Her lack of empathy
or just any sense of remorse is missing in that phone call,
and it is horrific to hear.
That was not the woman that I knew.
That was -- that was a whole 'nother level of evil.
I was warned ahead of time before it was
released that I would not want to hear it,
and I listened to it anyway.
That call has haunted me ever since hearing it.
If the entire world was a book or a story, for Brandi,
she, without hesitation, said that she was the main character.
In Brandi's mind,
it was Brandi's world, and we were all just living in it.
When you have someone who you love and trust
who abuses that love and trust to
control every aspect of your life,
it's something everyone needs to speak up about.
I learned the most dangerous time with an abuser is when you
try to leave that abuser,
because you never know what they're going to do when they
lose that control over your life.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
-[knock at door] -[creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
JASON: I feel anxious, because I feel
like everybody around me knows what happened.
"Oh, that's the guy
that survived Brandi Worley."
My initial impressions of Brandi
were that she was hard-working.
She was friendly and...
just kind of the center of any
friend group that she became a part of.
This was my initial opinion, but it changed over time.
It is very difficult to talk about Brandi.
I normally try not to use her name as much as possible,
because attention was something she loved,
and I don't really care to give her attention anymore.
In the fall of 2006, I was attending a college
in Indianapolis.
in college, Brandi was studying to be a paralegal.
At that time, I didn't notice Brandi,
but apparently, she took notice of me.
Then, later on, I kept seeing Brandi all over campus,
like she would be outside my classroom or in
a hallway or outside the dorms as I walked by.
Jason?
You again.
She seemed like somebody who was bubbly and full of joy.
I found out from a mutual friend
that Brandi was interested in me.
And soon after, we started dating.
Later in the relationship, a friend
asked Brandi how Brandi and I met.
Brandi admitted that she followed me around college
and had memorized my class schedule.
So I can see him as much as I could.
JASON: Brandi spoke about it as if this was
a completely normal thing for a person to do.
I was taken slightly aback, because I did not realize
these were planned encounters.
I thought this was just random chance,
but I very much believe it was
like the beginning of a form of manipulation.
It was an intentional plan of hers.
This is a photograph of Brandi and I in college.
This is the version of Brandi that I fell in love with.
This was the fun, bubbly, energetic Brandi
that was who I thought I was going to spend my life with.
I started to fall in love with Brandi
because she was such a people pleaser.
It wasn't until later on that I found out that it was just
kind of how she got what she wanted from people
was to treat them in a way that made them feel good.
But nowadays, when I see Brandi,
it makes me angry.
Here's the person that took everything that
was important to me away from me.
Brandi and I had only been dating for six months,
but I approached Brandi's mother with the intent
of asking her for Brandi's hand in marriage.
That night, her mother filled me in on some of Brandi's life
prior to my knowing her and kind of things
Brandi had been through.
Brandi's mother had told me about her previous marriages
and how Brandi had multiple father figures throughout
that time, how Brandi didn't know her biological father.
She told me about
instances of abuse in Brandi's childhood
that kind of shaped Brandi's view of the world.
I was somewhat surprised that I didn't
hear it from Brandi initially.
I always tried to be very open about who
I was and things that have happened in my past.
At the time, I just
assumed it was something that Brandi
just didn't like talking about it.
Maybe it was a sore spot for her.
I had thought this is someone that needs protection, needs
love, needs care so that they can continue moving forward in
their life.
Knowing what I know now about Brandi,
she very carefully curated people's opinions of her.
Brandi was very much two people, and I don't know if even
I know what the true Brandi is let alone if anyone does.
Shortly after we got engaged,
I was working already as a software engineer,
and Brandi was working in a department store.
She believed she was going to be promoted to manager.
After work,
I meet her back at the apartment,
and she explains to me that
another employee got the job instead of her,
and it made her angry.
It was supposed to be me!
JASON: She accused the store manager of
having relations with this other employee
and made a scene in the store.
That's how she ended up losing her job.
