Authorities charged the defendant with carrying out a hate crime, with the murder of the embassy officials described as calculated and planned.
A man accused of shooting dead two Israeli embassy staff members in Washington, DC, has been indicted on federal hate crime and murder charges, as President Donald Trump suggested he may call on the National Guard to bring down crime rates in the United States capital.
Court documents filed in federal court in Washington and unsealed on Wednesday show that defendant Elias Rodriguez has been charged with nine counts, including a hate crime resulting in death.
The 30-year-old is accused of shooting dead Israeli embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, a young couple who were about to become engaged, as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington in May.
Rodriguez, who witnesses described as pacing outside the museum before the attack, approached the couple and opened fire.
Surveillance footage then showed him advance on Lischinsky and Milgrim as they fell to the ground, firing additional shots as he stood over them. Rodriguez appeared to reload before jogging off, according to officials.
Two other people who were standing with the couple at the time of the attack escaped unharmed.
Rodriguez then entered the museum and confessed to the killings. He was heard shouting “Free Palestine” as he was led away. Rodriguez also told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza “, according to federal authorities.
Prosecutors described the killings as calculated and planned in court papers, alleging that Rodriguez flew to Washington from Chicago with a handgun in his checked luggage. Authorities also claimed Rodriguez purchased a ticket for the American Jewish Committee-organised event at the museum three hours before it started.
Rodriguez was previously charged with the murder of foreign officials and other crimes. Prosecutors added the hate crimes charges after bringing the case to a grand jury.
Also included in the indictment is a notice of special findings allowing the Department of Justice to potentially pursue the death penalty.
Prosecutors are now tasked with proving that Rodriguez was motivated by anti-Semitism when he opened fire on Lischinsky and Milgrim.
Lischinsky was a research assistant at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, while Milgrim organised trips to Israel for the embassy. Lischinsky, a German-Israeli citizen, had reportedly bought an engagement ring days before he and Milgrim, a Jewish US citizen, were killed.
Also on Wednesday, President Trump said he may deploy the National Guard to police Washington’s streets, telling reporters outside the White House that the capital is “very unsafe” and it “has to be the best-run place in the country”.
“We’re going to beautify the city. We’re going to make it beautiful. And what a shame, the rate of crime, the rate of muggings, killings and everything else. We’re not going to let it,” Trump said.
“And that includes bringing in the National Guard, maybe very quickly, too,” he added.
Trump made his latest threat of a federal takeover of the US capital after a staffer who was part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was assaulted during a carjacking over the weekend.
According to records on the police department’s website, violent crime in Washington was down 26 percent in the first seven months of 2025 compared with last year, while overall crime was down some 7 percent.
Neighbours suggested that the youngster had suffered with a disability and required the use of a wheelchair, but was often heard playing in her back garden.
McGrath was taken to hospital before later being remanded into custody on suspicion of murder.
West Yorkshire Police previously said it was treating Hope’s death as an “isolated incident”.
Detective Chief Inspector Stacey Atkinson, of West Yorkshire Police’s Homicide and Major Enquiry Team, said: “We are continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding Hope’s death.
“A photograph of the three-year-old has been released by her family. I would ask that people respect their privacy at this extremely difficult time.”
A TEEN boy who tortured, killed and dismembered two kittens with a girl in a warped bid to reduce his urge to kill a human has been locked up.
The depraved pair used rope to tie up the defenceless animals before “mutilating” them.
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The teens were captured on CCTV carrying the animals
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They later fled the scene after killing the animals
One of the kittens was found cut open on the ground in Ruislip, North West London, while the other was hanging from a tree.
Chillingly, the boy, 17, wrote how he “really wanted to murder someone” and killed cats to “reduce my urges”.
He also made a number of harrowing searches about sacrificing animals to Satan.
The boy has been detained for 12 months after pleading guilty to causing unnecessary suffering to the protected animals by “mutilating and killing” them.
His co-defendant will be sentenced for the same charge this afternoon.
The teens, who legally can’t be named, also admitted one count of possession of a knife.
Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court was told the horror unfolded on May 3.
Footage released by police showed the girl, 16, and 17-year-old boy strolling through a residential street.
The boy could be seen clutching a bag that is believed to have been used to carry the kittens.
CCTV then captured the twisted pair running back down the same street after killing the baby cats.
Prosecutor Valerie Benjamin said the animals were discovered with their flesh and fur cut off and burnt.
As well as the tragic kittens, knives, blowtorches and scissors were found at the scene.
Police later discovered a note on the boy’s phone that read: “I really wanted to murder someone and I was searching how to get away with murder.
“I have come close.
“I have killed cats to reduce my urges.
“I have skinned strangled and stabbed cats.”
The boy had also carried out a number of chilling searches for “killing cats and dogs” and “how to kill a human”.
Ms Benjamin said: “There were concerns about his desire to go on to killing humans.
“He questioned how easy it would be get away with murder and how to kill homeless people.”
It also emerged the teens had chillingly put out adverts for the kittens and went to pick them up before killing them.
Sentencing, Judge Hina Rai also imposed a lifetime ban from caring for animals on the boy.
She said: “You have caused extreme suffering to those two kittens. You knew exactly what you were doing and it would result in their suffering.
“Without a doubt these are the most awful offences I have seen against animals in this court.”
A childhood friend of Lucy Letby has revealed the serial baby killer attended her wedding day while she was on police bail after being granted ‘special permission’ to go
Liam McInerney Content Editor
23:00, 03 Aug 2025
Lucy Letby letting loose on the dance floor while supposedly on police bail (Image: ITV)
A childhood friend of Lucy Letby made a shocking revelation after showing off pictures of the baby killer at her wedding – while she was on police bail.
Letby was first arrested in July of 2018 on suspicion of murdering eight babies. She was officially charged in November 2020 before being found guilty across two trials of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more. Dawn Howe, who went to Aylestone Secondary School in Hereford with Letby, brought out a stash of photos during a new ITV documentary called Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt?
Speaking on the documentary, Dawn said: “Definitely got some holiday snaps, birthdays, holidays I’ve forgotten we even had. The wedding photos are definitely my favourite.”
Laughing, she added: “There is Lucy at my wedding. I am just so glad she could be there because it was while she was on bail, she had to get special permission to be allowed to come from the police.”
Letby (right) pictured smiling during her friend Dawn’s big day (Image: ITV)
The shocking photo shows Letby, wearing a red top and grey skirt, beaming while others alongside her clap on the dance floor.
Another image shows a just-married Dawn walking past Letby, who is throwing confetti in the air.
Dawn and Lucy met as teenagers and reflecting on the wedding snaps, she said: “Shortly after this she was held in custody so… I don’t think Lucy has seen these.”
Speaking about how she reacted when her friend was arrested before her big day, she said: “I watched it all unfold every step of the way. I just couldn’t believe it. It was beyond belief that this could be happening.”
And later in the programme, Dawn features once again. She is seen driving to Letby’s former school, where they spent most of their adolescence together.
Out of their friendship group, she said Letby was the only one who had a clear career path, and during her A-levels, she was eager to one day “be a nurse and deal with really poorly babies”.
Dawn shared photos showing Letby at her special day (Image: ITV)
And speaking on camera, she said: “We were here and then university and then a few years after university is when she is supposed to have gone off on this killing spree…”
Dawn was working when Letby’s guilty verdict was announced in August 2023 and she described being “dumbfounded” when she heard the news.
Her immediate thought was what happened next. She remembered thinking: “She can’t just spend the rest of her life in prison.”
She is now serving 15 whole-life sentences (Image: PA)
Letby lost two attempts last year to challenge her convictions at the Court of Appeals. Her legal team meanwhile, led by barrister Mark McDonald, also submitted evidence from a panel of international experts to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in April, in an attempt to have her convictions overturned.
Dawn supported Letby throughout the trial and is continuing to do so now, but she said she felt guilt for being free while her friend was serving 15 whole-life sentences.
She concluded: “I am living a life Lucy should be living beside me in parallel. We should both be having families and we both bought our houses and we were looking forward to the next chapter of our lives and then all this happened.
Lucy Letby pictured with her childhood pal Dawn Howe(Image: ITV)
“It is just… there is so much guilt that I am sort of living a life that Lucy should also be living.”
Cheshire Police were contacted regarding claims made in this story but they chose not to comment.
Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt? will air on ITV1 at 10.20pm on Sunday August 3.
A KNIFEMAN is on the loose after a teenage boy was stabbed to death in a Powerleague football car park.
Cops now say a murder investigation has been launched after the brutal attack in Bury, Greater Manchester.
