No crime is more troubling than a parent breaking the sacred family bond and attempting to murder their children. It’s especially troubling when the children are toddlers can’t take care of themselves at all, and are just innocently along for a ride. That’s what happened to two twin toddlers when their father, Robert Brians, decided to perpetuate a murder-suicide by speeding off a cliff with his little daughters in his lap.

The moment that Brians sped off Sunset Cliffs in San Diego, California was captured by in grainy and disturbing surveillance camera footage from a nearby residence. In the video, the truck hits the curb extremely fast, flies into the air and lands completely in the water.

Brians, 51, was 47 years old when he decided to kill himself and his two daughters in an apparent move to upset his ex-wife. This didn’t come out of nowhere: the San Diego man had dealt with a run of bad luck before the incident. He owned a tile company but it wasn’t successful and he was forced to file for bankruptcy.

That would rattle anyone’s serenity but as a follow-up act his wife filed for divorce and he was arrested on charges of domestic battery. On June 13, 2020, he took his twin 2-year-old daughters from his parents’ house without his ex’s permission. He had just had a parental visit with the girls the night before, and he returned early in the morning to abduct them. When the ex-wife found out, she was frantic and tried to get in touch with Brians to find out what was going on.

The couple went back and forth through text and then the kids’ mom called 911. Brians told the mom numerous times that he had a plan: he was going to drive off a cliff with his girls by his side. One particular message said, “The girls are going to Heaven and I’m going to Hell to wait for you.”

Just three minutes before he made the fateful decision to complete his murder/suicide plan, he posted to Facebook: “Tonight, I’m sending my babies to Heaven.”

Realizing the seriousness of the situation, police scrambled to locate Brians before anything terrible happened. Authorities tracked his cellphone to the Sunset Cliffs area, even though he told his wife he was going to a different location.

Police spotted Brians’ truck in the area but before they could stop him he gunned it to the cliffs’ edge, hit the curb, went airborne and landed upside down in the water. Police gathered quickly. San Diego Police K-9 Officer Jonathan Wiese was on the scene within four minutes of the crash, and knew that if he didn’t act immediately, anyone who survived would surely perish in the waves. But how to get down there?

True heroes appear when the circumstances demand it, and that’s just what happened with Wiese. He would later say that his first thought was to jump right in after the truck, but he quickly realized he wouldn’t be much good to anyone if he hit something on his way down.

“Then, I remembered I have a 100-foot leash in my car that we use for SWAT missions, and I thought if that can hold my 95-pound dog, then maybe it could hold me.”

Things were especially frantic because officers then spotted Brians treading water with both of his daughters in his arms. This offered a little bit of relief to officers, but time was of the essence.

“They were getting pushed up against the cliff by the waves,” Wiese said. The officer quickly removed his uniform shirt, bulletproof vest and duty belt to lose some weight. He took the leash and “looped it under my armpits” and around his chest.”Some other officers had arrived so I threw the end of it to them and pretty much told them ‘hang on I’m gonna go over the edge,'” he said.

He bravely rappelled down the cliff in his makeshift climbing gear and swam to the father and his offspring. Wiese would later testify that when he reached Brians, one of his daughters was holding onto her father’s neck for dear life. The other girl was limp and lifeless. Here’s the account per the Carnegie Hero Fund foundation:

“Wiese removed the leash, entered the ocean, and swam to the man, who was much larger than him. Wiese then grasped the man, as he held the girls, and pushed them back to the rocks and pulled them out of the water. Wiese carried the unresponsive girl to the point where he descended the cliff and secured her to a backpack that officers lowered with the leash; officers hoisted her to safety. With help from a firefighter who had swum to the scene, officers similarly hoisted the second girl. A helicopter lifted the man to the top of the cliff.”

During the rescue, Brians spoke with Wiese about the crash, saying he couldn’t believe “we didn’t die” because he was trying very hard to kill everyone. He told Wiese that the girls were in his lap without seatbelts on when he drove over the cliff. “I couldn’t fathom how they survived,” the father told Weise. He also took the time to disparage his wife.

The more injured girl had serious injuries that included a brain bleed and compression fractures on her vertebrae. The other one was covered in scratches and bruises. They both thankfully survived. Brians was taken to the hospital and then booked in jail.

He was charged with 18 felony counts, including two counts of attempted murder with the use of a deadly weapon enhancement; two counts of child abuse; two counts of kidnapping as well as burglary and domestic violence counts. In a plea deal with the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, Brians pleaded guilty to eight of the 15 charges against him. He will be sentenced to 31 years in California state prison, per the district attorney’s office, on Sept. 20. He deserves every bit of time the judge will give him to think about his selfish and homicidal actions.

It’s a familiar tale. A man in power, sworn to protect the public from deviant monsters ends up exposed as a monster themselves. This all-too-common tragedy is exactly what happened with police officer, then FBI Agent, then State Trooper, Christopher Bauer. His monstrous deeds? Sexually assaulting a woman and two kids.

For most of his adult life, Bauer, 45, was in a position of authority over the general population. While he would commit unspeakable acts to an underage girl from the age of 5 to 11, his own childhood was reportedly also a nightmare. He was removed from his own abusive household at the age of 5 and forced to grow up in foster homes and orphanages. He was also diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, a condition characterized by defiance, vindictiveness and violence. “Several instances stick out to Mr. Bauer, including once when he was pushed out of the third floor of a building and another when he was left in a burning apartment,” his attorneys wrote in a court filing.