Brandi very much played the victim in this situation.
She put on a very emotional act.
She was crying, she was shaking.
It didn't feel like the right time to
ask her even why did you do this?
This is not proper behavior, to be
yelling at a fellow employee and your manager.
I went into crisis management mode of okay...
It's okay. It's okay.
...here's how we're going to handle the finances.
I'm just taking any opportunity to
make sure I am the best provider I can be.
Because of all things,
I idolized my father for being an excellent provider.
And so that's what I wanted to be.
I wanted to be my father.
How could you think about money at a time like this?
JASON: I was trying to make money,
and we were trying to pay for a marriage.
It was all the balls in
the air and just trying to keep everything moving.
But this was the first instance of me seeing
how poorly
Brandi would react to her own plans not coming to fruition.
I thought maybe it was just a one-off or just -- just a fluke,
if anything -- I was distracted
from the reality of the situation.
Brandi is very calculating, until her plans
don't work as she expected them to.
At that point, she's just raging against the world.
JASON: After Brandi lost her job,
I switched employers and took on more responsibilities
with work -- it also included working longer hours.
One day, I had come home from work.
As soon as I was in the door,
she was on top of me.
What took you so long?
JASON: What were you doing downtown?
Who were you with?
She was very accusatory.
She wanted to know who I was talking to
and where I was at all times.
And then she demanded that I block my exes on social media.
Let me see.
She was standing over my shoulder
and making sure I actually followed through on it.
There was an application that she insisted we use that
gave her access to my GPS location at all times.
What she wanted was, okay,
what time did Jason get to work?
What time did Jason leave?
Did he leave the office at any time today?
The lack of trust made me feel actually sorry for Brandi.
It made me wonder what experience
made her see the worst in people.
I believe this came from a place of having seen
father figures
cheat on her mother.
So I just went along with it.
It seemed like a gesture of good faith to Brandi.
Now you have nothing to hide.
Brandi took every advantage of my kindness
to manipulate the situation into
what she wanted to meet her own
personal goals.
For Brandi, people were almost dispensable.
As soon as a person did not provide
something that made Brandi's life easier, they just
no longer existed in her mind.
We were getting closer to the actual wedding.
Did you think more about it?
We had had a discussion about when
we actually wanted to start having children.
And for me, the answer was not right
away, because we were both working on our careers.
Maybe we take the temperature after the wedding, right?
JASON: She was unusually silent.
AS JASON: Sound good?
JASON: I thought, you know,
wow, she's valuing my opinion.
I didn't know that she was asking
for a very specific reason.
A week later, I go back to the bedroom to see what
she's doing -- I find out that she had taken
a pregnancy test and found out she was pregnant.
[sobbing quietly]
Honey, what's wrong?
JASON: Even though just a week prior, I was like,
"Let's wait a couple of years," I was still, like, ecstatic.
I'm going to be a father. This is amazing.
This must be meant to be
because, you know, I thought she was
still on birth control at the time.
So it's one in a million chance or whatever.
This isn't my fault.
JASON: She framed it as my fault.
She was very good at manipulating my guilt
and making me feel
that I was responsible for situations that
I had no control over.
She's like, "Well, I haven't been taking it,
because you didn't pick it up for me."
I was taken slightly aback.
I had never picked it up for her.
It was always something she had done.
I wouldn't have even known where she was getting it from.
You haven't been taking your birth control?
-See?! -JASON: At the time,
I kind of accepted Brandi's claim that I could
have been picking up the birth control for her.
Brandi.
We're having a baby.
And then she's like, "If you think at any
"point in the future, you're going to want to leave me,
"do it now, because once the child is born,
I will not accept you leaving."
It's not too late to call it here.
Why would you say that?
It was very jarring, because here I was wanting to celebrate
this moment, and she was bringing a very negative
outlook to it.
It wouldn't be long until Brandi really
leaned more heavily into this kind of behavior
and become even more controlling
than she already was.
This is a photograph of Brandi and I on our wedding day.
