The Catfish Killer: How a Snapchat Romance Led to Murder

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You know that feeling when you hear a story that makes you want to immediately check your teenager's phone?

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This is one of those episodes.

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We're talking about 19-year-old Denali Bremer, who fell for a guy on Snapchat,

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promising her $9 million to kill her best friend.

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What happens when social media becomes a hunting ground

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and someone's entire sense of reality gets warped by an online relationship?

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This case has everything that makes our modern world terrifying.

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And at the center of it all, is C.C. Hoffman, whose biggest mistake was trusting the wrong friend.

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You know how people always say "Don't believe everything you see on the internet"?

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Well, 19-year-old Denali Bremer probably should have listened to that advice.

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Because the handsome millionaire she fell for on Snapchat turned out to be neither handsome nor a millionaire.

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And by the time she figured it out, her best friend was dead.

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This is one of those stories that makes you wonder how we got here as a society.

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Like, at what point did we decide anonymous strangers online were more trustworthy than the people actually sitting next to us?

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But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

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Denali Dakota Sky Bremer was born in 2001 in Anchorage, Alaska.

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Right off the bat, her life was complicated.

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She was the third of five daughters in a household that was basically a master-class and dysfunction.

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Her mother cycled through boyfriends like most people cycle through Netflix shows

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and none of these relationships were what you would call healthy.

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All the children were in and out of foster care throughout their young lives,

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which is already heartbreaking enough.

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But then something happened that would change everything permanently.

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One of her mother's boyfriends was charged with killing Denali's two-month-old baby sister.

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Think about that for a second, a baby, two months old.

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After that tragedy, all the surviving Bremer children were adopted into different families.

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The system was trying to give them better lives, and in many ways it worked.

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But some kinds of damage run deep, and they don't heal easily.

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Fast forward to 2019, Denali was 18 trying to figure her life out like most teenagers do.

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That's when she met Tyler on Snapchat.

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And Tyler seemed too good to be true, which should have been the first red flag.

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He was 21, supposedly gorgeous, and had won millions of dollars in the lottery.

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Because that's definitely how lottery winners spend their time trolling Snapchat for teenage girlfriends.

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But when you're young and you've been through what Denali had been through,

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sometimes you want to believe in fairy tales.

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Tyler lived in Kansas, so their entire relationship existed in the digital world.

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They'd spend hours messaging back and forth.

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And slowly, Tyler started revealing his true interests.

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He liked dominance.

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He liked control.

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And eventually, he admitted something much darker.

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Tyler wanted to watch someone die.

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Now, most people would have blocked him, and maybe reported him to the authorities,

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but Denali didn't run.

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Instead, she seemed intrigued by the idea of giving Tyler what he wanted,

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which brings us to the question that would change everything.

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If Tyler paid her $9 million, would she make a real snuff film for him?

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$9 million to someone who'd grown up in foster care, bouncing between homes.

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That kind of money represented everything she'd never had, security, freedom, and a completely different life.

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Enter Cynthia Hoffman, who went by C.C.

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She was 19, the same age as Denali, and they'd been best friends since high school.

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C.C. had been there for Denali through all her foster care transitions and family drama.

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She was exactly the kind of friend that everyone needs, loyal, supportive, and genuinely caring.

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C.C. had her own challenges. She was born with the learning disability and high functioning autism,

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which meant she needed extra support in school and took longer to learn new things.

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But she was determined to be independent.

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She worked at local restaurants and helped her father with his handyman business.

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She was building a life for herself, one small step at a time.

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But teenage friendships are complicated, and there'd been some drama over a boy named Zach.

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Denali felt betrayed by something C.C. had done, and when she told Tyler about it, he saw an opportunity.

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"If C.C.'s actions hurt you so much, why don't you get her back?"

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And that's when the plan crystallized. Denali would have her $9 million, and she'd have her revenge.

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Here's where the story gets even more disturbing.

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Denali didn't plan to do this alone.

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She recruited four other teenagers to help her, two of whom were under 15 years old.

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Let that sink in. Children barely old enough for high school were being pulled into a murder plot.

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The older accomplices were 16-year-old Caden Macintosh and Caleb Leland, who would drive them to and from the scene.

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Denali promised all of them a share of the $9 million Tyler was supposedly going to pay,

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because apparently nobody stopped to think about why some random guy in Texas would pay teenagers in Alaska $9 million for a murder video.

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On June 2nd, 2019, Denali asked C.C. if she wanted to go on a hike to Thunderbird Falls.

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And their friend group, Hike, was code for going somewhere to get high.

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So the invitation didn't seem suspicious. It was something that they'd done before.

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C.C. was shot and killed on the banks of the river near Thunderbird Falls, but the path to that moment was calculated and cruel.

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The group suggested they duct tape each other and take photographs, as part of what they presented as harmless fun.

