This case is a tragic story about a scorned mother who decided to take drastic and horrific steps to punish her husband, but there is a strange subplot about a Reddit post and how the internet got caught up in one of those most disgusting crimes imaginable.
In 2016 Jason posted on Reddit looking for advice - he did this under the username u/Jasoninhell.
He went to the relationship advice subreddit, to seek solace and help for a case of his wife Brandi cheating on Jason with their neighbour.
Jason described in detail that he discovered the affair with the neighbour and had a confrontation with both his wife Brandi and the neighbour - but ultimately made the decision that he felt was best for their kids, to stick with his cheating wife.
The situation became worse for Jason because his wife used Jason’s previous suicide attempt against him, suggesting that this would be leverage for her that Jason is unfit to care for the kids.
Brandi’s vindictive nature came through, as she demanded that Jason apologise not only to her but also to the neighbour with whom Brandi was having the affair. For his stable family life and children, Jason degraded himself and his self-respect by adhering to her wishes.
Clearly unaware of the level of callousness that Brandi was capable of.
But the lingering pain of betrayal was too much for Jason and he needed an ear to listen. This is where Reddit comes into the story.
Jason then posted on Reddit titled - I'm [30/m] having a hard time coping with my wife [29/f] having cheated on me with our neighbor [51/m]
The post came over 400 days after the discovery of the infidelity and it really went into the constant and obsessive ruminations that Jason has had since the affair and how this was damaging Jason emotionally.
Jason shared his experience of catching Brandi, his wife, cheating with their neighbour over a year ago and how he’s been struggling ever since. Despite the discovery, he stayed in the marriage for the sake of their children. He regularly counts the days since confronting her, hoping each day will be the one where he stops thinking about it.
The infidelity began when Jason was working long hours and noticed suspicious behaviour. Brandi added a password to her phone and gave vague reasons, but eventually, Jason discovered explicit texts and messages between her and the neighbour. Although he had plans to catch them in the act, he couldn’t get solid evidence beyond the messages.
When confronted, Brandi initially denied everything but eventually admitted to the inappropriate behaviour, though she insisted they hadn’t had sex. She then threatened to use Jason’s past mental health struggles against him to take their children if he left. Feeling trapped, Jason chose to stay to protect his kids. He was also forced to apologize to the neighbour and maintain social ties with him because their children were friends.
Despite their agreement to work on the marriage, Brandi later sent more inappropriate pictures to the neighbour, claiming it was an accident. Though things have been quiet for a few months, Jason remains consumed by the betrayal. His job performance has suffered, and he has difficulty sleeping or finding peace. He fears that seeking a divorce now would make things even worse for his children. With no one to confide in and no belief in religion, Jason feels stuck and unsure how to move forward.
The Reddit post is linked below - it's very long - but worth reading for the full context of the affair.
It was at this point that Jason received the desired advice from Redditors, some of which was sage and wise advice - other advice, more from a place of judgment than empathy.
The top-voted reply went as follows:
MonsieurLeDude 530 points 28 days ago
You are trying to navigate this alone and you should seek counsel ASAP. You should have done this months ago - Your wife's threats should hold no weight until you can get a professional legal opinion on your exposure in a divorce.
You won't be doing your children any favors by remaining in a marriage that is now founded on lies, infidelity and outright bullying. She made you apologize to your neighbor? And you did it?
Come on man. You cannot honestly say that you see any sort of future here that isn't a hell on earth for you, so for your sake and the sake of your children get to a lawyer ASAP and follow his directions to the letter.
Some other replies went as follows - and spoke of the incredulity of the situation and grasped a failure to understand Jason and his motives fully:
couldabeen 148 points 28 days ago
I cannot believe you stayed with her. I cannot believe you 'begged' her to stay. I cannot believe you apologized to neighbor.
TheCosmicSerpent 62 points 28 days ago
smack the shit out of that old man. go to an attorney (i hope you saved all the evidence) and talk about ways to get custody of your kids. your wife is a twat
Deidara77 8 points 28 days ago
He should have got a lawyer as soon as he had all that information together, its been over a year now and the wife knows he knows. He has no more hidden cards, and the element of surprise is gone. Unfortunately OP made the wrong decision and caved to her blackmailing (even if he had good reasons to do it, still wrong decision) and given her more power in this scenario. I think the best thing he can do now is suck it up and keep on keeping on.
omeguy3 1 point 27 days ago
She is poison in your life. Get rid of it. And a disfunctional family is worse for the kids than a divorce. As for the kids believing her lies, tell them not to believe anything she says about you, or you say about her.