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A murder investigation has been launched after a teenage boy was stabbed to death in BuryCredit: MEN Media
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The attack happened in the car park of a Powerleague football complexCredit: MEN Media
The 19-year-old man was attacked just before 9pm on Friday, August 1 in a car park on Market Street, according to Greater Manchester Police.
He sustained several stab wounds and later died from his injuries, the force said.
His family are being supported by specially trained officers.
No arrests have yet been made in what police believe was a “targeted attack” and officers have appealed for any witnesses to contact them.
Detective Chief Inspector John Charlton, from the Major Incident Team, said: “Firstly, our thoughts are with the victim’s family and friends after this tragic and upsetting incident – our specially trained officers are supporting them at this difficult time.
“This incident will have shocked the community and distressed anyone who witnessed it, but we believe this was a targeted attack with no wider threat.
“We have several scenes in place with the investigation ongoing in order to identify and apprehend the offenders responsible.
“There will be officers in the area today and in the coming days as we are determined to bring the family the answers they deserve.”
Filming kicked off in 2024, with none other than Steven Spielberg serving as producer, and Osman has been keeping his followers informed about the latest happenings. Taking to Instagram, he reassured fans that the film would be available both in cinemas and on Netflix, addressing concerns that some might not be able to watch it.
The Thursday Murder Club(Image: Giles Keyte/Netflix)
He announced: “Some very good news for everyone who wanted to see #TheThursdayMurderClub in UK cinemas. Netflix have listened to the clamour, and the film will now have a run in UK cinemas.”
Here’s everything you need to know about the release date, cast and more.
When is The Thursday Murder Club out?
The Thursday Murder Club is set to premiere in UK cinemas on August 22.
It will then be available for streaming on Netflix from August 28, with a runtime of nearly two hours.
Who are the stars of The Thursday Murder Club?
The main four characters, Elizabeth Best, Ron Ritchie, Ibrahim Arif and Joyce Meadowcroft, will be played by Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie.
Osman recently addressed the contentious casting of Ron, telling Empire: “You have to do something unusual and different and interesting.
“Here’s the key thing about Pierce Brosnan playing Ron: Pierce Brosnan is who Ron would choose to play Ron.”
Doctor Who legend David Tennant has also been signed up as Ian Ventham, alongside Jonathan Pryce who plays Elizabeth’s other half Stephen.
Naomi Ackie is set to portray PC Donna De Freitas, whilst Daniel Mays takes on DCI Chris Hudson and Henry Lloyd-Hughes stars as Bogdan.
Additional big names joining the production include Richard E. Grant, Tom Ellis, Geoff Bell, Paul Freeman, Sarah Niles and Ingrid Oliver.
Helen Mirren and Celia Imrie(Image: Giles Keyte/Netflix)
Is there a trailer for The Thursday Murder Club?
Viewers get a sneak peek at Cooper’s Chase, the retirement community where the central characters live.
When a killing occurs nearby, Joyce is eager for the group to get involved and crack a fresh case.
Supporters flocked to the comments section to share their enthusiasm, with one posting: “The perfect cast, I am sooooo looking forward to seeing this film, love all the books, get ready to snuggle in and be totally enthralled.”
Someone else commented: “Totally didn’t expect this book series to be adapted by Netflix, really looking forward to this. I hope it’s good. And man this cast is stacked!”.
The Thursday Murder Club will hit UK cinemas on August 22. It will subsequently become available to stream on Netflix from August 28.
The murder of Wadee Alfayoumi and attack on his mother stand as one of the worst hate crimes in the US since Gaza war began.
A United States landlord who was jailed for decades for the horrific October 2023 stabbing death of a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy, and for critically injuring his mother, has died in prison.
Joseph Czuba, 73, died on Thursday in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Saturday, citing the Will County Sheriff’s Office. The law enforcement agency did not return a call seeking comment on the death, according to the Associated Press news agency.
The murder of the boy, Wadee Alfayoumi, and the attack on his mother, Hanan Shaheen, was one of the earliest and worst hate crime incidents in the US since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Czuba attacked them on October 14, 2023, because they were Muslims, and as a response to the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on southern Israel.
Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Chicago office, said in a statement on Saturday that “this depraved killer has died, but the hate is still alive and well”.
Evidence at trial included harrowing testimony from Shaheen and her frantic 911 call, along with bloody crime scene photos and a police video. Jurors deliberated for less than 90 minutes before handing in a verdict.
The family had been renting rooms in Czuba’s home in Plainfield, about 40 miles (64km) from Chicago, when the attack happened.
Central to the prosecutors’ case was harrowing testimony from the boy’s mother, who said Czuba attacked her before moving on to her son, insisting they had to leave because they were Muslim.
“He told me: ‘You, as a Muslim, must die,’” said Shaheen during her testimony.
Czuba’s ex-wife, Mary, also testified for the prosecution, saying he had become agitated about Israel’s war on Gaza, which has now killed nearly 60,000 Palestinians.
Police said Czuba pulled a knife from a holder on a belt and stabbed the boy 26 times. Some of the bloody crime scene photos were so explicit that the judge agreed to turn television screens showing them away from the audience, which included Wadee’s relatives.
The case generated headlines around the world and deeply struck the Chicago area’s large and established Palestinian community amid rising hostility against Muslims and Palestinians in the US. Wadee’s funeral drew large crowds, and Plainfield officials have dedicated a park playground in his honour.
Other similarly-motivated incidents in the US include the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl in Texas, the stabbing of a Palestinian-American man in Texas, the beating of a Muslim man in New York, a violent mob attack on pro-Palestinian protesters in California and a Florida shooting of two Israeli visitors whom the suspect mistook for Palestinians.
Three young Palestinian men were also shot near a university campus in Vermont just weeks after Alfayoumi was stabbed to death.
A former cleaner claims he was forced to bury the bodies of hundreds of women and girls, on the orders of supervisors at one of southern India’s most revered temples. As Soraya Lennie explains, the case has shocked the country and sparked accusations of a three-decade old cover up.
IT was the craziest start to a love affair that survived against the odds for more than 40 years.
Superstar rocker Ozzy Osbourne had been given an envelope stuffed with cash to hand over to Sharon Arden, daughter of his band Black Sabbath’s manager.
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Drugs, fights, affairs – Ozzy Osbourne and wife Sharon Osbourne’s marriage survived against all oddsCredit: Getty
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Ozzy and Sharon pictured in Brazil in 1985
Instead, Ozzy blew the money on cocaine — which he was working his way through when Sharon arrived at his hotel.
Despite being completely off his head, Ozzy, who died on Tuesday age 76, never forgot that first meeting when Sharon asked, “Do you have anything for me?”.
He recalled: “‘No, I don’t think so’, I said, all innocent.
“But it didn’t take Einstein to work out what had happened.
READ MORE ON OZZY OSBOURNE
“There was a massive bag of coke on the table next to a ripped-up envelope with ‘Sharon’ written on it in felt-tip pen.
“Sharon gave me a monumental bollocking when she saw it, shouting and cursing and telling me I was a f***ing disaster.
‘Drunkest and loudest’
“I guess I won’t be shagging her any time soon, then, I thought.
“But she came back the next day, to find me lying in a puddle of my own p**s, smoking a joint.
“She said, ‘Look, if you want to get your s**t together, we want to manage you’.”
That ill-fated meeting led to an incredible marriage that lasted 33 years — despite Ozzy’s drug and sex addiction and even his attempt to strangle Sharon.
Inside Ozzy Osbourne’s final days after historic last show ‘took huge toll’ on his health
In one of his last interviews, Ozzy described the reality TV star and X Factor judge as his “soulmate”.
He said: “Sometimes I love her, sometimes I don’t love her, sometimes I’m angry with her, sometimes I’m crazy about her, sometimes I’m very jealous of her, sometimes I wanna f***ing kill her.
“But through it all, at the end of the day, I love her more than anything in the world.”
As Sharon took over running Ozzy’s professional life, the Brummie lad quickly realised that he had never met a woman like her before.
In his 2009 biography, I Am Ozzy, he revealed: “I’d never come across a girl who was like me.
“Wherever we went, we were always the drunkest and the loudest.
“I learned that when Sharon is on a mission, she’ll throw herself at it, lock, stock and barrel, and not stop fighting until well after the bell’s rung.
“I trusted Sharon like I’d never trusted anyone before on the business side of things.”