That troubled beginning didn’t affect his ambition and he enlisted in the Air Force as an adult. After he left that outfit he joined the Montgomery, Alabama police department. His upward trajectory continued in 2009 when he joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). There, he had the opportunity to work on numerous high-profile investigations.

While he worked for the bureau, one of his co-workers claimed he sexually assaulted her. In an application for a restraining order, she said Bauer choked her, raped her at knifepoint, and made her “scared for my life.”

“I couldn’t see any more and felt my legs go out from under me,” the woman wrote. “He told me many times if I went to war with him I would lose. He told me many times he would destroy me.”

“It was a year of torture,” she told the AP. “He quite literally would keep me awake for days. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep, and in six months I went from 150 pounds to 92 pounds. I was physically dying from what he was doing to me.” She said he raped her so often that her hair started to fall out.

When confronted with these claims, Bauer reportedly said they were consensual. The FBI didn’t agree. The top of the bureau’s food chain considered his behavior in relation to his co-worker to be “egregious.” After they interviewed several female employees, however, an unnamed senior FBI agent told the AP that they decided that the truth of what happened was “somewhere in the middle” of both accounts.

In an internal investigation, they found he violated quite a few FBI policies, including having sex in an FBI car. He should have lost his job and really should have been charged criminally,” the anonymous agent said.

In late 2018, Bauer’s security clearance was revoked and he was suspended without pay, effectively ending his FBI career. That should’ve been the end of it, but Bauer is smart and knows the system, so there is a lot more to this story.

The next year, Bauer applied for a job with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency using a forged letter from the FBI and was hired. We’ll get to that in a sec. Around this time, Bauer was actively raping a five-year-old girl, and he would continue to do so for years.

On April 23, 2021, when the victim was 11 years old, she confided in a friend about Bauer and his constant sexual assaults. A few days later the girl told her mother, who contacted the school. Bauer was arrested that same day. After his arrest, Bauer resigned from the state troopers, citing personal reasons. That’s when authorities found out his letter was a forgery.

On his application to be a trooper, Bauer said he’d never been dismissed or forced to resign from any job because of disciplinary issues, and that he was still employed by the FBI. The letter claimed to be from FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. and said Bauer had ten years of “creditable service” and that he was “eligible for rehire.”

In a big oops, the state troopers apparently never called the FBI to check if the letter was legitimate or not. “You have to ask yourself why an agent from the FBI would want to leave after 10 years,” said Lou Reiter, a law enforcement consultant and former top brass with the Los Angeles Police Department. “They obviously didn’t do any kind of due diligence with their background check.”

When confronted by the AP, the state police said it did a “full and thorough” background check on Bauer and “no derogatory comments were uncovered by former employers.”

That restraining order, by the way, was public record and out for a year when the state police did its “thorough” investigation. Bauer also has similar child sex abuse charges in Louisiana, and the Louisiana State Police said it will extradite him to face those charges.

His official charges were sodomy and sexual abuse of a child under 12. For some reason, he decided to testify in court. So did his victim. The teen testified with tears streaming down her face, per the AP, that she was too afraid to say no to Bauer or tell anyone what was going on.

When Bauer took the stand, he said “no, never” when asked about the allegations against him and said, “if she said I did something to her, then yes that’s a lie.”

A jury of his peers convicted him in June of 2024 and on Aug. 1 he appeared before Montgomery Circuit Judge Jimmy Pool shackled and in a prison-issue orange jumpsuit for his sentencing. He told Judge Pool that he never thought he would end up on the wrong side of a prison cell, and that juries get things wrong sometimes.

“It seems no matter what I say, no one wants to believe I’m innocent,” he said. “All it took was an accusation to strip me of everything.”

The girl’s mother spoke at the hearing and called Bauer a “monster” who used his authority as law enforcement to convey an “image of a good person” who “had everyone fooled.”

Judge Pool said he “believed every single word” the girl had said and sentenced Bauer to life in prison. Because the victim was younger than 11 when the assault occurred, he will not be eligible for parole.

District Attorney Daryl Bailey, who prosecuted Bauer, said that it was “always extremely disappointing when someone who is supposed to enforce and uphold the law commits a crime against the people they have sworn to protect.” He said the victim can “take solace in knowing Christopher Bauer will never harm her nor anyone else ever again. … I extend my gratitude to Judge Jimmy Pool for sentencing this sexual predator to life in prison as that is where he deserves to die.”

On January 20, 2024, Ava Wood was the victim of a tragic shooting. This true crime story is made all the more harrowing considering the shooter was her father.

The Post-Standard reported that the 14-year-old girl from Baldwinsville, New York had died during a murder-suicide perpetrated by her father, Christopher Wood. The tale started when the girl’s mother, Heather, became concerned that her daughter hadn’t shown up for school. Ava’s parents weren’t legally divorced, but were living separately while separated. When Heather discovered that there was no answer at Wood’s home, she called the authorities. They found Ava dead from a gunshot wound and her father died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The tragic incident was later publicized to the community through an email from the Baldwinsville school district.

“It is with great sadness and a very heavy heart that I inform you of the tragic loss of Durgee Jr. High School 9th grade student Ava Wood. We are a close-knit school community and our hearts are broken by this tragedy. Our thoughts are with Ava’s family and friends during this extremely difficult time.”

