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The Netflix docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet introduced the world to the woman who took Samuel Bateman down from the inside. But the documentary couldn't tell the whole story. There's a conversation behind that footage — about what it actually took to walk into a self-proclaimed prophet's house every day, lie about why you were there, and quietly build a case that would put him in federal prison for fifty years.
In this first part of a three-part interview, Christine Marie sits down with Tony to tell that story.
Christine and her husband Tolga moved to Short Creek on the Utah-Arizona border in 2016, planning a project that had nothing to do with Samuel Bateman. Then Bateman rose out of the post-Warren Jeffs FLDS community, declaring himself the new prophet, taking "spiritual wives," some of them girls as young as nine. He sized up the two outsiders with cameras and made a decision that would end his freedom — he let them in. He thought they were going to make a film that would carry him to the world. He didn't know Christine had once been under another false prophet's spell years earlier. He didn't know she could read him on sight.
She tells Tony what it took to keep his trust. The double life she lived for years inside that community. The performance she had to put on for his wives. The moment "documentary" became "evidence-gathering" in her own head. And the strange truth she still wrestles with — whether Bateman knew, somewhere underneath all of it, that he wasn't really a prophet at all.

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The federal prosecution of Timothy Hudson in the death of Anna Kepner aboard the Carnival Horizon rests on DNA evidence with a statistical match of 120 sextillion to one, surveillance footage establishing a cabin timeline, cellphone location data, and autopsy findings of mechanical asphyxia with bilateral ruptured tympanic membranes consistent with sustained physical force.
Hudson, sixteen, is charged as an adult with murder and aggravated offenses in connection with the death of his eighteen-year-old stepsister. He has entered a not guilty plea. A federal grand jury returned the indictment after the case was transferred from juvenile court.
The evidentiary challenge for prosecutors centers on a specific gap. All DNA evidence recovered connects to alleged conduct preceding Anna's death — not to the act prosecutors contend caused it. Under oath during detention proceedings, the FBI's lead case agent was asked whether DNA was collected from the bruising on Anna's neck, consistent with the alleged cause of death. The agent stated he was unsure. The inability to confirm collection of evidence from the alleged point of fatal injury creates a significant opening for the defense.
An additional forensic consideration: Anna had a prior consensual encounter with another minor aboard the vessel. That individual was tested and excluded through DNA analysis. The defense is expected to use the existence of that encounter to challenge the prosecution's interpretation of the recovered evidence.
Despite arguments from the U.S. Attorney's office for pretrial detention, the magistrate has allowed Hudson to remain on bond under GPS monitoring in the custody of a relative.
Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer and retired FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program Chief Robin Dreeke join Tony Brueski to evaluate the strength of the prosecution's evidentiary position, the significance of the DNA gap, and the procedural implications of the court's bond determination.
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A thirteen-year-old girl was found in the truck of the man charged with crimes against her — after midnight, while he was on bond with a no-contact order. Her father found her. Stopped the man. Called 911 himself. And the system that failed to protect that child turned around and charged her father with second-degree murder.
That case is now over. Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. dismissed it after finding that Lonoke County law enforcement's conduct was "so egregious" that the prosecution couldn't stand. His written order describes "a pattern of policy and procedure violations" and "the appearance of a coverup." At the center: a dashcam SD card from the deceased's truck that investigators had, mishandled in violation of their own procedures, and then lost entirely. The one piece of evidence that could have shown what really happened — gone.
And it wasn't just the evidence. The original judge attempted to gag Aaron Spencer and restrict public access to the courtroom. The Arkansas Supreme Court removed her from the case after intervening twice. State legislators formally raised concerns. The prosecutor fought to keep the murder charge alive through his final filing — submitted the day before the judge dismissed everything.
The sheriff's department that lost the SD card was run by the man Spencer was challenging in the next election. Spencer won that primary with over fifty-three percent. The voters saw what was happening before the judge confirmed it. But the dismissal only answered one question. The bigger ones — why every institution in Lonoke County appeared to coordinate against a father who protected his daughter, who benefits from the evidence disappearing, and whether the trail leads beyond Michael Fosler — haven't been touched. And until someone with federal authority starts asking, the people the judge described aren't answering to anyone.
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For half a century, the BTK Killer story has been told the way Dennis Rader wanted it told. Factor X. The Minotaur. The BTK brand. Every term that has anchored his mythology came from a typewriter in his own kitchen in Park City, Kansas. Every term was his.
In this first chapter of a five-part investigation from True Crime Today, host Tony Brueski sets the version of Dennis Rader that documentaries have repeated for forty-seven years next to the actual investigative file. The two don't match.
The man who wrote the 1978 Factor X letter to KAKE-TV was a thirty-two-year-old husband and father. An alarm installer for ADT in Wichita. A student at Wichita State University working toward a degree in the administration of justice. He had taken courses on profiling. He knew what serial killers were supposed to sound like in the cultural imagination of the late seventies. He typed himself into the role.
The press printed his words. The cops filed his words. The country read his words. And for nearly fifty years, when somebody has tried to explain Dennis Rader, they have explained him the way he wanted to be explained.
This episode walks through the 1978 letter sentence by sentence. The literary references he borrowed from. The cultural figures he compared himself to. The contradictions inside the letter that read, in retrospect, less like the confession of a possessed killer and more like the audition tape of a man trying out for a role.
The series will continue with the chase that didn't close, the official roles that made him invisible, the thirteen-year silence between his confirmed killings, and the floppy disk that ended his thirty-one years of getting away with it. Start here.

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Mackenzie Shirilla was convicted of four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault, and two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide in a bench trial that turned almost entirely on physical and digital evidence. She never spoke to investigators. She never testified. The prosecution's case was built on what was recovered from the wreckage, the surveillance footage, and the digital record she left behind.
The data recorder from Shirilla's Toyota Camry showed the accelerator at full capacity in the seconds before impact, with no braking input. Surveillance footage captured the vehicle maintaining a controlled, straight trajectory before striking a commercial building in Strongsville, Ohio, at close to a hundred miles per hour. Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan were pronounced dead at the scene.
Prosecutors presented evidence of premeditation extending weeks before the crash. Shirilla had previously told Russo she would "crash this car right now," and had driven the same dead-end route days before the fatal night. On monitored jail calls, she and her mother communicated in a coded language that, once decoded by investigators, allegedly revealed Shirilla suggesting they tell police she suffered a seizure.
The defense presented a POTS diagnosis — a blood pressure condition that can cause fainting — as the basis for involuntary loss of consciousness. No medical records or expert testimony confirmed the diagnosis at trial. The court found the evidence of intentional conduct overwhelming, with Judge Nancy Margaret Russo declaring the crash "was not reckless driving" but "murder."
Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer and retired FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program Chief Robin Dreeke join Tony Brueski to evaluate the evidentiary framework, the role of data recorders in establishing intent, and how decoded communications factored into the conviction.
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