In this picture, Brandi was pregnant.
I suggested the idea of postponing the wedding.
Brandi did not like that idea at all.
I would not even categorize my wedding day as a happy day.
It was another day and another time
where I had to keep Brandi happy.
It was another example of Brandi has a plan.
We do not deviate from that plan, or Brandi will be angry.
I had to keep moving chairs in and out of the building
because we wanted it to be an outdoor wedding,
then it would rain a little bit,
and I had to take the chairs back in
and take the chairs back out when it cleared up again.
Brandi was angry.
She was irritable.
She was snapping at everybody -- when you
look at this picture, and Brandi looks happy,
it's simply because that's what Brandi wants you to see.
Brandi knows how to switch her face on a dime.
I would like to have believed that she loved me at
some point, but in light of everything she's done,
I don't know.
And I don't know if I'll ever know.
This is a picture of Tyler right after he was born.
Tyler was 10 weeks premature.
It was a very hectic and unsure time.
Brandi's health was
in a critical state when she arrived at
the emergency room, and they were telling me that
all -- they would only be able to save one of them.
I thought I was either gonna say goodbye
to my wife or goodbye to my son that day.
Tyler is 2 pounds, 12 ounces,
and he's receiving assistance to breathe.
He's being kept in an incubator because
he's not maintaining his body temperature yet.
I would just sit there and just read to him,
just to make sure he knew I was there.
While Tyler was in the NICU,
I spent a lot of time with him,
and Brandi's mother took care of her.
I would take pictures and, you know,
hang them up around her room.
I just thought she'd want to see our son.
I thought she'd be excited about that,
but Brandi just would not go and see him.
One afternoon, I go into the room, and I notice
the pictures are not hanging where I had left them.
It wasn't until later that I found out, when I wasn't in
the room, Brandi was asking her mother to take the pictures down
because she didn't want to see them.
She did eventually come around and go see Tyler for
the first time, right before she was
discharged from the hospital.
Much later, she finally told me
why the pictures were taken down,
why she didn't go see Tyler, was
Brandi had a very particular idea in mind
of how her pregnancy would run its course.
And when it didn't
go that way, she was very upset about things
not going to plan, angry that Tyler was so small.
She was upset with Tyler that this had happened.
It was another example of this wasn't the plan,
so she was throwing her little temper tantrum about it,
but there was never any kind of indication that
things would ever go as far as they did.
JASON: In the days and weeks that followed,
Brandi fell into a role of taking care of Tyler.
I returned to work, and things
seemed good, seemed -- she seemed normal.
It was -- it was a good time.
The spring after Tyler was born,
we were doing some work in the yard, and Brandi's family
had come over to help us with the yard work.
Brandi's stepdad had started burning weeds out of the fence
line instead of just pulling them out of the fence,
which is what I would have done.
It really bothered me.
I did not like that they were doing that.
And so I pulled Brandi aside, I'm like, "Hey,
could you ask your family to back off a little?"
Brandi's response was to tell me that, "If you don't like
"my family, then we can't be together.
And if you leave, you're never seeing Tyler again."
I was like, where is this coming from?
Brandi had a very stern and serious composure that
made me believe that this was a serious threat.
She's going to kick me out of my son's life
over this, and it was really upsetting.
Tyler was all important to me.
After Brandi's family left,
I took a moment with Tyler, and I just held him in my arms.
I held him, and I wept.
This became a...
almost a go-to for her when she wanted to win an argument.
"Do this, or you're never seeing your son again."
One of the things about Brandi is
people aren't really people to her.
They are a means to an end.
In this photograph is a picture of Tyler
posing and just being a little ham for the camera.
He loved putting on a big smile.
Tyler was a force.
He -- he just...
would blow through a room and fill everyone with joy.
It was just amazing how
wonderful he made people feel when he was in their presence.
He could walk into a room with 20 strangers
and walk out with 20 new best friends.
Father's Day came around.
