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FedEx Driver Who Kidnapped and Killed 7-Year-Old Pleads Guilty on Day One of Trial
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Hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson. Real quick, before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show from Crime House that I know you'll love. America's Most Infamous Crimes, hosted by Katie Ring. Each week Katie takes on one of the most notorious criminal cases in American history. Serial killers who terrorized cities, unsolved mysteries that keep detectives up at night, and investigations that change the way we think about justice. Listen to and follow America's Most infamous crimes Tuesday through Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House. Good morning everyone. We have multiple breaking true crime cases this morning that you need to know about. And we're starting with the biggest one. A seven year old girl vanished from her own yard while a FedEx driver was delivering one of her Christmas gifts. And now, years later, that driver has finally admitted what he did to her. This is crime house 24 7, your non stop source for the biggest crime cases developing right now. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Vanessa Richardson and we have quite a lineup for you today. Here's what you need to know.
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Foreign.
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The capital murder trial of 35 year old Tanner Lynn Horner got underway in Fort Worth, Texas. But it's looking nothing like the guilt or innocence proceeding that so many people have been waiting three and a half years for. Just months after the court feed went live at 9 o' clock in the morning, Horner stood before Judge George Gallagher in Tarrant county and pleaded guilty. Guilty to capital murder, guilty to aggravated kidnapping, both counts all at once on the very first day. That means the jury that was seated to weigh the facts of the case will not be deliberating on Whether Horner killed 7 year old Athena Strand. The question before them now is far more pointed. Should Tanner Lynn Horner be put to death? To understand what the jury will be weighing, we have to go back to November 30, 2022, the last day Athena was seen. Athena was seven years old and lived with her father and stepmother at their home in Cottondale in Wise County, Texas. That evening she'd been sorting laundry in a converted storage shed that served as a bedroom for her and her sister. At 6:41 in the evening, Athena's mother, Elizabeth Strand called 911 after she couldn't find her daughter. She was just gone. Working with FedEx investigators were quickly able to pull surveillance footage from a delivery van that had been at the Strand home earlier that day. The package that arrived that even contained one of Athena's Christmas gifts. The footage showed something that stopped investigators cold a young girl in the back of the van talking to the driver. That driver was Tanner Lynn Horner, a FedEx contract driver. Horner later confessed to police. According to investigators. He told them that he had accidentally struck Athena with the van while backing out of the driveway, but that she wasn't seriously hurt. What happened next is what made this case so devastating, horner said. He panicked. He was afraid that Athena would go back to the house and tell her father what happened. So he made a decision. He took her, he put her in the back of the van and he drove away with her, according to an arrest affidavit. When Horner attempted to break Athena's neck, it did not work, so he strangled her with his bare hands in the back of the FedEx van. Court documents say Athena even told him her name during the time she was in that van with him. When Horner later led authorities to where he had left her body near Boyd in Wise county, not far from the family's home, the Wise county district attorney had made clear from early on that he intended to seek the death penalty, citing Athena's young age and what he described as an unspeakable level of violence. Horner was indicted in February 2023 on charges of capital murder of a person under 10 years old and aggravated kidnapping. He had initially pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in March20, even after having already confessed to police. His defense attorneys later argued that Horner has autism and used that as the basis for motions requesting the death penalty be taken off the table entirely. Those motions have not succeeded. The case was transferred from Wise county to Tarrant county after Judge George Gallagher determined that concerns about a fair trial in the county where the crime occurred were too significant to ignore. The trial has also seen repeated delays. Originally expected to begin in early 20. Jury selection stretched out over months, with final jurors seated on April 1st of this year and the full trial beginning April 7th. But now, with Horner's guilty plea entered on day one, the punishment phase begins