Behind the door
“The party’s going on over here, and I turn the doorknob,” Mandell later recalled. He looked down and saw Blake Hadley’s leg, under a pile of things that had been thrown on the floor.
It was not a prank.
Any 17-year-old would be expected to run out of that house and call someone. Michael Mandell did not. He stayed. He went back to Tyler, and the two boys stood together, and Mandell took a selfie. Tyler is looking straight into the lens with a cup in his hand.
For years, people have asked what kind of person does that.
Mandell gave his answer on 20/20 in 2014. “When I took the picture, I had already seen ’em, seen the bodies,” he said. “I knew I was gonna call the cops on him when I took that picture.”
He took it, he said, because he knew it would be the last time he ever saw his friend.
“Look at the picture. Am I smiling? Is Tyler smiling?” he asked. “It’s a very sad picture. I don’t look happy at all.”
Later, after he had gone home, Mandell called Crime Stoppers. He told them that Tyler Hadley had killed his parents with a hammer.
“Party at my house again”
Police got to the house around 4:20 on Sunday morning. They found beer cups, cigar butts and a house in disarray. They also found Tyler, dressed all in black, “nervous, frantic and very talkative.” He told them his parents were out of town.
An officer saw what looked like dried blood on the frame of the master bedroom door. The door was locked.
When they got in, they found a room that looked as if a house had been emptied into it. Two dining chairs. A coffee table. Mirrors, bedding, clothing, a calendar. An officer lifted away two of the chairs, and called for an ambulance. It was far too late. Blake and Mary Jo Hadley had been dead for around 11 hours. The hammer was lying between them.
“It was a merciless killing,” police Capt. Don Kryak said.
Mandell also told police that Tyler had planned to end his own life with painkillers after the party. He never did. He was arrested and charged as an adult with two counts of first-degree murder.
When the case file came out, it held another detail that stayed with reporters. Kids at the party had talked about it. A 911 call released as evidence caught one friend telling another: “Bro, I don’t want to know any of the details.” The Rolling Stone writer who went through the 1,802 pages of discovery said he was amazed at how many of them seemed to have known, and kept partying anyway.
“I remember looking at myself in the mirror and laughing”
Tyler never went to trial. In 2014 he changed his plea to no contest, and a judge gave him two consecutive life sentences.
That was not quite the end of it. Because he was 17, a change in Florida’s juvenile sentencing rules sent the case back. In October 2018 he sat through a full week of hearings as his lawyers argued for 40 years.
The experts tried to explain him. One said he had been depressed, isolated and using drugs, in a worsening fight with his parents. On cross-examination, the prosecutor brought up how Tyler had once convinced a psychiatrist he was suffering from psychosis, then later admitted he had lied because he thought it might help.
His grandmother, Maggie DiVittorio, took the stand and said she spoke to him every day. She would like him to see the light of day again, she told the judge.
A neuropsychologist asked Tyler what he remembered. His answer came out in an interview obtained by WPTV.
“I remember looking at myself in the mirror and laughing … just looking at myself. I remember being bloody and it just happened.”
Could he make sense of it now, even looking back?
“Can’t make sense of it,” he said.
When it was his turn to speak, he talked for 48 seconds. “I’m sorry to my brother, my grandparents, the rest of my family and the rest of my parents’ friends,” he said. “I’m sorry I took them away from you.”
Life
On December 20, 2018, Judge Gary Sweet ruled that the crime was heinous, atrocious and cruel, and the product of premeditation. He sentenced Tyler Hadley to life in prison again. Under Florida law for juvenile offenders, he will get a review of his sentence after 25 years. He would be 42.
“If Tyler Hadley doesn’t deserve life in prison, then no one does,” prosecutor Tom Bakkedahl said.
Blake’s brother, Mike Hadley, said each new hearing felt like burying them again. “I feel like I’ve been to another funeral and I’m tired of these funerals,” he told reporters. Weeks earlier he had put it another way: “Even though we love our nephew Tyler, we know he’s done a terrible thing.”
The house was torn down in 2015.
The photo is still out there. A boy who had just killed his mother and father, holding a cup. Beside him, his best friend, who knew exactly what was in the bedroom, and who had already made up his mind to end it.