I had woken up that morning expecting, you know,
maybe a card or for someone to say
"Happy Father's Day" to me or something.
Oh, you're up.
JASON: I knew Brandi knew it was Father's Day,
because she had gotten her father a gift
and helped me pick up a gift for my father,
but, for whatever reason, she chose not to do anything
for me.
It wasn't like I wanted or needed much.
Like, I would have been ecstatic just to have
her trace Tyler's hand onto a piece of paper.
I would have hung it in my cube
and been just the happiest father ever.
And Brandi didn't even wish me a happy Father's Day.
I eventually tell Brandi that it's upsetting me.
Can I talk to you?
She turned it around and made it about her.
She gets angry that I'm upset and tells me that
if I feel so unappreciated, then I should just leave.
But if I leave, I'll never see my son again.
Say goodbye to Tyler on the way out.
JASON: It was her instant win the argument
button that she used repeatedly throughout
the relationship.
Brandi decided, okay,
well, he wants a gift.
I'll give him a gift in the most toxic way possible.
Tyler, come on, we have to get your dad a gift.
So Brandi had told Tyler that we're going to have
to eat less, because we don't have
the money for food right now, because daddy
needed a gift, and it was just...
vile -- there's no other way to describe that.
She actually overdrafted our banking account in
order to purchase a gift for me.
But I wanted to keep together as a family unit, so...
I shut up and put up.
I just let her do what she wanted
as long as I got to still be in Tyler's life.
Being with Brandi was very isolating.
She would go out of her way to drive a wedge
between me and anybody else that I knew,
things like lying to my parents and telling them that I
had to work on the weekend,
so we couldn't go and visit them.
If I were to ask to go out for beers with co-workers after
work, she would lay a guilt trip on me and saying, "Well,
"if you don't want to see your family tonight,
I guess you can go."
With all this isolation,
it made it difficult for me to get perspective on
the situation, to have someone tell me, "Hey,
what she's doing isn't right."
I did not realize Brandi was manipulating me.
I had been on medication for my mental health
since high school -- in high school,
I did make an attempt on my life, and it was
a moment that I shared with her that I thought would bring
us closer, but Brandi was very adamant that
I should get off the medication, because
she felt that the $30 a month we were spending on
it was hurting us financially.
She saw me as doing just fine.
I apparently didn't need the medication,
but I'm doing well because of the medication
not I'm doing well
so I don't need the medication.
She just refused to understand that, she very much used
guilt to convince me
that I should at least try going off the medication.
So I just no longer had my antidepressants anymore.
Now, part of me does wonder if it was more about keeping
me off kilter so she can further control
when and what I did.
I still believed that, at that point,
the fact that she was willing to do what she did
proves to me that I'm wrong,
and I never actually knew Brandi.
JASON: Years go by, and we settle into family life,
and we introduce a new family member,
our daughter Charlee.
This is a picture of Charlee on her
first day of early learning academy,
waiting for the bus.
At this point, she had seen Tyler getting on the bus,
and she was excited to be doing that herself, as well.
Tyler and Charlee were inseparable.
She was also a very opinionated little girl.
If you gave her the wrong shoes,
she would let you know in no uncertain terms.
For all her stubbornness, she was still
a joyful and loving child.
I was very happily wrapped around her little finger.
One day, I noticed that Brandi
had added a password to her phone.
In the weeks that followed, I started noticing that
she was spending a lot more time on her phone.
She'd be sitting there and just smiling and texting,
and just her general behavior
with her phone had changed.
It piqued my curiosity -- what's going on here?
One day, as she got into the shower,
I was able to get to her phone
before the screen had locked.
She was texting the neighbor.
She had sent him a message stating,
"I'm covered in frosting.
Would you like to come lick it off?"
While Brandi wasn't looking,
I installed software that allowed me to
view the messages that she was sending and receiving.
I didn't confront Brandi at that point, because she now had
two children to take -- to threaten to take away from me.
So I didn't want to cause a problem.
