MURDERED FOR CHANGING HER FACEBOOK STATUS

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime kiss today we're going to be talking about the murder of hayley jones but before we get into this video i just want to thank our sponsors for making this video possible nordvpn nordvpn is a virtual private network service that helps you stay safe online whether that's from unsecured networks people trying to access your private information i don't even go on the internet without a vpn enabled these days i like to make sure that i am protected you know in case i stumble across a dodgy link or something like that a vpn acts as a barrier between you and all your information and people out there that might be trying to get hold of that and since the world is opening up again if you use public wi-fi a lot like cafes or libraries or restaurants then you should probably have a vpn enabled because you don't know how secure those networks are it works by making it seem as though you're operating from another ip address and this other ip 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and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video just a couple of content warnings before we get into this video we are going to be talking about domestic violence domestic abuse emotional abuse there are some themes of like predatory age gaps as well so if that's triggering to you please don't watch this video feel free to click out right now look after yourself i'm sure i'll see you again some other time with a video that's a little bit more suitable for you with all that being said let's just get straight into the case so this case takes place in kai philly south wales in a small town called phillipstown in 2009. and when i say phillipstown was a small town i mean it it had a population of less than a thousand people at the time of this case they were all very close-knit everyone knew everyone and phillipstown was home to hayley jones a 26 year old mother of four hayley has been described as fun popular well-liked pretty outgoing she was very happy very positive very upbeat people said it was quite rare to see a frown on hayley's face she was a very nurturing very caring person i mean i suppose you can tell by the fact that she had four children by the age of 26 i feel like that was kind of her calling in life was to care for people and love people she ended up later on in life getting a job at a care home as well because she just loved to look after people that was like her gift but i'm getting a bit ahead of myself here let's go back to kind of hayley's younger years i don't know all that much about her childhood or her upbringing so i'm just gonna skip to her teenage years when hayley reached the age of 13 she got in her first serious relationship with a much older boy in fact i say a boy this was actually a man he was 18 years old so technically an adult dating a child a 13 year old child which is scary on a number of levels first of all obviously the age gap but second of all the fact that this was a serious relationship as well at the age of 13 like most 13 year olds relationships are not all that serious they're not gonna last you know but this was very serious they were both very serious about each other so this man's name was brian lewis the two of them hayley and brian met at a fun fair that was in town and their friends said that as soon as the two of them met they just kind of connected of course hayley's family as soon as they found out about this relationship that her daughter was having with a grown man they weren't very accepting of it a five year age gap when you're a teenager is just ridiculous when one of them is also an adult that's very predatory and of course hayley didn't see it at the time you know when you're younger and you're dating an older guy you know it's all fun and you know you feel really grown up and mature but he should have known better and her family didn't like it they didn't like this guy but you know what what could they do they couldn't really do anything about it they knew that if they told hayley to stop seeing him that would just make her want to rebel against them she wouldn't like them for saying that to her and besides she would probably find some other way to see him because that's just what teenagers are like you tell them not to do something they'll find a way around it so her parents much preferred to you know kind of stay on a good level with hayley they had this kind of mutual respect and understanding her parents didn't like the relationship but they weren't going to kick off because they didn't want hayley to turn in the other direction you know but a couple of years went by and hayley was still with this guy she was still with brian and you know like i said they were serious about each other and so her family eventually you know just accepted it accepted that this was a relationship that wasn't gonna change and he was gonna be in their lives for a while so they might as well get used to it they were very happy together and they told all their families that they saw themselves being together in the long term you know forever you know getting married having kids that was it for them and so their families believed them and they just accepted this age gap relationship so i don't know all that much about brian lewis's life his childhood his upbringing but i do know that he lived with his mother and they didn't have a very good relationship they would argue a lot brian would do a lot of things that his mother didn't like and eventually they argued so much that she ended up kicking him out of her house when he was i don't even think he was 20 yet so he's been kicked out of his home at this point he didn't have a job and he was just kind of out on the street he had nowhere to go and so hailey's family very kindly allowed him to move in with them so now this is a girl who is in her young teenage years she's like 14 15 and her adult grown adult boyfriend is now living with her but hayley was so happy and she loved this man and her family could see that and you know they started to like him too the more time they spent with him he was funny and he was nice and he treated really well and so you know the family liked him they grew to like him haley's auntie described the two of them hayley and brian as just smitten together they spent every single day with each