It was a game of catfish being played both ways — and it wound up deadly.
The story of convicted murderer Denali Brehmer is the focus of the latest episode of Court TV’s Interview With a Killer, 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 choosing.
The new episode, titled “Catfishing for Murder,” airs at 8 p.m. ET on Sunday, Nov. 3, and includes exclusive new interviews with Brehmer, now 23, and former FBI agent Brad Garrett, who helps host David Scott analyze the shocking case.
Brehmer was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the 2019 murder of her friend Cynthia Hoffman, the Alaska Department of Law announced in February.
According to authorities, Brehmer carried out the killing 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 learn through their own deep dive 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 episode shared 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 at one point in the new clip.
In addition to Brehmer and Schilmiller, Alaska men Kayden McIntosh and Caleb Leyland were convicted for helping Brehmer carry out the murder, the Alaska Department of Law said. 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 the day she was murdered, was merely “a place of opportunity” for them to carry out the killing.
“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, referencing a falling out the pair had over 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.”
Denali Brehmer and David Scott.
CourtTV
Brehmer says the killing is “on me” though she wavers back and forth about whether she wanted to murder her one-time friend or to simply put a scare into her.
The Anchorage Daily News reported the victim’s family said she had a learning disability and functioned at a younger developmental age than 19. Hoffman’s father, Timothy Hoffman, told the paper his daughter considered Brehmer her “best friend” after they met in high school.
Interview With a Killer: Catfishing for Murder,airs on Sunday, Nov. 3, at 8 p.m. ET on CourtTV.
