The Most EVIL Case In History! Police Needed THERAPY After Seeing This | True Crime Documentary 

overcome with grief. The woman they trusted to take care of their 2-year-old girl is now behind bars, accused of killing the child. CBS 46’s Melissa Stern live in Sandy Springs tonight. Melissa, this story is awful. The family is heartbroken. >> Well, Rick, I spoke with that little girl’s dad tonight, and they’re obviously very distraught.

 It’s any parents worst nightmare planning their own child’s funeral. The family of 2-year-old Fallon Fidley sent us this video. >> Hey. >> Hey. >> I love you. >> I love her. >> You’re a sweetheart. >> A sweet little girl her family called an angel. Now she’s an angel. And [music] at 10:00 in the morning on December 9th, 2020, a woman named Kirsty Flood picked up her phone and typed a series of questions into a search engine.

 search history that raised serious concern for investigators. So specific, so unusual that when veteran detectives later reviewed it, they went quiet. Not the kind of quiet that comes from shock, the kind that comes from understanding exactly what they were looking at. 3 and 1/2 hours after those searches, Kirsty sent a text to her best friend.

It was casual, friendly. She asked if little Fallon could just stay the night. The kids were having fun, a simple sleepover. Her best friend said yes without hesitation. Why wouldn’t she? Kirsty had a key to her house. She knew her phone password. Her 2-year-old daughter called her TT, short for auntie.

 By the next morning, Fallon Philly had passed away. What investigators uncovered became central to the case. Pulled from that phone and from the security cameras Kirsty herself had installed inside her own apartment. It built a record so thorough that there was no account that was consistent with the evidence.

 No version of events that matched the findings. Her own cameras had documented the events that occurred in that apartment. This is a true crime documentary about a little girl who was called Fallon Sunshine, about a friendship that turned out to be the most dangerous place she could have been, and about the digital trail that made sure the truth came out.

 Anyway, before we go further, drop a comment and let me know what country you’re watching from and what time it is where you are. If you’re new here, subscribe. Every case on this channel is documented, fact checked, and told with the respect these stories deserve. Share this one with someone who needs to hear it.

 Now, let’s talk about Fallon. Fallon Fidley was born in February of 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. Fallon Philly’s life lasted 2 and 1/2 years. That is not a long time to be in the world, but the people who knew her will tell you she made an impression that doesn’t shrink with time. Her mother, Kristen Fidley, was a veterinary technician at Furkids Animal Rescue and shelters in Atlanta.

 She was raising Fallon on her own, and she was doing it well. The kind of mother who showed up, who paid attention, who built a life around her daughter without making it look like a sacrifice. Fallon grew up around animals from the time she could walk. She wasn’t the kind of kid who flinched at a barking dog or a hissing cat.

 She moved toward them, slow, careful, curious, with a gentleness that seemed almost instinctive for a child that young. At home, she set up the tea parties for her stuffed animals. She pretended to give them checkups, mimicking what she watched her mother do. She tucked them in at night with a blanket one by one. Kristen used to say she was pretty sure Fallon was going to be a vet someday.

The people around Fallon started calling her Fallon Sunshine. It wasn’t just a nickname people assigned because she was a cute kid. It fit in a specific way. At the playground, she walked up to children she had never met. She smiled at strangers. She had opinions, too. She could be stubborn.

 She said no with real conviction. But there was something warm at the center of her that people noticed immediately. Every morning she would find her mother and wrap her arms around her neck. Not a quick hug. The full kind. Kristen always said Fallon hugged with her whole body. That was Fallon. That was the child at the center of this case.

 Now, the other person you need to understand is Kirsty Flood. Kristen and Kirsty had been close for 5 years by December of 2020. the kind of clothes and that doesn’t need explaining. They shared holidays. They leaned on each other. They knew the details of each other’s lives, the hard ones and the ordinary ones. Kirsty was a mother herself with two children of her own, and that only deepened the sense of trust between them.

 She wasn’t just a friend. She was the person Kristen had chosen to let all the way in. Fallon had known Kirsty since birth. She called her TT. She treated Kirsty’s home like a second home because, as far as she understood, that’s exactly what it was. Then the summer of 2020 arrived and with it a problem.

 The pandemic shut down Fallon’s daycare permanently. For a single working mother, that was not a small disruption. It was a crisis. Kristen needed someone she could trust to watch her daughter full-time while she worked. The search for that person didn’t take long because Kirsty volunteered before Kristen even had to ask. She said they were like family.

 She said she was there. Kristen said yes. Starting in August of 2020, Kirsty Flood became Fallon’s full-time caregiver. It seemed like the safest possible answer. What Kristen did not know, what she had no reason to go looking for, was sitting in the publicly available court records of Cobb County, Georgia, accessible to anyone willing to run the search.

Before her 21st birthday, Kirsty Flood had been taken into custody five separate times. The charges included assault, alcohol-related offenses, and possession of prescription medication without a prescription. Five incidents, all in the public record, all findable. But here’s the gap in the system that this case exposed.

 A private caregiver, someone hired informally by a family, is not required to pass any kind of official background check before working with a child. That requirement applies to employees at licensed childare facilities. It does not apply to the person your best friend recommends. It did not apply to Kirsty Flood. That gap is where the truth had been hiding.

 For 4 months from August through December of 2020, Kirsty watched Fallon every day and nothing visible suggested that anything was wrong. That would change on December 9th. December 9th, 2020 started like any other Wednesday. Kristen left for work. Fallon went to Kirsty’s apartment. Nothing about the morning suggested it would be the last ordinary day either of them would ever have.

