When kids reach their teenage years, life can become difficult for any parent. There are hormones, mood swings, the search for identity, the need to pull away from mom and dad, and those first serious choices they start making on their own. But one of the hardest parts is teenage love.
At that age, kids still do not have enough experience. So, the person they like can seem perfect. And it helps when parents can explain that first love almost never becomes the last. The story of Susan Bailey is one of those real life cases that is hard to forget. It is disturbing, heartbreaking, and almost unbelievable.
It has a strange love triangle, claims about split personality, talk of reincarnation, and in the end, a tragic loss of life. Help this channel grow. Like the video, try the new hype feature, leave a comment, and subscribe for more real stories. It helps us a lot. Thank you. In 2008, Susan Bailey lived in Rono, Texas.
She was 43 years old and from the outside it looked like she had built a good life. Rowanoke was a small town of about 11,000 people. It was not the place Susan had once dreamed about, but at that moment it was where she needed to be. Susan was raising two children on her own. She lived on a street with many similar families.
And right across from her house was a large park where her kids used to play. For Susan, Rowanoke was almost perfect for raising a son and daughter. Like most mothers, she was willing to put her own dreams aside to give her children safety and stability. Susan knew smalltown life because she had grown up near St. Paul, Minnesota. In a quiet place where everyone knew each other.
Then in the mid 1980s when she was about 20, a terrible snowstorm hit Minnesota. Snarly buried the state. People struggled to get to work and cars could barely move through the roads. After that storm, Susan told her parents she was done with snow, ice, and freezing winters. Before the next winter arrived, she decided to move somewhere warm and start over.
So, she went to Riverside, California, east of Los Angeles. Even though Susan was raised in the Midwest, she soon realized that deep down she felt like a California girl. She loved the sunshine, the warm weather, and the freedom of having her own place. But California gave Susan more than warm weather. It was there that she met Richard Bailey.
Richard was born and raised in California. He was a short, dark-haired young man with a relaxed California energy. He lived by his own rules and did not seem too worried about what other people expected. Susan and Richard dated until they believed they were meant for each other. In the spring of 1988, they got married, but Susan’s parents did not like her choice.
They thought the marriage rushed and believed she could have found someone better. They considered Richard rude and felt he had not shown them proper respect. There was also another concern. Richard served in the Air Force which meant new orders could come at any time and forced the family to move again.
Still, Susan and Richard were young and in love and the difficulties did not scare them. After several months of moving around the country, Richard left the Air Force and later worked for a time in the Coast Guard. In 1990, Susan and Richard had their first child, a daughter named Jennifer. 5 years later, their son David was born.
Jennifer did very well in school. She loved reading and drawing and spent most of her free time that way. She was not the kind of child who caused trouble. Even from a young age, she seemed to make sensible choices. She had a good relationship with her parents, but she did not really connect with kids her age. She was not bullied.
She was simply more of a loner and preferred staying home over trying to fit in. In high school, Jennifer still did not act like most girls her age. She did not go on dates or go to parties. Those things just did not interest her. David admired his older sister and wanted to be like her.
He also loved drawing and reading. Everyday he went to the library to pick out another book. By 2006, the Bailey family had settled in Rono, Texas. Susan and Richard had been married for 18 years, but their relationship was falling apart. Richard had left the Coast Guard and according to the family situation had not held a steady job since 1990.
He stayed home while Susan worked to support everyone. Eventually, Susan grew exhausted by that life. The tension in the home became harder to ignore. By the end of 2006, the marriage was over. Susan and Richard divorced. Susan kept custody of the children and Richard agreed to pay child support.
At that time, Susan was working in retail and she did not earn much. Even with child support, it was not enough to pay the bills and keep food on the table. She had to work two jobs and almost never had a real day off. David was 13 and Jennifer was 17. They were old enough to understand that money does not just appear out of nowhere.
Somebody has to earn it. But instead of seeing how hard their mother was trying, they started to resent her. They were upset that Susan was always gone and no longer spent time with them like before. They thought it was unfair that their family could not afford trendy clothes, new gadgets, and other things other kids had.
But Susan was away from home only because she was trying to give them a decent life. She was not partying, sitting in bars, or spending time with friends. She was working and earning whatever money she could. Still, Jennifer and David seemed to look at the situation selfishly. They knew the family had to count every dollar and follow a strict budget.
