♪
- When the unthinkable happens
between a 10-year-old boy and his father...
- He didn't realize his finger was on the trigger.
It went off.
- The impact on a child, it was very traumatic.
- It had to be an accident.
But there were things that didn't make sense.
- My dad was my world. He was my superhero.
Not a day goes by that I don't miss my dad.
- ...the case haunts the community
until nine years later,
new information changes everything.
- She told me that he told her that it wasn't an accident.
- The way my dad died,
it wasn't the way everyone thought it was.
- A heartbreaking allegation makes police question
who the real killer is.
- I'm sitting there thinking, this is crazy.
- You're talking to a teenager about stuff
that happened when they were little.
- Do you believe this? Do you not?
♪
[ Phone ringing ]
- Moments after the harrowing call,
Defiance County emergency services raced to the scene,
knowing there's a good chance the victim is
a friend or neighbor in this small community.
- They just told me that it was the Breininger residence.
And as soon as they said Breininger,
I knew right away where I was going.
Living in Defiance County all my life, you get to know everybody.
I knew Robert Breininger, owner of the property,
knew him growing up through school.
He lived out there with his wife, Judith, and Corey,
his 10-year-old boy who made the 911 call.
Every case is personal.
But this was even more.
I arrived at the Breininger residence,
and that's when Corey opens the door
and he's just devastated.
He grabs my hand and he started to take me to the back
where his dad was, and I stopped him.
And I walked back there,
and as soon as I seen Robert,
I knew there was nothing could be done.
It was clear that there had been a bullet through his head.
I knew the devastation that I'd seen.
He was gone.
My mind was shifted to many things.
Was this suicide?
Had Corey shot his dad intentionally,
or is this an accident?
- Shocked by his friend's death and unsure of the circumstances,
Detective Vandemark heads back out to his only known witness,
the victim's son.
- I take Corey outside. He was crying.
I started talking quietly to him to tell me what had happened.
- Corey's story was that he and his dad
were going to go hunting,
and his dad was teaching him about gun safety.
- Corey said he was holding the gun.
He didn't realize his finger was on the trigger.
It went off and the result was his dad being shot in the head.
- The impact on a child to an accident like that.
It was very traumatic.
- While Corey is handed over to EMTs,
Detective Vandemark goes back inside to assess the scene.
- Robert laid facing up in the bed.
He was covered with sheets.
There was a large pooling of blood around his head
and onto the floor.
The wound was just above the ear on his right side.
- There's hunting pamphlets that are tucked under
the deceased's arm on the bed.
- The gun was a shotgun, a 410.
A lot of children use the 410 shotgun
versus the 12 gauges and the 20.
There are more small and light.
It was laying on the left side of the bed,
where you would have expected it to be,
based on where the wound entered.
- At first glance, the crime scene matches
Corey's brief description of what happened,
but Detective Vandemark notices some elements don't make sense.
- Corey told me that his father was teaching him
how to shoot guns,
but why was he in bed covered with sheets?
And the other thing I noticed was he had earplugs in his ears.
That just didn't make sense.
- After finishing his examination of the body,
Detective Vandemark notices Robert's wife, Judith,
who has been Corey's stepmother for five years, arrive on scene.
- When Corey had seen Judith, he became real quiet.
I don't know if it was because he was going to
have to tell his mom there was this horrible accident,
and that's when I whisper in her ear that he's gone.
He's gone.
And a tear came into her eye.
- Judith, appearing to be in shock,
is able to tell Detective Vandemark some of the events
that led up to Robert's death.
- Judith told us Robert worked third shift from 10:00 at night
until 5:00, 6:00 in the morning.
He would normally sleep during the day,
but Judith and Robert had been running errands
until about noon that day.
And then when Corey got home from school,
she went over to her mother's house, closing up a garage sale.
Corey didn't go.
He was going to stay there with Dad.
So Robert hadn't had much sleep that day at all.
Judith said that the reason he wore earplugs
is to help him sleep during the day.
And she also told us she didn't know why the gun was out.