 At 10:00 in the morning, Kirsty Flood picked up her phone. She wasn’t looking up recipes. She wasn’t searching for things to do with the kids. The searches that became important to the investigation were specific and targeted in a way that was difficult to explain away. Investigators who later reviewed that search history described the experience of reading it as one of the details that stayed with them longest.

Not any piece of physical evidence, not any image, just those search terms and the time they were entered. 10:00 in the morning. Fallon was in that apartment with her. 3 and 1/2 hours passed. At 1:30 in the afternoon, Kristine’s phone buzzed. It was a text from Kirsty. Casual and tone, simple, and ask.

 Could Fallon just stay the night? The kids were having a great time. Just a sleepover. 3 and 1 half hours after that search activity, she was asking to keep Fallon there longer. Kristen smiled and said yes. She went about the rest of her workday without a second thought. Around 4:30 that afternoon, she sent a check-in message.

Kirsty didn’t respond immediately. When she finally did, she said everything was fine. They had taken the kids to the park. Then her phone went dark. Calls went unanswered. Messages sat undelivered. Kristen felt a pull of unease, but she talked herself out of it. Kirsty was her closest friend. Fallon was safe.

 There was probably a simple explanation. At 7:30 that evening, Kirsty finally picked up. They moved to a FaceTime call. Kristen could see Fallon in the background, but Kirsty was holding the phone deliberately more than 3 ft away from the little girl, angled so that Kristen couldn’t get a clear look. Kristen started talking to her daughter.

 And at that moment, Kirsty ended the call. Not a drop, an ending. Kristen called back. No answer. She called again. Nothing. The unease she had been pushing aside all afternoon was no longer something she could manage, but she still didn’t know what she was dealing with. She had no framework for what later came to light in the investigation.

 At 9:20 that night, her phone finally rang. It was Kirsty. Her voice was frantic, broken. She said that Fallon had fallen at the playground, that she wasn’t waking up, that the paramedics were already on their way. Kristen doesn’t remember the drive to the hospital. She has said that the only thought she could hold on to was that children fall, that doctors fix things, that her daughter was going to be okay.

At Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the medical team worked on Fallon with everything they had. But when Kristen looked at the faces of the people coming out of that room, she understood before anyone said a word that what she had been telling herself in the car was not going to hold.

 Late that night, crossing into the early hours of December 10th, 2020, efforts to save Fallon were unsuccessful. She was 2 and 1/2 years old. A moment described as overwhelming for those present followed in that hospital corridor. A scene that deeply affected everyone there. The sound of a mother processing something no parent should ever face.

 Also in that hospital that night was Kirsty Flood. She was performing grief, tears, distress, the visible shape of a person devastated by a terrible accident. But the Sandy Springs Police Department was already asking questions. And the answers were not going to come from Kirsty’s expression. They were going to come from her phone.

 The Sandy Springs Police Department opened a criminal investigation the same night Fallon was brought to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. They did not wait for the morning. They did not take the playground story at face value. Something about the timeline, the phone behavior, the circumstances surrounding Fallon’s passing.

 Something told investigators immediately that this case required a closer look. That closer look started with the medical evidence. The forensic examination conducted by the medical team raised serious concerns within hours. The medical assessment did not align with the initial explanation. The clinical evidence pointed in a different direction, one that moved away from the account Kirsty had given and towards something that authorities concluded was not accidental.

 With that determination made, investigators moved fast. They secured Kirsty Flood’s phone. What they found on it restructured the entire case. The search history from the morning of December 9th entered at 10:00 a.m. 3 and a half hours before Kirsty texted Kristen asking to keep Fallon overnight was not the search history of someone who had panicked after an accident. It was not reactive.

 The specific and unusual search activity was not the kind of thing you type when something goes wrong unexpectedly. The searches were targeted in a way that investigators said they could not unread once they had seen them. Veteran detectives who had worked serious crimes for years described that moment of reviewing those search terms as one that stopped them cold.

 Evidence indicated premeditation. The phone established a picture of intent before anything had happened. It placed Kirsty Flood in a position that no explanations could reach. But the phone was not the only thing investigators found. Inside Kirsty’s apartment, she had installed her own security cameras, her own system, her own setup recording inside her own home.

 Investigators pulled that footage. The contents were sealed from the public record to protect the integrity of the proceedings and the dignity of those involved. But what was on those recordings, combined with the phone evidence, built a case that left no account consistent with the evidence, no version of events that matched the findings.

 Her own cameras had documented the incident in the apartment under investigation. Then investigators identified a second person. Kirsty’s boyfriend, Jeffrey Scott Meyers, had been present in the apartment on December 9th. He was there. He was aware of the circumstances surrounding Fallon’s passing and he did not intervene. He did not call for help.

 He did not remove Fallon from the situation. Investigators determined plainly that his decision not to act was not passive. It was a choice. And that choice allowed the situation to reach its conclusion. Two people in that apartment, one child. And no one made the call that might have changed the outcome.

 Kirsty Fled was arrested 2 days after Fallon passed away. When officers took her into custody, she was still performing the role of grieving friend. She cried. She maintained her version of events. She held to the playground story even as investigators were standing in front of evidence that dismantled it entirely.

 Jeffree Scott Meyers was taken into custody in January of 2021. The legal process that followed was not quick. Cases like this rarely are. There were delays, procedural hearings, and legal maneuvering that stretched the timeline across years. Kristen Philly showed up to every single hearing. She sat in those courtrooms and she waited because waiting was the one thing she could still do for her daughter.

 For those following this case as a true crime documentary story, the patience required of that mother over 3 and 1/2 years is one of the most quietly significant details of what came after December 9th. The justice system moved at its own pace. Fallon had been gone for months, then a year, then two, then three, and Kristen kept showing up.