Even more disheartening was that this was not an isolated incident. The outlet also reported that the family had domestic disputes and concerning rhetoric from Christopher Wood, leading many to wonder how this could have happened in the first place.

As it often is with these cases, there can be little resolution in such heartbreaking events. The only thing the public knows for sure is that Christopher demonstrated a pattern of concerning behavior. Before the event, there had been reports of stalking as well as harassing text messages. Two weeks before, the perpetrator purchased a shotgun which was used in the murder. No one can be quite certain where this escalation of behavior came from, only that he told his wife the night before the crime: “This is how it ends for us.” This true story is one of many that offers no solace.

Marco Trooper, the 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and her husband Dennis Trooper, was tragically found dead on Feb. 13, 2024, in his dormitory room at UC Berkeley.

Trooper was studying to major in Maths and was in his second semester of freshman year at the university’s College of Letters & Science. Speaking to SFGATE, Esther Wojcicki, Trooper’s grandmother, said her grandson was achieving great academic results, that he was “athletic,” “loving,” “gregarious,” and was “everything you could have wished for in a son and a grandson.” He was also described as a genius at mathematics who was truly enjoying his course.

Marco Trooper’s cause of death

Marco Trooper was found unresponsive in his dorm room at around 4 pm on a Tuesday. Despite paramedics’ best efforts to revive him, the 19-year-old was declared dead at the scene.

From the beginning, even before an autopsy and toxicology tests were performed, the family was aware that his passing had been due to drug consumption. Esther Wojcicki said, while the investigation was ongoing, “He ingested a drug, and we don’t know what was in it. […] One thing we do know, it was a drug.”

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office’s coroner’s toxicology report described high concentrations of cocaine in Trooper’s system, in addition to amphetamine (a stimulant drug sometimes legally used to treat ADHD), alprazolam (otherwise best known as Xanax), hydroxyzine (an antihistamine medication sold under the name Atarax or Vistaril, also prescribed to those suffering from anxiety), and THC.

The medical examiner considered Trooper’s levels of alprazolam and cocaine to be the determining factor in his untimely passing.

This year has been devastating for the Trooper-Wojcicki family. Six months after her son’s accidental overdose, Susan Wojcicki died on Saturday, Aug. 10, after a two-year-long fight against lung cancer. She was 56 years old and is survived by her husband and four children.

In St. Martins, Missouri, on Oct. 21, 2009, a 15-year-old girl committed the most heinous of acts when she murdered her 9-year-old neighbor in cold blood. It’s one of the most shocking true crime stories in recent American history.

Warning: This article contains mentions of self-harm and details of a murder.

As per CBS, Alyssa Bustamante brutally killed Elizabeth Olten by strangling her, slitting her throat, and stabbing her eight times in the chest. Moreover, she said she enjoyed it and wrote the following in her journal on the same day she committed the despicable crime:

“I just f***ng killed someone. I strangled them and slit their throat and stabbed them now they’re dead. I don’t know how to feel atm. It was ahmazing. As soon as you get over the “ohmygawd, I can’t do this” feeling, it’s pretty enjoyable. I’m kinda nervous and shaky though right now. Kay, I gotta go to church now… lol.”

To maneuver Olten into place, Bustamante had convinced her younger sister to bring the girl to a nearby forest to hang out. The murder then occurred due to Bustamante’s homicidal ideation — homicidal thoughts and the need to find out what it’s like to take someone’s life. She then buried her victim’s body in a grave that she had dug in the forest five days earlier and covered it with leaves.

While it’s obviously no excuse, Bustamante had a troubled childhood. Her mother, Michelle, was a teenager when she gave birth to Alyssa, and she had addiction issues and had been in trouble with the law for theft and drug use. Her father, Caesar, was serving time in prison at the time Alyssa committed the murder. Her grandparents, Gary and Karen Brooke, had taken legal custody of her in 2002 when she was eight.

Alyssa’s persona changed, as her friends noticed, around 2007, following an attempt at taking her own life using “a bunch of Tylenol and something else, some sort of pain killer.” She self-harmed, and her online profiles listed “killing people” and “cutting” as hobbies (as per CBS).

It is, therefore, widely believed there could and should have been an intervention that might have prevented this awful crime from being committed. Of course, it happened, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it now, but what consequences did Alyssa Bustamante suffer as a result of her violent actions?

What happened to Alyssa Bustamante after she killed Elizabeth Olten?

After Elizabeth Olten was reported missing and police got involved in the case, Alyssa Bustamante ultimately led them to her grave.

Her first court appearance after her arrest came on Nov. 17, 2009, where she pleaded not guilty but was indicted on first-degree murder and armed criminal action. In Jan. 2012, Bustamante accepted a plea deal for the lesser charges of second-degree murder and armed criminal action. Shortly after that, she received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of conditional release and a consecutive sentence of 30 years for armed criminal action (as per Huffington Post).

The prosecution had urged Pat Joyce, the judge on the case, to sentence Bustamante to an additional 71 years so every time she was up for parole, she could explain, “Because I robbed 71 years from Elizabeth Olten on Oct. 21, 2009” (as per Missouri Net).

Several mental health professionals testified that Bustamante has major depressive disorder in addition to borderline personality disorder (as per St. Louis Post-Dispatch), which her defense attempted to use as reasoning for leniency, but that justification was denied.

Patricia Preiss, Elizabeth Olten’s mother, agreed to settle a wrongful death lawsuit that requires Bustanate to pay her more than $5 million (as per Associated Press).

