Part 3 of our interview with James Lasdun closes out the series with the question the trial couldn't answer — how does a man kill his own wife and son?

The Family Man places Alex alongside documented family annihilators whose cases mirror his with disturbing specificity. Jean-Claude Romand — fake career, decades of financial fraud, killed his wife, children, and parents when the lies collapsed. Researchers categorize this type as "anomic" — men who equate family with status. When the status falls, the family becomes disposable.

The book also confronts the contradiction at the center of Alex's behavior that night. The first officer on scene described his eyes as wrong. Hours later, he's sobbing in a SLED car and it looks real. The author argues both the grief and the deception were genuine — happening at the same time in the same person.

The psychology behind this case has been studied for decades. The answers are darker than most people expect.

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Read Indiana's response brief in the Richard Allen appeal cover to cover and one thing becomes clear. The State of Indiana has stopped defending the trial. The State is defending a procedural firewall.

Every excluded piece of evidence — harmless. Every blocked witness — harmless. Every claim of confession coerced from 13 months in solitary — waived, defaulted, or harmless. Every alternative suspect theory — speculative. Every procedural argument the State could file — filed. What is conspicuously missing is engagement with the underlying facts.

That matters now because the case is fully briefed. The defense's reply brief landed at the end of April. The motion for oral arguments was filed alongside it. The State has not joined the request. Three judges at the Indiana Court of Appeals are now sitting on the full written record and one side is asking to stand in the room and answer questions while the other side stays silent.

Defense attorney Bob Motta joins Tony Brueski for a three-part panel on where the Delphi appeal actually stands. Three collision points. The procedural-versus-factual fight, including the cause-of-death mismatch and the alternative suspect interview allegedly recorded over by investigators. The 13 months Allen spent in solitary under IDOC's own 30-day limit, and the religious-conversion narrative the State has offered to explain his confessions. The strategic asymmetry of the oral arguments motion, the de novo review on the search warrant, and the .40-caliber pistol that vanishes from any retrial if the panel agrees with the defense on that single issue.

Three judges. No more paper. The State is hoping they don't read the record too closely.

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The .40-caliber pistol prosecutors leaned on at the Delphi trial came out of the search of Richard Allen's home. If three judges at the Indiana Court of Appeals rule that search was unconstitutional, the gun is gone. Permanently. The State cannot go back in time and undo it. The fruits of an illegal search are inadmissible by law — in this case and in any retrial.

That single appellate ruling has the power to take the State's central piece of physical evidence out of this case for good.

And the search warrant is the one issue in the appeal that gets de novo review. The appellate panel owes no deference to the trial court on it. No deference to Judge Fran Gull. No deference to anyone. They look at the warrant fresh. They look at whether investigators omitted or altered key facts in the probable cause affidavit. They look at whether eyewitness Betsy Blair's description of the man on the bridge actually matched Richard Allen — and whether a reasonable judge being asked to sign that warrant would have signed it knowing the full picture.

Defense attorney Bob Motta joins Tony Brueski for Part Three of a three-part panel on the Delphi appeal. They walk through the de novo geometry sitting in front of the panel. They get into the motion for oral arguments — filed by the defense, ignored by the State — and what that says about confidence on the written record. And they sit with the strategic landmine: if the panel agrees with the defense on the warrant, the State's strongest piece of physical evidence ceases to exist as legal evidence in any future proceeding.

Three judges. One warrant. The gun in the balance.

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The woman in charge of protecting Alex Murdaugh’s jury was the one who corrupted it. That is the finding of the South Carolina Supreme Court, which has unanimously reversed Murdaugh’s double murder convictions and ordered a new trial.

Former Colleton County Clerk Becky Hill made repeated comments to jurors urging them to reject the defense — to watch Murdaugh closely, not to be fooled, not to be confused or thrown off by his attorneys. She told them the day he testified was “epic.” Someone from her staff told the jury deliberations shouldn’t take long. One juror — Juror Z — submitted a sworn affidavit saying Hill’s remarks made her feel like Murdaugh was already guilty before deliberations began. She had doubts about his guilt but voted to convict under pressure.

The five-justice panel found that former Chief Justice Jean Toal committed multiple legal errors in denying Murdaugh’s new trial motion. Toal placed the burden on the wrong party, questioned jurors about their internal deliberations in violation of evidence rules, and relied on those improper answers. The Supreme Court overruled one of its own prior decisions to reinforce that juror mental processes are off-limits in these proceedings.

The ruling also takes aim at the prosecution’s financial crimes presentation, which consumed over twelve hours of jury testimony across ten trial days. The court said the State went far too deep into inflammatory details with no connection to the motive theory and ordered any retrial to limit that evidence significantly. Hill pled guilty to perjury in December 2025. The Attorney General has confirmed a retrial is coming. Murdaugh stays incarcerated on financial sentences while the murder case begins again.