other they were inseparable and then when she was 16 years old hayley jones fell pregnant she hadn't even finished her gcses at this point but she was certain in her mind that she knew she was keeping this baby there was no chance in hell she was getting rid of it because that was her baby and she was happy they had the conversation hayley and brian and they decided they were ready they were ready to start their family and so they had their first of what would be four kids eventually after a couple of years hayley and brian managed to save up enough money to move out they started renting a house i think just like two streets away from where her mother lived so they were still very close so now this teen couple were all grown up hayley was in her early 20s brian in his mid to late 20s they had a house they had kids they had lives hayley got a job at a care center like i said earlier like a care home and she really enjoyed it brian on the other hand he bounced between different jobs he couldn't hold a job down for very long and i'm not entirely sure why he had a lot of gaps in his employment history and this put a lot of financial strain on the family this is a family of six four children and for a lot of it they were all just living off of hayley's singular paycheck but you know they got by they were happy together and this was their life and you know they were going to make the most of it whether they had money or not they decided that they were going to go out as much as they could see their friends as much as they could they were regulars at their local pub they saw their friends there pretty much every week and they had the same friend group obviously because they'd practically grown up together hayley was 13 when she met this guy so they'd been together like a decade at this point so all their friends were kind of the same friend group and they all said that hayley and brian were so good together you know they were a really nice couple they got on really well they were both fun both outgoing they loved a good time however there were some slight things that started creeping in brian sometimes had very sudden mood changes so one minute he'd be happy happy happy at the pub having fun time and then something would happen and all of a sudden he'd go super quiet and reserved and a little bit moody wouldn't talk to anyone which i suppose i mean you know that does kind of happen to some people some people are quite sensitive all it takes is one thing to kind of ruin their mood and then they're quiet and that's kind of how they deal with it they go into themselves and they no longer feel like socializing so that's not a huge red flag hayley and brian did have the occasional argument the occasional fight just over normal kind of couple things it's very normal for couples to do that but all these arguments they never really got out of hand they were always solved pretty quickly i mean the worst it ever got was after one particular argument the couple just needed some space from each other and sir brian went to live with his mother for just a couple of days and then when they came back together it was all sorted but one thing that i found in my research that i personally think is is really concerning which i actually think was quite normalized in this case for some reason maybe like the people around hayley and brian didn't think that this was a big deal but it kind of is and that was that brian was very controlling of hayley i mean it started out not that bad but it got progressively worse through the relationship so for example it started out with brian having the only access to the couple's joint bank account which seems like an oxymoron in itself how did he own their joint bank account that is supposed to be accessible for both of them hayley had to ask him for money when she needed it like every purchase that she made had to be run through brian first and he had to like approve that that was a good use of their money even though she was the only person earning the money for the most part she had to ask him before she went out with certain friends she had to tell him where she was going you know what restaurants she was planning on going to things like that but like i said the controlling behaviors just got even worse and worse so it started out with just those kind of things and then it was like he didn't want her to even have her job anymore he didn't like the idea of her going out and socializing in the world without him he kind of wanted to isolate her from the world he didn't want her to have a life outside of him so i mean he wouldn't have let her have that job if they didn't desperately need the money and throughout their relationship even though brian was getting more and more controlling hayley was finding more and more ways to be more independent so he wouldn't let her socialize on weekends okay she'll go out and get a job where she's socializing with people all day every day she was still gonna find ways to socialize and brian hated it and it was at this point where her family started seeing some changes in brian lewis for example he had no patience with the kids at first he was a really good dad and he was really enthusiastic about having loads of children with the love of his life hayley jones but then as soon as the kids were there he just could not be asked with them he got annoyed easily at the kids he got super stressed super easy and he would take that out on haley he became verbally abusive with her emotionally abusive he would tell her that she was never gonna find anyone better than him like there's no point ever leaving him because no man would even want her anywhere he was just constantly trying to bring her self-esteem down calling her names making comments on her appearance he would call her a slag a lot which is quite ironic considering he was the only man she'd ever been with literally for the last decade of her life he is the only man that she's ever really given any attention to yet he's somehow still calling her a slag he actually even taught their young kids the word slag and got them to call their own mother a slag obviously they didn't understand what it meant but what what's all that about he also didn't like the fact that towards the end of their relationship hayley got a facebook account again he felt the need to control all of her socialization everything that she