Bustamante is now 30 years old, and her sentence means that the earliest she will ever be released is 2054, when she will be 60.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. A list of international crisis resources can be found here.

Before he was gunned down in his home in the family game room near a pool table, 63-year-old San Diego defense lawyer Timothy MacNeil had been dating someone new. His stepdaughter, Brae Hansen, didn’t like that, especially after he missed a birthday lunch to hang out with his new lady.

That anger and rejection may have been just enough to convince Hansen and her brother Nathan Gann to murder their father in cold blood. This is the story of how that all went down, in one of the more disturbing true crime tales of the last 15 years.

At around noon on July 19, 2007, police rushed to the MacNeil’s house in a nice neighborhood in Rolando on Marraco Drive in San Diego, California. Stepdaughter Hansen had just frantically called 911 and said a masked gunman tied her up along with her father, and then shot and killed him in front of her.

When authorities arrived, they found MacNeil face down in a pool of his own blood. He wasn’t wearing pants and there was a zip tie nearby. Detective J.C. Smith told CBS that Hansen had also been zip-tied and she was crying uncontrollably when they arrived. She claimed that she saw her stepfather murdered in front of her eyes and told the police the gunman ran out the back door. Police found the gun and canvassed the neighborhood.

A neighbor named Ernest Torgeson said he heard a “pop, pop, pop, pop” but didn’t think much of it. Eyewitness Christopher Miles said he saw a man jump out of the hedges near the house and run off in broad daylight.

“You could see he was definitely putting a lot of effort into it and he was definitely trying to run away from a situation,” Miles told police. “He immediately started to run directly down [the] path and all the way up the stairs… at that point that’s where I lost track of him.”

Police then found more evidence: A wad of black clothes and a mask stashed in a nearby tree. Police didn’t know it yet, but the “robbery” was actually planned months in advance. Let’s back up just a bit first, though.

The story is perhaps all the more tragic because MacNeil, by all accounts, was a stellar man, a great attorney, and a caring father. His younger brother Rick described him as “a great guy, the best possible big brother I could ever have.”

MacNeil was “a very big joker” who was funny and athletic. He was also a killer in the courtroom, according to his fraternity brother John Keifer, who said MacNeil never lost a case. He also knew how to work a room and could “talk to anybody,” per his daughter Erin MacNeil Ellison. After he split from Ellison’s mother, he met a troubled woman named Doreen. Along with Doreen came two stepchildren: Brae Hansen and Nathan Gann. Gann was 7 when he came to live with MacNeil and Hansen was 5.

Brae Hansen and MacNeil quickly formed a tight bond. Ellison said Hansen quickly took to calling MacNeil “daddy,” and he reciprocated by doing “everything a father does.” Their bond was so close that most of the family was exceptionally worried for Hansen after the murder.

Doreen was suicidal and had abused her children from a young age. Gann got the brunt of it, according to his attorney Ricardo Garcia. “She was physically violent with him, hitting him … with sticks,” Garcia said. “She would, ridicule him. He would be in the bathroom … and [she would] bring his sister in and point out his penis and ridicule him about it in front of his sister.” Gann eventually moved out to live with his grandmother in Arizona.

Later in life, Gann seemed to be getting it together. He was a clean-cut honors student at the University of Arizona. He liked to blog and post wacky videos of himself on YouTube.

“I love the stars, ever since I was a child,” he said on his MySpace page. “Because of them I have always wanted to reach for the stars. My dream goal is to be an astronaut.”

At first, Hansen was simply a victim of the crime, but there were some things that gave authorities pause. When they found Hansen, her hands were crudely zip-tied. She told authorities she called 911 with her tongue. The main detail that troubled Detective J.C. Smith was the fact that she was left alive at all.

“…To be killed…in your own house is a very, a very brutal, violent killing, and to leave a witness to that seemed unusual,” Smith told ABC News. After Hansen was sent home to family, she gave another statement and said that MacNeil called the killer “Nathan,” which of course is the name of her brother. She tried to backtrack, deny, and then went out of her way to say that the killer was absolutely not her brother.

This detail, along with other little points that didn’t quite match up, compelled authorities to arrest her and her brother. This is when one of the more chilling accounts of the murder came from Gann himself, courtesy of his cellmate after Gann was arrested.

Gann said he shot his stepfather “accidentally” in the back because he came home “unexpectedly.” According to the testimony from the cellmate, MacNeil said, “Nathan, why are you killing me? Why are you shooting me? Why are you doing this to me?”

When she was arrested, Hansen “stood right up, turned around, and put her hands behind her back,” Detective Smith said. “It’s typical of someone who knows they’ve been caught.”

She then told the police all about the murder. “I don’t know exactly how this part happened, because it happened so fast,” she told police, “but I think my dad lunged at him and tried to get the gun and I kind of turned away and was just like freaking out majorly.”

Hansen admitted she started the whole thing and she had a “lapse of judgement.” She revealed that they originally considered beating MacNeil to death with a baseball bat or injecting him with poison. She claimed it was all talk though.

“It was just more of going through the motions and I just never believed it was really going to happen,” she said. However, things got very real when Gann showed up with a gun.

“‘You’re gonna tie his hands behind his back, then we’ll kneel him down in the laundry room…'” she told police. “He missed once, I know. [Nathan] hit the side of his face once, I know, and then he fired another shot in the back of his head once, once he was down, because he was twitching.”