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According to Richard Allen's appellate brief, the Indiana Department of Correction knew. They knew that solitary confinement could worsen Allen's Major Depressive Disorder. They knew it could cause psychosis. Their own written policy restricts inmates with serious mental illness to 30 days in solitary for exactly that reason.

They held Richard Allen in solitary for 13 months.

By April 2023, the man who would later confess to the Delphi murders weighed 45 pounds less than when he arrived at Westville. He was, in the defense's own words, gravely disabled. He was eating his Bible. He was drinking from the toilet. He was asking his own father how much longer he could stay lucid.

The Indiana Attorney General now argues that none of this rises to coercion. The State offered a religious-conversion theory to explain Allen's confessions instead. The defense has documented a psychiatric collapse.

Defense attorney Bob Motta joins Tony Brueski for Part Two of a three-part panel on the Delphi appeal. They sit with the institutional knowledge the State had before it ever put Richard Allen in that cell, and the decision the State made to leave him there anyway. They get into what an appeals court does when a state agency violates its own written rule by more than a year and then asks a panel of judges to call the resulting confession voluntary. They walk through the religious-conversion narrative the State is selling and the medical record sitting underneath it.

Three judges. Indiana's own rulebook. The State's own warning. A pretrial detainee who lost his mind in a cell he was never supposed to be in.

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Richard Allen told his prison psychiatrist he shot Abby Williams and Libby German. The medical examiner concluded the girls were killed with a blade. That is not a minor inconsistency. That is a confession that does not describe the murders.

It is also one of the factual problems Indiana's response brief never directly answers in the Delphi appeal. The State leans on harmless error. The State leans on procedural waiver. The State leans on the trial court's discretion. What the State does not do, across nearly a hundred pages, is explain how a man who confessed to the wrong method of killing can be the killer.

Defense attorney Bob Motta joins Tony Brueski for Part One of a three-part panel on where the Richard Allen appeal actually stands. They sit with that cause-of-death mismatch and what an appellate panel actually does with it. They walk through the van timeline contradicted by FBI cell data and surveillance footage. They get into the alternative suspect whose interview was allegedly recorded over by investigators, whose weapon was never collected, whose phone was never searched.

And they take apart the selective admission of Allen's jailhouse calls. The jury heard one. Within five hours that same day Allen made two more. The defense was barred from playing either. In one of them, Allen asks his own father how much longer he's going to be lucid. The jury was not allowed to hear the man's mind coming apart in the hours surrounding the only call they did hear.

Three judges in Indianapolis are now reading the full record. The State is hoping they don't read it too carefully.

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Part 2 of our interview with James Lasdun, author of The Family Man, gets into the evidence from the night of the murders that was never put in front of the jury.

SLED built a full timeline of Alex's activity on June 7th. But the version prosecutors showed the jury had names removed — men with criminal records who were in phone contact with Alex hours before the killings. Alex had deleted his call log for that entire week. The book connects dots that remain officially unconnected.

The defense wanted to put Cousin Eddie on the stand as an alternative suspect. Eddie had failed a polygraph about the murders and told SLED an absurd fabricated story when they asked what he knew. Prosecutors pulled Eddie from the witness list to block that cross-examination.

Lasdun also surfaces physical evidence that was never explained at trial. Maggie's car with the seat pushed back. Unidentified tire tracks near the bodies. And a phrase Alex allegedly used — "things just got all fucked up" — that led the author to build a theory about a staged attack gone wrong.

The thirteen minutes of silence at Moselle may be more complicated than either side told the jury.

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Retired FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program Chief Robin Dreeke joins Tony Brueski for the complete session covering three of the most actively discussed cases in true crime — D4VD, Nancy Guthrie, and the Duggar family. Robin brings behavioral expertise that connects the alleged patterns of protection and failure across all three.

The D4VD segment addresses the alleged accomplice theories, the grooming timeline prosecutors have laid out, and why an entire circle of adults allegedly failed to protect Celeste Rivas Hernandez. Robin analyzes the alleged behavioral markers — the matching tattoos, the thousand-dollar bribe allegation, the reported fake identification — through the lens of organized predatory behavior versus impulsive concealment.

The Nancy Guthrie segment tackles the alleged investigative failures that have kept an eighty-four-year-old woman missing for three months. Robin provides the FBI perspective on what alleged jurisdictional friction costs an investigation operationally and breaks down the porch footage for behavioral indicators that separate alleged planning from alleged desperation. The ransom demands and their alleged lack of follow-through get Robin's analysis on whether this is allegedly about money or misdirection.

The Duggar segment uses the jail calls and Jim Bob's email to illustrate what Robin identifies as alleged closed-system protection behavior — a family allegedly operating within a religious framework that historically prioritized internal forgiveness over external accountability. The alleged generational pattern from Josh to Joseph and the question of children allegedly still inside that system drive the conversation to its most urgent conclusion.

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