immediately. Prosecutors are seeking death. The defense will argue that Horner's autism diagnosis warrants life in prison without the possibility of parole. Instead, it's worth noting that this moment was not entirely without precedent given the circumstances. As mentioned, Horner had already confessed to police back in 2022. His attorneys had spent years since then filing motions, securing delays and working to get the death penalty removed from the table, all while he maintained a not guilty plea in court. But that changed whether the Last minute admission was a strategic move by the defense to influence the jury during the punishment phase or something else remains to be seen. As always, we'll continue to follow this trial closely as the punishment phase gets underway and we'll bring you updates as they we go from Texas to North Carolina now in a case where the danger wasn't a stranger, it was a husband, prosecutors say he poisoned his wife with something you'd find in any medicine cabinet, then spent years trying to cover his tracks. On April 6, a North Carolina paramedic named Joshua Hunsucker walked into a Gaston county courtroom for the first time since being formally indicted last month, and he pleaded not guilty to killing his wife with eye drops. 41 year old Joshua is charged with first degree murder, insurance fraud and obtaining property by false pretense in the death of his wife, 32 year old Stacy Robinson Hunsucker, who died on September 23, 2018 at the couple's home in Mount Holly, North Carolina. Joshua told friends and family that Stacy had died of a heart attack. The couple had two daughters together, and Stacy, who had a history of heart problems and wore a pacemaker, was cremated within two days of her death. There was no autopsy and Joshua filed a claim for more than $250,000 in life insurance just days later. For a time, that appeared to be the end of it. But Stacy Hunsucker had been an organ donor. Because of that, a vial of her blood had been preserved after her death. When investigators later began looking more closely at Joshua's behav, that preserved blood sample became the foundation of the entire case against him. Testing revealed that Stacy had been poisoned with tetrahydrozoline, the active ingredient found in common over the counter eye drops. Prosecutors alleged that Joshua had been secretly squeezing eye drops directly into her drinks. What made that discovery even more incriminating? According to court documents before Stacy's death, Joshua had told two of his co workers that if he ever killed someone, he would do it by poisoning them with eye drops. The murder had taken place in September 2018, but it wasn't until more than a year later that investigators closed in on Joshua. In the meantime, prosecutors say, he was already coming apart at the seams. On November 26, 2019, just days before his arrest, Joshua allegedly set fire to medical equipment aboard a helicopter while working as a paramedic for Atrium Health. Mid flight, the helicopter made an emergency landing. He faces separate charges of burning personal property in connection with that incident. Days later, on December 19, 2019, Joshua was arrested and charged with first degree murder. He posted a 1.5 million dollar bond on Christmas Eve and was released. But the behavior didn't stop there. In February 2023, investigators say Joshua went even further. He staged his own kidnapping, called 911 and told police he'd been pistol whipped, zip tied and injected with an unknown substance while he stopped to change a flat tire and he tried to pin it on his former in laws, Stacy's parents, John and Susie Robinson. Police found no evidence of any attack and instead accused Joshua of fabricating the entire incident to shift blame. He was later charged with witness intimidation and obstruction of justice, accused of spending years surveilling and harassing the Robinsons. Prosecutors say Joshua also poisoned his then 11 year old daughter, identified only as P.H. in court documents, by putting tetrahydrozoline into her drink. The child was hospitalized with low blood pressure, low heart rate, extreme exhaustion and constricted blood vessels. A second drug, O desmethyl Venlafaxine, a medication commonly prescribed for depression and not approved for use in children, was also found in her system and was allegedly found in Joshua truck. Joshua's bond was ultimately revoked in late 2024 and he has remained jailed in Gaston county Since then. On March 11th of this year, a Gaston county grand jury returned a superseding indictment on the murder and fraud charges. He appeared for arraignment on April 6 and entered his not guilty plea. His trial is currently scheduled to begin on September 8th. His defense attorney has filed a motion to move the trial out of Gaston county, citing years of intense media coverage, though a judge not yet ruled on that request. From North Carolina we head to Pennsylvania where a dispute over money between housemates ended with a homeowner dead and his body left along a set of active railroad tracks.