Me and Sharon were bonking all over the place. We couldn’t stop. Some nights Sharon would go out of one door and [first wife] Thelma would come in the other
Sharon
When Sharon was relaunching Ozzy as a solo star with a new album, Blizzard Of Ozz, and a tour following his firing from Black Sabbath in 1979, the star’s private life was falling apart.
He was married to Thelma Riley, had adopted her son Elliot from an earlier marriage and they had two kids of their own, Jessica and Louis.
After months of trying, Ozzy finally bedded Sharon after leaping into her bath at a hotel near Shepperton Studios.
He recalled: “Me and Sharon were bonking all over the place.
“We couldn’t stop.
“Some nights, Sharon would go out of one door and Thelma would come in the other.
“I was knackered all the time, having two women on the go.
“I don’t know how those French blokes do it.
“When I was with Sharon, I’d end up calling her ‘Tharon’, which earned me more than a few black eyes.
“I’d never known what it was like to fall in love before I met Sharon.
“We were inseparable.
“I realised that when you’re in love, it’s not just about the messing around in the sack, it’s about how empty you feel when they’re gone. And I couldn’t stand it when Sharon was gone.”
But when he split up with Thelma in 1981, Sharon bore the brunt of Ozzy’s anger.
He said: “I was a wreck.
“I was in love with Sharon, but at the same time I was cut to pieces by losing my family.
“I’d get drunk and try to hit her, and she’d throw things at me.
“Wine bottles, gold discs, TVs — you name it, it would all come flying across the room.
“I ain’t proud to admit that a few of my punches reached their target.”
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Ozzy on tour in Las Vegas in 2002 with his beloved Sharon by his sideCredit: Shutterstock Editorial
But the following year, Ozzy and Sharon married in Hawaii on the way to a gig.
The rocker didn’t make it back to their hotel room after the ceremony.
Sharon recalled: “The manager called and said, ‘Your husband is lying in the hall, will you come and get him’ and I said, ‘No I won’t’.”
While Sharon managed Ozzy’s soaring solo career, the couple welcomed their three children Aimee, 41, Kelly, 40, and Jack, 39.
But she could not curb her husband’s appetite for booze, illegal drugs and prescription pills.
‘Slumped in corridor’
When he got violent, Sharon would take her revenge like the time she took a hammer to all his gold records.
But seven years after their wedding, Ozzy tried to strangle Sharon while high on drugs and Russian vodka, at their 17th Century home in Little Chalfont, Bucks.
The family had gone to their bedrooms after returning from a local Chinese restaurant to celebrate Aimee’s sixth birthday.
Before lunging at Sharon, Ozzy stripped naked and told her: “We’ve had a little talk and it’s clear that you have to die.”
She pressed the panic button, alerting the police.
Ozzy woke up in a cell the next morning with no recollection of the attack, to find he had been charged with attempted murder.
Three months later, ahead of his court case, Sharon visited the rehab centre where Ozzy had been sent to dry out.
In his autobiography, Ozzy recalled how she told him: “I’m going to drop the charges.
“I don’t believe you’re capable of attempted murder, Ozzy.
People keep asking, ‘How come you and Sharon have stayed together all this time?’
Ozzy
“You’re a sweet, gentle man.
“But when you get drunk, Ozzy Osbourne disappears and someone else takes over.
“I want that other person to go away.
“I don’t want to see him again.”
But Ozzy instead developed a prescription pill addiction.
Sharon almost died from colon cancer during the making of their Noughties fly-on-the-wall MTV show, The Osbournes.
While she was still undergoing chemo, the couple retook their vows on New Year’s Eve 2002.
Ozzy revealed: “People keep asking, ‘How come you and Sharon have stayed together all this time?’.
“My answer was the same then as it is now. ‘I’ve never stopped telling my wife that I love her; I’ve never stopped taking her out for dinner; I’ve never stopped surprising her with little gifts’.
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Animal-lovers Ozzy and his wife campaigning against trophy hunting last yearCredit: Ban Trophy Hunting /Animal News Agency
“Unfortunately, I’d never stopped drinking and taking drugs, so the ceremony ended much the same as our original wedding — with me slumped in a corridor, p*ssed out of my brains.”
A year later, Ozzy had a near-fatal quad bike accident on their estate that required multiple surgeries and affected his long-term mobility. In the aftermath of the crash, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, only going public with the condition in 2020.
Meanwhile, Sharon — who described their life together as “a Shakespeare play” — slipped Ozzy extra sleeping pills in 2016 to extract a confession that he had been having an affair with his hairdresser.
It was also revealed that there were more mistresses.
Devastated, Sharon tried to kill herself but was found by a cleaner.
Jessie Breakwell, who worked as their nanny, said: “Ozzy was obsessed with her.
“They’d giggle and make jokes.
“It was genuine love.”
After Ozzy went to rehab for sex addiction, the couple reconciled and renewed their vows in Las Vegas in 2017.
Sharon admitted: “I love him.
“I can leave if I want, take half of everything and go. I don’t want to.”
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Ozzy was obsessed with his wifeCredit: Getty
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Sharon and Ozzy as youngstersCredit: Getty – Contributor
Wild and hilarious Ozzy stories
1. Ozzy once told Sharon: “Don’t cremate me, whatever you do.
“I want to be put in the ground, in a nice garden somewhere, with a tree over my head.
“A crabapple tree, preferably, so the kids can make wine out of me and get pissed out of their heads.
“As for what they’ll put on my headstone, I ain’t under any illusions.
“If I close my eyes, I can already see it:
“Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948
“Died, whenever.
“He bit the head off a bat.”
2. Ozzy decided to stop using acid while recording Black Sabbath album Vol 4.
He said: “I took ten tabs of acid then went for a walk in a field.
“I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour.
“In the end, the horse turned around and told me to f**k off.
“That was it for me.”
3. The rocker began tattooing himself as a teenager while growing up in Birmingham.
He said: “I even put a smiley face on each of my knees to cheer myself up when I was sitting on the bog in the morning.”
Decades later he had ‘thanks’ tattooed on his right palm.
He said: “It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.
“How many times do you say ‘thanks’ to people during your lifetime?
“Tens of thousands, probably.
“Now all I had to do was raise my right hand.”
4. The Osbournes had a donkey called Sally, who used to sit in the living room with Ozzy and watch Match Of The Day.
5. Former slaughterhouse worker Ozzy claimed to have killed his family’s cats while high.
He recalled: “I was taking drugs so much I was a f***ed.
“The final straw came when I shot all our cats.
“We had about 17, and I went crazy and shot them all.
“My wife found me under the piano in a white suit – a shotgun in one hand and a knife in the other.”
6. The Prince of Darkness was interested in the Bible.
He said: “I’ve tried to read it several times.
“But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like, ‘What were these people smoking back then?’”
7. Ozzy met the late Queen at the Royal Variety Performance.
He recalled: “I was standing next to Cliff Richard.
“She took one look at the two of us, and said, “Oh, so this is what they call variety, is it?” then cracked up laughing.
“I honestly thought Sharon must have slipped some acid into my cornflakes that morning.”
8. Ozzy loved putting hidden messages in songs.
He said: “On No Rest For The Wicked, if you play Bloodbath In Paradise backwards, you can clearly hear me saying, ‘Your mother sells whelks in Hull’.”
In “The Hunting Wives,” a brightly configured murder mystery cum cartoon sex opera premiering Monday on Netflix, Brittany Snow plays Sophie O’Neil, newly arrived from Boston with husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) and prop young son to fictional Maple Brook, Texas, a rich people’s town somewhere in the vicinity of Dallas. Graham is an architect, seemingly — at one point he will say, “Soph, you gotta check out this joinery,” which, in the three episodes out for review, is as specific as that will get — who has come to work for rich person Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney) to build “the new Banks HQ.” What will happen in there is not said.
The O’Neils step into this world by way of a fundraiser at which Banks, who wants to be governor, is making a speech in support of the National Rifle Assn., highlighting the need for guns for “good people” to fend off “all sorts of evil sumbitches” and the “personas malos keep pouring in every day” across the border. This is as much of a platform as he will bother to have; plotwise, the point is that running for office may expose his swinging private life to public scrutiny.
Over the course of the party, we meet the major players: Jill (Katie Lowes) is married to Rev. Clint (Jason Davis), who runs the local megachurch; her son Brad (George Ferrier) — who would be named Brad — is an unpleasant slab of basketball-playing meat who is seeing, which is to say, trying to sleep with Abby (Madison Wolfe), a nice girl from the wrong side of the tracks. (Jill is against the relationship; Abby’s mother, Starr, played by Chrissy Metz, has her own reservations.) Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), second among the eponymous wives, is married to Sheriff Jonny (Branton Box); I’m not sure whether Jonny is his first or last name, but this does seem the kind of place where the sheriff would be known by his first. Supplementary wives Monae (Joyce Glenn) and Taylor (Alexandria DeBerry) are just there to make up the numbers.
