The Crash: Did the Investigation Against Mackenzie Shirilla Get It Right?

**Tony Brueski** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
The Mackenzie Shirilla case was prosecuted as murder, not manslaughter, for reckless homicide. Four counts, the evidence, surveillance footage, the car accelerating to nearly a hundred miles per hour before impact. Black box data showing full throttle with zero braking, 93,000 text messages, that's over the lifetime, not in that one ride, although that would be impressive, and a prior threat to crash the car. No confession, no note, no witnesses to intent. This next part here, we're going to break down how the evidence was interpreted and whether the investigative approach actually holds up or whether a narrative got built around ambiguous data and never got challenged. I want to start with the bracelet, because that is a piece of the evidence here. Yeah, I took a hard look at this. The bracelets, she had a bunch of them on.
I've watched social media on this and I've been just silently observing everybody's reactions over the weekend on this case as they're watching the doc. There's a lot of kerfuffle, if you will, I don't know where that word comes from, but I like it, kerfuffle, around the bracelets. How heartless, how she doesn't, she's more concerned about her vanity, about her bracelets. Take a step back, look at the context. No, she even says in the damn video, these were the last things that her boyfriend gave to her and she doesn't want them cut when she's being arrested. I think that's a reasonable request, especially if, and by all evidence that we have seen, or at least some of the evidence we have seen, I'm sorry, this girl did miss her dead boyfriend. The way she's processing it, we can speak to that in different ways because it seems a little discombobulated. But there was plenty of footage in that doc that showed her, with what I would classify when I look at it, is genuine grief and remorse. Standing, sitting at the grave site with the dad of one of the victims and they were trying to do, they were trying to communicate with him through the dead.
Doing, Todd, what was that called?

**Todd** (2:23)
It's a pendulum.

**Tony Brueski** (2:24)
Pendulum, the pendulum.

**Robin Dreeke** (2:25)
Kind of doing the Haddock Ouija board.

**Tony Brueski** (2:27)
Yeah, yes, exactly. And it's like, okay, I mean, if that makes you feel good. And I'm sorry, if you watch that little piece of footage, that girl was genuine, that was not a fake crying. I don't know, I mean, I felt it to be pretty genuine. I'm getting off topic. Back to the bracelets, thoughts on the bracelets. I don't think that that was a vanity issue there.
It was a self-centered thing, but it was true to her. It was her last piece of her boyfriend that she still had. Thoughts on the bracelet kerfuffle?

**Robin Dreeke** (2:58)
Yeah, and good pickups on that. And so I think a lot of the kerfuffle people are having and calling it, because it really is 50-50 on, you could see it as someone on a psychopathy scale. This is as a trophy, it's insensitive, it's used as a manipulation of someone else's emotions towards me.
Yeah, possibly. But at the same time, I'm on your side with this, there was genuine emotion there for a true connection she felt, which is very empathetic. As well as, see, I saw this as a continuing, kind of going back to some of the things you're saying, not off topic, but a continuum of the same toning, that is, the thing that really struck me first with her, believe it or not, was her response at the hospital. Again, it was related through her parents when they told her that Dom was dead. Quote, because I had to write it down. I've watched it twice. It's not him. It's not him. Please go check.
In tears, wailing, crying, that quote, that is not someone with the intent to kill. That's not the intent. That is not the someone. That is not the response. Someone on impulse without premeditative thought about what to say, which is what psychopathy does, is they have to premeditate what to say because they're empty shells like Kohbeger, right? Or Corey Richens, who has to read from her kid's book that was ghostwritten for, right?
That was an impromptu response to a stimulus of knowledge that's coming in from the outside. Very connected. That is exactly the response you get from someone who unexpectedly tragically lost someone that they cared very deeply about. And then when you have the next data point of the bracelets, and again, how she responded to it, it wasn't a show. It wasn't for grandstanding. It was very genuine, in my opinion, as well. What happens though, when we don't like someone and she's extremely unlikable, we will have our confirmation biases. It's easy to then fill in all these data points of saying, she's nothing but horrible. And so I think people are going on that other side because it's easy to confirm, hey, there's no data point of what a horrible human being she is. But with the emotion that she delivered behind it, it wasn't psychopathic in any context for me. It was real to me.