She makes the comment,
it was normally way up high in their closet.
And then she reaches out to Corey
and says "Daddy's going to be okay."
- 34-year-old Robert Breininger was born
and raised in Defiance County.
- When I first met Robert, we were teenagers playing baseball.
Robert was a down-to-earth homebody type guy.
Pleasant, easy to talk to.
Just a great person all around to be around.
- Robert was an avid hunter-fisherman.
That was his pastime,
was to go hunting with his buddies
or to take Corey fishing.
- His son was his priority.
He was a loving and nurturing father.
- Robert had been previously married.
The only child that they shared was Corey...
and she left.
So Robert was raising that child alone
until Judith came into his life.
- In 1998, when Corey is 4 years old,
Robert meets and falls in love with Judith Foudy,
who lives in their small community.
- They hit it off pretty good.
She could be personable, pleasant to be around.
- I didn't know Judith well,
but they married quite quickly and she was bound
and determined to be Corey's mom,
and she adopted Corey right away.
Their married life seemed to be the typical married life.
There wasn't flags going off
that it was a bad marriage or anything like that.
Robert was a very good writer.
He worked at a steel mill.
He was an ironworker.
- In the late '80s, I worked with Robert.
He was a hard worker, very knowledgeable person.
Robert was so smart.
I couldn't imagine him having a firearm of any sort
in the house being loaded,
let alone being something that Corey could get.
- This 10-year-old boy is devastated.
It had to be an accident.
However, there were things I seen that didn't make sense.
- Just hours after the shooting,
as law enforcement finishes up at the scene,
Detective Vandemark goes to get a more detailed statement
from Corey about what happened.
- During our second interview with Corey,
Judith would not let me talk to him alone,
and I wasn't going to argue that fact that
she's the mom.
He was devastated. He was crying.
I asked questions about the gun.
"Did he load the gun?"
"No, he didn't load the gun.
I didn't realize there was a bullet in there."
- Corey said this was supposed to be a hunting lesson.
Corey and his dad were looking at
hunting magazines and pamphlets
when he and his dad were exchanging the gun
when it went off.
- I asked why his dad was still laying down in bed.
He didn't know, is what he told me at the time,
and I asked him, "Were you mad at your dad?
"Were you getting along with your dad?"
And he indicated through the tears that
"No, I wasn't mad at him."
At some point, Judith just said,
"Enough's enough," and I felt that
it had reached that point, too.
- The next morning, the coroner determines
Robert Breininger's manner of death.
- The coroner felt there was no reason for an autopsy,
and he gave the manner of death as being an accidental shooting.
As to the investigation at that point, it got closed.
It was clear Corey was saying
that he shot him accidentally in the head.
- The focus at that time was
a 10 year old had a terrible accident.
He's traumatized.
We don't want to make this any worse.
- The news of Robert Breininger's violent death
deeply affects the tight-knit community.
- Everyone felt bad for their family.
Corey was 10, and he was home by himself.
I can't imagine how scary that was for him.
- To hear that there was a death as a result
of a gun caught people by surprise,
because we know how to handle guns out here.
There were questions, but I think people said,
"Let's move on because this child has suffered enough."
- Nine years later, in March of 2012,
the case that haunted the tiny community comes back to life.
- In March 2012,
I received a call from Sheriff Westry
asking me to come to his office.
He just asked me if I knew Lauren Beck.
I said, "Yes. Teacher at Prairie View."
And he says, "She told me that Corey told her
that it wasn't an accident."
And as soon as he said Corey and no accident,
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
- She was the blonde bombshell charmer.
- Most of the people were terrified of her.
- He needed a mom, and she wasn't a mother to him.
♪
- Nine years after the shooting death of Robert Breininger
was ruled accidental,
his son Corey is about to tell a new story
that may change everything
police thought they knew about the case.
- We went to Paulding High School
to do an interview of Corey to find out what had happened.
♪
- As soon as I walk in the principal's office,
I saw Lieutenant Cliff Vandemark.
