WTOL Investigates Double Murder with Help from Police and Prosecutors

By Paul Greeley,
817-578-6324, Paul@NewsBlues.com

It’s a horrific story.

Eleven people kidnap, torture and murder two Toledo teens, then dump the bodies in the basement of an abandoned house and firebomb it.

The murders happened in 2022, but as headlining grabbing as the crime was, news coverage was hampered by plea deals nine people took behind the scenes. Two were tried and convicted in court.

“They’re the worst human beings on earth,” says Brian Dugger, WTOL’s lead investigator on the story when talking about the killers. “They’re evil incarnate.”

WTOL is Tegna’s CBS affiliate in Toledo.

The WTOL 11 Investigates report, Piecing Together The Puzzle – The Murders of Two Toledo Teens, runs about 36 minutes in its entirety and was initially released on WTOL 11+, the station’s streaming service, Dugger says.

“This is the first big project we broke exclusively on our streaming platform,” Dugger says.

Some segments have been used in podcasts and longer form stories in the station’s newscasts over the past week.

When the murders came to court, “we didn’t get to do a ton on it,” Dugger says. “This was such an unusual case, 11 people being convicted of killing two kids then throw them in a vacant house and firebomb the house.”

The crime is so unusual that the WTOL 11 Investigates took a deep dive working with the police and the prosecutor.

Dugger says the investigators were able to get their hands on the police file with access to photos and all the interrogation videos.

The investigators waded through hours of interrogations, conversations and legal deals to put the pieces of the puzzle together to tell the story.

Promotionally, the station’s digital manager, Victoria Dugger, Brian’s wife, put together videos that were released on “Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all the different platforms the station has, and then we did promotion in the various newscasts.”

The in-show promotion aired across all the newscasts, morning, noon, evenings and late night and featured either Dugger or his partner, Melissa Andrews, in the studio on camera, introducing a short package with sound bites.

Piecing Together The Puzzle – The Murders of Two Toledo Teens drove a 50% increase in minutes watched on WTOL+ in its first week, and continues to be the overall #1 non-newscast show on WTOL+ for the month of February.

The 15 different videos related to the investigation have been viewed a combined 37,500 times, Dugger says.

“We wanted to get as many streams as possible on our WTOL 11+ platform before releasing to YouTube, where we knew it would have a long shelf life,” he says.

NOTE: The WTOL 11 Investigates team were awarded a National Edward R. Murrow Award in 2023 for their work on Dark Side of Cedar Point.