Even more damning? A letter Hansen wrote for her family while she was in jail. Prosecutor George Bennett presented it in court:

“She says, ‘It was supposed to be one clean shot, easy shot to the head. No pain, no suffering. That’s the plan.’ She never tried to withdraw from any conspiracy. It just got messy. And those tears and that expression is too late,” Bennett said. “Brae Hansen controlled this thing the way you control a dog on a leash. She had that dog, Nathan Gann, on a leash, holding him back, holding him back, holding him back, and then she let it go.”

After the first trial ended in a hung jury, the state took the unusual step of trying the siblings at the same time. Hansen was sentenced to life in prison without parole, a conviction that was eventually overturned because she was 17 when she was tried. Her new sentence? Twenty-six years to life.

Gann got 25 years to life. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2032 when he’s 44 years old – almost 20 years younger than his stepfather when he was shot in cold blood by his stepson.

It’s hard to rise to the top of the field in any profession, but snake collecting?! Snakes are off-putting to most people, but somehow breeder and collector Ben Renick became a sort of rock star in his field, garnering worldwide praise and the financial rewards that came with it. But then, one day, he was found dead facedown in his snake pit. Was he the victim of one of his exotic poisonous snakes? Or was he murdered? Read on to find out the truth about this bizarre true crime tale.

Ben was wildly successful as a snake merchant. His company, Renick Reptiles in New Florence, Mo., was known for breeding special “designer” snakes with price tags over $100k. His friend David Levinson said Ben was doing stuff nobody had ever seen before, and he had a lot of “‘world’s first’ over the years.”

From the outside, Ben had quite the idyllic life. He was married to a lovely woman named Lynlee and had a few kids. They were doing so well financially that Lynlee even opened a second business: Ascensia Spa – something that Lynlee, a massage therapist, had always dreamed of doing.

However, everything came crashing down on June 8, 2017, when Lynlee called 911 frantically to say that Ben was lying face down in a pool of blood in his snake house. Could a snake have gotten loose and murdered its owner? Following the call, Montgomery County sheriff’s deputies rushed to the scene and entered the facility cautiously.

“I don’t care if it’s a 5-inch-long snake if something tries to bite me, I’m gonna light its ass up,” one officer said on audio captured by bodycam. “Holy shit!” a second officer said, looking at all the snakes. “Something got him, so watch your ass.”

The officers, holding shotguns, were on edge, according to coroner Dave Colbert. “Someone being killed by a snake is not something that happens every day, especially in Missouri,” he said.

However, when Colbert took a closer look at the body, he made a grisly discovery – there were no snake bites on Ben’s body at all. There were bullet holes though, eight of them, to be exact. One of those shots was at extremely close range.

Ben’s brother Sam rushed to the scene, finding authorities and Ben’s wife Lynlee distraught. “He was … shot in the back almost exclusively. I — I don’t think he saw it coming at all. … Ben had such a future ahead of him. You know, he was 29 years old. He was almost — almost 30. … A lot was lost.”

Who killed Ben Renick?

Ben met Lynlee when they were teenagers and married in 2014. Lynlee had a previous son and they had another child after the marriage. In 2016, Lynlee opened the spa. In the meantime, the snake business was booming. The whole enterprise was worth millions.

Police quickly ruled out a robbery because nothing was missing. Then they tried to find out who would have a motive to kill him. Ben and Sam’s father was involved in a ponzi scheme and had recently committed suicide, so they initially thought it may have been a revenge killing, but that led nowhere.

Next, they looked at Sam, who by cooperating fully and subjecting himself to a polygraph test, was cleared, despite Lynlee’s attempts to implicate him. Then they looked closer at Lynlee. Could she have been responsible? Deputies soon discovered that the couple’s marriage was not what it seemed.

Missouri State Highway Patrol criminal investigator Devin Foust said Lynlee told them about an affair she was having, and then another one with a man named Brandon Blackwell. She had also suspiciously deleted some social media messages with Ben. Those messages showed that Lynlee was mired in debt from her failing spa business and that Ben chastised her for it.

“After we started to find out about boyfriends, the shape the spa was in, how much money she owed, it just started pushing Sam to the side [as a suspect],” Foust said.

A motive soon emerged: If the couple divorced, Lynlee could potentially lose out on the sale of the snake business and the property. But his death would not only allow her to avoid that, it would also gain her access to a $1 million life insurance policy after Ben’s death. Altogether, it was a very significant amount of money.

However, despite her failing a polygraph, authorities couldn’t quite pin the murder on her, and the case went cold for three years. Then police got an unexpected tip from Lynlee’s ex Brandon Blackwell, who just happened to be in jail.

Brandon was in jail for violation of a stalking order that Lynlee got against him. He was screwed and wanted to make a deal, so he sang. He told authorities that Lynlee asked an ex named Michael Humphrey to help her with the murder.

“They drove to the farm, he had gloves, he had a firearm, the plan was for him to do it. They get there he hands her the gun and says he doesn’t feel comfortable doing … it’s something she’s gotta take care of.  She walks in with a gun … and just shoots him a bunch of times.”

A spa employee named Ashley Shaw said that Lynlee told her “Michael got — too nervous, or didn’t want to do it, and so he handed her the gun, and she actually killed him, she said that she put the gun to his back and shot him several times.”

Lynlee was arrested and found guilty of murder in the second degree. She was sentenced to 16 years in prison. The judge in the case, Boone County Judge Kevin Crane, told Lynlee she was “lucky” for such a lenient sentence.