I'll never forget he just had this look on his face of...
"It's been a long time."
- I said, "Corey, it was my understanding
that you talked to somebody
and shared that you had shot your dad intentionally."
- I said the way my dad died was not an accident.
It wasn't the way everyone thought it was.
- My mind was blown.
I asked him, you know, "Why would you do that?"
Corey tells me,
"I shot my dad because Judith wanted me to."
And he goes through the whole story.
- November 3, 2003, I remember getting off the bus and my mom,
Judith, was actually waiting there, and the first thing
she said when she saw me was,
"This is the day."
And, uh, I right away knew and...
Everything changed.
- Corey tells me Judith walked him to the house
and went in the back door.
She had the gun ready for him.
Already loaded, sitting, like, in a corner.
And then she told him, "Okay, I'm going to leave.
You do this now."
- After Judith had left, I opened the room
where my dad was sleeping and I saw him in there.
Judith had mentioned she had put some hunting magazines in there.
I took the gun in there as well.
There was a train going by, and right after it went by,
I had decided this--
this must be the time it's supposed to happen.
And, uh...
I raised the gun and pulled the trigger,
and all it did was click.
in my mind, I was actually excited.
I thought for sure either the gun's broken or something,
and I'm not going to have to go through with this.
And I decided, "All right, just to prove to her
I'm going to do it one more time,
then she'll understand that it wasn't supposed to happen."
So I raised the gun, and I was so certain
that the gun was not going to go off, and it went off.
That was it.
I was 10 years old.
- Corey tells me that Judith abused him over the years.
She would hit him, strike him.
It was going on right up to the day he shoots his dad.
- About a week before it actually happened,
Judith had told me that my dad was dying from a brain tumor.
She had told me that it was actually his idea of me
to shoot him so that we could get the life insurance policy,
and we'd all be taken care of.
But I didn't want to do it.
She would say that I was letting my dad down,
that he was going to be upset if I didn't do it.
And, you know,
eventually it became more threats of if you don't do it,
then I'm going to do it to you.
And I believed her.
I just-- I felt so helpless.
After my dad passed, things got somewhat better.
However, the abuse persisted.
As I got older, I started to realize more and more
how wrong things were.
I was at the point where I wanted to tell someone.
I'd kept all of it so deeply buried.
I had to let it out.
So when I was 18 and going into my senior year of high school,
I actually confided in one of my best friends about my home life
and they said, "You're not going back there ever,"
and convinced me to come to his house.
- Corey says he ceased all contact with Judith
at that point, even though she pleaded with him to stay.
- She wanted me to come home,
but I knew I was never coming back home.
- I'm sitting here thinking, this is crazy
that it wasn't an accident.
I said, "Corey, I'll be honest with you.
We've got to dig into it further."
- Wanting to believe Corey but unsure of how to proceed,
Detective Vandemark reaches out to the prosecutor.
- We immediately started to talk about,
how are we going to figure this out?
- Fortunately for us, we were involved in a task force
for abuse against children with the FBI.
This whole case had to have fresh eyes on it.
We brought up the 911, call,
all the photos up, and every interview
that had been taken at the time--
we looked at them with the FBI.
- When I heard that 911 call
you hear a young 10 year old, hysterical.
I shot my dad to.
When you see those crime scene photos,
they seem very calm.
We're talking about hunting,
but you're laying in bed with the sheet
perfectly pulled up with you,
and you still have earplugs in.
It looked like Robert was sleeping peacefully
when Corey shot his dad.
There's pamphlets there laid methodically on the bed.
The crime scene seemed staged,
as opposed to something that happened accidentally.
- After reviewing the evidence from 2003,
it's clear to investigators
that this was not an accidental shooting.
The question now is whether Corey's version
of events holds up.
- We have now a 19 year old who stating
that when he was ten years old,
his stepmom had made him shoot his dad.
There's a degree of "Do you believe this? Do you not?
Has he manifested some mental health issues
or did she really make him kill him?