They were not starving or walking around in torn clothes, but careless spending was not something their household could handle. One problem involved their family cell phone plan. Back then, phone companies limited internet use and call minutes. If a family went over those limits, the extra charges could be huge.
But Jennifer began calling and texting almost everyone she knew as if she was trying to get back at her mother. David also spent far more time online than their plan allowed. By the end of one month, the bill had reached $15,000. For Susan, who worked two jobs just to support her children, that amount was almost impossible to manage.
But Jennifer and David still made no real effort to cut back. They simply ignored the adult problems their mother was carrying. Things became more complicated when Jennifer started dating Paul Hansen from school. Paul was one year younger than her. Jennifer was 17 and he was 16. He lived outside the city in a trailer, so they rode their bikes back and forth to see each other.
Both of them had divorced parents and in both families, one parent was barely involved. Jennifer no longer had much contact with her father, and Paul barely communicated with his mother. He was raised by his father, Paul Hansen, Senior. From the beginning, Susan did not like Jennifer’s boyfriend. She thought Paul was strange, even if she could not fully explain why.
Something about him felt different from other teenagers, and Jennifer seemed to be taking the relationship far too seriously. Jennifer was a senior in high school and planned to attend an art college in Dallas. But after Paul entered her life, her behavior changed and her grades began to slip. She should have been focused on graduation and her future, but her feelings for Paul took over.
Susan tried to talk to her daughter about the relationship, but it did not work. In a strange way, Susan had once done something similar herself. When she was young, she married Richard against her parents’ wishes. Now, the same pattern was repeating with Jennifer. The more Susan showed that she did not approve of Paul, the more attached Jennifer became to him. It turned into a vicious circle.
No matter what Paul said or did, nothing seemed strong enough to make Jennifer walk away. Around the same time, Paul became close to a 14-year-old school girl named Merilli. That was not her real name. For privacy reasons, the media did not release her identity, but reporters called her Merrily. Merrily was completely fascinated by Paul.
To her, he seemed mysterious, unusual, and even a little frightening. They spent a lot of time together, and eventually Paul suggested that Merrily should date him, too. Even though Merrily knew Paul already had a girlfriend, she could not say no. She was excited by his attention and agreed. The strangest part was that Paul and Merrily did not hide it from Jennifer.
They told her directly what was happening. Paul claimed he had dissociative identity disorder or in simple words, a split personality. According to him, one personality wanted to be with Jennifer while the other wanted Merrily. He even gave the second personality a name. He called it Talis. In Paul’s version of the story, those personalities were separate from each other.
So, in his mind, he should not be blamed for being unfaithful to either girl. In real life, dissociative identity disorder is a serious condition. A person with it may have trouble remembering everyday events, personal information, or moments connected to trauma and stress. They may also experience sudden changes in speech, emotions, and behavior.
But Paul did not act like someone truly suffering from that illness. He seemed more like a clever, calculating person using a strange story to control the people around him. Maybe he did have mental health struggles. But this diagnosis looked like something he had made up. Jennifer and Merrily simply did not understand that.
In the end, both girls started dating Paul at the same time, and from that point on, everything became even stranger. Paul Hansen told bizarre stories about his other personality. According to him, Talos was not just another side of his mind. Paul claimed Talos was a real man from the 1700s, an executioner whose soul had somehow become trapped inside the body of a 16-year-old boy from Texas.
Paul also believed in reincarnation, the idea that after a person passes away, the soul returns in a new body. He told Jennifer and Merrily that if they stayed together and never let anyone separate them, they could be reborn together and share the next life, too. Both girls, completely caught up in their feelings, accepted this fantasy.
They believed they could stay beside Paul and Talis forever. At that point, Jennifer and Merrily were no longer rivals. They became extremely close and their bond with Paul turned into a strange unhealthy relationship between all three of them. Sometimes Paul seemed to lose track of his own story.
He would show affection toward Jennifer while claiming to be Talos. And then as Paul, he would give attention to Merrily. It became a tangled mess of obsession, fantasy, and control. Susan did not know even half of what was happening between her daughter Paul and Merrily. But deep down she felt something was wrong.