Most important is Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), whom Sophie encounters in a bathroom where she has gone to take a Xanax for her social anxiety, and who, within seconds and not for the last time, is casually topless. Margo has no social anxiety.
She seizes on Sophie as fresh blood, or from some genuine connection, or because she recognizes in the newcomer the sort of person who needs a person like her, someone Margo can productively dominate to their mutual advantage. Margo immediately declares they’ll be besties — creating a rift with Callie, the current occupant of that role, who, radiating jealousy at every pore, is determined to get between them.
Sophie, Graham seems proud to announce, was once “a bit of a wild child … a party girl” who became a career woman — a political PR operative — and, for the last seven years, a full-time mother. He has a lightly controlling, “for your own good” manner, keeping her from drinking or driving — there’ll be a reason for that, you’ll have guessed — but before long, she will drink, and she will drive. “Two rules,” says Margo, getting her behind the wheel. “Trust me and do everything I say.”
Drafted into Margo’s world, Sophie is soon shooting skeet, and then, having bought her own guns, wild boar. I cite again the Chekhov dictum to the effect that a gun in the first act ought to go off in the second, but there are so many about here, and our attention so significantly drawn to them, it would be a shock if some didn’t fire — the only questions being which and when and whose, pointed at what or whom.
Developed by Rebecca Perry Cutter (“Hightown”) from May Cobb’s 2021 novel of the same name, the series offers a light dusting of political references — “deplorables,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, no abortion clinics “left to bomb,” negative mentions of feminism and liberals — that might as easily been left off in light of the insular fantasyland within which “The Hunting Wives” operates. (Did J.R. Ewing ever express a political opinion?) Given the context — liberal Northerners camped among conservative Southerners — one might have expected a “Stepford Wives” scenario, but this is something different. Within, or exploiting, their sociocultural limits (“We don’t work, we wife,” says Monae proudly), the women party heartily while the men, even when nominally powerful, come across as comparatively bland, uninteresting and distracted. Graham, who is very nice, can seem positively dim; “Take my wife, please,” he’ll happily joke when Margo rides up on a jet ski to spirit Sophie away from a family day at the lake.
The characters are types, but the actors fill them out well, and the dynamic between Margo and Sophie really is … dynamic. Margo is intriguing because she’s hard to figure. Like Sophie, she has a hidden past — when a mysterious figure at the local roadhouse (Jullian Dulce Vida) calls her Mandy, it makes her atypically nervous because, obviously, she was once called Mandy. She lies to her husband; she’s having sex with Brad, which just seems like bad taste. But there’s something authentic and genuine about Margo magnified by Akerman’s entrancing performance. Margo is a temptress, the devil on Sophie’s shoulder — but maybe the angel too.
Lest we forget, there’s a murder, which opens the show in a flash forward; the series catches up with it by the end of Episode 3. (It brings in Karen Rodriguez as Det. Salazar, which promises good things.) There’s also a briefly mentioned missing girl, which will certainly tie in somehow. But with only three episodes out of eight seen, it’s impossible to say where it’s all going — unless you’ve read the book, I suppose, but even then, you never know. What’s clear is that there’ll be more secrets to reveal, with skeletons tumbling out of every closet. And these are big houses, with plenty of storage.
A 22-year-old man was charged Thursday with killing an “American Idol” music supervisor and her musician husband who walked into their Encino home during a burglary.
Raymond Boodarian is accused of fatally shooting Robin Kaye and her husband, Tom DeLuca, on July 10. Los Angeles police did not find their bodies until four days later, when officers were sent to the home for a welfare check.
Boodarian is charged with two counts of murder with enhancements for allegedly killing the couple during the commission of a robbery, intentionally using a firearm, and committing multiple murders. He is also charged with burglary.
During an initial court appearance in Van Nuys on Thursday afternoon, Boodarian was ordered to remain in jail. His arraignment was delayed until Aug. 20.
If convicted, Boodarian would face either life without parole or execution if prosecutors seek the death penalty.
According to police, officers visited the Encino home around the time Boodarian was believed to be inside.
The Los Angeles Police Department responded to a report of a possible break-in at 4 p.m. July 10 and determined that nothing appeared out of place at the couple’s residence, Lt. Guy Golan said.
Officers reported that the property was locked and no one responded inside, while a police helicopter from overhead reported not seeing anything suspicious.
Kaye and DeLuca’s bodies were discovered Monday when officers responded to a welfare check at the couple’s homes in the 4700 block of White Oak Avenue. The following day, officers with a joint LAPD-FBI task force arrested Boodarian.
According to police, Kaye, an “American Idol” music supervisor and her rock musician husband, DeLuca, were returning to their $4.5-million Encino home when they came upon Booderian.
Booderian allegedly shot Kaye and DeLuca multiple times then ran off, locking the door behind him. Though the couple’s house was well fortified, police said, the suspect had managed to get in through an unlocked door.
According to Golan, the department received a call at 4 p.m. the day the couple was killed and the caller described seeing a person climbing over a fence into the property. Golan said officers went to the home, but did not get any response and saw nothing out of place, and a helicopter was flown over the property because it was difficult to access.
By then, the couple had been killed, LAPD officials said. Boodarian left after about half an hour, police said.
The delay in finding Kaye and DeLuca’s bodies bore similarities to two other homicides in the Valley where police were called the location and did not immediately find a victim and left the scene.
Menashe Hidra’s body was found April 26 inside his fifth-floor Valley Village apartment after an assailant broke into a neighboring unit, jumped from the balcony to his unit and attacked him, investigators said.
Three days before, neighbors had called 911 and reported hearing shouting and a struggle coming from the apartment. Officers responded to those calls, knocked on the door and left without finding anything.
Erick Escamilla, 27, was charged with the killing, along with an unrelated homicide from 2022.
The same day that Hidra’s body was discovered, police found the body of Aleksandre Modebadze, who was beaten to death inside his Woodland Hills home.
In that case, a woman inside the home called LAPD about 12:30 a.m. and reported three people had broken into her home and were beating her significant other before the call suddenly cut out, according to law enforcement sources. The 911 operator tried to call back multiple times without success.
Shortly before 1 a.m., officers arrived at the home but no one answered the door, there was no noise coming from inside the home, and the blinds were down, the sources told The Times.
Modebadze was later found by officers badly beaten with a traumatic head injury and died of his injuries. Authorities arrested suspects hours after the attack.
In this Encino case, Golan said the department would investigate why the couple, who were both 70, were not found earlier and whether the officers involved acted appropriately. LAPD officials said the front door of the home was not visible from the outside during the initial response.
According to court records, Boodarian was charged in three instances of misdemeanor battery last year. Those charges were ultimately dropped a series of hearings related to his mental competency and a conservatorship investigation.
“Untamed,” a quasi-police drama premiering Thursday on Netflix, is a vacation from most crime shows, set not in a big city or cozy village but in the wilds of Yosemite National Park. (Never mind that the series was shot in British Columbia, which has nothing to apologize for when it comes to dramatic scenery, and whose park rangers are not threatened by draconian budget cuts nor their parks by politicians’ desire to sell off public lands.)
The mountains and valleys, the rivers and brooks, the occasional deer or bear are as much a part of the mise-en-scène as the series’ complicated, yet essentially straightforward heroes and villains. Lacking big themes, it’s not so much meat-and-potatoes television as fish and corn grilled over a camp fire, and on the prestige scale it sits somewhere between “Magnum P.I.” and “True Detective,” leaning toward the former.
Created by Mark L. Smith (“American Primeval”) and Elle Smith (“The Marsh King’s Daughter”) and starring Eric Bana and Sam Neill, Antipodean actors wearing American accents once again, it’s a limited series, though, for a while, it has the quality of a pilot, introducing characters that could profitably be reused — with perhaps a little less of the trauma peeking out at every corner. Of course, if the show becomes a fantabulous success, the Netflix engineers may contrive a way to make it live again; it’s happened before.
“Untamed” starts big. Two climbers are making their way up the face of El Capitan when a woman’s body comes flying over the cliff, gets tangled in their ropes and hangs suspended, dead. She is hanging there still — the climbers have been rescued — when Investigative Services Branch special agent Kyle Turner (Bana) rides in on his horse.