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On April 6, two people were arraigned in connection with the death of a 71 year old Pennsylvania man named Ralph Brown A man author authorities say was killed inside his own home by the very people he'd been trying to get out of it. 30 year old Alicia Riggins and 58 year old Terry Newland both lived with Brown at his home on Crow avenue in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a small city of about 10,000 people located south of Pittsburgh in Fayette County. But according to the Fayette County District Attorney's Office, Riggins and Newland had effectively become squatters, refusing to leave even after Brown had made clear for months that he wanted them out. Last week, tensions came to a head over money. According to the criminal complaint, Riggins and Nuland allegedly hatched a plan to kill Brown and steal from him. Court documents paint a brutal picture of what happened next. Both defendants told police that the violence began after Brown came home around 8:30 in the evening. According to investigators, Newland stabbed Brown with a knife. He then allegedly beat him with a table. Riggins told police that Newland then asked her to place a garbage bag over Brown's head, which she secured with a belt. The Fayette County Coroner's office determined that Brown suffered blunt force trauma to the head and face as well as a laceration to the neck area. After the killing, the two defendants allegedly moved Brown's body to the basement, where it remained for several days. In the early hours of April 4, they reportedly dropped Brown's body, wrapped in a blanket, along an active railway near Kerr Street. His remains were discovered the following on April 5th. Interestingly, when investigators interviewed Newland and Riggins separately, both acknowledged that the dispute had been over money. But neither was willing to take the blame for how it escalated. Each defendant told police that the other person was the one who initiated the conflict, leaving investigators with two people pointing fingers at each other in the aftermath of a man's death. Riggins and Newland were both arraigned in the early morning of April 6. Nuland faces charges of criminal homicide, tampering with or fabricating physical evidence, and abuse of a corpse. Riggins faces the same charges, along with additional counts of theft and using Brown's access device, his debit card, to make approximately $660 in cash withdrawals and charges after his death. Both defendants were sent to the Fayette County Jail without bond. Their preliminary hearings are currently scheduled for April 20th. It's a case that underscore scores, a scenario that can feel impossible to navigate. What do you do when you can't get people out of your home? And for Ralph Brown, it ended in the most tragic way imaginable. He was 71 years old. He owned that house and according to prosecutors, the people he wanted gone made sure he was the one who didn't make it out. Shifting gears, we turn now to South Florida where rapper Offset was shot outside a Casino. On April 6, rapper Offset, born Kiari Kendrell Cephas, was shot outside the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida, just outside Miami. His representative confirmed to multiple outlets that he was stable and receiving medical care. And by the following day, April 7, TMZ obtained footage of Offset outside Memorial Regional Hospital sitting in a wheelchair on what appeared to be a smoke break break, still in his hospital gown with bandages visible on his arm. He's since been released from the hospital. According to a statement from the Seminole Police Department, the shooting occurred after 7pm in the valet area outside the hotel and casino, resulting in non life threatening injuries to an individual who was then transported to Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood. Police said. Two people were detained and an investigation is ongoing. At this time, authorities have not publicly identified a motive or released further details about the circumstances leading up to the shooting. For those who follow hip hop, there's a painful parallel that's impossible not to acknowledge. This morning, Offset was a member of the Grammy nominated Atlanta rap trio Migos alongside his cousin Takeoff and their fellow member Quavo. In November 2022, takeoff was shot and killed after an argument broke out during a private party at a bowling alley in Houston. He 28 years old. Now just a few years later, another member of that group has been shot, though thankfully in this case, Offset's injuries are described as non life threatening. We'll continue to follow this story as more details become available, but as of this recording, Offset has been discharged and is recovering. And for the Migos family, that is a relief that Takeoff's loved ones never got. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson. I wanted to take a brief moment to tell you about another show from Crime House that I know you'll love. America's Most Infamous Crimes. Hosted by Katie Ring. Each week Katie takes on a notorious crime, whether unfolding now or etched into American history, revealing not just what happened, but he how it forever changed our society. Serial killers who terrorized cities, unsolved mysteries that keep detectives up at night, and investigations that change the way we think about justice. Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, released every Tuesday through Thursday. From the first sign that something was wrong to the moment the truth came out or didn't. These are the stories behind the headlines. Listen to and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes Tuesday through Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts. Lastly, let me tell you about what else is happening at Crime House today. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is examining the Raelian Movement, the organization founded in 1970s France after its leader claimed to have been contacted by extraterrestrial beings and which made international headlines in 2002 when it announced it had successfully cloned the first human being. The claim was never verified. The story never went away. The Raelians are a striking example of something that runs through the history of cults more broadly, the gap between how these organizations are remembered and how they actually functioned on a day to day basis. The headlines tend to focus on the doctrine, the leader and the crimes. What gets less attention is everything else. The business, the buildings, the institutions, the products that these groups built, often in plain sight while the world was focused elsewhere. Before you head over to Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes for the full story, here are five famous cults with side hustles most people have never heard of. Number one the Oneida Community. The Oneida Community was a religious utopian group founded in upstate New York in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, who believed that the second coming of Christ had already occurred and that it was therefore possible to live without sin. The community practiced what noise called complex marriage, in which every member was considered married to every other member of the opposite sex and reproduction was subject to a form of selective breeding he called stirpiculture. Children were raised communally rather than by their biological parents. Entry into and exit from the community was tightly controlled, and Noyes himself held near absolute authority over members personal and spiritual lives. By most modern definitions, the Onida Community meets several criteria for what we would recognize as a cult. Its leader claimed divine authority, exercised control over members intimate lives, and discouraged outside relationships. When the community dissolved in 1881, many former members described complicated legacies of coercion and psychological control. What the Onida Community also did with considerable skill was manufacture steel, animal traps, silk thread, and eventually silver. The silverware operation was so successful that when the community restructured itself as a joint stock company upon dissolution, the silverware business became its primary commercial focus. That company became Oneida Ltd. One of the most recognized flatware brands in American history, whose products have appeared on tables in homes, hotels and restaurants for well over a century. Oneida Limited was eventually acquired by another company in the 2000s, but the brand continued. The silverware still bears the name most people who have held a piece of it have no idea. It traces its origins to a 19th century communal religious group that believed in selective human breeding. Number two nxivm. Before NXIVM became internationally known as a criminal organization, one whose leader, Keith Ranieri, was convicted on charges including sex trafficking, forced labor and racketeering, it operated for years as a surprisingly well regarded executive coaching and personal development company. The organization's flagship program, Executive Success Programs, or esp, attracted clients from the corporate world, including employees of Fortune 500 companies. Participants described the curriculum as intense but valuable, built around concepts of rational inquiry, emotional discipline and personal accountability. The sessions were expensive, entry level courses ran into the thousands of dollars and the program was structured as a multi level hierarchy that encouraged participants to recruit others. But the surface presentation was professional, credentialed and largely indistinguishable from other high end corporate training programs of the era. Several prominent business people, politicians and public figures either attended programs or were associated with the organization before its criminal dimensions became public. The Bronfman sisters, heirs to the Seagram's liquor fortune, became significant financial backers after going through the program. At its peak, NXIVM claimed to have tens of thousands of students across multiple countries. The criminal enterprise that prosecutors described the secret inner society called dos, the branding of women, the coercion, was built inside and around a legitimate seeming business operation. The coaching program wasn't just a cover. It was genuinely functional, genuinely attended and genuinely profitable. That combination of surface legitimacy and hidden exploitation is what allowed Nexium to operate for as long as it did did Number three. The Unification Church. The Unification Church, founded by Sun Myung Moon in South Korea in the 1950s, is best known in the United States for its mass wedding ceremonies in which Moon personally matched and married thousands of couples simultaneously, and for the devoted following of members who became known colloquially as Moonies. Moon claimed to be the Messiah, taught that he had been chosen by God to complete the mission of Jesus Christ and built a global religious and commercial empire spanning dozens of countries. In 1982, the Unification Church founded the Washington Times, a daily