 What finally happened in that courtroom and what Kristen said when she was given the chance to speak is where this case reaches its conclusion. And that is exactly where we are going next. In March of 2024, more than 3 years after Fallon Philly passed away in a hospital in Atlanta, the case finally reached its resolution.

 3 years is a long time to carry something like this. Three years of hearings and continuences and legal proceedings that move on their own schedule, indifferent to the grief sitting in the gallery. Three years of Kristen Fidley walking into courtrooms and walking back out, still without a verdict, still waiting for the system to finish what the evidence had already decided.

 That wait ended in the spring of 2024. Kirsty Flood entered a guilty plea on six charges. She did not go to trial. She did not make the state prove its case in front of a jury because there was no version of a trial that ended differently. The phone, the cameras, the forensic evidence, the timeline. All of it had been sitting in the record for years and all of it pointed in one direction.

 The judge presiding over the case looked at the full picture. the evidence of premeditation, the deception, the cover story, the performance of grief, the three and a half years of legal delay, and handed down a sentence that reflected the weight of what had been established. Life in prison, no possibility of parole.

 Kirsty Fled will not leave prison. That is not a projection or a likelihood. It is the legal reality of what she pleaded guilty to. The woman who had a key to Kristen’s house, who knew her phone password, who Fallon called TT, she will spend the rest of her life incarcerated for the events that occurred in that apartment. Jeffrey Scott Meyers, the man who was present and chose not to act, pleaded guilty to his role in the incident.

 His sentence was 15 years. Investigators and prosecutors have been clear throughout the case that his inaction was not incidental. It was a decision made in real time that contributed directly to the outcome. The court treated it accordingly. Then it was Kristen’s turn to speak. She stood up in that courtroom and she looked directly at the woman who had once been the person she trusted most in the world.

 She spoke about the life that was lost. Not in abstract terms, not about loss in the general sense, but specifically the morning hugs, the stuffed animal tea parties, the way a Fallon moved toward animals instead of away from them. The nickname, the future that was no longer possible. She spoke about raising a child alone and believing that the people you choose to let in are the ones who will protect what matters most to you.

 She spoke about what it means to find out that trust was never real, that the person holding it have been wearing it like a costume. No verdict returns a child. Every person who has followed this case understands that the sentence handed down in March of 2024 was justice in the legal definition of the word.

 It was the system functioning the way it is supposed to function when the evidence is this clear and the circumstances this serious. But Kristen Fidley walked out of that courtroom the same way she had walked into every other one without her daughter. What she has done with that reality since then is the part of this story that deserves to be heard just as clearly as everything that came before it.

 After the verdict, Kristen Fidley did not go quiet. That would have been understandable. Nobody would have blamed her for stepping back from the public conversation, for choosing privacy over advocates, for letting the case close and trying to rebuild whatever life looks like after something like this. She had every reason to do that. She chose the opposite.

 Kristen became a public voice for child safety. She participated in interviews and podcasts. She built a presence on social media around the Justice for Fallon campaign. And she kept returning to the same message, not with an anger at the center of it, but with clarity. She wanted people to understand something specific, something practical, something that might actually change what happens to the next child.

 The message was this. Running a background check on someone before they watch your child is not an act of distrust. It is a reasonable standard of care. It is the same standard applied to every employee at a licensed childare facility in this country. The fact that it does not apply to private caregivers, to the neighbor, the friend, the person your best friend vouches for is not an oversight.

 It is a gap. And gaps have consequences. Kirsty Flood’s record had been sitting in the publicly available court documents of Cobb County, Georgia the entire time, five incidents before her 21st birthday, findable by anyone willing to run the search. But Kristen never ran that search because you do not run background checks on your best friend.

 That is not how trust works. That is not how any of this is supposed to work. And that, Kristen has said repeatedly is exactly the problem. In Georgia, the case sparked a direct legislative conversation about the gap between what is required of licensed childare employees and what is required of private caregivers. Fallon’s name entered that conversation.

A child who spent most of her short life learning how to be gentle toward living things is now part of the policy discussion about how to protect children from the people closest to them. At Fkid’s Animal Rescue and Shelters in Atlanta, where Kristen still works, there is now a memorial fountain dedicated to Fallen.

 It was installed after the verdict. At the dedication, the people who gathered did not talk about the case. They talked about the child, about who she was before any of this happened, about the tea parties and the stuffed animals and the way she walked up to kids she had never met at the playground. The flowing water of that fountain is not a symbol of grief.

It is a marker that says this child was here and she mattered. And that does not stop being true because she is no longer with us. There is one more layer to this case that this true crime documentary would be incomplete without addressing directly. The system fell short of protecting Fallon before a December 9th ever arrived. Not dramatically.

 Not in a way that would have been obvious to anyone watching. It fell short quietly in the space between what the law requires and what common sense would suggest. Private caregivers in Georgia are not screened. They are not checked. The threshold for handing a child to a licensed facility worker and the threshold for handing that same child to a private individual are not the same.

They have never been the same. And this case is one of the clearest possible illustrations of what that gap costs. Kristen Philly did not fall short of her daughter. She made the decision that millions of parents make every single day. She trusted the person she had chosen to trust, the person who had shown her nothing but reason to trust them, the person the system had no mechanism to flag.

 The shortcoming was structural. The cost was the life that was lost. That is the part of the story worth sitting with after the verdict has been read and the courtroom is emptied. Not just what one person did, but what the system allowed to remain invisible until it was too late. Fallon Fiddley lived for 2 and 1/2 years.

 She loved animals and she hugged her mother every morning with everything she had. And she smiled at strangers at the playground and she had a nickname that fit her perfectly. Her life was far too short. The least we can do with the time we have is make sure her story changes something. The investigation continues into the tragic murder of the grandparents and mother of a 15-year-old who cops say was catfished by a police officer pretending to be a teenager.

