What happens when the person who knows every pattern of domestic abuse becomes the target?

​In this episode of True Crime on the Brain, we break down the brilliant life and tragic death of Dr. Amie Harwick, a prominent Hollywood therapist and fierce advocate for women’s safety. Nearly a decade after escaping a volatile relationship with Gareth Pursehouse, a chance encounter at an industry gala re-ignited a dormant, deadly fixation.

​We dissect the chilling psychology of the "Rejected Stalker," the systematic failure of the legal safety net, and the harrowing details of the night a predator lay in wait in the Hollywood Hills.

It’s 4:00 AM on a freezing Minnesota winter night in 1978. An isolated farmhouse. A single mother fighting for her life in a dark kitchen, and an 11-year-old boy under the covers upstairs, forced to play dead as a killer fires into his bed.

By sunrise, Alice Huling and three of her children are dead. Only young Billy survives.

For over twenty years, the brutal massacre of the Huling family sits in a cold case file. Investigators, trapped by their own tunnel vision, hunt for a local killer with a grudge, completely ignoring a wandering predator who was caught just days after the crime. But when the killer drove away, he didn't just leave behind a shattered community. He took a tiny, two-inch toy Batmobile from the family's kitchen table as a trophy.

When 41-year-old Ricky McCormick was found dead in a Missouri cornfield in 1999, it seemed like a tragic end for a vulnerable, functionally illiterate man. But twelve years later, the FBI shocked the world: tucked in Ricky’s pockets were two notes containing a highly sophisticated, uncrackable cipher.

​The feds claimed Ricky had been writing in secret code since childhood. But his mother, Frankie Sparks, flatly denied it, stating plainly: "The only thing he could write was his name. He didn't write in no code."

​We break down the eerie rhythm of the text, the street theories tying it to a 90s St. Louis drug ring, and a terrifying question: Was Ricky living a profound double life, or was this uncrackable code a brilliant red herring planted by his killers to send the FBI down a decades-long rabbit hole?