Nick Reiner Warning Signs: FBI Behavioral Expert on Conan O'Brien Party, Schizophrenia & What Family Knew
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The night before Rob and Michele Reiner were stabbed to death in their Brentwood home, their son Nick was at Conan O'Brien's Christmas party making guests uncomfortable. He stared at people. Interrupted conversations. Asked guests if they were famous. Got into a shouting match with his father loud enough for the room to hear. His parents brought him specifically because they were worried. His mother had been telling friends for weeks they were at their wits' end. We've tried everything, she said.
Three weeks after the murders, Nick's high-profile defense attorney Alan Jackson quit the case — but not before declaring to cameras that Nick Reiner is not guilty of murder under California law. He said he's legally and ethically prohibited from explaining why he withdrew.
Former FBI Special Agent Robin Dreeke ran the Bureau's Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program for years. He's the author of Sizing People Up and has built his career on reading people and predicting dangerous behavior. Today he breaks down everything we know about Nick Reiner's deterioration in the weeks before the killings — the schizophrenia diagnosis, the medication change that sources say sent him off the rails, and the behavioral red flags that were visible to everyone at that party. We talk about what it means when a family identifies a threat and still can't stop it. What Alan Jackson's statement telegraphs. And whether this tragedy could have been predicted.
#NickReiner #RobReiner #HiddenKillers #FBI #TrueCrime #BehavioralAnalysis #AlanJackson #ConanOBrien #MicheleReiner #Schizophrenia
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske. |
| 0:02.9 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:07.0 | Well, TMZ just dropped a significant development of the Nick Reiner case. |
| 0:11.5 | Sources with direct knowledge say Nick now admits to killing his parents, allegedly, according to TMZ source, Robin Michelle Reiner. |
| 0:20.9 | But here's the caveat. |
| 0:23.0 | This is where we get to that insanity defense. |
| 0:26.6 | Genuinely believes his incarceration is part of a conspiracy against him. |
| 0:32.8 | Apparently, he doesn't understand why he's in jail. |
| 0:35.3 | His medications for schizoaffective disorder were reportedly changed about a month before the murders |
| 0:39.8 | and still aren't apparently working properly. |
| 0:42.8 | Robin Drake is here with us to help break a lot of this down and some of these new developments. |
| 0:50.4 | This is such a confusing case, one where, yes, there is a place for some empathy in it, but at the same point, it is insanely difficult to have empathy for a person who has abused others, goodwill, patience, and everything else that comes along with everyone that's dealt with |
| 1:13.6 | Nick Reiner for his existence and put up with all of his addictions and all of his actions |
| 1:19.2 | and all of his everything. Now suddenly to say, okay, he knows he kills his parents, but he |
| 1:25.4 | thinks it's a conspiracy, which, you know, |
| 1:35.2 | does line up to schizophrenic type thinking, but at the same point, it also lines up right in step with manipulative behavior, which he's also very good at, which he's talked about doing |
| 1:40.2 | every single time he comes down from one of his drug binges. |
| 1:46.0 | Robin, you've recruited spies, people whose survival depends on making others believe things that |
| 1:53.3 | aren't true. |
| 1:54.3 | When you look at Nick Reiner's documented history of cycling through 18 rehabs and allegedly |
| 1:59.0 | manipulating every system he touched. |
| 2:01.5 | What kind of profile emerges here? |
... |
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