Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Crime Alert 12.26.22

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

Manhunt for shooter leads to a sinister discovery. A traffic stop develops into a murder investigation. For more crime and justice news go to crimeonline.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Alert, I'm Nancy Grace. Breaking crime news now. Tori Moore gets into an argument with a clerk at a gas station and shoots the man dead. Maryland cops track Moore to an apartment complex across the street and find a decomposing body in Moore's apartment. Investigators think it's Moore's pregnant girlfriend. Nancy Lopez tells cops the stabbing victim was the aggressor and threatened him with a small knife for his wallet. And Lopez

was able to wrestle the knife from the man and use it himself. Lopez had small cuts on his hands and fingers in addition to a puncture wound on his left shoulder. Moore, 31, now charged with two counts of murder one. If she's pregnant, there could be a third count. Think about it, Maryland PD. Nina Cochran, pulled over for reckless driving, tells cops the guy who owns the truck is at home, dead. The 32-year-old says she killed Douglas Nielsen as part of a satanic initiation. Billings, Billings police go to the home and they find Nielsen's body inside. Now Cochran admits in

an interview that he stabbed Nielsen in his Billings home as part of an initiation that the detective would not understand. And Nancy, Cochran also claimed, get this, she was born to become Lucifer and rule over the earth. Cochran, 32, charged with deliberate homicide and Nilsen's death. That whole satanic admission is not going to help her at trial. More crime and justice news after this. Now with the latest crime and justice breaking news, Crime Online's John Limley. A former Missouri deputy who investigated a murder case that became the subject of an NBC

show starring Renee Zellweger is now accused of harassing and stalking a detective who was investigating him for potential misconduct. Mike Merkle was charged and accused of photographing and sending threatening messages to the detective. Merkle was among the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office detectives who initially interviewed Pamela Hupp after Hupp's friend, Elizabeth Betsy Faria, was stabbed to death in 2011. The investigation resulted in a 2013 murder conviction for Faria's husband, Russell Faria.

He was later acquitted and Hupp was charged, a move that resulted in scrutiny of the initial investigation. The case drew national attention and was the subject of The Thing About Pam, which ran on NBC earlier this year. A Kansas City judge has declined to order a new trial for two men who claimed a disgraced police detective helped convict them for a 1997 murder they did not commit. Crime Online's Sydney Sumner. Brian Betts and Celeste McKinney allege that former Kansas City, Kansas detective Roger Golubski and another detective coerced their uncle into identifying them as the shooters in the death of 17-year-old Gregory Miller. Judge Gunnar Sundby ruled the men did not prove their case despite a, quote, cloud of doubt over Golubsky, who was indicted in September on federal charges

that accused him of sexually assaulting and kidnapping a woman and a teenager from 1998 to 2002. He also faces a separate federal indictment alleging he was part of a sex trafficking ring involving girls between 1996 and 1998. The FBI has been investigating allegations that Golubsky, who is white, sexually assaulted black women for decades in Kansas City, Kansas, and exchanged drugs for information during criminal investigations. Golubsky, who is under house arrest, has pleaded not guilty to all charges. A Kansas City man already serving a federal prison sentence for running an illegal autopsy scheme also has been sentenced to serve an additional year in jail on state criminal charges. The Kansas Attorney General's Office announced that Sean Parcels was ordered by a state court judge to serve his 12-month sentence

after he finishes a sentence of nearly six years in federal prison on a wire fraud charge. Parcels is housed in the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, after pleading guilty in May to the wire fraud charge. Parcels also has been banned from doing business in Kansas. Parcels had no formal education in pathology, but made more than $1.1 million in Kansas between 2016 and 2019 from autopsies for more than 350 clients, most of which he did not perform. He gained national attention in 2014 by assisting a privately held pathologist in an autopsy of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old from Ferguson, Missouri, who was fatally shot by a white police officer. Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried

has walked out of a Manhattan courthouse with his parents after they agreed to sign a $250 million bond and keep him at their California home while he awaits trial on charges he swindled investors and looted customer deposits on his FTX trading platform. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Ruse said in federal court that 30-year-old Bankman Freed quote, perpetrated a fraud of epic proportions. Ruse proposed strict bail terms, including the $250 million bond, which he said is believed to be the largest federal pretrial bond ever, and house arrest at his parents' home in Palo Alto. Ruse said an

important reason for allowing bail was that Bankman Freed, who had been jailed in the Bahamas, agreed to be extradited to the U.S. Anthony Tarduno walks out of a Florida bar, sees a marked police SUV. Tarduno, 48, grabs a bag of trash from a dumpster, sets it under the car, and lights it on fire. He then goes back into the bar. Firefighters are called. Tarduno comes back out to tell cops he did it, promptly landing him behind bars for arson. What an idiot! For the latest crime and justice news, go to CrimeOnline.com.

With this crime alert, I'm Nancy Grace. This is an iHeart Podcast.