 Today, grieving family members broke their silence, delivering a desperate plea. They say, “Know what your kids are doing online.” >> Heartbreak and horror for the family in the catfish triple murder case. Nobody could imagine this crime happening to my family, to our family, especially [snorts] it just being one day after Thanksgiving.

 This horrific event started with an inappropriate online romance between a predator and a child. Catfishing led to the deaths of the three most important people in my life. >> [music] [music] >> Friday, November 25th, 2022. 6:58 a.m. Price Court, Riverside, California. Most of the neighborhood was still asleep.

 Thanksgiving had been the night before. Good food, full tables, people staying a little too late. The kind of Friday morning where nothing moves fast and nobody expects it to. At 6:58 a.m., a red Kia soul rolled slowly into the culde-sac and parked. The man who stepped out was dressed in a tan trench coat, a black fedora, and a face covering.

 He was carrying a black duffel bag and a plastic bag. He walked the street unhurriedly, paused outside one house for a long moment, then returned to the car and drove away. Then he came back and did it again. One neighbor found it strange enough to call the Riverside Police non-emergency line at 7:04 a.m.

 She gave them the license plate number. The officer on the line took the note. The man hadn’t actually done anything, so there was nothing more they could do. 2 hours later, at 9:00 a.m., a man inside that same house was on the phone, reassuring a worried daughter that everything was fine. He told her he was a detective. He knew which room belonged to the teenage girl.

He knew what memorabilia was on the walls. He had a badge. He had a reason for being there. He had already been inside for some time. The license plate had been sitting in a log book since 7:04 that morning. This channel covers real cases, the kind that don’t let go of you long after the story ends. If you’re new here, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

 And drop your city in the comments. I always want to know where people are watching from. Now, back to Price Court because before we go any further into what happened that morning, you need to know who lived in that house. Mark Winnick was 69 years old. He had lived in Riverside long enough that the neighborhood knew his routines.

 Most mornings he was already moving, checking on something, fixing something, offering to mow a neighbor’s lawn simply because he had the time and didn’t see a reason not to. He volunteered as a high school softball and baseball coach. And the kids he coached remembered him the way you remember someone who actually showed up. He didn’t just coach the game.

 He checked in on them years later. called them in college to ask how things were going, whether life was treating them right. His wife Sherry was 65. Thanksgiving was her season. The house would fill up, the table would be covered, and she would have been baking for days beforehand. Her daughter Michelle later recalled the debate the family had gotten into.

 Heated enough to be memorable about whether Sherry’s brownies should be frosted with sprinkles or left plain. That argument happened the last time Michelle saw her parents alive. Brooke was 38. Sherry and Mark’s daughter, a single mother to two girls. Her eldest had just joined the color guard at school, and Brooke had been telling anyone who would listen.

She collected Starbucks cups. She raised her daughters in that house on Price Court, surrounded by her parents. Then that Friday morning, she had taken her girls out so the house would be quiet. By 9:00 a.m., she was on her way back. At 9:00 a.m., Brooke pulled up to the house on Price Court with her eldest daughter.

 Following the instructions the man inside had given over the phone. Her daughter stayed in the car. Brooke went in alone. Inside that house, her parents were already bound. Michelle, still out in town, sent a text to her mother asking for an update. No reply came. She tried calling. Nothing. At 11:08 a.m., dispatchers at the Riverside Police Department received a welfare check call.

 Two neighbors had been watching a man leave the house on Price Court with a teenage girl. What they described to the operator stopped the call take her cold. The girl had no shoes on. She was visibly distressed. And as she walked toward the red Kia Soul parked in a neighbor’s driveway, the same driveway whose owner had reported that license plate at 7:04 that morning, she was mouththing words at the people watching her. Silent words.

 No one could make out what she was saying. The homeowner stepped outside and told the man he couldn’t park there. The man was calm, apologetic, said he was leaving. He opened the rear passenger door and the girl got in. He walked around to the other side, placed the black duffel bag in the back seat, and as he turned, a neighbor caught a glimpse of red spots on his clothing.

 Before the door closed, the girl whispered two words. Help me. The car pulled away. Minutes later, Michelle’s phone lit up. A Facebook message from a neighbor of her parents. Please call me ASAP. Then the call started coming into the Riverside Police Department from a different direction entirely. A house was on fire at Price Court.

 Michelle and her husband got in the car and drove. She called her mother, her father, her sister over and over the whole way there. No one picked up. When they pulled up to Price Court, the windows of the house had already started shattering from the heat. The roof was going. Firefighters worked urgently to reach the interior of the home as the fire spread.

 They found Mark, Sherry, and Brooke near the front door, close together, as though they had been trying to reach each other. Investigators immediately recognized the scene as a targeted and deeply tragic crime. None of them survived. They were already gone. Michelle tried to run through this police tape. Officers pulled her back. Her parents’ cars were still parked outside.

 Her sister’s car was still there. A short while later, sitting at the police station, Michelle described the morning, the phone calls, the man who knew about the Green Bay Packers memorabilia, the badge, the calm voice that had taken the phone from her mother, and told her everything was going to be okay. When she told officers about the tattoos on her father’s arms, a Green Bay Packers logo on his left, a Notre Dame mascot on his right, the confirmation she had been trying to avoid arrived without anyone having to say a word.

 Her mother, father, and sister were gone, and her 15-year-old niece was somewhere in a red Kia Soul, heading in an unknown direction with a man no one could yet identify. The autopsy later confirmed that all three family members died during the attack. Evidence indicated that Brooke had fought to protect herself and her family.