did in her life he wanted to control it but now she had this account that had a password on it she was messaging people that he had no idea about and he did not like this this freaked him out on a number of occasions this would freak him out so much that he started getting kind of physical not with hayley yet but with her possessions so she'd be kind of texting on her phone and he'd come over grab it out of her hand and smash it on the floor he smashed one of her mobile phones one of her laptops and bear in mind by the way this is a family that is financially struggling very hard as well they have one wage between six of them four children that they're trying to feed cloth you know and he's just what smashing all of their most valuable possessions i know that's kind of the least important factor of this the more important thing is is that he is trying to control everything that his girlfriend does all her socialization he's trying to cut her off from the world she's not even allowed to message people from the comfort of her own home so she's not allowed out and she's also not allowed to message them brian lewis very quickly became physically violent and like i said this wasn't to hayley just yet that does come in later though but right now he was you know punching walls he once punched their microwave and left a big dent in it i don't know why the microwave he would especially be very aggressive with her possessions and like break her stuff probably just this like power thing that you wanted to have over and gradually this violence did move on to hayley and he began kind of dragging her about by her hair if they were having an argument he would slap around the face and this kind of stuff was happening behind closed doors for a while and then eventually brian didn't even care anymore and he started doing it in public literally in front of hayley's own friends and family and as if hayley wasn't isolated from the world enough she couldn't go out and socialize she couldn't even message people in her own home but now she didn't even want to go out anywhere even when brian would let her even when brian would go with her places she didn't even want to go because she was so embarrassed with how he would act in public she didn't even want to go so hailey began spending more and more time inside literally almost every single day she was just holed up in their house all day every day and because of this she was spending a lot more time on facebook which brian didn't like we know that but he liked it more than her going out at least if she was in the house messaging on facebook he could like peer over and look at the screen and see what she was doing but if he was gonna let her go out to a bar by herself she could be up to anything by the age of like 25 26 hayley jones was having serious thoughts about leaving brian lewis this was not the relationship she signed up for this was not what it was like in the beginning and she didn't want it anymore of course but at the same time she was very scared to leave for a multitude of reasons obviously he had now become quite physically aggressive and sometimes even violent to her so you know could he have hurt her if she tried to leave could he have hurt the children plus there's also the fact that it would just be hard for her to live on her own she would be trying to raise four kids whilst trying to work a full-time job she had this one wage she would have to find them more housing you know it would just be so stressful that it was just kind of easier for her to stay even though it was an awful time so she's got all these thoughts going through her brain and she complains to her family and her friends all the time over like facebook messenger that she just wants to leave him that's all she wants but right now these are just thoughts but she doesn't feel like she's gonna act on them anytime soon because she kind of needs a better plan or like a structured solution so for now it's just kind of like venting over facebook messages and this meant that hayley had to be quite secretive with her laptop and her facebook account in general because she was telling her friends and family all this very confidential information that if brian read these messages that she wanted to leave him and that she was hoping to kind of do that in the coming months then you know who knows what he would do he would freak out so she started like hiding her screen whenever he would walk past she would kind of like tilt her screen so he couldn't see whenever he walked in the room she'd close the laptop lid and of course this just made him even more suspicious because it was obvious that she was trying to hide something but he took this the complete wrong way like he thought that this meant she was talking to other men she was messaging men on facebook she was cheating on him and from there everything just got drastically worse if that was even possible he became even more controlling even more manipulative even more abusive because he thought that his girlfriend was cheating on him and he just was yet to find proof of it until finally in february of 2009 hayley jones had just had enough of this so she sat brian lewis down and they had a conversation and she let him know that she didn't want to be in this relationship anymore i don't exactly know how he took this conversation i don't know if he took it quite well i don't know if he got angry and aggressive but eventually after this conversation a plan was made that within the next couple of months he was gonna move out of that house hayley was gonna keep the house with the four kids and he was gonna go back and live with his mother and then eventually find his own place and they were gonna separate but for the time being he was gonna stay there but they weren't gonna stay in the same bed so they were like already kind of emotionally separated they just had to physically separate and he had to move out but for the next couple of weeks or months one of them was going to sleep on the surfa while the other one slept on the bed and they would kind of take turns and swap who slept on the surface at least on the surface this was the plan you know that he was gonna move out and live with his mother and they were gonna separate but deep down brian knew that he wasn't gonna let hayley go that easy and like i said from that moment his controlling behaviors took