Alleigha Botner was the prosecution’s star witness in the Caleb Flynn murder trial. She helped put Caleb away for shooting his wife Ashley in her sleep. But the 107,000 messages she read aloud from the stand included her own words about wanting Ashley dead. When Flynn allegedly wrote about hiring Read more…
Ken Urker was found dead in bed on his birthday in Raceland, Louisiana. A handgun, syringe, shot glasses, and powdery substance surrounded him. Before the autopsy was done, Gypsy Rose Blanchard was giving exclusives and launching a cyberbullying petition. Four days earlier in Tennessee, the state gave Christa Pike two Read more…
Rob and Michele Reiner sat in a circle of chairs at a Malibu treatment center in 2009 for every family session their 15-year-old son was given, and the boy across the circle remembers them for it. He remembers Nick Reiner for something else. Danny Svilar, Nick’s roommate that summer, told Read more…
Christa Pike cooperated with her own execution. According to her attorneys, she tried to help the IV team locate a vein in her arm. They still could not carry out the procedure. Two doses of pentobarbital. Multiple needle attempts. Arms swollen, burned, and blistered. Pike still breathing on the gurney. Read more…
Caleb Flynn stood before Judge Jeannine Pratt and told the court he did not kill his wife. Then his own daughters’ statements were read. One told him he’d caused too much pain, that Ashley was the best thing that ever happened to him, and that she is never coming to Read more…
After the May execution of Tony Carruthers was halted — after over an hour of failed IV attempts and an alleged stroke — Tennessee sent the same physician into Christa Pike’s execution chamber on September 30. Dr. Mark Fowler testified under oath he had not placed a central line in Read more…
On September 30, Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike — its first attempt to execute a woman in over two hundred years. The doctor running the procedure had already failed at another execution four months earlier and had told a court under oath that he wasn’t qualified. Dr. Mark Fowler Read more…
The public story is cyberbullying. The Lafourche Parish police report describes something else. Ken Urker was found unresponsive in bed on October 1 — his birthday — surrounded by a handgun, a syringe, shot glasses, and a powdery substance. He had told family at church the night before that he Read more…
Ken Urker was found dead in bed at his Raceland, Louisiana home on October 1 — his thirty-fourth birthday. Lafourche Parish deputies confirmed his death after family members climbed through a bedroom window for a welfare check. He had told family he was severely depressed the night before at church. Read more…
The sign was homemade and sprinkled with glitter, and Sandra Birchmore made it for a Stoughton police officer. Federal prosecutors say that officer, Matthew Farwell, walked into her building masked on the night of February 1, 2021, strangled her, and staged a hanging. This is the whole Sandra Birchmore story, Read more…