High school boy throws massive party after killing his parents with a hammer
By: Dani Hendrix
Tags: Teenagers, Crime, Murder, True Crime, Psychology

High school boy throws massive party after killing his parents with a hammer

Tyler Hadley was going to throw a party, but not for the reason you might think. Unsurprisingly, no one thought twice when seventeen-year-old Tyler posted on social media that he was having a party later that night. He claimed that his parents wouldn’t be home. The truth of the matter was much darker, in fact. His parents would be home, but they wouldn’t be alive.

Photo by Dean Machala on Unsplash

The murder

On July 16th, 2011, Blake and Mary-Jo Hadley were in their home, unaware of the danger that they were in. Just before 5:00 PM, Tyler took his parent’s phones, swallowed three pills of ecstasy, and grabbed a hammer. He stood behind his mother as she sat quietly working on the family’s computer for work. This is when he began to beat her head in with a hammer.

Blake emerged from his bedroom at the sound of his wife screaming. He saw his son beating his wife and tried to stop him but Tyler turned his rage on his father instead. Tyler beat his head in as well, and soon both of his parents lay dead at his feet.

Tyler spent all of three hours trying to clean up the blood from the room. He wiped down the walls, floor and himself before attempting to drag the bodies to the master bedroom. Tyler tried to hide the bodies under a mess of broken glass and dishes, towels, pillows, and other various items from the room. He placed the hammer between his parent’s bodies under the mess of objects, and then went to get ready for his party.

The party

At 1:15 PM, Tyler posted on his Facebook wall,

“Party at my crib tonight… Maybe”.

Everyone who knew Tyler knew that his parents were incredibly strict, and did not believe that there was actually going to be a party. Realizing this, he later posted at 8:15 PM,

“Party at my house hmu.”

It wasn’t until a girl asked online if his parents would be there and he said no, that the adolescents began to take notice of the party invitation. By 11:30 PM, the party had started when a popular school athlete by the name of Mike Andrews brought ten or so of his friends to Tyler’s house. In the next hour, more than 100 high schoolers had shown up, almost none of which knew who Tyler was.

Those who attended the party reported that Tyler was acting strange and that he was very clearly high. Some said that he appeared to be anxious, but that they blamed it on the drugs he had taken.

A school soccer player, who asked for his name to be withheld from the case, arrived at he party at 1:15 PM. He said the first thing he noticed was the smell, and said he thought it smelled like sweaty clothes. The boy said that the house was in absolute disarray, and it was clear that Tyler didn’t care what anyone did during the party.

Mike Andrews was getting ready to leave the party when Tyler asked to speak with him outside. Tyler told him that he was going to go away for awhile because he had killed someone. Mark immediately got upset and told Tyler not to tell him such things, so he went back inside to speak to other students.

Tyler told him that he had thrown the party because he was planning on killing himself afterwards.

When they asked why, he said,

“Because I did something really bad”.

Tyler then proceeded to tell someone by the name of Michael that he killed his parents. Understandably, this student also did not believe Tyler. Frustrated by this, Tyler took Michael to the master bedroom where he was able to see legs sticking out from the pile of miscellaneous items. Tyler told his friend exactly what he had done, but for some reason the friend did not leave the party right away. He stayed another 45 minutes and even took selfies with Tyler before leaving to another party. But before he left, Michael hid the rest of Tyler’s pills because he was afraid that Tyler might actually attempt to take his life.

Once Michael had left the property, he called a crime stoppers hotline and told them everything that he had seen. The police showed up just after 4:30 AM and just after Tyler had posted on his Facebook once again about the party. The cops detained Tyler outside in his driveway as he screamed for them not to go into the house. It wasn’t long after that when they discovered the bodies of Blake and Mary-Jo Hadley.

The aftermath

Tyler said that he had been under a great deal of stress from his parents and occasionally told his friends that his dad would hit him. The general consensus among friends and family was that even if Blake was cruel to his son, it wouldn’t have been bad enough for Tyler to kill him in the way that he did. Some blamed the drugs, but Tyler had a small criminal history. He had assaulted a kid at school and had set a couch on fire in a forest after pouring gasoline on it.

Ryan Hadley, Tyler’s older brother, had been in college at the time of the murders. Ryan attended his parents funeral which had more than 1,000 guests that came to pay their respects. Ryan also visited his brother in prison and told reports that while he didn’t want to, he felt like he had to because…

“It’s what my parents would want me to do.”

Because Tyler committed the murders six months before his eighteenth birthday, he did not face the death penalty. Instead, he was given life in prison for brutally beating his parents to death by hitting them with a hammer upwards of 70 times total. Tyler was originally sentenced in 2014, but was re-sentenced in 2018 to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Tyler is currently serving out his life sentence in a correctional facility in Florida and the house where he killed his own parents has since been demolished.