for this show than anything else

you could do. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop

a comment. Tell me which of these four you want

more of, because we can go deeper on any of them,

and I'd rather follow you than guess. We'll be back tomorrow.

A note on sources and legal status. Nick Reiner has

pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocence. Reporting on the

value of his trust varies. Court filings describe more than

one and a half million dollar, while some outlets have

reported roughly one point six million. Tabloid accounts describing how

the killings were carried out are not established in the

court record. The autopsy reports remain under seal, and the

unsealed indictment does not explain the lying in wait allegation.

Reported details about Reiner's psychiatric diagnosis come from anonymous sourcing

and have not been established in court, and outlets have

described that diagnosis differently. Whether his siblings support his petition

has been characterized inconsistently across reports, and we have not

aired those characterizations. The District Attorney's office has not announced

a decision on whether to seek the death penalty. Monday's

probate hearing had not produced a public ruling at the

time of this recording. Lindsey Clancy is pleaded not guilty

and is presumed in a sense. Her age has been

reported as both thirty five and thirty six. The number

of prosecution witnesses has been reported as about seventy and

as more than five dozen. The judge announced Monday morning

that the Commonwealth would rest later that day. We recorded

before the close of the session and cannot confirm it

was completed. This segment describes testimony about self harm, suicidal thinking,

and postpart of mental illness. If you are struggling, you

can call or text nine to eight eight in the

United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for

pregnancy and postpart of mental health Support. Postpartum Support International

can be reached at one eight hundred nine four four

four seven seventy three. Postpartum psychosis is rare, and the

overwhelming majority of parents who experience postpart of mental illness

never harm anyone. Dwayne Davis has pleaded not guilty and

is presumed innocent. Opening statements began Monday morning. We recorded

before the parties completed them, and this segment reflects the charges, rulings,

and case history as reported at the time of recording,

rather than the content of either opening. Alex Murdau's convictions

were vacated by the South Carolina Supreme Court. He is

awaiting retrial and is presumed innocense. Allegations described in the

Friday hearing, including the defense's claim regarding agreements with a witness,

are contested and unresolved. Court proceedings described here were ongoing

at the time of recording. Where accounts conflict, we have

said so, rather than picked aside.