Five Years After a $9m Murder-for-hire, She Finally Reveals Why She Betrayed Her Best Friend
It was a game of catfish played both ways, and it turned fatal.
The latest episode of Court TV’s Interview With a Killer focuses on the story of convicted murderer Denali Brehmer, featuring the first in-depth sit-down interview with the Alaska woman who shot and killed her friend on a hike after forming an online relationship with an Indiana man who convinced her he was rich and willing to pay her $9 million to murder a person of her choice.
The new episode, titled “Catfishing for Murder,” airs at 8 p.m. ET on Sunday, Nov. 3, and features exclusive new interviews with Brehmer, now 23, and retired FBI agent Brad Garrett, who assists host David Scott in analyzing the horrific case.
The Alaska Department of Law stated in February that Brehmer had been sentenced to 99 years in prison for the 2019 murder of her friend Cynthia Hoffman.
According to police, Brehmer committed the murder after Darin Schilmiller, a 21-year-old Indiana man living in his grandparents’ basement, catfished her online and “solicited the murder of Hoffman from Brehmer in Anchorage.”
But, as Scott and Garrett discover via their thorough investigation into the case, Brehmer was “no naive, unwitting victim of a bad online influence,” the Court TV host says in an exclusive new clip of the program published with PEOPLE this week.
“It’s not clear to me who was the predator and who was the prey in this case of catfishing,” Scott says in the latest video.
In addition to Brehmer and Schilmiller, Alaska men Kayden McIntosh and Caleb Leyland were convicted of assisting Brehmer in carrying out the murder, according to the Alaska Department of Law. Both were convicted of second-degree murder.
Brehmer tells Scott in the new interview clip that Thunderbird Falls, where she, Leyland, and McIntosh took Hoffman hiking on the day she was murdered, was simply “a place of opportunity” for them to carry out the murder.
“Initially, when we all came up with it, I agreed and said yeah because I was mad at her and she was mad at me and I was just over her s—,” Brehmer tells Scott, referring to a disagreement the two had about another man named Zack. “I wanted to make amends, I did want to make amends but she needed payback for what she did with Zack.”
Brehmer claims the killing is “on me,” but she is unsure whether she wanted to murder her former friend or simply scare her.
According to the Anchorage Daily News, the victim’s relatives stated that she had a learning problem and functioned at a developmental level of less than 19. Hoffman’s father, Timothy Hoffman, told the newspaper that his daughter considered Brehmer her “best friend” after they met in high school.
Interview With a Killer: Catfishing for Murder will premiere on CourtTV on Sunday, November 3, at 8 p.m. ET.