“Here comes f—ing Gary Cooper,” mutters grumbling ranger Bruce Milch (William Smillie) to new ranger Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), a former police officer (and single mother, with a threatening ex) newly arrived from Los Angeles. (The horse, says Milch, who regards it as a high horse, gives him “a better angle to look down on us lowly rangers.”) What are the odds on Vasquez becoming Turner’s (junior) partner? And on a difficult relationship developing into a learning curve (“This is not L.A. — things happen different out here”) and turning almost … tender?
More heroically proportioned and handsome than anyone else in the show, a man of the forest with superior tracking skills, Turner is also a mess — a taciturn mess, which also makes him seem stoic — barely holding himself together, drinking too much, living in a cabin in the woods filled with unpacked boxes, undone by the unaddressed family tragedy that broke him and his marriage. (The dark side of stoicism.) Sympathetic remarried ex-wife Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt, keeping it real), who herself is only “as happy as I can be, I guess,” and sympathetic boss Paul Souter (Neill), try to keep him straight.
“You’ve locked yourself away in this park, Kyle,” Souter tells Turner. “It’s not healthy.” Turner, however, prefers “most animals to people — especially my horse.” Nevertheless, he has a couple of friends: Shane Maguire (Wilson Bethel), a wildlife manager — that means he shoots things, so be forewarned — also living in the woods, but without the cabin, is the toxic one; Mato Begay (Trevor Carroll), an Indigenous policeman, the nontoxic one. And he’s sleeping with a concierge at the local nice hotel, just so that element is covered; it’s otherwise beside the point.
If the dialogue often has the flavor of coming off a page rather than out of a character, it gets the job done, and if the characters are essentially static, people don’t change overnight, and consistency is a hallmark of detective fiction. The narrative wisely stays close to Turner and/or Vasquez; there are enough twists and tendrils in the main overlapping plots without running off into less related matters. (Keeping the series to six episodes is also a plus, and something to be encouraged, makers of streaming series. Your critic will thank you for it.) Still, between the hot cases and the cold cases, with their collateral damage; hippie squatters from central casting chanting “Our Earth, our land;” a mysterious gold tattoo, indigenous glyphs and old mines — there is an especially tense scene involving a tight tunnel and rising water — the show stays busy. Though last-minute heavy surprises don’t register emotionally — trauma overload, maybe — you will not be left wanting for answers, or closure.
And you will learn quite a bit about vultures and their dining habits — not what you might think.
Dan Serafini was a first-round draft pick from a prestigious private high school. He pitched professionally for 22 seasons and earned more than $14 million while with six Major League teams and two in the Japanese League.
Now he might spend the rest of his life in prison.
Serafini, 51, was convicted Monday of first-degree murder in the 2021 shooting death of his father-in-law, Robert Gary Spohr, 70. He also was found guilty of the attempted murder of Spohr’s wife, Wendy Wood, and first-degree burglary.
Serafini entered the Spohrs’ Lake Tahoe home June 5, 2021, where prosecutors said he secretly waited with a .22 caliber gun for several hours for the victims to return before ambushing them. Two children, ages 3 years and 8 months, were in the home at the time.
“The guilty verdicts come after a six-week trial during which the jury heard testimony from dozens of witnesses and the presentation of physical evidence, including digital, cell phone, and other forensic evidence,” according to a Facebook post from the Placer County District Attorney’s Office.
According to evidence presented at trial, when the Spohrs arrived, Serafini shot both of them in the head and fled the house. Wood survived and called 911. She died by suicide in 2023.
Two years later police arrested Serafini and his nanny-turned-lover, Samantha Scott, 33. Scott pleaded guilty in February to an accessory charge.
Serafini’s motive centered on a $1.3-million dispute over the renovation of a ranch, according to prosecutors. Serafini, prosecutors said, hated his in-laws and had written “I’m gonna kill them one day” in a text message mentioning $21,000, according to ABC News Sacramento affiliate KXTV. The victims had given $90,000 to Serafini’s wife, Erin, the day of the shootings.
“It’s been four years since my mom and dad were shot, and it’s been four years of just hell,” said Adrienne Spohr, the victims’ daughter and Serafini’s sister-in-law, said after the verdict.
Adrienne Spohr was heard gasping and crying along with others in the courtroom when the verdict was read aloud, according to KXTV. Serafini shook his head in disagreement.
The mandatory minimum for first-degree murder with a firearm enhancement is 25 years to life, but could increase to 35 years depending on how the charges are applied.
“My parents had been incredibly generous to Daniel Serafini and Erin Spohr throughout their marriage,” Adrienne Spohr said earlier in the trial.
The Minnesota Twins made Serafini their first-round draft pick in 1992 out of Junipero Serra High in San Mateo, Calif., the same school all-time home run king Barry Bonds attended. Serafini made his big league debut in 1996 with the Twins and pitched in parts of seven seasons with the Chicago Cubs, San Diego Padres, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds and Colorado Rockies.
Serafini pitched in Japan from 2004 to 2007 before returning to the U.S. He was suspended for 50 games in 2007 for using performance-enhancing drugs that he blamed on medication he took in Japan. He also pitched for Italy in the 2013 World Baseball Classic.
On June 28, 2015, Serafini’s bar in Sparks, Nev., was featured on an episode of “Bar Rescue.” The bar’s named was changed from the Bullpen Bar to the Oak Tavern as part of the makeover, but not before his financial woes were described as blowing through $14 million in career earnings and taking a $250,000 loan from his parents.
Serafini’s sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 18. He will remain in custody without bail until then.
“At this point, our focus is on the sentencing and making sure that Dan Serafini never sees the outside of a jail ever again,” Adrienne Spohr said.
Emmy nominations arrive Tuesday, and there will be plenty of time for us to argue about who should win (let’s start with “The Pitt”) and why this could be the year (though probably not) that we’ll have a surprise or two when the trophies are handed out on Sept. 14.
In the meantime, if you love “Severance,”“The White Lotus,” “The Pitt,” “The Studio,”“Hacks” and “Adolescence,” you will find plenty of reasons to smile. These are the shows that are going to steamroll through the nominations. If you belong to the “What We Do in the Shadows” cult and want a tip of the hat for its final season, you’re probably in luck. And if your comic taste embraces the absurd, and you have complicated feelings about air travel, you might be disappointed that Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal” is left out of comedy series, though Fielder could earn a nod for his direction. Attaboy, Captain!
Who else will be flying high when nominations are announced? Let’s take a look.
COMEDY SERIES “Abbott Elementary” “The Bear” “Hacks” “Nobody Wants This” “Only Murders in the Building” “Shrinking” “The Studio” “What We Do in the Shadows”
Possible surprise: “The Four Seasons” Possible “snub”: “What We Do in the Shadows”
“The Bear” won 11 Emmys last year, the most wins ever for a comedy series in a single ceremony. But that record was lost on viewers when “Hacks” won the final Emmy of the evening, besting “The Bear” for comedy series. “The Bear” has been sliding with critics, going from a 92 rating on review aggregator Metacritic for its second season to an 80 for its third and a 73 for its just-released fourth season. Sometimes I wonder if the naysayers are taking the time to consider the whole picture and the patient, deliberate way “The Bear” shows the difficulties in breaking free from addiction and familial dysfunction.
Because the show’s new seasons arrive in June, there’s some overlap between what voters are watching (the latest episodes) and what they’re supposed to be voting for (the episodes that came out a year ago). The new season was exceptional, ending in a showcase for its primary actors and providing well-earned catharsis for their characters. I don’t know if “The Bear” will win any Emmys this year, but the nominations will still be plentiful — and deserved.
COMEDY ACTRESS Kristen Bell, “Nobody Wants This” Quinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary” Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear” Natasha Lyonne, “Poker Face” Jean Smart, “Hacks”
Possible surprise: Selena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building” Possible “snub”: Lyonne
As always, it’s an honor to be nominated. And in a category that includes Smart, a nomination will be as far as it goes for the four women joining her. Edebiri and Brunson are sure bets to return. Bell has never been nominated, though she was a delight on “The Good Place.” She should break through for “Nobody Wants This,” the most easily binged contender this Emmy season. But voters could go any number of ways here, opting for past Emmy favorites like Tina Fey (“The Four Seasons”), Kathryn Hahn (“Agatha All Along”) or Uzo Aduba (“The Residence”). Or they could re-up Gomez, who received her first acting nomination last year, or Lyonne, recognized two years ago for the first season of “Poker Face.”