- You're talking to a teenager about stuff
that happened when they were, you know, little.
How do we add credibility to their story?
- We need to establish what that abuse looked like
and walk through everything
that built up to the day of the shooting.
And so we made arrangements
to have Corey come in for a forensic interview.
- Corey had moved out of her home,
had no interaction with Judith.
But Corey was still fearful of Judith, even in that interview.
- As a little kid, I didn't even really know what a mom was.
I was between two and three years old when my dad
and my birth mother decided to split up.
And then it was just my dad, and that's really all I needed.
My dad was kind of my world.
He was kind of my superhero.
When I first met Judith,
she just seemed really nice at the beginning.
They both seemed pretty happy.
But when my dad had married Judith,
a lot of things changed.
♪
- In the summer of 2012,
the FBI conducts a forensic interview of Corey
to determine if his version of events is credible.
- I don't think my dad ever really fully knew
what Judith was doing.
He didn't want to discipline me,
and she volunteered and he said, "Yeah, go ahead."
I think she convinced him
that I was just a troubled little kid,
and he just went with it.
- It's so horrific that it's difficult to believe,
but Corey's story definitely seems plausible at that time.
- Judith was, I guess, fairly smart in a twisted way,
so I was always sent to school in pants and long shirts
to cover the marks and bruises on my body.
- That's hard to wrap your brain around
that another human being would do that to anyone,
let alone a child.
But it was significant to talk about
because that left a scar
and that can help corroborate Corey's statements
of this abuse.
- As we did the interview,
we realized that this wasn't simply an abuse case,
but there was elements of what we considered torture.
- It was very methodical.
Corey, he was under her thumb
very firmly at that time in his life.
- I had fully convinced myself that this was normal,
and this must just be how every family and little kid is.
And my little mind knew that none of this was right.
Yet I had no way of doing anything about it.
So I just I had to endure it.
- Corey tells investigators that one week before the shooting,
after four years of abuse,
Judith begins to push him to kill his father.
- I really thought that perhaps my dad was dying
from a brain tumor.
And I really think that's
how I convinced myself to make it okay.
- Judith orchestrated that by telling Corey,
"Here's where the guns going to be,
after you shoot your dad...
...drop the gun, call 911
and say the gun accidentally went off."
- She had already washed his brain enough by then.
The only thought was staying in his role,
that he had been set up and had been programmed for.
- The magnitude of how much he endured prior to 10 years old,
when this happened, and now all the years after,
were just so stunning.
- From what Corey had told me, he felt guilty,
that he didn't realize sooner what he had done,
but he was a child and he didn't realize
how wrong she was and all the stuff
that she did to break him down.
He needed a mom, and she wasn't a mother to him.
- It's difficult for people to understand
how does a 10-year-old shoot their father
at the direction of somebody?
But here we are with all of these elements--
severe physical abuse, psychological terror.
The interview changed everything for what we thought this was,
from accident to this is a homicide
at the direction of his stepmother.
- Now that investigators have Corey's full version of events,
they know that that is only one side of the story.
- We had to prove that.
We got to not only have Corey say it, which he did,
but we got to-- we got to prove it
in every other way we can to charge Judith with murder.
♪
- Investigators now believe that Corey Breininger
was coerced into killing his father,
Robert Breininger, by his stepmother, Judith,
after years of abuse.
- First of all, we needed to change the manner of death.
The coroner spent time reviewing the evidence
that we had collected in 2003.
Along with the confession from Corey,
he changed the manner of death from accidental to homicide.
- The objective then became, let's see what else
is out there to correlate Corey's description of his life.
- Cautiously, so as not to alert Judith to their investigation,
police begin to interview potential witnesses
from the area that may be able to verify pieces
of Corey's story.
- Corey's teachers from '98 to 2003 had seen
that he was always wearing long-sleeve shirts.
He was hiding something, hiding bruises, marks,
grab marks, and one of his teachers
actually seen marks on him,
but nobody reported it at that time.