She believed Hansen was bringing trouble into Jennifer’s life. When Jennifer realized Susan was against Paul, she began running away to the trailer where he lived with his father and stepmother. Paul Senior did not like having his son’s girlfriends constantly at his house. More than once, he offered to drive Jennifer home.
She would pretend to leave, then sneak back to Paul. Sometimes Paul came to Jennifer<unk>’s house too, especially when Susan was at work. Eventually, Jennifer, Merrily, and Paul got tired of hiding. They no longer wanted any parent telling them what to do or how to live. The situation kept getting worse until the three of them came up with a horrifying plan.
They decided to get rid of their parents, take whatever money they could find, and run away to Canada, where they imagined they could start a happy new life. In their minds, Susan was the biggest problem. She was the one who most strongly forbade Jennifer from seeing Paul and kept interfering with their relationship.
All three started seeing Susan as an enemy. Marily was close to her mother, but her mother also did not approve of Paul for the same reasons Susan did. Marily loved her mom, but if forced to choose, she would have chosen Jennifer and Paul. She was ready to do almost anything to stay with them.
As for Paul Senior, he actually liked Jennifer and knew his son had mental health problems. Paul seemed calmer after spending time with her. But Paul Senior grew tired of the secret meetings and Susan’s constant calls asking whether Jennifer was at his house. Paul Senior also knew about Merrily. He did not approve of the unusual relationship, but he did not openly fight it either.
Even so, in their plan, he became a target, too. In their twisted thinking, he had to be removed along with the girl’s mothers because he did not fully support his son’s choices. So, the three teenagers began planning a terrible crime against the people closest to them. To carry it out, they decided to involve one more person, Jennifer’s younger brother, David, who was only 13 years old.
David had just entered those difficult teenage years, and his respect for parental authority had started to weaken. Jennifer kept telling him that Susan was trying to keep her away from the person she loved. Since David and Susan already argued often, it did not take much for him to agree to help with his sister’s cruel plan.
In the end, Jennifer, Paul, Merrily, and David decided that Susan would be first. The only question left was how they were going to carry it out. One of the first ideas they came up with was to make Susan’s death look like an accident in the bathroom. The teenagers planned to use an electrical cord near the bathtub, hoping that when Susan went to shower, it would end in a fatal accident.
Afterward, they planned to hide the cord so everything would appear natural. Jennifer, Paul, Merrily, and David seemed to believe that first responders would find Susan in the bathroom and assume she had suffered a sudden medical emergency. Apparently, they did not understand that a medical examiner would usually determine the real cause of death.
They also had a backup plan in case the first one failed. That version was even more brutal. They talked about attacking Susan first and then trying to make it look like the original bathroom accident. For some reason, they thought nobody would notice injuries or obvious signs of a struggle. Clearly, these teenagers had no real understanding of how investigations worked.
Still, they believed their plan could succeed. But at some point, they came up with a third idea. Susan loved chocolate pudding, and Jennifer knew that well. One evening, she made a large pot of pudding and mixed a dangerous amount of medication into it, hoping Susan would eat it and become seriously ill.
But Susan tasted it, spit it out, and said something was wrong with it. Then at Jennifer’s request, she put it in the refrigerator. Then came Friday, September 19th, 2008. That day, Merrily went to visit Jennifer without telling her mother. Her mother believed Merrily had run away from home, but strangely, she did not report it to police.
Instead, she searched for her daughter on her own. Apparently, leaving home without permission had already become something Merrily did from time to time. All weekend, Marily’s mother drove around looking for her. Meanwhile, Susan was busy with work and did not even realize Jennifer was not alone in her room.
Finally, on Monday, Marily’s mother found her daughter walking near Jennifer’s house. She put her in the car and demanded to know where she had been. Merrily was deeply upset. She started crying and talked about reincarnation Paul and wanting to be with him in another life. In a way, she was admitting there was some terrible plan connected to their future.
But to her mother, it sounded like confused nonsense about past lives and the spirit of an executioner from the 1700s. Still, Merrily stayed extremely emotional. She cried all evening, and even after going to bed, her mother could hear her sobbing through the wall. On Tuesday, September 23, Merrily’s mother woke up because her bed was shaking.
