Inside the Anna Kepner Cruise Tragedy: What SHOCKING Family Statements Reveal!
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3 • 791 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this interview, former FBI Special Agent Robin Dreeke breaks down how investigators read these conflicting accounts. What signals truth? What signals narrative-protection? And how do you tell the difference between a family genuinely blindsided — and a family rewriting history?
We explore the grandparents’ “everything was fine” statements, the ex-boyfriend’s drastically different perspective, the minimized reports of chokeholds, and the strange detail that sleeping arrangements were handled through a travel agent rather than the teenagers themselves. Stacy presses an important question: what does that say about the family’s communication — and who was actually being considered?
This is a breakdown of behavior, messaging, and the subtle cues investigators look for when tragedy fractures a family story.
#AnnaKepner #CruiseInvestigation #RobinDreeke #FamilyDynamics #TrueCrimePodcast #HiddenKillers #TonyBrueski #BehavioralAnalysis #JusticeForAnna #CrimeBreakdown
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Bruske, Stacey Cole and Todd Michaels. |
| 0:08.8 | Let's move on to another case. |
| 0:11.4 | 18-year-old Anna Kepner died on a cruise ship, her 16-year-old stepbrother, is the suspect. |
| 0:16.8 | Since then, we've heard wildly different accounts. |
| 0:19.5 | Grandparents saying everything was fine. |
| 0:22.4 | You know, and I get it. |
| 0:23.6 | They're grandparents. |
| 0:24.4 | They're going to see things through their prisms. |
| 0:25.9 | Parents pushing the happy, blended family narrative, the three amigos. |
| 0:30.6 | While the ex-boyfriend and other stepbrother describe aggression, chokeholds, and tension. |
| 0:36.1 | The adults claim they never saw that. |
| 0:39.3 | So how do investigators read these statements? What signals truth and what signals damage control? |
| 0:46.5 | Robin Drake, retired FBI special agent, former chief of the counterintelligence. Behavioral |
| 0:50.5 | analysis program is with us to help break all of this down. Robin, when you're looking |
| 0:55.4 | at conflicting statements from family members after a tragedy like this, what are your first |
| 1:01.5 | behavioral cues that tells you, you know, someone's being truthful versus someone protecting a |
| 1:08.3 | narrative versus someone just seeing it through their, |
| 1:11.5 | their prism in a really innocent way? |
| 1:14.3 | You know, the first thing that strikes me when you hear a lot of conflicting statements is, |
| 1:17.7 | wow, no one in this family is close at all because no one's talking. |
| 1:20.5 | No one has the same context. |
| 1:22.6 | True. |
... |
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