“You’re awful lucky, ma’am,” Crane said. “You’re going to get out in your 40s, and my 40s weren’t too bad. I just hope you don’t kill again.”

At present, Lynlee is still in jail and Humphrey is serving a life sentence.

Content warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of murder. Please take care while reading.

In a case as bizarre as it is tragic, in 2006, Marc and Debra Richardson and their eight-year-old son were brutally murdered in a stabbing attack at their home in rural Alberta, Canada. As the police would later learn, Marc and Debra’s daughter, Jasmine Richardson, was partially responsible for the crimes.

Then 12-year-old Jasmine, however, was not the only person involved in her family’s murder. Jeremy Steinke, Jasmine’s boyfriend, a 23-year-old high school dropout and self-identified “300-year-old werewolf,” who wore a vial of blood around his neck and said he liked the “taste of blood,” killed Jasmine’s parents while Jasmine murdered her brother in his bedroom, slitting his throat. Jasmine’s father tried to fight off Steinke with a screwdriver. All combined, Marc and Debra were stabbed more than 30 times.

The police searched for Jasmine

Before those details were known, however, police were concerned that Jasmine, too, had been the victim of foul play. When they arrived at the Richardson’s home, they found three bodies, but Jasmine was missing, and they issued an Amber Alert. Before long though, evidence discovered in the young girl’s bedroom, as well as text and digital exchanges between Steinke and Jasmine led the police to declare them persons of interest in the case.

“I have this plan. It begins with me killing them and ends with me living with you,” Jasmine reportedly wrote Steinke in one message. “Their throats I want to slit. They will regret the s*** they have done. Especially when I see to it that they are gone. They shall pay for their insulince [sic]. Finally there shall be silence. Their blood shall be payment!” Steinke wrote on his blog, according to The New Zealand Herald.

Inspired by the movie Natural Born Killers, the couple planned the murder when Jasmine’s parents forbade them from seeing each other. Steinke and Jasmine met at a punk show, and both had profiles on VampireFreaks.com where they communicated.

At that time, VampireFreaks had a social media component for people interested in goth culture and extreme lifestyles. The social media aspect has since been removed because several killings were linked to the site, including the Richardson family murder.

Steinke and Jasmine were seen kissing after the murders happened

After killing Jasmine’s family, Jasmine and Steinke were seen kissing at a house party just up the street from where it happened, according to Global News. The day after the crimes, Jasmine and Steinke were arrested about 80 miles away. Steinke’s friend, Kacy Lancaster, was also taken into custody, charged as an accessory for allowing the couple to use her truck and disposing of evidence.

Given Jasmine’s age, her name was kept confidential and she was only identified in the media as “J.R.” At first, she denied her involvement in the triple-murder. While she admitted to planning the attack, she said she never intended to follow through with it and pleaded not guilty. Witnesses at her trial, however, said both she and Steinke admitted what they had done.

Is Jasmine Richardson out of jail?

The jury gave Jasmine a 10-year Intensive Rehabilitative Custody and Supervision (IRCS) sentence, including time spent in a psychiatric institution followed by community supervision, the maximum punishment allowed under Canadian law because of her age. Meanwhile, Steinke, who has since changed his name to Jackson May, confessed and was sentenced to life in prison. Steinke proposed to Jasmine behind bars. She accepted, but they never married.

In 2016, Jasmine’s sentence expired, and she was freed. To this day, Jasmine is thought to be the youngest killer convicted of multiple murders in Canadian history. “I think your parents and brother would be proud of you. Clearly you cannot undo the past; you can only live each day with the knowledge you can control how you behave and what you do each day,” Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Scott Brooker told Jasmine announcing her time served was complete, according to the CBC.

As of a 2016 The New Zealand Herald report, she now lives somewhere in Canada, amid the people who vividly remember what she did and are not exactly on board with her walking free and living in their suburban neighborhood.

In December of 2000, Mike Williams woke up before dawn and drove to Lake Seminole in Tallahassee, Florida to go duck hunting. Later in the day, he planned on celebrating his sixth anniversary with his wife Denise Williams.

Unfortunately, in one of the more bizarre true crime tales out there, he didn’t return. His body wouldn’t be discovered for another 17 years after his best friend Brian Winchester confessed to killing him with a shotgun blast to the face. Winchester was never charged with murder in that crime, despite committing it.

There are three main characters in this homicidal love triangle. Mike Williams, the victim, grew up in Bradfordville, just north of Tallahassee. He worked hard throughout his youth and took up duck hunting around the age of 15. He attended high school at North Florida Christian and then he majored in political science at Florida State University. When he was hired by Ketcham Appraisal Group as a property appraiser, his boss said he was the “the hardest-working man I ever saw.” He married Denise Williams in 1994.

At the time, Brian Winchester, the actual murderer, was Mike Williams’ best friend and fellow property appraiser. Winchester and Mike Williams’ wife Denise had dated in high school, and later it would come out that they never stopped dating and carried on a years-long affair.

The Williams family had a daughter in 1999 and halfway through the year they bought a $1 million life insurance policy through, you guessed it, Winchester. Even more wildly: Winchester and Denise Williams would eventually get married.

Let’s go back to that December day when Mike Williams went duck hunting early in the morning. There are two tales here: one is the one authorities tried to thread together at the time of the disappearance, and the other is what really happened. Let’s start with the former.