When she opened her eyes, she saw her daughter standing over her with a large kitchen knife in her hand like something from a horror movie. Thankfully, her mother moved to the other side of the bed, grabbed her phone, and called emergency services. She yelled at Merrily to put the knife down, but Merrily, crying, said she needed to take the car and leave.
She kept repeating, “I have to go with them. I have to go with them. We were all supposed to leave and you ruined everything. Then a struggle seems to have happened. The operator heard it and sent officers to the house. A few seconds later, Merrily’s mother told the dispatcher she had taken the knife away and was safe.
When police arrived, they arrested Merrily and charged her with aggravated assault. During questioning, she did not give clear answers. She mostly kept saying she needed a car so she could go to Canada. Unfortunately, detectives did not dig deeper into her final plan. Since her mother was alive, they treated it more like a family incident and asked only basic questions.
Police knew Marily had attacked her mother, but they did not suspect anyone else was involved. They saw it as a teenage breakdown and did not realize how serious the situation truly was. The attempt involving Maril’s mother had failed. After that, Paul was supposed to be next. He took his father’s gun without permission and sat inside the trailer waiting for Paul Senior and his stepmother to come home from work.
His plan was to attack them the moment they walked through the door. But then, almost by chance, fate stepped in. Paul had no idea that on that exact day, his father and stepmother had made a spontaneous decision to spend the evening together. Instead of going straight home after work, they met at a restaurant for dinner.
After that, they went to see a movie. Because of that, Paul’s father and stepmother were delayed for several hours. At some point, Paul got tired of sitting in the trailer and waiting. He became bored, put the gun away, and simply abandoned the plan. His parents had no idea how close they had come to danger that night. That same day, September 23, the day Merrily went after her mother, David also brought a knife to school.
He did not try to hurt anyone, but he showed it off to his friends. when a teacher found out about it. David was suspended from school for 3 days for bringing a weapon onto campus. And honestly, that teacher’s decision may have saved someone’s life. Later that evening, police received a report that Paul was missing.
His father was used to his teenage son sneaking out and disappearing for a few days, but this time felt different. Paul Senior was worried because a gun had also disappeared from the safe, and he suspected his son had taken it. It did not take police long to track Paul down. They discovered he had been at Jennifer Bailey’s house, but Paul managed to get away before officers could find him there.
Susan did not even know that her daughter’s boyfriend had been hiding inside her home. So, when police showed up early in the morning and asked to search the house, Susan was shocked. After that, she and Jennifer had a very tense argument. Susan yelled at her daughter and said she was going to send her away either to California to live with her grandparents or to Minnesota to live with her father.
While Susan was scolding Jennifer, officers searched the house. They found several packed suitcases and among the items was a bag filled with kitchen knives. Then they checked Jennifer’s phone and found several voice messages from Marily’s mother, who had been calling to ask what was going on with her daughter.
Jennifer had never called her back. At that moment, the pieces started coming together in Susan’s mind. She had just learned from the messages that Merrily had gone after her mother with a knife. Before that, police had found a bag full of sharp kitchen tools inside her own house. And on top of everything else, her children had been acting strange for days.
Then, Susan remembered the chocolate pudding Jennifer had made the day before. Suddenly, it made sense why it had tasted so strange, almost chemical. After learning about the knives and the messages, Susan realized her own daughter may have tried to harm her in a much quieter, more calculated way, Susan told the officers that she believed someone may have tried to poison her.
But the officers were there because of Paul Hansen’s disappearance and they did not take her fear seriously. Since they did not fall in the house, they simply left. Two days later, on September 26th, Susan Bailey did not show up for her shift at the store. That was completely unlike her. Susan was reliable. She did not just miss work and she was not the kind of person who called in sick without warning.
Her manager tried to reach her, but Susan did not answer the phone. After that, her co-workers contacted her mother, Kate, because Susan had listed her as the emergency contact. Kate was living in Minnesota, so there was only so much she could do from a distance. First, she tried calling her grandchildren because Jennifer and David should have known what was going on with Susan, but neither one of them answered.
The house phone just kept ringing and ringing. The longer Kate waited, the worse her feeling became. This was not like Susan. She was a responsible woman, especially when it came to work and her children. Kate knew her daughter would not simply disappear for no reason and leave everyone wondering where she was.