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C.C. agreed to go first. She let them bind her wrists and feet with duct tape, then cover her mouth.

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It was only when she was completely helpless that she realized something was terribly wrong.

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While Denali and the others documented everything through Snapchat, sending pictures and videos to Tyler back in Kansas,

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Caden Macintosh took the gun from Denali and shot C.C. in the back of the head.

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Afterward, Hoffman's body was placed into the river.

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The group drove back to Anchorage thinking they were criminal masterminds.

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They burned C.C.'s clothes, her purse, her phone, and the murder weapon.

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Then they sent a message to C.C.'s sister, saying they dropped her off at a local park.

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But here's the thing about murder. It's not actually that easy to get away with.

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C.C.'s family realized she was missing almost immediately.

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The police tracked her movements to Thunderbird Falls and found her body the next day.

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Within hours, all five teenagers were arrested.

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So what about Tyler and his millions?

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When police tracked him down and brought him to Alaska, the truth was almost laughably pathetic.

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Tyler was actually Darren Schmiller, a shy, awkward young man from a small town in Indiana.

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He wasn't handsome, he wasn't rich, and he definitely wasn't a lottery winner.

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Darren was the kind of person who made others uncomfortable.

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He'd harassed classmates in school, asking them to send pictures of themselves in bikinis.

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When that didn't work, he'd approach their mothers and ask for photos of their children.

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His online relationships consistently fell apart when he started making similar requests.

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In Denali, he found someone who didn't run away from his darker impulses.

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And in him, she'd found someone that she thought could lift her out of the life she'd been born into.

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They were both chasing fantasies and C.C. Hoffman paid the price.

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Denali Brenner, now 24, pleaded guilty to murder in 2023 and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

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The prosecution argued that she deserved the maximum sentence because she had engaged in, quote,

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"one of the most serious crimes that we have seen in Alaska"

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and had executed C.C. in a murder for higher plot.

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Darren Schmiller also received 99 years for his role in the conspiracy.

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Caleb Liehlund, who drove the group to and from the scene, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received 30 years.

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McIntosh's trial, in the case, is still pending.

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Two juveniles who were under 15 at the time have had their cases handled privately as is typical for minors.

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This case raises uncomfortable questions about how we live now, about social media, about online relationships,

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about the desperation that can drive people to believe in impossible promises.

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C.C. Hoffman was working to build an independent life despite her challenges.

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She was loyal to her friends and close to her family.

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She deserved to grow up, to achieve her goals, to experience all the ordinary joys of life.

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Instead, she became the victim of a plot that existed primarily in the digital world until it suddenly, violently, didn't.

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The tragedy is that none of this had to happen.

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If Denali had talked to literally any adult about Tyler's promises,

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if she'd stopped to think about why a millionaire would pay teenagers millions for murder videos,

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if she'd chosen to work through her feelings about C.C. like normal friends do,

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everyone involved might have had different lives.

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But that's not how this story ends.

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Instead, it ends with a young woman dead, several teenagers behind bars, and families destroyed by choices that started with a lie on social media.

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Sometimes the internet connects us to wonderful things.

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Sometimes it connects us to people who destroy lives.

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The difference is learning to tell which is which.

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[Music]

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Vengeable True Crime Stories.

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I'm Joe, the host, and I appreciate you taking the time to listen today.

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If you're a new listener, subscribe wherever you're listening, and you can go to 10minutemerder.com to learn more about the podcast.

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OG listeners, I love you as usual, keep sharing this show with your friends and your family and rating them, reviewing it.

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Anyplace that's possible.

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Let's get to a quick email from one of you that listens, subject, this one's weird. Sorry.

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Joe.

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Okay, this is more personal than true crime, but have you ever had a dream where you're the victim or the killer?

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I had one last night after falling asleep to your podcast, and I woke up genuinely stressed about where I hit the body.

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Anyway, love the show, you have the best, let me tell you a story voice.

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Hannah, recovering sleep walker.

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Hannah, that's disturbing.

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I love that you're falling asleep listening to the podcast, by the way, I get that a lot.

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If you haven't tried that, I understand I don't do this myself because it's weird to listen to myself as I fall asleep.

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I don't do that.

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But I hear it a whole bunch that people go to bed and listen to my podcast as I fall asleep.

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They just keep binging and binging episodes until they fall asleep.

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So I guess this is what Hannah's doing, but Hannah, I've never had a dream where I was the killer.

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I don't think, not that I remember.

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I've had a million of them where I've been the victim, where someone's chasing me or is after me.

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I call those nightmares.

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I have them often, as I've documented in the past on this show.

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But think God never the killer.

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I don't know what I would even do.

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I guess that's normal.

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I think you're normal, Hannah, but knock on wood, I've never done that myself.

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All right, thank you for the email and thank you for listening to 10 Minute Murder.

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I will see you in the next one.

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Later.