Harlan Coben's Final Twist: "Gambler's Debt" (Levels Audio, CBS-TV, aired January 14, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 14) CBS-TV ran the second episode of Harlan Coben’s quirky true-crime series, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist. The odd subtitle represents Coben’s belief that in every murder there’s a “final twist” in the mind of the killer that makes him (or her, though in the two episodes so far the killers have both been male) not only contemplate a murder but actually do it. This time the story was called “Gambler’s Debt” (though I’m glad this is one show that doesn’t give its titles at the beginnings of the episode because for this one that would have been a big-time spoiler!) and it was about the brutal slaying (she was stabbed 97 times) of Anna Mae Branson, a woman in Madisonville, Kentucky who had managed to build a single ice-cream parlor into a regional chain and accumulate a major fortune, including a string of rental properties. Branson was found dead on January 13, 2003 by police doing a wellness check on her. Suspicion initially fell on two of her business associates, a tenant who had fallen thousands of dollars behind on his rent to her and a former employee, but it turned out both had life-threatening health issues (the tenant had just had abdominal surgery and the worker had had a heart attack), and doctors insisted that they could not have committed such a brutal, forceful murder without re-injuring themselves. Next the police started looking at members of Branson’s family and zeroed in on her nephew, Russell Winstead, who on the surface seemed to be a happily married coal miner (Madisonville is in the middle of the Kentucky coal country and most of its working-age males work in the mines) with a church-going wife and two kids. Underneath that identity he was a compulsive gambler, frequently visiting the riverboat casinos in that part of Kentucky and dropping an estimated total of $1.6 million. (I know something about compulsive gambling from having had a home-care client who was a gambling addict.) Over the years Winstead had borrowed over $100,000 from Anna Mae Branson to support his gambling habit, and the day before she was killed he wrote her a check for $12,000 but told her not to cash it without his O.K. Then he went for another all-night gambling session on a riverboat casino and I’m guessing thought he make enough money to cover his check to his aunt. Instead he lost once again, and the next morning Russell went over to Anna’s place, where she confronted him about the large and growing size of his debt to her (she kept careful tabs on how much her benefactees owed her in a little red book called “Addresses”) and he apparently lost it completely and killed her.

The case wasn’t as open-and-shut as the police initially claimed, especially after Russell was polygraphed and the examiner said it was the most complete case of deception he’d ever seen, especially in all the questions in which Russell was asked if he had any knowledge of the murder, and he repeatedly said no. But there were a few holes in it: the DNA evidence from the hairs and fibers found on the crime scene were tested against Russell’s DNA and did not match. Also, the one eyewitness the police were able to find, a Black woman who had seen Russell leave his aunt’s house just after the probable time of the murder had originally said the man she saw fleeing was six feet tall, and only later, after Russell’s photo had been published in newspapers, did she retract that and name the 5’6” Russell as the man she’d seen. Russell complicated the case by fleeing to Costa Rica, which won’t extradite people who face the death penalty in their home countries, so the Kentucky authorities had to agree not to seek to execute Russell if he were convicted of Branson’s murder. Ultimately he was arrested in 2005 and brought back to the U.S., though with one of America’s typically delayed justice systems he wasn’t put on trial until 2007. In the meantime he got a fellow convict to write an anonymous letter declaring that he had killed Branson, though this man, who was in prison awaiting trial for another murder of an old woman who lived alone two years later, ultimately recanted his confession after he realized he was facing the death penalty for both murders even though Russell, insulated from a death sentence by the deal Kentucky and Costa Rica had cut to get him back, was not. Russell allegedly tried to bribe this man by offering him money to set up a trust fund for his wife and kids – unless he was making it up out of whole cloth, one wonders where Russell would have got this money. In the end, Russell was convicted in 2007 and given a life sentence, though it carried with it the possibility of parole and he could be released as early as 2030. One of the things that struck me was how genuinely physically attractive Russell Winstead seemed to be – no doubt that was how he was able to have two girlfriends on the riverboats along with his wife – and another was that Branson’s family predictably split wide open on the issue of Russell’s guilt, with the Winsteads (including Russell’s father Eric, who pleaded guilty to having helped cover for him but got no jail time) steadfastly maintaining his innocence while the non-Winstead branch of the family were equally insistent that he did it. Like the previous week’s episode, this was about a case that had already been covered by previous true-crime shows, in this case one on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen network in 2021 as well as at least one Web-only podcast.