The first tale

When Mike Williams never returned from Lake Seminole, his wife called Winchester, who went out to search with his Dad, but came up empty. Police searched for days with boats, helicopters, and underwater cameras. The search was called off after 44 days with no trace of the body, with the presumptive theory being that he’d drowned.

There were a few other hypotheses as to what happened. Mike Williams was the first death out of 80 deaths on the lake where a body wasn’t found, which was weird but also led authorities to conclude alligators “dismembered and … stored [Mike Williams’] remains in a location” hidden to them.

In June of 2001, a fisherman found some waders in the lake and divers found a hunting jacket with Mike Williams’ name on it. None of the clothes showed any damage from alligator and the clothes weren’t as worn down as they should have been after being in the water that long. Regardless, Mike was declared dead after Denise Williams petitioned the court to do so, which it did, freeing up the life insurance policies.

That could’ve been the end of it, but Mike Williams’ mother wouldn’t let the case die, as she wasn’t convinced about the whole drowning/alligator theory. The case was reopened in 2004 and many inconsistencies became glaringly obvious. A few: Mike Williams’ Bronco was found on mud and not on the boat launchers where it should be. A storm that night should have blown the boat away, but it didn’t. Also, when the boat was found the motor was off but the gas tank was full, when it should have stayed on if he fell out of it.

The alligator theory was then debunked when authorities realized alligators wouldn’t be active at the time of his disappearance. Even so, no one knew what happened. Winchester and Denise Williams married and life went on. Mike Williams’ mom kept trying to get the case reported but by 2012 it was considered closed.

Things were quiet again until August 2016: Denise (now a Winchester) and Brian separated. Apparently, he had a sex addiction and Denise Williams was over it. She stopped taking Winchester’s calls, which freaked him out because he was worried she would tell the authorities he killed her ex-husband, so he hid in her car, held a gun to her ribs and told her he was going to kill himself.

“We promised each other neither one of us would ever say anything,” Winchester would say in court later. “Because we knew the only way they’d get anything is if one of us talked.”

Denise Williams eventually calmed him down and convinced him she wouldn’t say anything, but she lied and immediately had him arrested for kidnapping. She asked the judge to keep Winchester in jail because she was scared for her life.

“I would never wish this on anyone,” she said in court. “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t close my eyes because I always see him rising up out of the back of the car screaming and waving a gun. I can’t relax because all I can feel is the gun shoved in my ribs. I can’t have peace because I only hear his voice screaming and cussing at me.”

Winchester was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the kidnapping. Now that they had him dead to rights, Brian Winchester made a deal with the police. In exchange for immunity in the murder trial, he would confess about what really happened to Mike Williams.

Winchester’s account

Winchester said he and Denise Williams had an affair that started in college and lasted through their own marriages. After a year of sneaking around, they decided they wanted to be together for good and started talking about how to make that a reality. Because she had a religious family that frowned on divorce, Denise Williams and Winchester settled on murder.

They discussed a few ways to do it: maybe a late-night robbery at the office? No. What about they kill both their spouses in a staged boat accident? No, because Brian Winchester didn’t want to kill his kids’ mother. Eventually, they decided on the boating accident.

“Denise liked this idea. She felt better, I guess, about herself — or we could feel better about ourselves — if there’s a chance that he could make it out of it,” he said. “I think there was even talk that it would be up to God what happens. Not us. It won’t be a murder. It will be an accident. It’s kind of screwed-up thinking. But that was a scenario that she could live with, I guess.”

The description of the murder is brutal. Winchester was with Mike Williams on the boat that fateful Dec. morning in 2000. He told Mike Williams to put on his waders and then pushed him out of the boat. When Mike Williams, frightened and frantic, came up and grabbed onto a tree stump “I didn’t know how to get out of that situation, so I loaded my gun and made one or two circles around and I got closer to him and he was in the water and as I passed by I shot him.”

He pulled Mike Williams’ body from the water and stashed it in the back of his Suburban. He knew he had to leave the body “close and it had to be quick and obviously it needed to be a location where [Mike] wouldn’t be found.” He bought some tarp, weights and a shovel at Walmart and buried the body at Carr Lake about 60 miles to the southeast.

When he got back he went to a car wash to get the blood out of his car. After that, Winchester drove out to search for Mike Williams with his father Marcus.

“He was searching and I was just lying,” Winchester said in court. “My dad didn’t want to give up. My dad loved Mike.” After that, he said he worked with Denise Williams to make sure the murder stayed something only the two of them knew about. They didn’t talk for days and waited even longer to meet. Brian Winchester said he was “kind of nervous” when they did see each other because it would be “weird to see her because of what we had done.”

After the kidnapping incident years later, Winchester said he felt like he couldn’t trust Denise Williams anymore. Finally, after 18 years in 2018, Denise Williams was convicted of her ex-husband’s murder. In exchange for testifying, Brian Winchester was not charged, despite shooting Mike Williams in the face. In Feb. 2019, she was sentenced to life in prison for murder. Her murder conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, but she was still on the hook for 30 years for the conspiracy charge. Both Brian Winchester and Denise Williams are currently serving out their sentences in prison.

It’s been 20 years since Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife, Laci, and their unborn son. While many believe justice has been served, many still assert that Peterson was wrongfully convicted.

Laci, who was eight months pregnant, went missing from her home in Modesto, California, on Christmas Eve 2002. Laci and the baby’s remains were found on the shores of San Francisco Bay a year later, and in 2004, Peterson was convicted of killing them. He was given a death sentence, but it was commuted to life in prison without parole in 2020.

