Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary

Every case Michael Proctor ever investigated now carries a question mark — and that question mark just got a lot bigger. According to a lawsuit filed against the Town of Canton and Massachusetts State Police, the fired state police trooper who led the investigation into John O’Keefe’s death had been exchanging messages with Canton Sgt. Sean Goode for more than a decade. Messages that, according to the complaint, allegedly include racial slurs, antisemitic statements, discussions of planting evidence on people, and a derogatory comment about Sandra Birchmore — the woman whose death in her Canton apartment was initially ruled a suicide and is now at the center of a federal case against former Stoughton detective Matthew Farwell.
Proctor was already pulled from the Brian Walshe prosecution because the state couldn’t trust his testimony. Defense attorneys across multiple other cases he investigated have pushed for access to his communications. And now the documented record shows that the contempt wasn’t limited to one investigation or one person — it allegedly spanned years, departments, and the kind of language that reveals exactly how these officers saw the communities they policed.
On the Birchmore side, four officers from the Stoughton Police Department have been decertified or permanently barred from law enforcement. According to federal prosecutors, three of them allegedly became involved with the same young woman they met through a department youth program. The medical examiner changed Birchmore’s manner of death to “undetermined” more than five years after she died.
The through-line connecting both cases isn’t geography, although both happened in Canton. It’s a culture where officers allegedly believed they were untouchable — and where every institution that should have caught the behavior either looked the other way or genuinely didn’t register it as wrong. The families of Sandra Birchmore and John O’Keefe are the ones paying for that failure.
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In Lonoke County, Arkansas, a judge found that investigators' handling of evidence in Aaron Spencer's murder case was "so egregious" the prosecution had to be dismissed. The dashcam SD card that could have told the whole story was handled in violation of department policy and lost. Spencer, who killed the man accused of crimes against his daughter, was running for sheriff against the incumbent whose deputies mishandled the evidence. The court used the word "coverup."
In Strongsville, Ohio, Mackenzie Shirilla's car did what she wouldn't — it recorded the final seconds before she drove into a brick building at close to a hundred miles per hour, killing Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. She never talked to police. On monitored jail calls, she and her mother used a coded language that investigators cracked, allegedly revealing a plan to fabricate a seizure defense.
On the Carnival Horizon, the FBI built a case against Timothy Hudson using DNA that points to him with 120 sextillion-to-one certainty in the death of his eighteen-year-old stepsister, Anna Kepner. But the lead agent couldn't confirm under oath whether DNA was collected from Anna's neck — the area linked to the cause of her death. The judge allowed Hudson to remain free on bond.
Three investigations. Three evidence failures. Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer and retired FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program Chief Robin Dreeke join Tony Brueski for an extended conversation on what happens when the people tasked with delivering justice are the ones whose work breaks down — and what the FBI sees in each of these cases that the public doesn't.
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A man who trusted almost no outsiders sat down across from Christine Marie and handed her the access that would eventually put him in federal prison for fifty years. He didn't know what she was. He didn't know her history. He didn't know what she could see.
When Christine and her husband Tolga first moved to Short Creek — that quiet stretch of FLDS country along the Utah-Arizona border — they came for a completely different reason than the world now associates with their names. They had a different project, a gentler one, meant to humanize a community most outsiders had condemned. Samuel Bateman wasn't anywhere on their radar. Then, slowly, he became the entire story.
He cast himself as the new prophet. He took "spiritual wives," some of them girls. He looked at these two outsiders with cameras and made a calculation: they could be useful. He let them film him. He let them sit with his women. He sat for the camera and preached, certain his words were about to be carried to the world.
Christine carried them to the FBI instead.
In this first part of a three-part conversation, she tells me how she pulled it off. What she pretended to believe. How she got him to keep handing her access. The moment she stopped thinking of herself as a documentary maker and admitted, even to herself, that she was a mole. Whether the women around Bateman were really performing or really believed. And the most uncomfortable question of all — did Bateman ever quietly know he wasn't who he said he was?

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The FBI built its case against Timothy Hudson on DNA evidence, surveillance footage, cellphone data, and a cabin timeline aboard the Carnival Horizon. DNA recovered from Anna Kepner's body points to her stepbrother with a probability prosecutors called 120 sextillion to one. The injuries Anna sustained were severe enough to rupture both eardrums. Her body was found hidden under the bed in the stateroom she shared with Hudson and another teen.
The prosecution's timeline is meticulous. Anna was last captured on surveillance entering the room at 7:38 p.m. She was never seen leaving. Hudson was in the cabin during the critical window. His movements afterward, captured on the ship's cameras, showed him walking past the room without stopping to check what was happening — even as crew members discovered what had been hidden inside.
But the evidence has a gap that could prove decisive. Every DNA sample recovered links to what allegedly occurred before Anna's death — not to the act prosecutors say ended her life. Under oath, the FBI's lead case agent was asked whether anyone collected DNA from the bruising on Anna's neck, where she allegedly suffered the mechanical asphyxia that was ruled her cause of death. He said he wasn't sure. The agent leading the entire investigation couldn't account for whether the most critical piece of evidence was ever collected.
Complicating matters, Anna had a prior consensual encounter with another minor on the cruise. That individual was tested and excluded — but the defense will leverage that encounter to challenge the prosecution's DNA narrative.
Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer and retired FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program Chief Robin Dreeke join Tony Brueski to examine how this evidence gap changes the calculus at trial and what it means for the prosecution's case.
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When a judge uses the word "coverup" in a written order, he's not guessing. Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. looked at how Lonoke County handled the Aaron Spencer murder prosecution and found a pattern — not a mistake, not an oversight, but a pattern of policy violations that gave "the appearance of a coverup." Then he threw the entire case out.
Aaron Spencer's thirteen-year-old daughter was found in the truck of Michael Fosler after midnight. Fosler was out on bond, facing over forty criminal counts involving that child, with a no-contact order in place. Spencer stopped him. Called 911. Never ran. The state responded by charging the father with second-degree murder — and then, according to the court's findings, the investigation went sideways.
A dashcam SD card that could have captured the final moments of the encounter was in investigators' hands. They processed it differently from everything else at the scene, broke their own department's procedures, and then it disappeared. That same department was run by the sheriff Spencer was running against in the upcoming election. The original judge tried to gag the defendant and close the courtroom until the Arkansas Supreme Court stepped in — twice — and pulled her off the case entirely. The prosecutor pushed for conviction through his last filing.
Every branch of the local system moved the same direction. Toward silence. Toward prosecution of the father. Away from anyone asking how Fosler operated as long as he allegedly did. Spencer won the Republican primary for sheriff with over fifty-three percent of the vote while this case was pending. The voters already knew something was wrong. A judge saw enough to use the word coverup and end the case. The question that remains is what scared Lonoke County enough to risk all of that — and whether the answer involves people who are still walking free.
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