Later on, the neighbor's girlfriend asked Brandi if
she would like to go to a movie.
So the two of them go off to a movie,
and the neighbor and I take the three kids back to
my house so the children can all play together.
-[phone buzzing] -During this time,
I am still able to watch Brandi's text messages.
The entire time that
the neighbor and I are sitting in
the living room across from each other,
they are sending each other illicit messages via text.
And at that point, I'm just...
doing my best to contain myself.
This is probably the angriest I've ever been with Brandi.
Later on, Brandi and the neighbor's girlfriend
returned to the house, and I confront Brandi.
I tell them, so you love each other, huh?
And Brandi immediately starts denying it.
The neighbor
is kind of just, like, shocked expression.
So I tell her, "So you're not texting each other?"
"No, we're not texting each other."
So I show her the text messages.
When I showed Brandi the texts, the evidence,
her initial reaction was, "Well,
this is the first time it ever got that far."
I felt extremely betrayed.
She had continuously accused me of cheating.
But in reality, she was the one that cheated.
Get out.
JASON: After the neighbors leave,
I told Brandi that I intended to take
the children and leave that night with them.
My intent was
to load the children in the car and just, like,
head off to a hotel or to my mother's
or just away from Brandi.
She informs me that she is going to tell the authorities
about my suicide attempt in
high school and say that I was behaving in
a manner that she believed I was a danger to myself
and to the children to have
the authorities come and take the children from me.
I believed that, with Brandi's education as a paralegal
in the legal system,
she would know how to convince the authorities that I was
a danger to myself and to the children.
And in that moment, I -- I knew she won.
I just backed down at that point.
We stayed in separate rooms after that.
I kept assuming that, you know,
Brandi was going to be a better person at some point in
our relationship.
In reality, I should have
cut her off a lot sooner.
As time went on, it became very evident that
Brandi wasn't willing to change.
I realized it was better for them to have
two happy parents that were separate
than two parents that were together and miserable.
I began the process of seeking a divorce.
Around November 15th,
she'd start throwing accusations around again.
I just want to know if you're seeing someone.
JASON: Asking me if I was having an affair,
asking if I no longer found her attractive.
I'm just tired of 20 questions,
and I just tell her that I'm divorcing her.
So while Brandi was initially very shocked,
her demeanor changed.
She accepted that this was because of her mistake.
She was acknowledging the affair and apologizing
for it.
I'm just sorry it happened this way.
It was not something that I expected from her.
There was an uneasy calmness coming from Brandi
that was very unsettling and very much unlike her.
I had known Brandi for over nine years
at this point, and I had never seen her
behave in such a calm and apologetic manner.
If anything, a calm Brandi in that situation was
even scarier than an angry Brandi.
On Wednesday, November 16th, 2016,
things were unusually normal.
We sit down and eat dinner as a family.
At some point, Brandi said that
she had to purchase pipe cleaners for
Tyler's art project.
She left to go to the store to go get them.
After dinner,
the children wanted to watch a movie.
So I put a movie on for them.
We all gathered together on the couch
and wrestled with the children, had a little tickle fight.
It was a rare moment of normalcy in
what had been a tumultuous relationship at that point.
Some time later, Brandi returned to the home,
seemingly empty-handed, and I asked her about
the pipe cleaners, and she said they didn't have any.
Which, okay, weird, but...
at this point, I don't care what she's doing anymore.
My priority was the children and spending time with them.
And then I get the children ready for bed.
I let them pick out books to read,
because that was one of the things I did
is I read to them every single night.
Good night, and I love you,
and I'll see you in the morning.
Same words I said to them every night.
I went downstairs to the spare bedroom
and set up a place to sleep.
And...
it was really a gift to have
such a wonderful night with my children
in light of what happens next.
Early the next morning,
I heard screaming from upstairs.
[distant scream]
JASON: Got upstairs, couldn't see very well.
It was dark. I didn't have my glasses.
Brandi was on the couch.
What's going on?
I asked her, "What did you do?"