So Kate called the police and asked them to check on her daughter. When officers arrived at Susan’s house, they did not immediately see anything suspicious. There were no signs of a break-in. The door was locked. The porch light was still on. They knocked, walked around the outside of the house, looked through what they could see from outside, and then decided that maybe Susan and the kids had gone out of town.
Since Susan’s car was not in the driveway, they assumed she might have left and simply forgotten to tell her family. Later, police called Kate back and told her they had not found anything alarming. But Kate did not believe it. A mother knows when something is wrong, and this time, every instinct in her body was telling her that Susan was in trouble.
She knew Susan would never just miss a shift at work without warning. >> >> So Kate spent the rest of the day calling Susan’s relatives, friends, and acquaintances, hoping someone had heard from her. She was trying to find any small clue, any person who could say they had spoken to Susan or seen her recently.
But every call only brought more silence. By the next morning, Kate still had no answers. So once again, she asked police to check Susan’s house, and once again, the same thing happened. Officers looked at the outside of the home, knocked on the door, got no response, and left. By the end of September 29, 2008, authorities finally received information they could not ignore.
That information came from police in South Dakota. But I will get to that in a moment. When officers finally forced their way into the Bailey home, the first thing they noticed was the smell. The house smelled of death and bleach. It was the kind of odor that told them someone had died inside.
And afterward, someone had tried to clean up the scene. There were blood stains throughout the home on the walls, the floor, the furniture, and different surfaces around the house. One officer later described it as looking like a slaughter house. The stripped electrical cord they had talked about before was still hanging over the bathtub.
But Susan was not in the tub. Something had clearly not gone according to their original plan. Instead, investigators found a knife and several cell phones in the water as if someone had tried to damage the phones and destroy the information on them. Experts later examined the electrical cord and concluded that because of the low voltage.
It probably could not have killed anyone. At most, it might have caused pain or discomfort. There were weapons scattered in different parts of the house. In one room, investigators found a wooden bat with blood on it. In another room, there were knives. One of them was even wedged between the cushions of the couch. In the refrigerator, the pudding Jennifer had made was still there.
And in the attic, police found the gun Paul Hansen had taken from his father. Among the other evidence, investigators also found strands of hair and a pair of scissors. Then, detectives went upstairs, and in the hallway, they found the body of 43-year-old Susan Bailey. Susan had been attacked with a knife, and investigators also saw signs that she had been struck with a bat.
Based on the condition of her body, she had been dead for several days by the time police found her. Her clothing and the carpet beneath her were heavily stained with blood. Investigators also noticed that some kind of chemical had been poured on or near her body. It was obvious that whoever did this had tried to clean up afterward, but they had done a terrible job.
Fingerprints were everywhere, and weapons had been left scattered around the house. Instead of hiding what had happened, their careless attempt to clean only made the scene look even more suspicious. Because of that, figuring out who was responsible was not as difficult as it might have been. The strong smell of cleaning products gave investigators another clue.
In the trash, they found a Walmart receipt. When they checked the store’s surveillance cameras, they saw 13-year-old David Bailey riding there on his bicycle several times in the days before, buying a large amount of household cleaning chemicals. That receipt helped place him directly in the middle of the coverup. The strands of hair found in the house belonged to 16-year-old Paul Hansen.
Most likely, he had cut his hair to make himself harder to recognize. But instead of helping him disappear, those pieces of hair became another clue, tying him back to the house. At that point, police had a pretty clear idea of what had happened. But now they needed enough evidence to file charges, find the suspects, take the case to court, and secure a conviction.
Knowing who likely did it was one thing. Proving it in court was another. The most unbelievable part is that by then the people they were looking for were already in custody. Police had returned to Susan Baileyy’s house for the third time because they had received a tip they could not ignore. Officers in another state had arrested three teenagers.
David, Jennifer, and Paul had taken the small amount of money they stole from Susan after her death and managed to drive all the way to South Dakota, more than a thousand km north of Rowanoke. By the time they got there, they had no money left. Not even enough to put gas in the car. So, the teenagers tried to steal gasoline.
