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
Quick Facts
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 became 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. The 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 plot. The two perpetrators were heavily fascinated by the horror film Scream from 1996 and wanted to recreate the film's terror 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 created 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.
