The Scream Murder on Disney+: The Story Behind the Murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart
The third episode of the documentary series maps out the planned murder by Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik in Idaho
What is the series about?
The Scream Murder: A True Teen Horror Story (ABC News Studios, 2026) is a three-part documentary series that investigates one of the most disturbing murder cases in American criminal history. The series culminates in the episode Life Is Cruel, which meticulously reviews the trial and the evidence that led to the conviction of two teenagers. The documentary highlights how pop culture and horror films can have a fatal influence on unstable young minds, and how a planned fantasy turned into a tragic reality for an innocent girl and her family.
The real case
The case of the so-called Scream murder began on September 22, 2006, in Pocatello, Idaho. 16-year-old Cassie Jo Stoddart was house-sitting for her relatives when her classmates, Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik, initiated a carefully planned murder act. The two perpetrators were heavily fascinated by the horror film Scream from 1996 and wanted to recreate the film's horror in real life. After visiting Cassie earlier that evening with her boyfriend, they sneaked back to the house, cut the power, and attacked her with knives while she lay on the couch.
The most macabre element of the case was the perpetrators' own documentation. Draper and Adamcik recorded their preparations and immediate reactions after the murder on a videotape. On the tape, they can be heard discussing their plans to become serial killers and selecting victims from a death list they had compiled at their school. This videotape, which they attempted to destroy and bury in Black Rock Canyon along with the murder weapons, became the police's key evidence.
Timeline of the case
The investigation progressed quickly as the police found inconsistencies in the two boys' accounts. During interrogations, Brian Draper eventually admitted parts of the sequence of events, which led the police to the buried evidence. In 2007, both Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik were found guilty of first-degree murder. Although they were minors at the time of the crime, they were sentenced as adults to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The case has since been the subject of several legal appeals regarding sentencing for minors, but the convictions have so far been upheld by the higher courts in Idaho.