 Mark is believed to have been the first family member killed. Three of the family’s dogs and their pet bird perished in the fire. A fourth dog, which had been in the backyard, survived. That detail, the license plate logged at 7:04 a.m. and sitting untouched in a non-emergency log book, was now the only thread law enforcement had to follow.

 At 11:08 a.m., the license plate the neighbor had called in at 7:04 that morning became the most important piece of information the Riverside Police Department had. It was the only thread connecting a man, a missing teenager, and three people dead inside a burning house on Price Court. Officers ran the plate.

 The red Kia Soul came back registered to a 28-year-old man named Austin Lee Edwards, an address in Virginia. Law enforcement began working to locate the vehicle immediately. What came next moved fast. Using the plate, officers tracked the Kia Soul as it traveled east out of Riverside, pushing into the unincorporated desert terrain of Kell, San Bernardino County.

 The road out there is the kind that disappears into nothing. Flat, empty, no exits, no cover. A SWAT team converged. A helicopter was in the air. At approximately 1:30 p.m., officers caught up to the vehicle on that remote stretch of road and moved to stop it. Austin Lee Edwards pulled over. A confrontation with law enforcement followed almost immediately.

During the encounter, the teenager managed to escape the vehicle and reach officers safely. Within seconds, Austin Lee Edwards was dead. Some reports indicate he turned the weapon on himself. Others indicate he was struck by law enforcement fire. The precise sequence has never been fully confirmed. What was confirmed? The 15-year-old girl was alive. She was physically unharmed.

She was taken into protective custody. When Michelle received word that her niece had been found alive, she publicly thanked the neighbor who had called in that license plate at 7:04 a.m. and then called again during the welfare check and said without hesitation that persistence saved her niece’s life.

 Back in Riverside, investigators were now standing inside the wreckage of the house on Price Court, trying to reconstruct every minute of what had happened between 6:58 a.m. and the moment the fire was reported. And in Virginia, at almost exactly the same time all of this was unfolding, a woman was filing a missing person’s report.

Her boyfriend of 5 years had been with her in San Diego for Thanksgiving. They had spent several days together at her parents’ home. Then, without warning, he had started packing. He told her he had run out of vacation time and needed to drive back to Virginia. He had just purchased a house there and needed to get back.

 The drive would take well over a day. It hadn’t been the plan. Something felt off. She filed the report. She did not yet know that her boyfriend had not driven toward Virginia. He had driven toward Riverside. And she would soon learn that the man at the center of a triple homicide and an abduction in California was the same man she had been sitting across the Thanksgiving table from just days before.

 Investigators now turned to the teenager herself. In her interview, she told police something that reframed the entire case. She knew Austin Lee Edwards. Not in person, but she knew him. They had met on Omegle, a free online platform that pairs strangers in anonymous one-on-one chat sessions. No account or registration required.

 Users appear to each other only as you and stranger. She had been honest with him about her age from the beginning. He had told her he was 17. At some point, Austin had begun requesting photographs of a sexual nature. When she refused and stopped responding to him, the contact ended, at least from her side. Investigators could not determine precisely how long the two had been communicating or how Austin had obtained her home address.

 But the answer to that second question was now the central threat of the entire investigation. Somewhere in the digital record, across platforms, across accounts, across what would eventually be cataloged as more than 1 million pages of social media content, was the moment Austin Lee Edwards found out where she lived. Detectives offered two possible theories for what had happened on Price Court.

The first, that Austin had gone there to silence her, to eliminate the people around her before she could tell anyone what he had asked her for. The second, that he had intended to take her, believing that if she was with him, she couldn’t speak to anyone. Neither theory could be ruled out. >> A huge showing of support for the three family members killed inside this home.

You can see the candles and flowers left after the vigil that happened out here with this community that is left in mourning. They are heartbroken and detectives are still trying to piece together everything that happened. A community gathers outside the Winnick family home on Price Court [music] in Riverside.

 neighbors holding vigil for the family killed the day after Thanksgiving. At the vigil, the victim’s daughter thanked to the community for all of its support. >> Thank you for being here, honoring my family, to see all of you out here supporting and giving us your strength. We really need it and we are really appreciative.

 Members of the Arlington High School baseball team among those at the home last night because Mark Winnick was their coach. The team tweeted out the world won’t know what he meant to the team and other athletes and students who showed up said he touched their lives as well. Cuz we didn’t have rides home after school.

 He would always talk to us for an hour and uh he I know he didn’t like it but we’d always try to keep him away from baseball cuz you were so jealous cuz you guys kind of stole him from us. But um we loved every second with him. Uh one of my favorite memories is when my sister hit a walk-off and uh he just gave my sister and I a big hug after the game.

 We are here to support her and the rest of their family um to make sure that they have peace as they’re going through this process of heartbreak and of a loss of not just one person but three. >> Joy organized the candlelight vigil. She says Mark Winnick was a local coach and he always kept a watchful eye over the neighborhood. >> I just feel so much sorrow for the family and I wish I could do more and more and more.

>> Investigators say after setting the home on fire, the suspect left with another relative. It’s not clear if she went willingly, but the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department confirms she’s now safe after a pursuit Friday afternoon near Needles. Deputies say the suspect was shooting at them, but eventually deputies shot and killed the suspect.

Both agencies investigating this complicated case say they expect to release new information very soon. As for the family, I talked with a relative who says they will soon start fundraising for those three funerals. Exciting news for the Virginia State Police. The department is welcoming 58 new troopers. I’d like to remind you graduates of the 135th basic session.

 We picked you because you’re the best. You’re the best. On Friday, the 135th class of the Virginia State Troopers were presented their diplomas during commencement at the State Police Training Academy. The new troopers have received 1300 hours of classroom and field instruction in more than 100 different subjects.

