True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews

Three active cases. Three distinct investigative landscapes. One episode breaking down the legal exposure, procedural questions, and systemic issues at the center of each.
Nancy Guthrie, 84, has been missing from her Catalina Foothills home near Tucson, Arizona, since February 1st. Authorities believe she was abducted. Blood confirmed as hers was found at the scene. Sourced reporting has revealed that the supervising sergeant had reportedly never worked a homicide, experienced detectives had allegedly been reassigned prior to the case, and the department's search and rescue aircraft was reportedly not deployed in the initial hours. The FBI is embedded, a task force is active, and a $1 million family reward remains in place. The Pima County deputies' union has voted unanimously for no confidence in Sheriff Chris Nanos.
Joseph Duggar, 31, faces charges in Bay County, Florida, of lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under 12 and lewd and lascivious contact. According to the arrest affidavit, he reportedly admitted to the alleged conduct twice. He posted $600,000 bond, is barred from unsupervised contact with any minor, and has an arraignment set for April 20th. Separately, both Joseph and his wife Kendra face Arkansas misdemeanor charges — four counts each of endangering the welfare of a minor and four counts each of false imprisonment — with April 29th court dates. The Tontitown Police Department has stated the investigation remains active and ongoing.
Rex Heuermann, 62, is expected to change his plea to guilty at an April 8th court appearance in Suffolk County. He is charged with the first-degree murders of seven women connected to the Gilgo Beach investigation. His defense had sought to exclude DNA evidence and split the trials. Both motions were denied. If the plea is accepted, he reportedly faces life without the possibility of parole.
Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer and retired FBI Counterintelligence Chief Robin Dreeke provide the procedural, forensic, and behavioral analysis across all three investigations.
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The FLDS put Warren Jeffs in prison for life. Then the same community, the same theology, and the same obedience structure produced Samuel Bateman — and he did it all over again. More than twenty wives. Children as young as nine. Fathers volunteering their own daughters. An interstate operation spanning four states. And a fifty-year federal sentence that might still not be enough to break the cycle.
Bateman's case is the most significant cult-based child trafficking prosecution in years, and it's back in the spotlight with Netflix's Trust Me: The False Prophet, which chronicles the couple who infiltrated his inner circle and helped bring him down. But the documentary tells only part of the story. This five-part series tells the rest — starting with the system that made Bateman possible.
Short Creek, the twin communities of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, has been the FLDS stronghold for nearly a century. Jeffs ran it as a closed state — cameras in homes, security patrols, no outside media, marriages assigned and dissolved at his sole discretion. When he went to prison, he tried to maintain control through coded letters and phone calls. His followers built wooden replicas of his cell to sit inside and share his suffering. But the community splintered, and Bateman recruited from the broken pieces — people conditioned from birth to follow a prophet, desperate for someone to fill the void.
The question this episode asks isn't how Bateman became a prophet. It's what kind of place produces them generation after generation — and whether anything can stop it.
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After nearly three years of maintaining his innocence, Rex Heuermann is expected to change his plea to guilty at an April 8th court appearance, according to sources familiar with his decision. If a judge accepts the plea, the case would end without a trial. Heuermann reportedly faces life without the possibility of parole.
Heuermann, 62, a former architect from Massapequa Park, New York, has been held without bail at Suffolk County jail since his July 2023 arrest. He is charged with the first-degree murders of seven women: Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla, and Valerie Mack. The victims were allegedly killed between 1993 and 2010. Their remains were discovered in isolated areas along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach and elsewhere on Long Island.
Prosecutors have said the evidence includes DNA analysis connecting hair found on the remains of multiple victims to Heuermann and reportedly to his ex-wife and daughter. Cellphone data allegedly placed Heuermann in contact with victims shortly before their disappearances. Investigators also recovered files from his computer described as a planning document containing checklists that reportedly referenced limiting noise, cleaning bodies, and destroying evidence.
Heuermann's defense had sought to exclude the DNA evidence and to split the case into separate trials. Both motions were denied. A trial had been scheduled for September 2026.
Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer examines the legal and investigative implications — what a plea reversal from a defendant who has fought this aggressively typically signals, what the families gain and lose when a serial murder case resolves without a public trial, and what happens to the additional unresolved cases connected to the Gilgo Beach investigation.
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Before Melissa. Before Megan. Before Amber. Before any of the women we came to know as the Gilgo Four — there was Sandra Costilla. Found in the woods of Southampton in November 1993. Twenty-eight years old. From Trinidad and Tobago. And for thirty years, completely disconnected from the Gilgo Beach investigation. Prosecutors say that was a mistake — and that advanced DNA evidence now links her to Rex Heuermann with near-certainty.
Episode 1 of "The Seven" — a seven-part series covering each woman Heuermann is charged with killing. Sandra's case rewrites the entire timeline. If the prosecution is right, this didn't start in 2007 with Maureen Brainard-Barnes. It started in 1993, when Heuermann was 30 years old and years away from the family life prosecutors say he used as cover.
The defense called the evidence "a single hair on a shirt." The prosecution called it a 99.96 percent DNA match. The judge ruled it admissible. The evidence, the wrong suspect, the cold decades, the forensic breakthrough, and what a seven-year gap between Sandra and the next known victim might mean — all of it covered here. This is the foundation of the series.
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The Duggar household ran on a doctrine that made silence feel like obedience and obedience feel like love. At the center of that system — more visible than Jim Bob, more present than any church elder, more constant than any camera crew — was Michelle Duggar and the performance she maintained for over two decades.
On True Crime Today, Tony Brueski examines how Michelle's specific application of IBLP doctrine — the cultivated whisper she admitted came from a Gothard curriculum, the "joyfully available" teachings she published on her blog, the blanket training she described publicly, and the "points of obedience" she enforced on her children from infancy — created an environment where victims had no language to name what happened to them and no framework to refuse forgiveness for the person who did it.
When the 2015 scandal broke, Michelle didn't shield her daughters. She went on Fox News and told Megyn Kelly her girls "didn't even really understand" what happened. Then she sent them on camera to defend their abuser. Jill Duggar later called that interview a "suicide mission" for the family's television contract. The victims performed forgiveness on national television. They did it with smiles — because that is what they were trained to do since they were babies on a blanket.
Michelle also recorded a political robo-call warning Arkansas voters about predators gaining access to children — while her own family sat on a sealed police report involving her son.
After Joseph Duggar's arrest, Jim Bob and Michelle broke their silence with "heartbreak" and a request for privacy. The same formula they used after Josh's conviction. Same redirect. Same pivot away from victims. Different son. Same machine.
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