COMEDY ACTOR Adam Brody, “Nobody Wants This” Seth Rogen, “The Studio” Jason Segel, “Shrinking” Martin Short, “Only Murders in the Building” Jeremy Allen White, “The Bear”
Possible surprise: Steve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building” Possible “snub”: Segel
As with comedy actress, this category has one less nominee slot this year, which could be bad news for veterans Martin and Ted Danson (“A Man on the Inside”). If Bell earns a nomination for lead actress, how could you leave out Brody? And if you laud Short, how do you neglect Martin? (That happened two years ago, when the field was five.) But if Emmy voters were paying attention — and that is, admittedly, a big if — they’d remember that it’s Martin who carried the emotional weight of the past season of “Only Murders,” his character grieving the guilt from the loss of his longtime stunt double and friend (played by Jane Lynch).
COMEDY SUPPORTING ACTRESS Liza Colón-Zayas, “The Bear” Hannah Einbinder, “Hacks” Kathryn Hahn, “The Studio” Janelle James, “Abbott Elementary” Catherine O’Hara, “The Studio” Sheryl Lee Ralph, “Abbott Elementary” Jessica Williams, “Shrinking”
Possible surprise: Megan Stalter, “Hacks” Possible “snub”: Hahn
There’s more room in the supporting categories, which sport seven spots. That should be good news for Hahn, consistently the most delightful actor working in television today. She could well be a double nominee for her profane, force-of-nature marketing exec on “The Studio” and for her lead turn in the Marvel spinoff “Agatha All Along.” She could also somehow be shut out completely. (Let’s not go there.)
COMEDY SUPPORTING ACTOR Ike Barinholtz, “The Studio” Paul Downs, “Hacks” Harrison Ford, “Shrinking” Ebon Moss-Bachrach, “The Bear” Tyler James Williams, “Abbott Elementary” Michael Urie, “Shrinking” Bowen Yang, “Saturday Night Live”
Possible surprise: Colman Domingo, “The Four Seasons” Possible ”snub”: Urie
“The Four Seasons” was a bit of a snooze, but I was nudged awake every time Domingo came onscreen. Will older voters have a soft spot for this featherweight Gen X friends drama, or were they just watching to take notes on places to visit in upstate New York? Netflix campaigners excel at vacuuming up nominations, so it wouldn’t be surprising if “The Four Seasons” outperforms expectations.
DRAMA SERIES “Andor” “The Diplomat” “The Last of Us” “Paradise” “The Pitt” “Severance” “Slow Horses” “The White Lotus”
Possible surprise: “Squid Game” Possible “snub”: “Paradise”
The first season of “Andor” earned 8 nominations and it could well surpass that for its second and final go-round, one that leaned into a pointed critique of authoritarianism, showing how easily a democracy can erode into fascism. The category’s last spot is a toss-up between the disappointing second season of “Squid Game,” which felt bloated even at just seven episodes, and “Paradise,” another dystopian drama, but a lot more fun, even with all the overwrought ’80s covers.
DRAMA ACTRESS Kathy Bates, “Matlock” Britt Lower, “Severance” Elisabeth Moss, “The Handmaid’s Tale” Bella Ramsey, “The Last of Us” Keri Russell, “The Diplomat”
No “snubs.” No surprises. These are the nominees. And jumping ahead, to answer your question: Yes, Kathy Bates has won an Emmy — two, in fact. If you saw her on “American Horror Story: Coven” somehow making a serial killer and slave abuser almost sympathetic, you know that particular Emmy was earned. And I’m not sure if she had more than two minutes of running time for the guest turn on “Two and a Half Men,” for which she won her first Emmy, but watching her spot-on imitation of Charlie Sheen as the ghost of Charlie Harper, I can’t argue with the choice.
DRAMA ACTOR Sterling K. Brown, “Paradise” Gary Oldman, “Slow Horses” Pedro Pascal, “The Last of Us” Adam Scott, “Severance” Noah Wyle, “The Pitt”
Again, no “snubs.” No surprises. Unless the nerds in the actors branch go all in for Diego Luna in “Andor.”
DRAMA SUPPORTING ACTRESS Carrie Coon, “The White Lotus” Taylor Dearden, “The Pitt” Allison Janney, “The Diplomat” Katherine LaNasa, “The Pitt” Parker Posey, “The White Lotus” Natasha Rothwell, “The White Lotus” Aimee Lou Wood, “The White Lotus”
Possible surprise: Leslie Bibb, “The White Lotus” Possible “snub”: Dearden
“The White Lotus” snagged four nominations in this category for its second season, with Jennifer Coolidge winning. I’d expect the widely seen third season to at least equal that and possibly exceed it if voters go with Bibb. Meanwhile, “The Pitt,” featuring an ensemble with more fully realized characters, will have to settle for a one or two nods. (I’ll need Dr. King’s calm, caring support if Dearden isn’t nominated.) What will it take to break through this two-show category blockade? Just an actor owning seven Emmys. Janney doesn’t need a spot on “The Pitt” or “The White Lotus” to make it in, though wouldn’t it be fun if she showed up on the next season of one of these shows?
DRAMA SUPPORTING ACTOR Walton Goggins, “The White Lotus” Jason Isaacs, “The White Lotus” Jack Lowden, “Slow Horses” Sam Rockwell, “The White Lotus” Patrick Schwarzenegger, “The White Lotus” Tramell Tillman, “Severance” John Turturro, “Severance”
Possible surprise: Patrick Ball, “The Pitt” Possible “snub”: Schwarzenegger
Do all the “White Lotus” men make the cut too? Possibly. Though, again, it’d be nice to even things out a bit and include Ball, so good as the troubled Dr. Langdon on “The Pitt.” Given the character’s ambiguous fate, this might be the only chance to nominate Ball. Lowden earned his first nomination last year, alongside “Slow Horses” castmate Jonathan Pryce. With the show’s latest season hinging on the emotional relationship between their characters, there’s a chance they both could return.
LIMITED SERIES “Adolescence” “Dying for Sex” “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” “The Penguin” “Say Nothing”
Possible surprise: “Disclaimer” Possible “snub”: “Say Nothing”
Perhaps I’m underestimating “Disclaimer,” Alfonso Cuarón’s pulpy psychological thriller. Expectations were high; Apple TV+ had the chutzpah to show it at both the Venice and Telluride film festivals last year. But its pleasures and narrative momentum dissipated rather rapidly over the course of its seven episodes. I don’t know anyone who managed to finish it. Yet, in a weak year for limited series, it might make it in on name value alone.
LIMITED SERIES/MOVIE ACTRESS Cate Blanchett, “Disclaimer” Kaitlyn Dever, “Apple Cider Vinegar” Cristin Milioti, “The Penguin” Michelle Williams, “Dying for Sex” Renée Zellweger, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”
Possible surprise: Ellen Pompeo, “Good American Family” Possible “snub”: Dever
Zellweger won an Oscar for playing the plucky farmer in “Cold Mountain” and a deteriorating Judy Garland in “Judy.” And, given the film academy’s aversion to humor, it might surprise you to learn that she earned a lead actress nomination for the first “Bridget Jones” movie in 2002. Now, more than two decades later, Zellweger has a shot at her first Emmy nomination for the fourth film in the series. It’s her signature role. Give her the nod and the Emmy too.
LIMITED SERIES/MOVIE ACTOR Colin Farrell, “The Penguin” Stephen Graham, “Adolescence” Brian Tyree Henry, “Dope Thief” Kevin Kline, “Disclaimer” Cooper Koch, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story”
Graham figures to be nominated for “Adolescence” as a producer, actor and writer. (He wrote all four episodes with series co-creator Jack Thorne.) He’s excellent playing Eddie, the shell-shocked dad, particularly in the series’ final episode, which has his character dealing with the aftermath of his son’s arrest, trying to have normal life, a happy birthday, while plagued by doubts that what happened was somehow his fault. Graham deserves the Emmy for the last scene, where Eddie goes into his son’s room, tucks in his teddy bear and whispers, “I’m sorry, son. I should’ve done better.”
LIMITED SERIES/MOVIE SUPPORTING ACTRESS Erin Doherty, “Adolescence” Deirdre O’Connell, “The Penguin” Imogen Faith Reid, “Good American Family” Chloë Sevigny, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” Jenny Slate, “Dying for Sex” Christine Tremarco, “Adolescence”
Possible surprise: Lesley Manville, “Disclaimer” Possible “snub”: Reid
Doherty will likely win for the series’ third episode, the taut two-hander with Owen Cooper. But, again, the fourth episode is just as good — maybe even better — featuring a heart-rending turn from Tremarco as the mom trying to hold it together.