a full step up and he hacked into her facebook account he like got hold of her password he would read through all of her messages interrogate her about each one and this went on for a few days until eventually one night he was out at a pub with his friends and hayley knew that he was on her facebook account like on his phone at the pub he was logged into her facebook because he kept texting her and calling her like screaming down the phone to her all these different questions that he would only know about if he was on her facebook at that exact minute if that makes sense he was asking questions about conversations that he technically shouldn't have known were happening he would only know they were happening if he was logged into her facebook and this made hayley so mad like this man was not her boyfriend anymore they were separated but for some reason he felt the need to still be checking on her like this he was invading her privacy the fact that he was just kind of letting himself into her facebook account and reading through her private and confidential messages with her friends and family haley had had enough and so she decided to retaliate she went on to her laptop logged into her facebook account and changed her relationship status from married to single and this came as quite a surprise to everyone none of her friends knew she was gonna do this she didn't tell anyone before she did this this was literally like a spur of the moment i'm so mad at this guy i'm gonna go on and show him that i am single all her friends like called her up and they were like why why have you done that why have you changed your status you know what brian's like and she was like well i am single i'm single now i can be single on facebook by the way i just want to clarify that her relationship status was married before this but i don't think they were ever actually officially married i think they just kind of had their statuses set to that but anyway brian in the pub obviously still on his phone still on facebook he sees that hayley has changed her relationship status and you can only imagine how this went in his head he was fuming he was screaming to his friends in this club saying that he was gonna kill her his exact quote was actually if i can't have her then no [ __ ] else will because i'll kill her first i don't actually know what happened that night when brian got home to hayley i don't know if this was a huge argument i don't know if this was you know i don't know if he got violent or aggressive but this stuck in brian's mind constantly for the next two weeks he just couldn't get over the fact that hayley had done this and i don't think it was the fact of her changing her status in itself i think it was the fact that it was so public because obviously they both knew that they were both single now they'd both split up they knew that it wasn't the fact that she was single that was pissing him off it was the fact that she was telling the world that she was single and he was losing that control over her that he had tried so hard to get for years and brian just kept going over this and over it and over it in his mind and within two weeks these thoughts would boil over in the most tragic way on march 12 2009 26 year old hayley jones had woken up and she wasn't in the best mood she was going on facebook she was telling all the friends and family you know that she just felt really low that day i don't think she actually left the house at all that day i think she was just at home looking after the kids just messaging people on facebook cleaning the house just as she often did and then that night it was actually her turn to sleep on the surface and it was very cold it was early march and so she decided to get two different sleeping bags she put on like three layers of clothes and she snuggled in on the couch that night brian was actually out at the pub again and hayley was actually quite relieved because she went to bed on the couch before brian had even returned home from the pub so she's thinking thank god i'm not gonna have to deal with him tonight like not gonna have to put up with any arguments cause i'm just gonna be asleep when he gets in but hours later in the early hours of the morning hayley's mother is awoken to screams outside of her house she looks out of the window and there are her four grandchildren hayley's children out in the garden screaming she runs downstairs to see what was going on and she said that just from the turn of these screams she could tell that something was seriously wrong these kids were terrified so she went downstairs she asked the kids what was going on and one of them said mummy's on the floor she's bleeding she's dead so they all ran back to hayley's home her mother bursts through the door and there she sees her own daughter hayley jones laying on the floor dead in a pool of her own blood she called the emergency services who rushed to the scene and they tried to resuscitate her as best as they possibly could but it was just too late they were trying to put this tube in her throat and for some reason it wasn't going down and eventually the paramedics pronounced hayley jones dead at the scene this was a 26 year old mother of four not only with her own life ahead of her she was still so young but she also had four babies to care for and they were now left without their mother and 31 year old brian lewis hayley's ex-boyfriend the father of those four children was nowhere to be seen he wasn't home but not for long because shortly after hayley was pronounced dead at her home police at blackwood police station had a surprise guest stumble through the front door it was brian lewis he walked over to the woman at the front desk and quite unemotionally just said to her i've murdered my wife it turned out that brian lewis had been out drinking all night and then returned home at 4 00 a.m to hayley asleep on the surfer now it's unknown exactly what triggered him to do this you know what was going on in his brain what had happened that night that meant that tonight was the night but he took his opportunity then and there to take hayley jones's life he stumbled into the kitchen grabbed a knife and then went back into the living room where he walked over to hayley who was sound asleep on the surfer and he stabbed straight through her stomach the knife actually got stuck in haley's ribs which