This is Hidden Killers Year in Review.

A look back at the biggest stories of 2025.

This is the Hidden Killers podcast with Tony Bruske and continuing coverage of the case against Brian Koberger.

In the true crime space, we often talk about escalation, how someone doesn't just wake up one day and commit an atrocity.

It's usually a slow build, a psychological rot.

It slowly spreads.

And if you know what to look for, you can almost feel the tension tightening before it snaps.

In the next part of our conversation with investigative journalist Howard Bloom and former FBI

behavioral expert Robin Drake, we're going to go right into the heart of that escalation and the

dark obsession that may have lit the fuse. We're talking about Brian Coburger, not just the man

who entered the King Road House with a knife, but the man who may have spent months,

even years, mentally preparing for it,

not just studying criminology,

but quietly fantasizing about becoming the very predator,

his textbooks described.

At the center of it all,

one name keeps rising to the surface.

Madison Mogan.

Howard lays out a theory, and let's be clear, it's a deeply informed one, that Maddie wasn't just a random victim. She may have been the object of a toxic, one-sided fixation. Someone who symbolized

everything Koeberger wasn't. Confident, connected fixation. Someone who symbolized everything Koberger wasn't, confident,

connected, desired. Someone whose very existence in his warped mind had to be erased in order for him

to feel powerful again. Now, did Koberger subscribe to full-blown in-cell ideology?

...