Tanner Horner Pleads Guilty To Athena Strand Murder Penalty Phase Day 1 Recap
Pretty Lies And Alibis
GiGi McKelvey
4.6 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tanner Horner suddenly pleaded guilty to: Capital murder of a child under 10 & Aggravated kidnapping in the murder of 7-year-old Athena Strand. The plea happened right as the trial was about to begin — completely skipping the normal “guilt vs. innocence” phase. So now, the trial is NOT about whether he did it anymore.
The jury’s only job now: Decide death penalty OR life without parole This phase is expected to last up to a few weeks & WILL resemble a trial as both sides present evidence to the jury in the penalty phase.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Pretty Lies and Alibis. |
| 0:03.0 | Let's seek the truth and travel the long road to justice together. |
| 0:08.0 | What you know, Alibiers, welcome to another episode of Pretty Lies and Alibis. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Gigi. Good to have you here. It's Tuesday, April 7th. |
| 0:16.0 | If you didn't see my YouTube short this morning, it's a good reminder to go subscribe and |
| 0:21.0 | click that little bell icon for notifications. We are very, very close to 100,000. I think we'll |
| 0:26.9 | do a big celebration live when that happens. But Tanner Horner, who is accused of killing |
| 0:32.5 | seven-year-old Athena Strand, pleaded guilty this morning to her murder, but he is up for the death penalty. |
| 0:39.6 | So we are in the penalty phase. So instead of going directly into sentencing, we essentially |
| 0:44.9 | have trial, where the jurors will hear the evidence and then eventually we'll decide life |
| 0:50.7 | or death. A big trigger warning for this recap and probably for the rest of this |
| 0:55.3 | trial, it does talk about some very, very disturbing things involving the assault and murder of an |
| 1:01.3 | innocent seven-year-old girl. So I wanted to make sure that's clear for those of you that |
| 1:05.7 | understandably are sensitive to cases like this. He was a contract FedEx delivery driver |
| 1:11.3 | that was actually delivering a Christmas present to her. |
| 1:14.5 | He abducted, assaulted, and killed her. |
| 1:17.9 | Let's get into the state's opening statements. |
| 1:20.4 | Both the state and the defense were relatively brief, |
| 1:23.9 | but let's jump in. |
| 1:25.9 | Right out of the gate, |
| 1:26.8 | the defense objected to a photo of Athena |
| 1:29.4 | when she was alive and well, being shown during the state's openings, and the judge overruled it. |
... |
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