That was when they were caught and handed over to police. Their escape plan, which they had imagined as the beginning of a new life, fell apart almost as soon as reality caught up with them. Jennifer, Paul, and David had chosen the worst possible time and place to try stealing gas. They were out at night in a city where minors were not even supposed to be on the streets because of curfew laws and all three of them were under 18.
When patrol officers checked the license plate, they found out the car was registered in Texas. None of the teenagers had a driver’s license either. So, the officers contacted the police department in Rowenoke and asked them to check on Susan Bailey. The woman listed as the owner of the car. Only after that information came in did officers finally decide to enter Susan’s house and find out where she was.
Inside the Bailey home, investigators also found a school pass with Merrily’s name on it. By then, Merrily was already in juvenile detention, facing charges for aggravated assault. Detectives thought it was a very strange coincidence that one school girl had gone after her own mother, and then her belongings were found inside a house where another serious crime had happened.
Merrily was brought in for questioning and this time she told them everything. She explained the strange relationship between herself, Paul, and Jennifer. She also told investigators about the plan to run away to Canada, which was exactly where her three friends had been heading when police stopped them in South Dakota.
Because Merrily was honest with investigators, prosecutors charged her only in connection with the attack on her mother. She was not charged for taking part in or planning what happened to Susan Bailey. In exchange for her cooperation, Merrily received immunity. In the end, for what she had done, she spent 5 years on probation.
David Bailey, who was only 13 years old, pleaded guilty to a very serious charge. Because he was still a minor, he was sentenced to 26 years in prison. He is expected to be around 40 years old when he is released in 2034. Paul Hansen, who was 16, accepted a plea deal and received a 60-year prison sentence.
After 30 years, he can apply for parole. In Texas, the maximum sentence for a minor convicted of this type of crime could have been life in prison without parole. So, by taking the deal, Paul avoided the harshest possible outcome. After the final sentence was announced, Paul was given a chance to describe what happened in detail.
At that point, he had no real reason to keep lying. Hansen started by bringing up the split personality story again, but the officer immediately stopped him and made it clear that excuse was not going to work. After that, Paul acted completely normal for the rest of the conversation. He did not try to pretend he was someone else.
To me, that made it pretty clear that his so-called second personality had been something he used to manipulate the girls who were in love with him. According to Hansen, the whole thing had been Jennifer’s idea from the start. He claimed she was the one who wanted her mother gone.
He said that when Susan came home from work that evening, Jennifer used a fake excuse to get her mother upstairs where Paul and David were already waiting. Paul said that he and David were armed with knives and that the attack continued until Susan was gone. Jennifer Bailey also accepted a plea deal. But part of the agreement required her not only to admit what she had done, but also to explain her motive.
At her sentencing hearing on October 15th, 2009, Jennifer did not want to explain anything. In her version, she had not done anything illegal. She tried to blame Paul and David for everything. She claimed she had helped talk about the plan, but never took it seriously and never believed they would actually go through with it.
Jennifer also shifted the blame onto her younger brother, saying David was the one who attacked Susan. According to her, she was too shocked at first to do anything. Then when she tried to call 911, Paul supposedly stopped her and took the phone away. Thankfully, the judge did not believe her story. Jennifer was told that the lighter sentence in her plea deal depended largely on whether she was honest.
She took a few days to think about it, and at the next hearing, she finally gave a fuller explanation. This time, her story matched the physical evidence found inside the house. Paul Hansen had been hiding in Jennifer’s home for several days, and Susan had no idea. While Susan was at work, the teenagers disconnected the landline phones in the rooms so she would not be able to call for help.
Susan’s shift ended close to midnight. By then, David and Paul had fallen asleep. When Suz came home, Jennifer woke Paul up and the attack followed. Jennifer still insisted that she had not personally taken part in the physical attack. She claimed she had not done anything that directly harmed her mother, but in the end, the examination showed that all three teenagers had taken part.
Even though Jennifer never fully told the truth, the judge still allowed her plea deal to stand. She received the same sentence as Paul Hansens, 60 years in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years. Paul, Jennifer, and David are all still in custody. What happened to Susan Bailey is tragic on so many levels.
She was a mother who loved her children, cared for them, and spent her life trying to provide for them. And the fact that the very children she sacrificed for turned against her in such a cold and cruel way makes this case especially hard to process. If you watched until the end, then you are a real true crime fan.
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