LIMITED SERIES/MOVIE SUPPORTING ACTOR Javier Bardem, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” Owen Cooper, “Adolescence” Rob Delaney, “Dying for Sex” Rhenzy Feliz, “The Penguin” Peter Sarsgaard, “Presumed Innocent” Ashley Walters, “Adolescence”
Possible surprise: Clancy Brown, “The Penguin” Possible “snub”: Sarsgaard
Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were stabbed to death in their home in Moscow, Idaho, in 2022, with roommates Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke surviving
A new docuseries has revealed harrowing details of the night four students were murdered in Idaho(Image: ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock)
Friends of the two University of Idaho students who survived the brutal stabbing of four roommates in 2022 have revealed why the pair didn’t call 911 for several hours after the massacre.
The revelations come in One Night in Idaho, a new Prime Video docuseries that premiered on July 11. The show includes interviews with relatives and friends of the victims – Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin – as well as insight into the surviving roommates’ state of mind in the hours following the killings.
Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke, who lived in the Moscow, Idaho, off-campus house where the four students were murdered, were home at the time but were unharmed. They placed the 911 call at 11:58am on November 13, 2022 – roughly eight hours after the attack, which investigators believe happened between 4am and 4.20am.
Their friend Hunter Johnson discovered Xana and Ethan’s bodies the following morning(Image: Courtesy of Prime Video)
Dylan later told police she had opened her bedroom door around 4am after hearing noises and saw a masked man with bushy eyebrows walking toward a sliding glass door before locking herself in her room, according to a probable cause affidavit.
Speaking in the docuseries, friends Hunter Johnson, Emily Alandt and Josie Lauteren shared how Dylan and Bethany contacted them that morning asking for help. “She was like, ‘Something weird happened last night. I don’t really know if I was dreaming or not, but I’m really scared. Can you come check out the house?’” Emily recalled.
Dylan told her she had been in the basement with Bethany and had tried calling Xana several times but received no response. Emily said she didn’t initially think the request was serious. “I was like, ‘Ha, ha, sure. Should I bring my pepper spray?’ Not thinking anything of it,” she said.
Josie explained that Dylan had previously called friends for support after hearing strange noises in the house. “She’s called us before and been like, ‘Oh, I’m scared. Can you bring your boyfriends over?’ But it was never anything serious… because it’s Moscow.”
Emily Alandt also went inside the house on the morning of the murders(Image: Courtesy of Prime Video)
When Emily, Josie and Hunter arrived at the house, they quickly realised something was terribly wrong. “Dylan and Bethany had exited the house. They looked frightened, just kind of like, hands on their mouth, like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’” Emily said.
“As soon as I stepped in the house, I was like, ‘Oh, something is so not right.’ Like, you could feel it almost,” Josie added. Hunter, who entered the home first, urged them to call police without revealing what he actually saw when entering Xana and Ethan’s bedroom.
“Hunter had enough courage to tell them to call the police for not a real reason,” Alandt said. “He worded it very nicely. He said, ‘Tell them there’s an unconscious person.’ Hunter saved all of us extreme trauma by not letting us know anything.”
Bethany Funke (left) was one of the surviving roommates
Dylan made the 911 call, but was too distraught to speak. “I had to take the phone from her because she was so completely hysterical,” Josie said. “They’re like, ‘What’s the address, what’s the address?’ and I was like, ‘1122 King Road.’”
Even then, Josie said she believed paramedics might revive the victims. “I mean, even when [Hunter] said they had no pulse, I still was like, ‘Oh, the paramedics are gonna come and revive them.’”
In the series, the friends say Dylan and Bethany’s delay in calling 911, and hazy memory, was likely caused by shock and confusion. “It wasn’t until the morning that [Dylan] realised, holy s***, that couldn’t have been a dream,” Emily said.
Dylan Mortensen came face to face with the killer(Image: Facebook)
“She just called and said, ‘Something weird happened, I thought it was a dream, I’m not quite sure anymore. I tried to call everybody to wake them up and no one’s answering.’”
Bryan Kohberger was arrested nearly six weeks after the murders and charged with four counts of murder and one count of felony burglary. On July 2, Kohberger pleaded guilty to all charges. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 23 and faces life in prison.
Dylan and Bethany did not take part in the documentary and have not commented publicly about the new revelations. A psychologist in the docuseries said it’s likely Dylan – who came face to face with the killer – acted in a “trauma response”.
It’s the biggest question that’s been asked over and over again about the night of Nov. 13, 2022, when four University of Idaho students — Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves — were brutally stabbed to death in their off-campus house in the college town of Moscow, Idaho: Why?
With no apparent motive or clue as to who could have committed such a heinous crime, Moscow became the epicenter of an intense investigation and a social media storm that Prime Video’s “One Night in Idaho: The College Murders” delves into over four episodes dropping on Friday.
Liz Garbus (“Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer”) and Matthew Galkin (“Murder in the Bayou”) share directing and executive producing duties on the docuseries, which is based on reporting by author James Patterson and investigative journalist Vicky Ward, and they knew early on what angle their production would take. “We decided that a very interesting and unexplored angle was to see what it was like inside the eye of the hurricane,” Galkin says. “So, for the people, the family members, the friends of the victims that had not ever spoken to the media, that was where we chose to focus our energies as far as access is concerned.”
That included exclusive interviews with Stacy and Jim Chapin, parents of 20-year-old Ethan, and Karen and Scott Laramie, parents of 21-year-old Mogen, who have never talked about the murders — despite numerous projects on the subject — and how it ripped apart not only the town of Moscow but their respective families.
Garbus and Galkin talked with The Times about how they gained the families’ trust, how social media affected the case, and the recent twists and turns that happened just before the series was set to air. For one, on July 2, primary suspect Bryan Kohberger, a former criminal justice doctoral student who was arrested six weeks after the murders, entered a plea agreement with a full confession of the murders — done to avoid the death penalty — just weeks before his trial was set to begin. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What were the origins of your involvement in the production and with crime novelist James Patterson?
Matthew Galkin: This was a story that I started tracking, obviously, when it happened, which was mid-November of 2022, and I didn’t make any outreach to any key people within the story, any of the families, until it was almost spring of 2023. We were tracking it to see how it developed once they made an arrest and once we could see the contours of the story and that things like social media played a major part in the energy created around this story.
Liz Garbus: Concurrently, as Matthew was laying the foundation for this by reaching out and trying to see where the families were on this story, I got outreach from James Patterson’s company about their interest in collaborating on a project around this case. That was quite fortuitous, and we laid some of those building blocks together and shared access and research. The film was made by its filmmakers, and the book [“The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy” by Patterson and Ward, which is being released on July 14] was reported by its writers, so they were operating on parallel tracks. We were able to support and help each other, but, truly, Matthew’s original outreach to the Chapin family is what laid the building blocks for this show and is really the bedrock of it.
Matthew Galkin, co-director of Prime Video’s “One Night in Idaho: The College Murders.”
(Matthew Galkin)
How was the gag order for law enforcement and other key people close to the case a challenge in telling your story?
Galkin: In this particular story, there was a probable cause affidavit that was filed in early January of ’23, which really laid out, up to that point, what investigative details existed in order to bring law enforcement toward the suspect and ultimately make the arrest. So we were able, at the very least, to tell that story through the details we learned through the probable cause affidavit.
It’s always a challenge if you don’t have all of the participating members of a story to try to tell the complete story. But in my past work, we tended to pick projects that are victim-centric more than law enforcement-centric. I’ve had experience telling stories through that perspective, so in a lot of ways, the limited access that we had actually lined up with the story we were trying to tell anyway.
Garbus: Even on “Gone Girls,” which was a show I made recently for Netflix, those murders were 10, 20, 30 years old. There were no gag orders, but there were certain people who didn’t want to talk for their own reasons, so sometimes, as documentary filmmakers, you have to pick a lane. What are you bringing to the story? What point of view can you fully express? And we clearly had that lane here.
And when you have that lane so clear early on, does that actually help get people to talk to you, especially those who hadn’t spoken to anyone before?
Galkin: I flew out to Washington state, and the first contact I made was to Jim and Stacy Chapin, who are the parents of Ethan, Hunter and Maizie. I convinced them to let me take them to lunch and just talk through what our vision of how to tell the story would be. I was probably the 50th in line to try to make a documentary project about it. They’ve been inundated at that point, and it was probably five or six months of journalists, documentary filmmakers [and] podcasters just coming out of the woodwork.