A lot of the teachers,
they said he was such a sad boy and they felt sorry for Corey,
but they didn't realize why.
We interviewed the neighbors.
They start telling us more.
What they seen was that Judith was taking him
further away from his dad,
and Corey became more quiet, withdrawn
over the years.
- My friends lived across the street
from the Breininger family.
They had had issues with them.
Judith had allegedly slashed their tires,
tried to kill their pets that they had.
- She was always feuding with the neighbors.
Most of the people that witnessed this
were terrified of her.
They said she was very dominant.
- Judith had ex-boyfriends in the nine years
after Robert's death.
They were interviewed and they did corroborate
that there was abuse that they saw happening.
One of the ex-boyfriends characterized it
as a modern-day Cinderella, but that was his perception,
even being in that home with them
for a very short amount of time.
- Investigators also speak to Judith's ex-husband,
who was a friend of Robert Breininger.
- I was married to Judith from 1991 to 1995.
When I first had met Judith,
she was the blonde bombshell charmer.
We hit it off pretty good.
But the day that we got married,
it was like a switch had been flipped.
She said, "Your family's dead. Your friends are dead.
The only thing that matters now is me."
She turned in more to a controlling,
psychotic, unstable person.
I had been hit. I had been kicked.
My nerves were shot.
By the time our marriage was done,
I was an entirely different person.
When I heard that she and Robert got married, it shocked me.
Because knowing her and knowing what I did of Robert,
that he was a very nice person,
I knew it was going to be bad for him.
- As Defiance County police continue to interview people
in the community,
experts are brought in to assess Corey's allegations of abuse.
- We had Corey examined.
One of the psychological things we learned
was that Corey had a resilient gene,
and that's what enabled him to survive.
- We also had Corey physically examined by a medical doctor,
who was also an expert in this area,
because we didn't have actual medical records.
- Corey said Judith actually cut him with a knife on the penis.
- The doctor finds that nine years later, this scar is there.
- That was something
that told them what this woman was capable of.
- As evidence supporting Corey's story grows,
police look into what Judith's possible motive was
to have her husband, Robert Breininger, killed.
- Corey says that Judith told him
that his dad had terminal brain cancer,
and so that it was actually his father's idea to kill him
so that they would be able to get the insurance money.
- We looked into that and found there was no medical history
that Robert had a brain tumor.
If somebody had been diagnosed with something like that,
there's going to be a paper record, right?
- That all was a lie.
- Investigators look into
whether Judith received a payout from Robert's life insurance,
which could be her true motive.
- What we found out was within 12 hours
of the death of Robert,
Judith was already filling out all the insurance papers,
wanting the insurance immediately.
She ended up with $300,000 to $400,000.
The sole beneficiary was Judith.
- This seems like that's what her motive was.
- She made him into a murderer
to collect money on an insurance claim.
- And what kind of a mother, a wife,
a human being...
could be that heartless?
♪
- With a strong but circumstantial case,
investigators enlist Corey's help to try
to get Judith to admit her guilt.
- The police set up a recorded phone call
where I was trying to call Judith to see
if she would admit guilt.
- I wanted to get her on the phone
to see what her reaction was when Corey called her.
We all would love to have that confession.
- This is the first time
he's confronting her about what she made him do.
[ Line ringing ]
♪
- Investigators asked Corey to make a recorded phone call
to Judith in the hopes
that she will inadvertently confess her guilt.
Corey has not seen or spoken to his abuser in over a year.
- I was pretty scared calling her and talking to her.
It was something I did not want to do,
but I knew it needed to be done.
- As his stepmother, if you're not a threat to him,
why are you saying there's cameras there?
- She was trying to let him know,
"You'll be safe if you're with me."
She figured she could control him better
if they were in person.
She acted like she didn't know what he was talking about.
- That is when I knew that
she knew she was probably being recorded.
- So after this call, things kicked up a notch.
- There's strong evidence that Corey was abused for years.
There's strong evidence that Judith was this domineering,
controlling person.
There was a lot of inherent credibility
that helped to corroborate the story from Corey.