 During the ceremony, Glender Glenn Yncan spoke saying that he’s excited for the beginning in the Commonwealth with this new class of troopers. >> Austin Lee Edwards, Division One in Reich. >> Austin was dead and could not answer for himself. What the messages did show clearly and without ambiguity was obsession.

 The investigators who reviewed them described a pattern of fixation that had been building for an unknown period of time toward an inevitable point of escalation. The investigation was no longer just about what had happened on Price Court. It was about who Austin Lee Edwards actually was and how he had ever been allowed to carry a badge.

 The license plate had cracked the immediate chase. But the deeper case, the one that explained how three people ended up dead in a house on Price Court on Thanksgiving weekend, cracked open on Instagram while investigators in Riverside and Virginia were still piecing together Austin Edwards movements. And now to developing news out of Riverside.

 It was last week when three family members were found murdered and their homes set ablaze in Riverside. Investigators say the murders were linked to a catfishing scheme carried out by a 28-year-old Virginia law enforcement officer. The suspect Austin Edwards here allegedly portrayed himself as a teenager to develop an online relationship with the teen daughter of one of the murder victims.

He then reportedly drove across the country to meet the girl and is then accused of murdering her mother and two grandparents and trying to abduct her as well. >> Never imagined anything, you know, like this and was actually very very happy to have an officer living behind me. You know, I felt safe. >> According to Smith County, Virginia records, Edwards also recently purchased a home in Saltville from Jacob Gordon.

 I had the house on the market for just a few hours and, you know, I got a full price offer and, you know, was told it was a Virginia State Trooper. He was only behind me for about 8 days. Um, you know, he was actually very nice, accommodating. He offered to help me on my home. >> After purchasing the home, it appears he blacked out windows and put up dark curtains.

>> Thought it was really weird. And then, of course, the owner told me also that uh he required that they sent the video of the basement. I mean, he didn’t see the per property before he purchased it, but he required a video of the basement, which seemed really weird to us. Um, and of course, the guy who lived in front of him that I know, he said that he had a very strange presence, that the guy was very weird, kept creepy, kept in his house, he didn’t get out a lot.

 Short time here, he had already set off alarms. >> Gordon still processing the news out of California. >> It still doesn’t feel real. It’s something you you never dream of. any of us are impressionable. Well, if you can imagine back when you were 15, there just you trust people and it’s just a different world out there and people have to realize that >> this guy’s a monster. He’s a predator.

We believe at this point that this suspect was the only one involved in the murders and in setting the fire. The online deception, catfishing, other techniques happens daily. It’s probably going on right now somewhere in the country in our county. As much as being a parent isn’t fun sometimes, I have been there.

 Uh you’ve got to check their devices. Um put filters, you know, have parental controls on these things. We don’t even feel comfortable uh affiliating him with law enforcement because that’s not what someone in law enforcement is about. >> A 21-year-old woman in another state was scrolling through her feed when a photograph stopped her cold.

 She recognized the face. She read the story attached to it. Then she read it again and then by her own account she nearly became physically ill. She had her own history with Austin Lee Edwards. It had started years earlier on Omegle. The same platform, the same anonymous pairing system. She had been 13 years old. Austin had been 20.

 When she told him she couldn’t because her mother was home, he sent a message investigators would later describe as deeply disturbing and threatening. She eventually cut contact. He made new accounts. He always found a way back. The harassment continued until she was 18 years old, at which point it stopped entirely and abruptly.

 Investigators noted that the timeline of when Austin’s contact with this young woman ceased aligned closely with the period in which he is believed to have begun communicating with the 15-year-old girl on Price Court. That detail at the time meant nothing to anyone watching. Later, it meant everything. But buried inside those 4,000 messages was something else.

a separate thread that pulled the investigation in an erection no one had anticipated. In 2016, 2 weeks after the then 14-year-old had told Austin she no longer wanted any contact with him, police had been called to the Edwards family home. Austin’s father, Christopher, had made the call. Austin Lee Edwards was 28 years old.

 He lived in Washington County, Virginia, in a small town of fewer than 2,000 people, where he had purchased a home less than 2 weeks before he drove to California. His neighbors described him as friendly, approachable, the kind of person who made people feel it. >> The Virginia State Police officer who kidnapped a 15-year-old girl in Riverside and killed her family had a glaring red flag on his record that apparently was not detected by Virginia authorities.

>> And the fact that he was a law enforcement officer gave the people around him an additional sense of security. He was someone you felt safe knowing was nearby. He had moved in and almost immediately began blacking out every window in the house. Less than 10 days after those curtains went up, Austin Lee Edwards was dead in the California desert and the Winn family was gone.

 On the surface, nothing that would have drawn attention. That was the exterior. What the record showed underneath it was something else entirely. In 2016, officers responding to a call at the Edwards family home found Austin’s father, Christopher, physically restraining his son on the kitchen floor. The floor was covered in blood.

 Christopher had bite marks across both arms. Officers drew a taser. Christopher told them to put it away. He could handle it. He was still trying to protect his son. Austin was eventually handcuffed, strapped to a stretcher, and transported to a psychiatric facility for emergency evaluation. When asked what had triggered the episode, he said he’d had an argument with his girlfriend.

 His girlfriend at the time was the 14-year-old girl he had been grooming online for over a year. the same girl who had just told him two weeks earlier that she wanted no further contact with him. A judge reviewing the case made two findings. First, that Austin posed a substantial likelihood of seriously harming himself or others in the near future as a result of mental illness.

 Second, that his firearm rights were to be stripped under Virginia state law, a provision that applies to anyone admitted to a treatment facility under a temporary detention order until a court formally restores those rights. His gun rights were never restored. When Austin applied to the Virginia Law Enforcement Academy in July 2021, he disclosed on his application that he had voluntarily checked himself into a mental health facility.