newspaper in the nation's capital. The paper was not a fringe publication. It was distributed widely, covered national politics, and was read by and cited by figures across the political establishment. For decades. It developed a reputation as a conservative counterweight to the Washington Post, and during the Reagan administration in particular, it was said to be read at the White House. The church subsidized the paper heavily, reportedly to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars over its history, which critics argued compromised its editorial independence. But the paper operated with a genuine newsroom employed professional journalists and broke legitimate news stories. It existed as a functioning piece of American political media for over three decades. Most readers who picked up the Washington Times had no particular reason to connect it to a church whose leader claimed divine authority and whose members signed significant portions of their lives and finances. To its organization, the paper looked like a newspaper. It read like a newspaper. It was also, throughout its history, entirely owned by a cult. Number four Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate is remembered almost entirely through the lens of the March 1997 mass suicide in which 39 members of the group died at a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, having consumed a lethal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka in the belief that their souls would be transported to a spacecraft trailing the Hale Bob Comet. What is far less frequently discussed is how the group paid its bills in the years leading up to that night. Heavens Gate operated a web design company called Higher Source. This was not a vanity project or an internal tool. It was a legitimate business that took on paying clients and delivered professional work. The Internet was still young, and skilled web designers were genuinely in demand. Higher Sources portfolio included real organizations and real websites built by members of the group working at computers inside the compound. Client reviews, where they've been documented, were largely positive. People who hired Higher Source to build their websites received functional, competently designed products delivered by a team that was professional in its communications and reliable in its turnaround. Those clients had no particular reason to know that their web designers lived communally, wore matching black clothes and Nike sneakers, believed the human body was a vessel for an alien soul, and were prepared to leave it behind. The Higher Source website was still online in the immediate aftermath of the suicides, sitting quietly on the Internet while the world processed what had happened to the people who built it. Number five the Rajnishis the Rajneesh Movement, led by Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, later known as Osho, established a commune in rural Oregon in 1981 after purchasing a 64,000 acre ranch in Wasco County. What followed was one of the most remarkable feats of organizational construction in the history of American communal movements. In under three years, the group built a fully functioning city. Rajneesh Puram, as it was called, was incorporated as an official municipality in 1982. At its peak, it housed thousands of residents and included paved roads, a functioning public transportation system, a shopping mall, a hotel, a restaurant, a discotheque, a post office, a fire department, and an airstrip capable of handling commercial, commercial sized aircraft, multiple dams, a sewage treatment plant, and an agricultural operation. That farmed the previously arid land. The construction was accomplished almost entirely by the labor of commune members, many of whom were educated professionals who had left careers in law, medicine, and business to join the movement. The organizational capacity required to build a town from scratch on a timeline of under three years was genuinely extraordinary, whatever one thinks of the ideology that motivated it. Rajneeshpuram also became the site of the first and largest bioterrorist attack in American history, when commune members poisoned salad bars at local restaurants in an effort to influence a county election, sickening 751 people. Its leadership was eventually prosecuted for a range of serious crimes, including attempted murder and wiretapping. The city was dissolved and the land was later sold. It's now the site of a Christian youth camp Camp but for a brief period in the early 1980s, a religious cult built a functioning American city in the Oregon desert, complete with its own government, its own infrastructure, and its own zip code. That part of the story tends to get lost in everything that came after it. For the full story behind the Raelian movement and the claim that changed the conversation around human cloning forever, head over to our Crime House feed for the latest episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crime Crimes. You've been listening to Crime House 24 7, bringing you breaking crime news. I'm Vanessa Richardson. We'll be back tomorrow morning with more developing stories. Stay safe and thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Not sure what to listen to next? Check out America's Most Infamous Cross Crimes, hosted by Katie Ring. From serial killers to unsolved mysteries and game changing investigations, each week Katie takes on a notorious criminal case in American history. Listen to and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes now. Wherever you listen to podcasts.