The Fear That Never Leaves: Hypervigilance, PTSD, and What Monique Tepe Carried After McKee
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
December 6, 2025. Monique was in Indianapolis. According to the affidavit, McKee was at her house. She left the game at halftime. No documented tip-off. Her nervous system picked up a signal the rest of us would have missed entirely.
This episode examines life after escape — the PTSD, the hypervigilance, the landmined ordinary moments, and the partners who inherit the fear. Spencer Tepe loved a woman carrying years of alleged terror. He carried it alongside her. This is the part of the story nobody covers — and the part that should change how we understand what survivors carry.
We talk about checking locks three times. Parking facing the exit. Flinching at unknown numbers. Lying awake cataloguing every sound. The way happiness itself becomes coded as dangerous because you learned that good things attract punishment. And the gaslighting that outlasts the relationship — the abuser's voice in your head whispering "you're overreacting" years after they're gone.
Your fear is not weakness. It is intelligence. Monique's instincts were right.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brewski. |
| 0:03.2 | Here now, Tony Brewski. |
| 0:06.6 | Monique Teffey was 200 miles away. |
| 0:14.5 | December 6th of 2025, Spencer and Monique Tepe were at a big 10 championship game in Indianapolis. |
| 0:20.8 | It was a Saturday. They made plans, gotten tickets, done the thing that happy married couples do with two small children when they get a chance to do something for themselves. |
| 0:30.8 | And according to court records at some point during the game, Monique left at halftime went back to the hotel. |
| 0:35.5 | Court record state Spencer later told friends she was upset about something involving her ex-husband. |
| 0:42.4 | 200 miles from her house in a stadium full of people. |
| 0:48.2 | And her body told her something was wrong. |
| 0:51.6 | She knew something was wrong. |
| 0:53.0 | How she was tipped off that something was wrong, |
| 0:55.8 | that we will find out when this gets to trial. According to the unsealed affidavit surveillance |
| 1:02.7 | footage showed Michael McKee at the Tapie residents that same day walking through their yard while |
| 1:07.5 | they were in Indianapolis. She wasn't there. She couldn't have seen him. |
| 1:11.3 | There was no indication in the court records of a phone call, a text message, or a direct tip-off. |
| 1:16.6 | Something was there, though. She knew. Something in her. Something trained by years of alleged |
| 1:21.3 | terror picked up a signal that the rest of us would have missed entirely. |
| 1:29.7 | It's not paranoia. |
| 1:31.2 | That's not an anxiety disorder. |
| 1:32.9 | That's not a woman who can't move on. |
| 1:34.5 | That's what sustained exposure to coercive control does to a human nervous system |
| 1:40.9 | when the signal is broadcast from the perpetrator. |
... |
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