 That disclosure triggered a mandatory mental health evaluation. He failed it. His application listed three references. His father Christopher, a close friend, and his Virginia State Police field training officer. Despite the failed evaluation, despite the court ordered removal of his firearm rights that had never been reversed, despite a mental health history that a judge had formally documented as a risk to himself and others, Austin Lee Edwards was accepted.

The Virginia State Police buried the results of the mental health examination. No further evaluation was conducted. No additional inquiry was made into that section of his application. He was handed a badge and a firearm he was legally prohibited from owning. He graduated. He joined Henrio County within the Richmond division.

 He resigned after a couple of months. No reason documented in his personnel file. A month later, he was back in uniform. This time as a deputy sheriff with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. Arteudo, interim police chief of the Aurora, Colorado Police Department and a nationally recognized policing expert, said the speed of Edwards’s career trajectory alone should have raised flags.

Moving through an academy and almost immediately turning around and leaving is not a typical pattern, he noted. And most departments would be unlikely to bring on someone with that kind of brief, fractured work history, unless they put him through their own academy first. Nobody asked those questions. And in a small town in Washington County, behind blacked out windows in a house he had owned for less than 10 days, Austin Lee Edwards had been preparing to drive to California.

 The neighbor who had reported his license plate at 7:04 a.m. had seen something that didn’t fit. She had trusted that instinct and made the call. The people who had reviewed Austin Edwards application had seen something that didn’t fit, too. They had buried it. The case against Austin Lee Edwards did not rest on a single piece.

 It was built in layers, each one closing off another exit, each one making the picture harder to look away from. It began with placement. Surveillance footage and cell phone data positioned Austin Lee Edwards at Price Court on the morning of November 25th, 2022 in the precise window between 6:58 a.m. and the welfare check call at 11:08 a.m.

 The red Kia Soul captured on a neighbor’s footage logged by a non-emergency operator and later tracked by law enforcement across two counties placed him there before, during, and after the deaths of Mark Sherry and Brook Winnick. That was the foundation. What followed was the weight. Physical evidence recovered from the scene and from Edward’s vehicle connected him directly to the interior of the house.

 The black duffel bag recovered from the Kia soul contained materials consistent with the bindings used on the victims. Additional forensic evidence recovered during the investigation further connected Edwards to the crime scene. Brook Winnick had fought. The forensic evidence confirmed it.

 Her injuries told investigators she had not been subdued easily or quickly, and the physical evidence on Edwards’s person reflected that resistance. Then came the digital record. Investigators working through Edward’s devices and accounts were facing a data set of staggering scale. More than 1 million pages of social media content flagged for review.

 But within the material already secured, a clear behavioral thread had emerged. The messages recovered by the now 21-year-old woman, nearly 4,000 of them timestamped across multiple years, documented a pattern of predatory contact that began when she was 13 and did not end until she was 18. Those messages established not only a history of targeting minors online, but a specific methodology, anonymous platforms, false age representation, escalating requests, and sustained harassment across multiple accounts when initial contact was blocked. The

timeline of when that contact ceased aligned directly with the period investigators believe Edwards began communicating with the 15-year-old girl on Price Court. That detail alone reframed everything. Then there was the 2016 psychiatric detention record. The judge’s written finding and that Austin Edwards posed a substantial likelihood of seriously harming himself or others as a result of mental illness had been entered into the court system.

 The corresponding firearm restriction had been entered into the legal record. Neither had been entered into the database query during his law enforcement hiring process. Virginia State Police would later acknowledge this in a formal statement. The language they used was careful and institutional. Human error had resulted in an incomplete database query.

 If the full record had been returned, they said Edwards would not have been hired. He had failed his mandatory mental health evaluation. That result had been deliberately set aside. No follow-up examination had been conducted. He had been handed a firearm. he was legally prohibited from owning under Virginia state law.

 He had carried that firearm as a sworn law enforcement officer for months across two separate agencies. And on the morning of November 25th, 2022, he had carried it into a house on Price Court in Riverside, California. The teenager recovered from the Kia soul in the California desert confirmed the online contact.

 She confirmed that she had been honest with Edwards about her age. She confirmed that he had presented himself as 17. She confirmed that when his request turned inappropriate, she had ended contact. She had done everything right. The evidence stacked in its entirety, told a story that required no interpretation. A man with a documented psychiatric history, a court ordered firearm prohibition, a failed psychological evaluation, and a yearslong record of targeting minors online had been processed through two law enforcement hiring systems. And both had placed a

badge and a weapon in his hands. On Price Court, the Winnick family had opened their door to what they believed was a detective. The badge was real. The authority it represented had been granted by institutions that had every reason and every available tool to know better. Austin Lee Edwards would never sit in a courtroom.

 He died on that empty stretch of road in San Bernardino County on the afternoon of November the 25th, 2022. The same day, he had walked into a house on Price Court wearing a badge that should never have been issued to him. The legal reckoning when it came was aimed at the institutions that had made impossible.

 In the weeks following the deaths of Mark Sherry and Brook Winnick, the failures that had allowed Austin Edwards to carry a firearm and a badge began surfacing one by one in public record. The Virginia State Police issued a formal statement acknowledging that human error had resulted in an incomplete database query during the hiring process.

 The failed mental health evaluation, the one that had been conducted, documented, and then set aside without follow-up, was confirmed. The court-ordered firearm prohibition never entered into the query database was confirmed. Their conclusion, it was an isolated incident. The Washington County Sheriff released a statement describing Edwards as an evil and wicked person who had infiltrated law enforcement while concealing his true identity as a predator.

