Paperback: It began as a joke on Facebook but did he really kill his own mother and father just like he said he would?
Seventeen-year-old Tyler Hadley posted an invitation on Facebook: party at my crib tonight...maybe. However, this was no ordinary house party in the Florida suburbs; it was a grisly crime scene. Later that night, Tyler revealed to his best friend, Michael, that he had bludgeoned his parents to death with a hammer after taking three ecstasy tablets. Michael did not believe him until he entered the master bedroom and saw the bodies of Tyler's parents on the floor - murdered beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Mary Jo and Blake Hadley had always known their son had a dark side, a melancholy undercurrent that would come and go. Lately, it was coming more often than going. He would make disturbing jokes about murder on Facebook. He had even begun saying lately that he wanted to kill himself. That tore at Mary Jo's heart and she had searched on the family computer for therapy in which she could enrol her once towheaded boy. At seventeen, though, he was not towheaded anymore. He was six foot one and awkward and he had his mother's eyes.
His desperate mother had him sectioned at New Horizons, a treatment center for people with emotional and mental health disorders - an act she was only able to do because she believed there to be a 'substantial likelihood' he would hurt himself. When a co-worker asked Mary Jo if she was worried her son might hurt her she said no - she was more worried about his depression and suicide - because she suffered from mental illness herself.
How could they have known their son was dead serious? What kind of person could kill his mother and father, throw a party with their bodies in the next room and brag about it?
Tyler Hadley's friends had pieced together that he had been having a tough time lately - he seemed to be grounded all the time and he was clearly depressed - but they never really worried about it. He was a jokester, mostly, albeit with a pretty dark sense of humour. If you believed everything he said, you would have to buy that he was capable of killing his parents. How could he say that and mean it, especially if he followed it up with a laugh? Overall, he was a good guy despite his macabre tendencies and he was fun to hang out with.
"It was a merciless killing. It was brutal and the Facebook invitation - a party to have your friends and forty to sixty people come over - I think speaks for itself," police captain Don Kryak told a reporter at the scene.
A neighbour of the Hadleys' said, "At no time would you ever see any emotion out of him. I don't think I've ever seen him smile. When he was in trouble, he wasn't like most kids who would put their heads down and feel bad. There was never any remorse or conscience when you looked into his eyes...His demeanour made you want to look out your window and see what he was doing."
The waterfront town of Port St Lucie, lined with ocean-view restaurants and beautiful boats docked along the Treasure Coast, had about 165 000 residents. In all of 2010, three people were murdered there. The city battled it out for the title of Safest City in Florida every year and was considered among the safest in the United States. However, picturesque views aside, Port St Lucie suffered from a problem common in so many communities, suburban and urban alike: A lot of kids there liked doing drugs. Dozens of young adults would gather for one shindig around midnight, only to pull up stakes and head to another across town at 3am...and at each, there often was an argosy of alcohol and drugs: blow, beans, zannies, pot, you name it. The prevalence led some to dub the city "Pot St Lucie" or "Port St Lousy".
In Tyler's sentencing hearing, speaking for less than ninety seconds in a message he directed to his entire family, he said, "Not a single day goes by I don't think about my parents or my whole family that have been affected by this." He said he realized he took away a son, father, a mother, a sister, a brother, and two friends. "I know I don't expect forgiveness, and I know that they will never forgive me and I'm not expecting forgiveness."
The judge decided that Tyler should never be part of the outside world again. The crime had been "brutal, horrific," he said; the punishment must be severe. "These attacks on his parents were very painful, both physically and emotionally," Judge Robert Makemson told the courtroom. "I say emotionally because they realized their own son was killing them."
See How Much You Love Me (2014) is a riveting account about the 2011 murders of Blake and Mary Jo Hadley in Port St Lucie, Florida, by an award-winning journalist that takes you deep inside the mind of a troubled teenager and behind the scenes of a true American nightmare. The author dedicated her book to the countless nameless victims of crime, caught in the ripple effects of others' unthinkably selfish deeds.
About the author: Amber Hunt is an award-winning journalist who works for the Cincinnati Enquirer as an investigative reporter. She previously covered crime for the Detroit Free Press and the Dakotas for The Associated Press and was a 2011 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. She has written three true-crime books: Dead but Not Forgotten (2010), All-American Murder (2011) and See How Much You Love Me (2014), and is co-author of The Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America’s Most Public Family (2014), which she wrote with longtime friend David Batcher.
Amber is a past recipient of the Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting, the only national award dedicated to crime coverage. She has appeared on NBC’s Dateline and A&E’s Crime Stories, among other TV shows. Amber is also a photographer and lives in Ohio.
No comments:
Post a Comment