Why Can't the FBI's Lead Agent Confirm Basic Evidence Collection in Anna Kepner's Case?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Let's go over to another case. Unsealed court documents in the Anna Kepner case lay out what allegedly happened inside that cabin on the Carnival Horizon, and it's worse than most people imagined. Prosecutors say Timothy Hudson choked his 18-year-old stepsister so hard, her eardrums ruptured. I think, Jen, you even said on your tweet this week, we know that was even possible.
DNA recovered from Anna's body points to a Hudson with near certainty. But the FBI's own case agent couldn't say whether anyone swabbed Anna's neck for DNA. That's been a big headline. Where prosecutors allege she was actually strangled, the judge still let Hudson walk out on bond pending trial. Joining me to discuss Jennifer Coffindaffer, retired FBI special agent, host of the podcast Break the Case, wherever you get podcasts and on YouTube, of course, Robin Dreeke, retired FBI special agent, chief of the counterintelligence behavioral analysis program. Let's start with this. Prosecutors say the chokehold lasted three to five minutes, forceful enough to rupture Anna's eardrums. What does that duration and that level of force tell you about what was happening in that cabin, Jen?

**Jennifer Coffindaffer** (1:17)
Well, a lot of people may not know that just within seconds, you're going to be incapacitated with a carotid hold because the carotid arteries that are here, they're going to be cut off and deoxygenate your mind, which is going to cause you to become unconscious. But when you're unconscious, it doesn't mean you are dead. You're strictly unconscious. So to actually manually strangle somebody without a ligature, it means a lot of force and a lot of time. I can't tell you how many cases where the person, when they're debriefed and talk about it, how hard it was to accomplish that. So I'm not at all surprised at the duration because to finally get where there's no pulse, it takes a long time. In fact, I was underwhelmed by the three to five-minute estimation. What I was overwhelmed by was the fact that you could actually cause somebody's eardrums to rupture.
Thinking about it from a tactical medical stance, I was thinking, wait a minute, how does the airflow push out enough to go through the eustachian tubes and go into the ear canals and explode them? This is, I've never heard of a case like that, and that is power.
That's what that is, that is force.

**Robin Dreeke** (2:51)
Yeah, and a lot, a lot of rage coming out and a lot of meditation. So I mean, just again, you do your own thought experiment. If you can ever imagine yourself, a normal human being, so angry with someone that you did something so horrendously stupid that you started choking them out. The second that that person, because Jen and I, when we went through the FBI Academy, you do these, you do actually practice these holds. You do practice chokeholds. And I've passed out from doing these things before. And when someone passes out in your life around you, what's your immediate reaction? Oh my God, you freak out. And you're like hands off. He's like, Oh my God, I've done, I've gone too far. It's a scary thing for the individual that perpetuates it, right?
Even in training for us, it's scarce living, but Jesus out of you. But for him then to move beyond that, to losing, like Jen said, to go to losing pulse for three to six minutes, whatever it was, oh my God, that is someone with a lot of rage and a lot of intent. I think that's not gonna go well for him whatsoever because again, the second you see someone become incapacitated and pass out, it scares living daylights out of it. It really does.

**Tony Brueski** (3:56)
I mean, it's certain. Go ahead, Jen.

**Jennifer Coffindaffer** (3:59)
No, all I was going to say is think about this. Take a certain cylindrical item that has about this big, right? I want you to squeeze on that as hard as you possibly can for three to five minutes. Feel the fatigue. This is not easy to do. Watch a wrestling match that's two minutes long, and the exhaustion that people experience. This is difficult. It's physically difficult.
I'm telling you, it says a lot about this crime.

**Robin Dreeke** (4:35)
Yeah, and I looked it up, Tony, so here it is increased. Cephalic, if I say it right, venous pressure.
Choke hold compresses jugular veins, and feeding blood returned from the brain causes rapid vascular congestion. Pitacea, tiny hemorrhages, basically elevated pressure basically transmitted to the middle ear via blood vessels, and you, I can't pronounce these words. Anyway, yeah, it caused an imbalance in pressures from that much pressure being exerted on the jugulars.