Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 1:15 on the afternoon of Saturday, July 16, 2011, a 17-year-old in Port St. Lucie, Florida, typed a status update on Facebook.
“party at my crib tonight … maybe.”
Tyler Hadley still lived with his parents. There was no obvious way a party was going to happen at that house.
By the end of that night, around 60 people would walk through the Hadleys’ front door. Almost none of them knew what was behind the door at the end of the hall. One of them did, and he took a picture.
A quiet street
From the outside, the Hadleys looked like a family nobody would ever need to worry about. Blake Hadley, 54, had worked as an engineer for Florida Power & Light for almost 30 years. Mary Jo Hadley, 47, was a first grade teacher at Village Green Environmental Studies School. A neighbor who had lived on the block for 15 years remembered Tyler and his older brother coming by on Halloween. They were always polite, she said.
Just the week before, Tyler and his father had taken a trip to north Georgia with Blake’s parents. They went for walks. They went white water rafting. “Everything was great,” his grandfather, Maurice Hadley, 82, told ABC News. “This is really confusing.”
Behind the door, things were harder than the neighbors knew. Tyler had been skipping school. He was using drugs. Police records would later show a receipt from a mental health center and a bottle of antidepressants in the house. His parents had taken away his phone, and he was furious about it. In a Facebook chat later found in the discovery file, he told a friend he might kill his mother.
The friend answered with a joke.
Michael Mandell, his best friend since they were eight, heard the same kind of thing. That Saturday afternoon Tyler called and said he planned to kill his parents. He said it again later in the day. Mandell didn’t take it seriously. Tyler had said it before.
Five minutes
What happened next comes from what Tyler told Mandell that night, as written down in a police affidavit.
He took his parents’ phones so that they could not call for help. He took three ecstasy pills. Some time around 5 p.m., he got a hammer. His mother was sitting at the computer. Tyler stood behind her for about five minutes, thinking about it.
Then he attacked her.
She turned to him and asked one word. “Why?”
Blake Hadley heard his wife scream and came out of the bedroom. According to the affidavit, father and son stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. Then Tyler went after him too.
It took him about three hours to clean up. He told Mandell it took longer than he had expected. He dragged his parents’ bodies into the master bedroom. Then he piled things on top of them: dining room chairs, a coffee table, books, files, towels, picture frames. He locked the door.
Hours after the killings he also went to an ATM. The police file includes photographs of him standing at a Chase machine. Friends he picked up on the way to the party said he showed them about $5,000 in cash.
At 8:15 p.m. he went back on Facebook.
“party at my house hmu.”
Beer pong
They started arriving around 9 or 10 p.m. Police would later put the number at 40 to 60 people. Most reports settled on around 60.
The kids played beer pong and smoked cigars. Friends told police that Tyler was in a good mood, a cheerful host. He told people to eat anything they wanted in the house.
Around 2:30 a.m., neighbors called in a noise complaint. A patrol car came through the neighborhood. The officers noticed nothing unusual and drove on.
Both of his parents’ cars sat in the driveway the entire time.
Some time during the night, Tyler asked Michael Mandell to step outside. He had something to tell him.
“Tyler confided in MM that he had killed his parents,” the affidavit says.
Mandell didn’t believe him. He thought it was a prank. So Tyler pointed at the driveway. Both cars were still there. Mandell still wasn’t convinced. Tyler took him to the garage and showed him a bloody shoeprint on the floor.
Mandell thought even that might be fake. “I actually thought he went that far out to play a prank on me, that he actually put fake blood on the ground,” he later told ABC’s 20/20.
There was only one way to find out. Mandell went back inside, past the kids and the cups and the music, and walked to the master bedroom. He put his hand on the doorknob.
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