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The Netflix docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet shows Christine Marie repeatedly bringing footage to the local police on the Utah-Arizona border — and the local police repeatedly sending her home. In this second part of a three-part conversation, Christine tells Tony what was really happening on the other side of that door.
Short Creek had spent decades teaching itself to look away from its own children. By the time Samuel Bateman declared himself the new FLDS prophet and started taking "spiritual wives," some of them girls as young as nine, the local authorities had long since stopped seeing the patterns that were sitting right in front of them. The sergeant in the documentary believed Christine's footage. He still wouldn't move. Christine has thoughts on whether that was incompetence — or whether the town was quietly protecting one of its own.
She walks Tony through the entire wait. Why she stayed with local cops as long as she did. What finally pushed her to skip them and go to the FBI. The recording in late 2021, where Bateman described handing three of his wives — one a minor — to three of his male followers, that finally broke the case open. The conversation she had with Julia Johnson, a mother whose four daughters had been given to Bateman, that turned her into a federal witness. The morning of the raid. And what she'd do differently if she could go back, knowing every month it dragged on was another month those girls were still in that house.
It's a conversation about how a community can know what's happening to its own children and still find a way not to act.

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Jesse Vang faces life in prison. Katrina Baur faces sixty years. Both are charged in the death of Baur’s three-year-old son Elijah Vue. Both have pleaded not guilty. And both are heading toward separate trials in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. The question hovering over every pretrial hearing: will one of them cooperate against the other?
The evidence already creates pressure. Text messages between Baur and Vang document what the criminal complaint describes as coordinated cruelty against a toddler. A deleted photograph from Baur’s phone. A suitcase with Elijah’s DNA that Vang dropped at a donation center while his phone was at home building a false alibi. And a Facebook message Baur sent within sixty seconds of Vang’s 911 call, coaching him on what to say to police — a message she deleted and investigators recovered. The evidence ties both of them to what happened. But their charges are structured differently. Vang carries the direct harm charge. Baur carries neglect. That gap could become leverage.
The pretrial fight has gone against the defense so far — venue change denied, outside jurors denied, sequestration denied. A forensic evidence challenge over sand and gravel is still pending. Vang was on federal supervised release when all of this happened, and nobody in the system flagged that a three-year-old had been placed in his home. Tony Brueski breaks down the legal positioning, the evidence each defendant faces, and whether the separate trial structure creates an opening for one to flip — with a reporter who has been covering every court appearance.
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Brendan Banfield’s defense attorney refused to handle his appeal. Another lawyer called the chances of overturning the verdict a 99-yard field goal. And the motion Banfield’s team filed the day before sentencing — built on three separate arguments — was denied across the board by Judge Penney Azcarate. So while Banfield has signaled he intends to fight his life-without-parole sentence, everything around him suggests the fight is already over.
Banfield was a former IRS law enforcement officer living in Herndon, Virginia, with his wife Christine and their young daughter. He started an affair with the family’s au pair, Juliana Peres Magalhães, and the two devised a scheme to eliminate Christine rather than face a costly divorce and custody battle. Banfield catfished a stranger named Joseph Ryan through fake online profiles impersonating Christine, lured him to the family home on February 24, 2023, then shot Ryan and stabbed Christine seven times in the neck. Their daughter was downstairs. The 911 call blamed Ryan as an intruder. Magalhães eventually cooperated, testified against Banfield, and was sentenced to ten years.
At sentencing, Azcarate called the scheme unfathomable and told Banfield his cruelty reflects evil. She reminded him the same crime would have carried a death sentence five years earlier. Banfield responded by proclaiming his innocence, telling the court he loved Christine, and insisting the system failed him. The jury, the judge, and the evidence say otherwise. Life without parole. No way out.
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Kevin Bright was nineteen years old when Dennis Rader shot him twice and left him for dead in his sister Kathryn's house in Wichita on April 4, 1974. Kevin survived. His sister did not. Before Kevin went into surgery, with one of Rader's bullets still inside his head, he gave Wichita detectives a description of the man who had attacked them.
A police sketch artist drew the face. On April 23, 1974, that drawing ran on the front page of the Wichita Eagle. Nineteen days after the attack. Dennis Rader was free in Park City, Kansas. He would remain free for the next thirty-one years.
In his own 2005 confession, Rader said the sketch was, in his words, uncomfortably close to him. He said no one ever came for him.
In the second chapter of True Crime Today's five-part BTK investigation, host Tony Brueski walks through every piece of Dennis Rader that the Wichita Police Department had in evidence rooms during the years he was still operating. A sketch in 1974. A confession letter inside a library book in 1974. A voice tape in 1977. A poem in a sealed package in 1979. A neighbor of his killed in 1985 and one of his own residents killed in his own jurisdiction in 1991.
The chase did not close because Wichita Police were incompetent. The chase did not close because Dennis Rader was a mastermind either. The chase did not close because the system, in a small city in the 1970s and 80s, did not yet know how to look at its own data. And the people paying the price for that gap, including a grieving husband suspected of his wife's murder for eighteen years, did not deserve to carry the cost.

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On September 7, 2024, a man preparing his private property for hunting season found skeletal remains in a wooded area with heavy underbrush near a quarry and the entrance to Camp Manitou — a Girl Scout camp roughly three miles from Jesse Vang’s apartment in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The area had been searched before. Multiple times. DNA testing confirmed the remains belonged to three-year-old Elijah Vue, who had been reported missing seven months earlier.
How remains end up in a location that was previously searched is one of the questions that hangs over this investigation. But it’s not the only one. The criminal complaint lays out a timeline that dismantles everything Vang and Baur told police. Vang said he was home watching Netflix the night before the 911 call — but surveillance footage shows him driving a borrowed car around town while his phone sat at the apartment. He was captured dropping a suitcase at a donation center. That suitcase tested positive for Elijah’s DNA. Within sixty seconds of Vang’s 911 call, Baur messaged him with instructions on what to say. She deleted the message. Investigators recovered it.
Forensic examination of Elijah’s remains showed healed fractures on his skull and face — injuries sustained weeks before he died. His blanket was found 3.7 miles from the apartment in a separate location. The manner of death was ruled homicide. Both Vang and Baur face felony charges and have pleaded not guilty. Tony Brueski breaks down the investigative timeline with a reporter who covered every phase — from the first search to the DNA confirmation — and what the evidence tells us about the case heading to trial.
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