And she tells me clearly, "Now you can't take my kids from me."
It's over now.
JASON: It was around this point that officers had
entered the home and had pulled me away.
OFFICER: Sir.
JASON: I was incredibly confused to see
police officers in my home.
I did not know what was going on.
I just knew it wasn't good.
The officer asked me if I knew anything about a hunting knife.
I didn't believe we had anything like that in the home.
And I hear over one of the officer's radios...
OFFICER: Attention all units.
...that there were two deceased children in the home.
In that moment, I hit the ground.
My legs fell out from under me, and I was just on the ground.
MAN: Seven-year old-Tyler and three-year-old Charlee Worley
were found dead inside their Darlington home on
Thursday morning.
Authorities say Brandi Worley called 911 on Thursday,
saying she stabbed herself and killed her two kids.
I myself relied on news coverage
to try and piece together what had just happened
in my own life,
because it wasn't until very much later, in 2018, at
Brandi's sentencing
that I actually found out what
the final moments of my children was like.
She went to that store with a particular
mission in mind, and that was to purchase a knife.
The pipe cleaners was a lie from the beginning.
After returning home from the store,
Brandi hid the hunting knife in a toy bin
belonging to Tyler.
And then,
after when the children were asleep,
she went and retrieved the knife.
She first attacked Tyler by...
kneeling on his chest,
holding his mouth shut,
and she proceeded to stab him four times in the neck.
Charlee woke up and asked her what she was doing.
Brandi told her nothing.
"Go back to sleep."
Once Brandi was certain that Charlee was asleep,
she did much the same to her.
And,
at some point, she turned the knife on herself.
And then Brandi called her mother,
who told her to call 911.
When I found out how my children's final moments
played out, I...
was devastated.
While I saw Brandi being manipulative,
I never saw her as somebody who could be physically violent.
I believe Brandi killed the children
because she wanted to destroy me.
She wanted me -- she wanted to drive me to
relapse, to take my own life.
She wanted
to make my life as hard as possible.
Ultimately, Brandi failed.
One of the things that makes me furious was
Brandi and Tyler got to go to a mother-son dance.
But just weekends after
Charlee passed was the father-daughter
dance we were supposed to go to,
and...
I never got to dance with my daughter.
I -- at a father-daughter dance, at her wedding.
That was just taken from me.
This is Brandi's mug shot immediately following
taking the lives of Tyler and Charlee.
This picture fills me with anger.
She chose to do an evil act
to leave them as she did.
I don't care to look at her.
This was a cognizant decision
to make something bad happen.
I do struggle,
but I am determined that,
if my children are looking down at me from somewhere,
that they see a man that they can be proud of.
After this happened, the community
as a whole reached out to me and was very supportive.
At some point, one of Tyler's teachers came up and told
me something I didn't know about Tyler.
He had asked us if he could carry his lunch to school.
And we're like, "Of course, anything you want, buddy."
He carries his lunch to school for a week, and he comes back to
us and says, "Can I have more food?"
Like, absolutely, and we double up
the sandwich and just give him more food.
The teacher informed me the other half of
the story was, Tyler was going to school,
and, at lunch time, he would eat
like the chips or just something,
just a little bit of it, and he was giving the rest away to
children who were not getting enough to eat.
It was in that moment that Tyler taught me more about
what it means to be a man that cares about your community
than I ever could have taught him.
And I was just overwhelmingly proud of my son.
You wanna do it by yourself or you want me?
With me? Okay.
Okay, let's go.
I hold every memory of my children very dear.
BRANDI: Go on, buddy.
JASON: To me,
they're always with me wherever I go,
as long as I keep
remembering them. -[speaking indistinctly]
[laughter]
JASON: I keep saying Tyler and Charlee's names.
I keep some small part of them alive with me.
It's hard to think about what I've been through.
I would have never thought that
a father could have did what he did.
Evil has two faces.
It don't want to show you right off the bat that it's evil.
Ray was evil.