May 27, 2026 · 27 min · 11 segments
In Ohio, bombshell after bombshell keeps dropping in the Mackenzie Shirilla case. Convicted of deliberately driving into a wall at over 100 mph and killing two people, Shirilla has recently projected…
Vanessa RichardsonHostSo we covered the Mackenzie Shirilla case previously, but this story's moving so fast that we have to come back to it because in just the past few days, a flood of new details has come out that paint an even more disturbing picture than what we already knew.
On May twenty-fifth, twenty-seven-year-old Cheyanne Topping sat down with People magazine and shared what it was actually like to date Shirilla behind bars.
Topping says the two started a relationship in twenty twenty-three when Shirilla first arrived at the Ohio Reformatory for Women after her conviction, and one of the first things she says Shirilla told her was her prison nickname, Shirilla the Killa.
Okay, so we'll get to who Mackenzie Shirilla is in a second, but first, the context for why this update matters so much.
This case has been completely reborn in the public consciousness because of a Netflix documentary called The Crash, which dropped on May fifteenth and immediately shot to the top of the charts.
The doc revisits the events of July thirty-first, twenty twenty-two, when seventeen-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla drove a car into a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio, that's a suburb about twenty miles south of Cleveland, at over a hundred miles per hour.
Sitting in the passenger seat was her twenty-one-year-old boyfriend, Dominic Russo.
Both were pronounced dead at the scene, while Mackenzie obviously survived.
Forensic evidence showed the car's accelerator was fully pressed and never let up right up until the moment of impact.
Prosecutors said this was a botched murder-suicide, that Mackenzie intentionally drove that car into that building because of a fractured, volatile relationship with Russo.
In August of twenty twenty-three, a judge found her guilty on four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault, two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide, and one count each of drug possession and possessing criminal tools.
She received two concurrent sentences of fifteen years to life, meaning she won't be eligible for parole until twenty thirty-seven.
Today, she's twenty-one and incarcerated at the Ohio Reformatory for Women.
Now, with The Crash bringing the case back into the spotlight, bombshell after bombshell has dropped.
The first major revelation came on May twenty-first when People magazine published a jail call obtained from when Mackenzie was being held at the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center while awaiting the outcome of her bench trial.
In the call, Mackenzie spoke with her mother, Natalie Shirilla, and said she had wanted to testify in her own defense, but that her attorney had advised against it.
She told her mother that if she'd been allowed to take the stand, people would have understood what really happened.
So we covered the Mackenzie Shirilla case previously, but this story's moving so fast that we have to come back to it because in just the past few days, a flood of new details has come out that paint an even more disturbing picture than what we already knew.
On May twenty-fifth, twenty-seven-year-old Cheyanne Topping sat down with People magazine and shared what it was actually like to date Shirilla behind bars.
Topping says the two started a relationship in twenty twenty-three when Shirilla first arrived at the Ohio Reformatory for Women after her conviction, and one of the first things she says Shirilla told her was her prison nickname, Shirilla the Killa.
Okay, so we'll get to who Mackenzie Shirilla is in a second, but first, the context for why this update matters so much.
This case has been completely reborn in the public consciousness because of a Netflix documentary called The Crash, which dropped on May fifteenth and immediately shot to the top of the charts.
The doc revisits the events of July thirty-first, twenty twenty-two, when seventeen-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla drove a car into a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio, that's a suburb about twenty miles south of Cleveland, at over a hundred miles per hour.
Sitting in the passenger seat was her twenty-one-year-old boyfriend, Dominic Russo.
Both were pronounced dead at the scene, while Mackenzie obviously survived.
Forensic evidence showed the car's accelerator was fully pressed and never let up right up until the moment of impact.
Prosecutors said this was a botched murder-suicide, that Mackenzie intentionally drove that car into that building because of a fractured, volatile relationship with Russo.
In August of twenty twenty-three, a judge found her guilty on four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault, two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide, and one count each of drug possession and possessing criminal tools.
She received two concurrent sentences of fifteen years to life, meaning she won't be eligible for parole until twenty thirty-seven.
Today, she's twenty-one and incarcerated at the Ohio Reformatory for Women.
Now, with The Crash bringing the case back into the spotlight, bombshell after bombshell has dropped.
The first major revelation came on May twenty-first when People magazine published a jail call obtained from when Mackenzie was being held at the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center while awaiting the outcome of her bench trial.
In the call, Mackenzie spoke with her mother, Natalie Shirilla, and said she had wanted to testify in her own defense, but that her attorney had advised against it.
She told her mother that if she'd been allowed to take the stand, people would have understood what really happened.
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