I know for a fact they looked at Liz’s track record, they looked at my track record, and I think they felt comfortable in the fact that if we were going to do crime stories, they were not usually from the killer’s point of view or even from law enforcement point of view. It’s usually from family or victim, so I think that gave them some comfort to know that they would have real input in how Ethan’s story was told. They liked the idea of picking one project to really go deep on and be able to help put Ethan’s narrative out to the world through their own voice, as opposed to other people who didn’t know Ethan telling it.
Maizie and Hunter Chapin were Ethan’s siblings. Both were interviewed for the documentary along with their parents.(Courtesy of Prime Video)
Did you know early on that social media would play such a big part in the case?
Galkin: It was actually the two main topics of conversation. My first conversation with the Chapins was our vision of how we were going to tell the story and also their experience dealing with the insane noise and pressures of social media sleuths and people reaching out, going into their DMs, creating theories about their children, about them, about their children’s friends — just the insanity. Obviously, there have been crime stories that deal with social media, but I have never experienced something of this magnitude with this much social media attention.
Garbus: Social media has become much of the atmosphere in the telling and digestion of crimes in the American public’s imagination of them. In some cases, it can be helpful, like the case of the Long Island serial killer, where the victims were not commanding national interest, and social media and advocates can play a huge role. Then there are other times in which the voracious appetites can overtake the story.
In your series, you don’t spend a lot of time dissecting all the gruesome details of the murders. Was that due to the law enforcement gag order?
Galkin: Maybe a little, but it was also a choice of ours. There are many other projects, documentary series or news specials about this case that go into all of the really horrific details of what happened in that house. It was a conversation from the beginning of how do we present this so it’s factual. We’re not necessarily avoiding things, but we didn’t feel like there was a reason to linger on those details because there were other aspects of the story that were of more interest to us.
Garbus: When you’re with these families and you experience the grief and trauma through them, that’s kind of what you need to know. The ways in which the ripple effect of the trauma has affected this entire friend group and all of these young people, that speaks volumes to what happened that day and we wanted to experience it through them.
Given the recent developments with Kohberger’s plea deal, did you change the tag at the end of your show?
Garbus: Thanks to some great postproduction supervisors and assistants, we will be updating the end card to have viewers be up to date with the plea.
Matthew Galkin and director of photography Jeff Hutchens on set of the re-created King Road house, where the murders occurred, in “One Night in Idaho: The College Murders.”
(Matthew Galkin)
In the latter half of the series, there’s talk about Kohberger and the notion of him being an incel, or involuntary celibate [where a person, usually male, is frustrated by a lack of sexual experiences]. How did that help understand a potential motive in the murders?
Garbus: That was something that was very interesting to us right at the beginning: Why were these young women targeted? We may never know with this plea deal now and it may remain a mystery, but there were signs, for sure, about involvement in that culture for us to explore that angle. As families watch this and they’re sitting with their sons and wondering what they might be doing online, this is the kind of conversation that people need to be having about the media, the infiltration of messages that young men receive today and it’s only getting more extreme in this moment.
Was four episodes always the amount to tell this story? Obviously, the case is still unfolding with Kohberger’s plea agreement. Could a sequel happen?
Galkin: Four episodes felt like the right amount of space to tell the story that we told. Obviously, there are still chapters unfolding, and if there is an appetite to continue to tell this story with our subjects and all of our partners, then certainly I think we’d be open to doing that. But we feel like we told a complete story here … every episode offers a pivot as to the perspectives that we’re seeing this case through, and every episode has a different lens.
Garbus: Clearly, our filmmaking stops at a certain point. You’ve had this plea deal, and the gag order will be lifted, so it is a capsule of time of what the families knew and understood since this tragedy happened up until a couple of months ago. We will see over the next weeks and months how much more we will learn, but it is a fragment of experience very much rooted in time.
Since there is so much interest in this case with many podcasts, documentaries and news stories out there, do you worry about that at all?
Garbus: In some ways you don’t think about it, but at the same time, when you’re setting off to make a project like this, you want to make sure you are saying something unique. We’re going to spend X number of years of our lives on this, and you want to make sure you’re adding something new to the discourse on the case. And, of course, it matters to us that this is the place where the Chapins and the Laramies will tell their story and that we are able to take care of it for them and the friends in the way that we intended. It matters just in that you want to make sure you have a lane that’s needed in the discourse and I think in this case we felt very clearly that we did.
Galkin: We knew from Day 1, given the access that we had, that our series would be unique to anything else on the market, because these are people that have never told their story before, and the way we were planning on doing it, which was truly from the inside, without any sort of outsider voices. So that was not an anxiety for us.
MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman, who was shot nine times by a gunman posing as a police officer who authorities say went on to kill another lawmaker, is out of the hospital and is now recovering in a transitional care unit, his family said.
“John has been moved to a rehab facility, but still has a long road to recovery ahead,” the family said in a statement Monday night.
The family released a photo showing a smiling Hoffman giving a thumbs-up while standing with a suitcase on rollers, ready to leave the hospital.
Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were awakened around 2 a.m. on June 14 by a man pounding on the door of their home in the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin who said he was a police officer. According to an FBI agent’s affidavit, security video showed the suspect, Vance Boelter, at the door wearing a black tactical vest and holding a flashlight. He was wearing a flesh-colored mask that covered his entire head.
Yvette Hoffman told investigators they opened the door, and when they spotted the mask, they realized that the man was not a police officer. He then said something like “this is a robbery.” The senator then lunged at the gunman and was shot nine times. Yvette Hoffman was hit eight times before she could shut the door. Their adult daughter, Hope, was there but was not injured and called 911.
Boelter is accused of going to the homes of two other lawmakers in a vehicle altered to resemble a squad car, without making contact with them, before going to the home of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in nearby Brooklyn Park. He allegedly killed both of them and wounded their dog so seriously that he had to be euthanized.
The chief federal prosecutor for Minnesota has called the lawmaker’s killing an assassination.
Yvette Hoffman was released from the hospital a few days after the attacks. Former President Biden visited the senator in the hospital when he was in town for the Hortmans’ funeral.
Boelter, who remains jailed without bail, is charged in federal and state court with murder and attempted murder. At a hearing Thursday, Boelter said he was “looking forward to the facts about the 14th coming out.”
Prosecutors have declined to speculate on a motive. Friends have described him as an evangelical Christian with politically conservative views.
It will be up to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to decide whether to seek the federal death penalty. Minnesota abolished its state death penalty in 1911.
Erin Patterson, 50, found guilty of murdering her estranged husband’s parents and aunt with poisonous mushrooms.
An Australian woman has been found guilty of murdering her estranged husband’s parents and aunt by serving them a meal laced with poisonous mushrooms.
Erin Patterson was on Monday convicted of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder following a 10-week trial.
Patterson, 50, showed no emotion as the verdicts were read out in the courtroom in Morwell, a regional town located about 152km (94 miles) east of Melbourne.
Patterson’s parents-in-law, Donald and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, died after eating a lunch of beef Wellingtons laced with death cap mushrooms on July 29, 2023.
Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson, was also poisoned but survived after spending seven weeks in hospital.
Patterson, 50, had pleaded not guilty to all charges, with her lawyers arguing that she had unintentionally served her relatives the tainted food in a “terrible accident”.
Prosecutors did not allege a motive for Patterson, but told the jury that her relationship with her estranged husband, who declined an invitation to the lunch, had become strained over his child support contributions.
Prosecutors alleged that Patterson lied about being diagnosed with cancer to lure her guests to the lunch, and that she lied to police about owning a food dehydrator that was later found in a rubbish tip.
Patterson, who spent eight days on the stand, was the only witness called for the defence.
A 92-year-old man has been found guilty of the rape and murder of a Bristol woman in a case that remained unsolved for nearly six decades.
Louisa Dunne, 75, was found strangled on her living room floor by a neighbour on Britannia Road in Easton, Bristol, on 28 June 1967.
Convicted rapist Ryland Headley, of Clarence Road in Ipswich, has now been found guilty of Mrs Dunne’s murder following a trial at Bristol Crown Court.
Senior investigating officer Det Insp Dave Marchant said Headley, who was in his 30s when he killed Mrs Dunne, was “predatory” and said his other crimes were “eerily similar”.
Headley is set to be sentenced on Tuesday.
He was only linked to the mother-of-two’s murder in 2023, when a review of the case uncovered new DNA evidence.
Det Insp Marchant said it was now believed to be the oldest cold case to be solved in the UK.
“This is a marrying of old school and new school policing techniques,” he added.
Mrs Dunne had been twice widowed and lived alone, but was well-known in the local area.
Headley was accused of forcing entry into her home before sexually attacking her and then strangling her.