 The Virginia State Police took a different position that during his time in uniform, Edwards had displayed no red flags, received no reprimands, generated no complaints, and had never been the subject of a use of force review or internal investigation. He was, by their account, well regarded. Michelle Blandon, who had lost her mother, her father, and her sister in a single morning, listened to those statements.

 For a significant period of time, she said, >> “Good morning, and thank you for everyone for being here today. My family and I truly appreciate the love and the compassion that we have received thus far in this trying time. If something like this horrific tragedy can happen here in our neighborhood, in our community, it can happen anywhere.

In [snorts] this tragic moment of our family, our grief, we hope some good will come from this. Parents, please, please know your child’s online activity. Ask questions about what they are doing and whom they are talking to. Anybody can say they’re someone else and you could be in this situation which I do not want for the world.

 This horrific event started with an inappropriate online romance between a predator and a child. We have some solless that this person will never harm anyone again. But we also want to make it very clear that we do not applaud his death. This was an adult that traveled across the country to kidnap a 15-year-old girl, my niece, our niece, our family member.

 He took an oath to protect and yet he failed to do so. Instead, he prayed on the most vulnerable. When you hear the term catfishing, you think of a longunning dating show or series about a national sports figure, both glamorizing and sensationalizing online relationships. However, in this instance, catfishing led to the deaths of the three most important people in my life.

 Please parents, guardians, when you are talking to your children about the dangers of their online actions, please use us as a reference. Tell our story to help your parenting, not out of fear, but out of example of something that did happen. There are no words for the gratitude we feel for the outpouring of support that we have received and I know that we will continue to receive from my two young nieces who are now left motherless.

We hope that this community can wrap your arms around them and lift them up. They have the most difficult journey ahead as they are minors and they don’t understand everything that has happened. We hope and we ask that this community continue to shelter them. Please positively support them. >> Not one department apologized.

 Not one agency reached out to acknowledge what the family had lost or what the institutional failures had cost them. Eventually, the Virginia State Police issued a fuller accounting. Governor Glenn Youngan formally requested a comprehensive investigation by the state’s independent watchdog agency. The agreement that followed allowed Virginia State Police to conduct a significant portion of the investigation into themselves.

Michelle and her family filed a notice of intent to sue. Their attorneys outlined a case built around negligent hiring, gross negligence, breach of mandatory duties, and multiple violations of Virginia state law. The argument was straightforward and devastating. Austin Edwards had been given a firearm by two separate law enforcement agencies despite a legal prohibition that was already on record.

The family’s claimed damages exceeded $100 million. Michelle framed it in one sentence. We want to know why this person was able to get hired by not one but two agencies and given a firearm when he couldn’t legally buy one. There was no trial. There was no confession. There was no moment in a courtroom where a verdict was read aloud and a family could watch a door close.

Austin Edwards ensured there would never be a trial when the events in the California desert came to an end that afternoon. What the family was left with instead was a process slow, institutional, and incomplete. Investigators continued working through Edward’s devices, his accounts, and the more than 1 million pages of flag digital content, looking for additional victims, and trying to assemble a cheer a fuller picture of how long this had been building and how far it had reached.

 Authorities acknowledged publicly that the full scope of his online activity might take years to fully document and that some of it might never be known. In Riverside, the community held its own form of reckoning. Price Court, the quiet culde-sac where Mark and Sher Winnick had built their life, where Brooke had raised her daughters, where neighbors had watched a family be carried out of a burning house on the Friday after Thanksgiving, was ceremoniously renamed.

 It is now called Vinn Court. The street sign sits next to where their home once stood. It was the community’s way of saying that what happened there would not be the last word on who that family was, that the address would carry their name forward, not the name of what was done to them. Riverside Police Chief Larry Gonzalez, speaking publicly in the aftermath, did not reach for careful language.

 He said it plainly, it was disturbing. It was disgusting. And that within law enforcement, people like Austin Edwards were despised more than anywhere else. because what he had done was a direct reflection on every person who wore a badge with integrity. He closed with a message directed not at investigators or institutions but at parents.

 If you’ve already talked to your children about how to stay safe online, have that conversation again. If you have not started it yet, start now. Mark Winnick coached kids who were not his own and treated them like they were. He checked in on them years after they had moved on, called them in college, asked how life was going, whether they had found their footing.

 The school paid tribute to him after he was gone. And former players said he had shaped not just how they played, but what they wanted to do with their lives. His neighbor remembered a man who never stopped moving, who would offer to mow your lawn, not because you asked, but because he was already outside and saw that it needed doing.

 Sherry lived for the calendar. Thanksgiving, Christmas, the occasions that pulled everyone back under one roof. She would have been baking days before the family arrived. the brownies that sparked the debate about frosting and sprinkles. The argument that turned heated the way only family arguments about small things can. Michelle did not know when that debate was happening that it would be the last time she and her husband sat with her parents and her sister in the same room.

Brooke was proudest when she was watching her daughters. Her eldest had just joined the color guard at school and Brooke had been telling everyone she collected Starbucks cups. She was a single mother who built her children’s world inside that house on Price Court, surrounded by her parents. And she was still doing that on the morning of November 25th, 2022 when she pulled into the driveway and went inside.

 What was taken from this family was not abstract. It was Thanksgiving next year and the year after that. It was the brownie debate that will never happen again. It was Brooke watching her daughter perform. It was Mark calling a former player in college just to check in. It was Sherry’s kitchen in December. The kind of warmth that only exists because someone decided to create it year after year.

 The street where it happened carries their name now. Winn court, Riverside, California. A neighbor who trusted her instincts at 7:04 on a Friday morning made a call that brought one member of this family home alive. She did not hesitate. She saw something that didn’t fit and she said something. That one call was the difference. If this story moved you, share it with someone today.

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