Peterson has maintained his claim of innocence throughout the years, and the Los Angeles Innocence Project picked up his case in January 2024. The organization is a non-profit with the mission of exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing. For the first time since his conviction, Peterson is now speaking about the case in a documentary series.

What will the documentary be about?

Those who have been following the case will get a better understanding of what has been happening to Peterson since he went to prison. The documentary, Face to Face with Scott Peterson, includes conversations between executive producer and director Shareen Anderson and Peterson via video calls. Other people involved and close to the case, including Peterson’s sister-in-law, the lead detective, and Peterson’s former defense attorney were also interviewed.

There have been several TV specials and documentaries about the Laci Peterson case since the beginning, but this is the first one released since the Innocence Project took on his case. Face to Face with Scott Peterson is a three-part series that will premiere exclusively on Peacock on Aug. 20, 2024.

Axel Rudakubana, accused of murdering three girls under age 10 and the attempted murder of eight children and two adults at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport in Merseyside, England, appeared as The Doctor from Doctor Who in a 2018 Children in Need campaign video.

Sky News reports that Rudakabana was picked for the 2018 video through a casting agency. In the clip, Rudakabana emerges from the Tardis dressed like former Doctor Who star David Tennant, in a trench coat and tie. “It’s that time of year again,” Rudakabana says, referring to the annual Children in Need fundraising drive.

Rudakubana was nearly 18 years old when the Southport stabbing attack happened in late July 2024, making him around 11 years old when the Children in Need video was made. Once discovered, the BBC removed the video from its website “out of respect” for the victims.

The BBC’s Children in Need helps fund charities benefitting children across the U.K., and Doctor Who, a popular family show, helps raise funds for Children in Need through short video clips produced annually.

The U.K. riots

In the aftermath of the tragic Southport stabbings, riots broke out all across the U.K. as far-right protestors blamed immigration — specifically non-white and Muslim immigrants — for the murders. Rudakabana was born in Wales to Rwandan immigrants, making him a British citizen. He was 17 when the attacks happened. Under U.K. law mandating suspect’s identities under 18 not be reported in the press, his identity was kept confidential.

However, a U.K. judge agreed to release Rudakabana’s name early since he was almost 18, and to contradict online misinformation misidentifying the Southport suspect, and alleging that the police wasn’t release his name because he was Islamic. Islam is a minority religion in Rwanda, and there’s no evidence to suggest that Rudakabana or his family follow the faith, and according to The Independent, regularly attend a Christian church. A motive for the knife attack has not yet been determined.

However, for rioters who claim the Southport assailant is foreign, and that immigration has diluted British culture, the irony would be lost on them that not only is Rudakabana U.K.-born, he appeared on TV as The Doctor, among the most British of all fictional characters.

In 1970, Donna Chiarelott arrived at the Northern Illinois University library to pick up her friend, Donna Doll, from work. Doll never showed, and nine days later Doll’s body was found in a nearby cornfield. She had been suffocated, and in a bizarre twist, she’d eaten as much as six pounds of potatoes before her death.

Doll not showing up to meet Chiarelott was the first sign something was wrong. Doll was a 21-year-old NIU senior when she died, and studied Russian with hopes of becoming a teacher. She was seen leaving her job at the school’s library, but she never returned home that night, the Chicago Tribune reported. She didn’t show up for work the next day, either, and she missed her younger sister’s 10th birthday, too, which was out of character.

What happened to Donna Doll?

After no one heard from her for two days, Doll was reported missing. Her personal belongings, including an uncashed paycheck and allergy medications she needed, were found in her room. Investigators discovered she was seeing a man in Pittsburgh, and in the days before cell phones, assumed she’d gone to see him. But once contacted, he, too, said he hadn’t seen her. Meanwhile, another man with whom she was romantically involved, Charles Burke, helped search for her in the NIU area.

Doll disappeared on October 2 that year, and on the 11th, teenagers found her body only about a mile from the NIU campus, with no signs of struggle at the scene. Authorities determined she had lived for about 48 hours after she was last seen, and while she had been suffocated — by a bag, possibly — no fibers were found in her lungs, as often happens in such cases. There were also “mystery substances” in her body, never identified with 1970s technology. And then there were the potatoes, one of the strangest and unexplained aspects of the case.

Donna Doll potato theories

Theories explaining the potatoes include a crime of jealousy linked to both potato vodka, and Doll’s Russian studies. Some think she had met the man in Pittsburgh on a Russian exchange, and recently cut things off with Charles Burke. Others say she could have had solanine poisoning, a substance found in potatoes that’s toxic and fatal to humans in large quantities, depending on body weight.

Doll had known allergies, but it’s unclear whether she was allergic to potatoes. Serious potato allergies can, however, result in anaphylaxis, causing shortness of breath. Anaphylaxis is sometimes fatal when untreated, according to Mayo Clinic. Doll’s cause of death was ruled suffocation, but could it have been death by potato poisoning, instead? We may never know.

Burke identified Doll’s partially decomposed body. He lived near where Doll was found, was said to be possessive, and she had broken up with him recently for the man in Pennsylvania. Burke, who cooperated with the authorities, attempted suicide when police declared they had a person of interest in the case, but the police never said who that person was. There was never enough evidence to charge Burke, however, and Doll’s murder remains unsolved to this day.