meant it didn't go as deep into her as it could have so this wound has she just sustained this one stab wound she would have survived because bear in mind as well it had to go through the two sleeping bags that she was in plus the three layers of clothes that she was wearing so this was a relatively shallow stab wound but this also meant that it was a lot of effort for brian to drive this knife into hayley he had to go through all of these layers first and it was just too much effort for him so he decided to pull the knife out throw it to the ground and then with his bare hands he squeezed hayley's neck and he strangled her until she stopped breathing and she died he was strangling her so tightly that he was literally crushing the inside of her throat and that was why the paramedic couldn't get the tube into her this whole time their four children were just asleep upstairs well i mean they probably weren't even asleep they probably heard this altercation this attack happening downstairs and they'd probably woken up brian lewis murdered his girlfriend his ex-girlfriend hayley jones and then jumped in his car and drove off into the night just drove off leaving the four children upstairs to walk down and find their own mother murdered in their living room the youngest of these children was just three years old at the time i believe the eldest of the children actually picked up a blanket or a sleeping bag or something and just covered their mother's body over with it just to give her that last little piece of dignity so this was quite a straightforward investigation for the police i mean the killer literally brought themselves to the police station and handed themselves over the trial took place the following year in 2010 and rather surprisingly brian lewis actually pled not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility he said that he had some kind of mental episode that night he completely blacked out he said that one minute he was there and then he blacked out and then the next thing he knew he was coming back to and hayley had a stab wound in her stomach he said in court that the reason he thinks he went into this like blind rage where he doesn't remember anything was due to hayley changing her relationship status on facebook like a week before this he claimed that he used to think about it a lot like he thought about her doing that every single day and it made him angry every single day that she even did that and he said that it must just have been those thoughts mixed with the alcohol that kind of led him to go into this episode he claimed that he already had the knife in his hand before the episode he wasn't planning on stabbing hayley with it he actually went and got it from the kitchen to trim his nails with a kitchen knife and he said that it must have been while he was holding this knife that he remembered that she changed her status he blacked out and then you know he came to and she was dead i mean thankfully the jury just saw straight through this story it all sounded like such a load of crap who cuts their nails with a kitchen knife and i mean the rest of it doesn't make sense either hayley had changed her status like over a week before this so i mean if it was really gonna lead him to murder which it shouldn't have it's just a facebook status but i mean if it was gonna lead him to murder charlie it would have happened on the night that she did it this guy drank a lot as well he was at the pub quite a lot so if he's saying oh it was the mix of alcohol and then i remembered she did it then how did it not happen before now when he was drunk before now no one actually really knows why he did this or what the trigger was or you know what went on in his mind that night to mean that that night was the night but anyway as i was saying brian lewis's not guilty plea was rejected and the jury found him guilty of murder they sentenced him to life with a minimum of 14 years which means he will actually be eligible for parole in just two years time in 2023 and the thing is slightly off topic from this particular case but hayley jones isn't the only victim to have been murdered after changing her facebook relationship status this has been the motive for at least another three murders in the uk three people have been murdered and their killer has said that this is the reason why because they changed their facebook relationship status and i mean those are the only known ones i can't imagine how many more there actually are where the killer just hasn't admitted that that was the reason why it's so scary to think that something so meaningless literally a word on your social media profile can trigger people to do things like this brian lewis has since sent multiple letters to hayley jones's family asking well begging literally begging to be part of his children's lives he wants to see his kids and as far as i'm aware hailey's family have ignored literally every single attempt that brian has made to contact them i think hayley's mother literally ripped up one of the letters and threw it in the bin and good on her they literally just want to forget he exists now and hayley's mother is raising her four children by herself you know without brian but that is it for this case thank you so so much for watching thanks again to nordvpn for sponsoring this video remember if you want to get a huge discount off of a two-year plan plus an additional month free you can go through my link which is nordvpn.com forward slash eleanor and use code eleanor at checkout i'll link it down below in the description go through that link use code eleanor at checkout you're welcome huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below because that would really help me out if you want to subscribe there'll be a link to do so right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel there'll be a link to do so right here and if you want to watch another true crown video there'll be a playlist on screen right now bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,640,935

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, horror, hayley jones, hayley, facebook, the facebook killer, facebook killer, social media, status, relationship status, single, brian lewis, wales, south wales, caerphilly, true crime daily

Id: W8tFhzC3zf4

Length: 33min 3sec (1983 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021