We felt confident that Judith was responsible
for the death of Robert Breininger.
- On March 8, 2013,
police arrest Judith Hawkey at her home.
At the same time,
they execute a search warrant of the residence.
- When we hit the house, we find things
that help support Corey's story.
They were, like, vignettes,
videos she took of Corey when he was a child.
"Corey, why are you doing that?"
"I don't know."
Because she had told him. That's why.
She had manipulated him.
It was all about that control.
- Judith would record me tearing up the house
or breaking toys.
She was recording me just to make my dad think
that there was something wrong with me.
- Watching those videotapes broke my heart.
There's abuse that's inflicting pain purposefully,
but there's also the psychological side of it
causing shame, humiliation, embarrassment.
- It was all about working up to the day
that she was gonna have him pull the trigger
and take his dad's life.
All of that brought more credibility
to what Corey told us was going on.
- At the sheriff's office,
police interviewed Judith, hoping she'll confess.
- Judith was being evasive.
She thought that she would-- She would beat this.
But that also goes hand in hand with the abuse she did to him.
Is that "I'm never gonna get caught."
- After refusing to speak further with investigators,
Judith is formally charged.
- Judith is charged with aggravated homicide
of Robert Breininger.
And there was several charges of child abuse
and child endangering.
- We felt that she was a dangerous person
because of what she did.
- So she was put on a large bond to retain her.
It was $3 million.
♪
- Cliff called me and told me that Judith was arrested.
That was probably one of the happiest moments in my life.
But it was just a brief moment.
I was so unprepared for what was to come.
♪
- On October 28, 2013,
the trial of Judith Hawkey begins in Defiance County.
- We had to get the jury not to see a 20-year-old male,
but to see a 10-year-old child.
- When I testified,
I actually didn't look at Judith a single time.
I was actually still pretty scared of her.
But I just wanted justice for my dad,
and I wanted her to be held accountable.
- Judith, seeing her in that courtroom,
there just was no emotion.
She just seemed very, very cold to me.
I think she probably thought that she would--
She would beat this.
- After 10 days of trial,
the case is put into the hands of the jury.
- So after hearing all the evidence,
the jury came back...
and found Judith guilty.
- She was convicted
on aggravated homicide and child abuse.
- She was sentenced to life without parole,
and I think that was well deserved.
- The vindication that Corey got that day,
it brought just a little bit of peace, a little bit of closure,
because the truth was finally out.
- For one of the first times in my life,
I felt safe
and I knew she wouldn't ever be able to do anything to me again.
That feeling didn't last very long, but just a few years.
- Nearly six years later, in April of 2019,
Judith Hawkey is awarded a new trial on appeal.
- Retrying a case is difficult.
We looked at the pros and cons
and elected to have her plead out to involuntary manslaughter.
She was sentenced to what ended up being a 10-year term.
- When I was told that, I felt betrayed.
I never had a scenario in my mind
where it would ever be overturned or retried.
- Judith was eventually released from prison in 2023.
She now lives in northwest Ohio.
- In all that, she only served 10 years.
10 years.
And Corey got a sentence of life.
- The day that she was gonna be released,
Corey told me, "I'm gonna be moving away."
And to me, I was like, "How heartbreaking.
He's leaving his life here with his friends and family
because she's out and living as a free person
and she shouldn't be."
It just seems so unfair.
♪
- In the beginning, it was very scary.
Just constantly looking over my shoulder,
but I've gotten used to knowing
that I can't ever let my guard down.
But to my knowledge, she has not tried to reach out to me.
♪
Not a day goes by that I don't miss my dad.
Every single day before I fall asleep,
I say something to him after my prayer
and that'll-- that'll probably never change.
I have learned to forgive myself.
Ever so much,
I still hold myself somewhat accountable
for not being able to tell her no.
But that's why I continue to share my story,
in the hopes that maybe someone else
who's going through it can find the strength to come forward.
I just wanted to be known that no matter how badly you think
you can't get out of it...
you can.