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Mickey Stines made someone help put a bulletproof vest on his wife. Per defense filings, he’d lost forty pounds in two weeks. He reportedly told a staffer that someone demanded he end his own life or “they” would harm his family. Weeks later, the former Letcher County sheriff allegedly walked into Judge Kevin Mullins’ chambers and shot him.
Stines hadn’t slept in seven days. He was calling family members who’d been dead for years. He FaceTimed his aunt the morning of the shooting and asked to speak to his grandmother — a woman he’d personally helped take off life support two and a half years earlier. His aunt described his behavior in one word: psychotic.
A social worker who examined Stines four days after his arrest found him still in an active state of psychosis. He was placed on antipsychotic medication. He didn’t recognize a jail cell — despite running the county sheriff’s office for years. His defense team is arguing insanity and extreme emotional disturbance. The prosecution counters with what the surveillance video shows: Stines clearing the room, closing the door, and firing. Anyone following the Mickey Stines insanity defense should know the judge has signaled a likely venue change and has indicated any bail would far exceed what the defense requested. No trial date has been set.

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Massachusetts gave Adam Montgomery custody of his five-year-old daughter despite twenty-one criminal cases on his record. New Hampshire’s child protection system saw the bruises, documented them, and emailed police that everything was fine. Two states failed Harmony Montgomery while she was alive. Now the legal system is asking for a second chance to convict the man who, according to prosecutors, killed her and hid her body for months.
The Harmony Montgomery case has reached its most consequential juncture: a murder retrial with less evidence, a compromised key witness, and a defense team arguing an alternative theory. All of it playing out while the defendant faces decades in prison regardless of the outcome and refuses to say where his daughter’s remains are.
Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta (Defense Diaries) joins Tony Brueski for the complete three-part breakdown: the Supreme Court’s reasoning for reversing the conviction, the prosecution and defense strategies for the retrial, and the larger questions about silence, civil judgments, and whether justice is still possible for a child the system abandoned at every turn. Tony Brueski and Bob Motta.

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Here's what we know. SLED reopened Stephen Smith's case in 2021 because of information found during the Murdaugh murder investigation. In 2023, SLED officially reclassified Stephen's death as a homicide. His body was exhumed. A second autopsy was performed. Those results are sealed. Kenny Kinsey — the prosecution's star forensic witness from the Murdaugh murder trial — is now independently investigating Stephen's death because he believes critical opportunities were missed in 2015. And still — no arrest. No suspect named. No charges.
Eric Bland represents Sandy Smith and has a direct line into this investigation. On True Crime Today, he addresses whether SLED is deliberately holding back until the Murdaugh retrial plays out. He explains whether anyone from the prosecution's side has ever spoken to him about the overlap between these cases. And he gives Sandy's perspective on what another year of silence means for a mother who has been fighting since before anyone cared about the Murdaugh name.
Bland also addresses the Buster Murdaugh defamation settlement — and whether that legal resolution makes it harder or easier for Sandy to get answers about her son.
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A civil court ordered Adam Montgomery to pay fifteen and a half million dollars for the wrongful death of his daughter Harmony. He will never pay a single dollar. But the judgment sits in the record as a measure of what one court believes Harmony’s life was worth — a number that stands even as the criminal murder conviction has been reversed.
The Harmony Montgomery case now occupies a legal no-man’s-land: Montgomery is convicted of concealing his daughter’s remains, tampering with evidence, and witness intimidation. He faces decades in prison on those charges alone. A civil court has found him liable for wrongful death. Crystal Sorey settled her own lawsuit against the state for over two million dollars over DCYF’s failure to protect Harmony. But the murder conviction — the one that was supposed to say who killed this little girl — has been erased on procedural grounds.
Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta (Defense Diaries) joins Tony Brueski to examine what the civil findings mean in the context of the criminal retrial. Whether a jury ever hears about them. Whether the state’s own child protection failures give the defense ammunition. What leverage exists — if any — to compel Montgomery to reveal Harmony’s location. And whether the retrial is about justice or about a record that matches what everyone already knows. Tony Brueski and Bob Motta.

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Something arrived under seal in the Anna Kepner case — and within two days, the judge who’d been defending Timothy Hudson’s freedom for four months reversed himself and ordered him detained. The question everyone should be asking: what was in that filing?
Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres had released Hudson in February under juvenile rules. He’d called the government’s case “a much closer call” with “various defenses.” On May 27, after a full hearing, Torres kept Hudson free. The defense pointed to months of flawless compliance. And then prosecutors filed sealed “newly disclosed, supplemental information” on June 8. On June 10, Torres signed the detention order.
The language was unlike anything he’d written before. Hudson displays “a level of psychopathy and lack of remorse.” He could “snap at any time.” No curfew, monitor, or custody arrangement could contain the danger. Torres expressed concern that Hudson could “make another very wrong decision the closer the trial gets.” That’s a forward-looking danger assessment from a judge who doesn’t trust the next three months.
Hudson surrendered to U.S. Marshals and is at Citrus County Jail. He’ll be transferred to a juvenile facility at Miami-Dade’s Metro West Detention Center by July 10. Mental health evaluation ordered. September 8 trial date holds.
This episode tracks the legal architecture behind the delay, the moment the Bail Reform Act replaced the juvenile framework, what Torres’s own words reveal about what he saw in those sealed filings, and the reality of preparing for a life-sentence trial from inside a detention facility.
Anna Kepner was eighteen. Her stepbrother is charged with first-degree murder. He pleads not guilty and is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

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