It was the advice and intervention of Redditors that urged Jason to step up and call it off with Brandi, demanding a divorce. This should have represented a pivotal and self-fulfilling moment for Jason to snatch back his autonomy, confidence and independence.
But instead - it turned deadly….
On the night of November 17, 2016, Brandi attacked both children in their sleep. She fatally stabbed Tyler and Charlee multiple times with a combat knife. After killing the children, Brandi stabbed herself in the neck in an apparent suicide attempt but survived.
Following the murders, Brandi called 911 and calmly reported what she had done, claiming she didn’t want Jason to take the children away from her. Jason was asleep in the basement and only became aware of what happened after the police arrived.
Here is her call to the police:
"I just stabbed myself and I killed my two children," Worley says in the audio of the call, which was made public shortly after the murders.
“You stabbed yourself and killed your two children?” the male dispatcher repeats incredulously.
“Mmm-hmm,” Worley responds.
“Okay, and what’s your name?”
“Brandi Worley.”
The dispatcher asks where the children are, and Worley, whose speech is somewhat slurred, responds that they are on the floor in her daughter’s room. The dispatcher continues asking questions between moments of silence, at one point asking Worley why she killed her children.
“My husband wanted a divorce and wanted to take my kids,” she responds. “I don’t want him to have my kids.”
Asked about her husband, she says he is downstairs in the basement. The dispatcher asks about Jason Worley’s condition.
“I don’t know, I haven’t talked to him,” she responds.
The dispatcher asks Brandi Worley what she feels, and she says she’s tired.
“I took a lot of Benadryl,” she says.
She tells the dispatcher that, before calling him, she called her mother, who told her to call 911.
Montgomery County prosecutors said that it was Jason Worley’s mother-in-law’s screams of horror that woke him that morning. He ran upstairs and found her in the kitchen, and his wife in the living room.
"That's when I heard (Brandi) say, 'Now you can't take my children from me," Jason Worley said.
Here's the timeline of what happened before the murders:
That afternoon, Jason Worley returned from work and the family went to Charlee’s (the daughter’s) dance practice.
After dinner at home, Brandi Worley went to Walmart, telling her husband that she needed pipe cleaners for a school project Tyler (the son) was working on.
Instead of pipe cleaners, she bought a knife at Walmart.
When she returned home, she hid the knife in Tyler’s bedroom before going into the living room, where she and her husband played with their children together before Jason Worley put them to bed for the last time, the newspaper said.
Buser said that early the following morning, Brandi Worley woke Tyler up for a "sleepover" in his little sister's room, the Journal Review reported. In Charlee's bedroom, she straddled her son and stabbed him repeatedly.
Charlee awoke at one point and asked what her mother was doing. When Brandi Worley told her “nothing,” Charlee went back to sleep.
Once Tyler was dead, Brandi Worley stabbed Charlee to death.
Worley then stabbed herself more than once in the neck but survived.
“She was more adept killing her small, sleeping children than killing herself,” Buser [the prosecutor] said.
Where was Jason during this period?
In a post a day earlier, he had claimed that his wife had suggested that he sleep on the sofa instead of an air mattress in the basement.
He wrote: "I just can't help but wonder that if I had slept on the couch like she had suggested instead of an air mattress in the basement then maybe I could have saved my children or at the very least died with them.
"A father has one job in this world, to protect his children, and I failed to do that."
Brandi Worley’s sentences were 55 years for her son’s murder and 65 years for killing her young daughter. These are consecutive sentences accumulating more than 100 years.
The moderators of Relationship Advice followed up, after the murders, with a notice about Jason and his previous post, which really reflected the polarising reaction he found online:
The intent behind much of the tough-love advice in the original thread was obvious to all of us reading the thread and upvoting comments as well as to jasoninhell himself. However, the tone used for quite several comments was unnecessarily harsh and may have failed to consider the reality of the situation (as best as we could've known—hindsight is 20/20). Ultimately, this speaks to the fact that everyone participating here is doing so with limited information and should be open to the possibility that there's more than meets the eye whenever providing guidance and advice. Going forward, all we ask is to please observe tone when providing advice and realize the potential for complications which might make any advice difficult to follow. Something which seems obvious to any one of us is rarely ever obvious to someone in the weeds of the relationship itself.
As the judge sentenced Brandi. He said the following in summary:
“Everyone wants an explanation for an unnatural event — a parent killing his or her children. Sometimes there is no explanation. Darkness is in this world. ... And it penetrates minds and our hearts.”
And this is the crux of the case here - there is no explanation for the cruelty and evil that Brandi Worley showed her husband, her children and the world.
Jason did not know the type of woman that he married, and when he found out, it was too late and he lost everything.
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