80: Eclipse Murders: An Astrology Influencer's Dark Spiral
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Let's go back to April 8th, 2024, 7.30 a.m. A squad car pulls up to an apartment on the 6200 block of Varial Avenue in Woodland Hills, California. The suburban community sits just north of LA in the valley. And though it's technically part of the city, a short stretch of hills separate the communities, making them feel like totally different places. An LAPD homicide detective steps out of the car,

And though this is just another day on the job for him and the other detectives from another precinct who arrived shortly after him, his heart immediately drops. A trail of bloody footprints is leading out of one of the apartments.

He was responding to a call that came in from a neighbor. Not even an hour earlier, they had observed everything the officer was seeing right now. Bloody footprints leading up to a door that was left open. The detective followed the prints through the doorframe, knowing what was coming next. The caller had already made the grim discovery. There on the floor was the body of 29-year-old Jalen Chaney.

A bloody knife was laying right next to him. I'm sure that homicide detectives in LA have truly seen it all, but there was something about this scene that was kind of perplexing. Eventually, a full investigative team is in the apartment, and as they walk through the rooms,

They notice that there's tarot cards, crystals, and other spiritual tools maniacally scattered throughout. The home was also in a state of complete disarray. Bags full of trash were everywhere, piles of laundry had stacked up, and all of these unclean dishes were littered throughout the kitchen. It was entirely unsanitary. And that's when the officers get a call.

Two other bodies had been found, one in a car that had crashed into a tree at over 100 miles an hour and a child that had been pushed out of a moving car on a freeway. Both of the deceased were confirmed to have lived in the apartment with Jalen. It's not long before the body in the car is confirmed to be 34-year-old Danielle Johnson, a self-proclaimed healer and tarot card reader who went by Mystic Lipstick on social media.

Not an unusual profession for someone in Los Angeles, but how did she, her partner, and one of her children wind up brutally killed? It's not until someone finds Danielle's Twitter that the case starts to take shape. Pinned to the top of Danielle's account is a tweet from her on April 5th that reads, in all caps,

Wake up, wake up, the apocalypse is here. Everyone who has ears, listen. Your time to choose what you believe is now. If you believe a new world is possible for the people, retweet now. There is power in choice, there is power in choice. Repost to make the choice for the collective.

Then, just below that, the final tweet on the account was reposted from Twitter user at QTheStorm. It read, That day, the day Danielle and two of her family members were found dead, was the solar eclipse. So,

What happened? How did we get to this point? After a short break. This episode is brought to you by Liquid IV.

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That's 20% off your first order when you shop better hydration today using promo code HSP at liquidiv.com. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaitlin Moore. I wanted to make a quick note about this story before we jump back into it. This

This case in particular caught my eye because I felt like a lot of misinformation was being spread about it right after it happened. I remember reading the headlines back in April that were like, "Tarot cards and feathers found in apartment of woman who killed her family and herself," and "Woman on murder spree feared the eclipse." I felt called to look into it more because I had actually followed Danielle on social media for quite some time.

I turned to astrology in my early 20s as a way to make sense of my life, and I'm sure many of you can relate to that. And that's how I found Danielle, who I knew as Mystic Lipstick. I loved her grounded approach and no-nonsense way of calling out my behavior and telling me what was in store for my future.

But as time went on, I watched as her postings got more and more concerning. Earlier this year, I finally felt like they were getting so out of hand that I had to unfollow her. And within a week, I found out she was dead.

That's to say there's a lot more to this case than what the newspapers reported on. It's a story of spirituality gone wrong, but it's also a story of postpartum depression, of childhood trauma, and being manipulated by people who say they can help you. And we're going to get into all of it today.

But before we jump in, I wanted to quickly announce that I'll be joining Annie Elise of the Serialistly podcast and 10 to Life on YouTube on stage for a live show on October 3rd in Brea, California. I've never done a live show before, and I've also never met any of you in person before. So I am very excited to do both of those things at the same time. If you're interested in coming, I think there's a few tickets left. You can head to AnnieElise.com for tickets, and I'll add a link in the show description. See you there.

See you there. And for now, let's get into the episode.

Danielle Johnson's path to astrology was not written in the stars necessarily. She took a circuitous route there. Danielle actually studied psychology at Norfolk University in 2010. And her friend and roommate, Maya Johnson, no relation, said she and Danielle were regular worshipers at their Baptist church. Apparently, Danielle attended in the hopes of repairing her relationship with her mother, Sharonda Cole.

Sharonda had Danielle when she was 16 and she gave away the custody of her child while she was struggling with addiction. The father had left them and Sharonda didn't feel like she was really in a place to raise a child.

So she sent Danielle to live with her uncle in Virginia. He was a Navy vet living with his wife, a situation that seemed more stable than what Sharonda could give. And though her mother felt like she was making the ultimate sacrifice to help her daughter, Danielle never really saw this as anything other than abandonment. And after this abandonment is where Danielle first started to struggle with anxiety.

She became a hypochondriac, assuming she had a brain aneurysm whenever she would get just a headache. No one seemed to know where this anxiety came from and no one really knew what to do about it.

Danielle tried Bible study in college as a way to heal from her childhood, but she just didn't feel like organized religion was working. She didn't even feel like the psychology she was learning about in class was working, or at least helping her make sense of her life. And so her junior year, she abruptly dropped out of college. Instead of finishing her degree, she dove into practices aimed at heightening the psychic abilities she felt like she had since she was three years old.

Think numerology, shamanism, Reiki, and astrology. These all became Danielle's way of discovering herself. She created a Twitter account, Mystic Lipstick, to share her journey of healing and her tips with the world. And quickly, her friends and family started to see how important this kind of mysticism was becoming to Danielle, who started blossoming back into the bright, funny version of herself that they knew.

Reiki, which is described as a spiritual practice that involves laying on hands and channeling life force energy for wellbeing, was not only a solo therapy for Danielle, but it was also what she would use to rebuild her relationship with her mother. She would practice on Sharonda, who started to see Danielle as her own personal spiritual healer in a way. It seemed like these alternative practices were starting to repair generational trauma.

It was everything she had been looking for. And other parts of Danielle's life were starting to improve as well. In 2013, Danielle stumbled across Cecil Rice on Twitter

Cecil was a straight-laced Procter & Gamble employee, not a spirituality guy at all. But he was attractive to Danielle's positive personality in spite of her rough past. And over DMs, the pair realized that they lived close enough to take this virtual romance IRL. So by 2014, Danielle and Cecil were married in Springfield, Ohio.

A year later, in 2015, Danielle's Mystic Lipstick account was finally starting to take off. Her meme-worthy astrological observations made her a social media star. She became a must-follow account featured in interviews and guest columns for places like PopSugar.com, Vader Magazine, and The Scottie and Sylvia Show.

Danielle, who also started going by A-Yoka at this time, was exposed to thousands of new fans obsessed with her spiritual homegirl approach, as one loyal follower described it. And this is when I personally found her. She was teaching Zodiac-curious millennials like myself how to read birth chart landmarks like North Nodes and Sun Signs to discover our purpose before apps like CoStar even existed.

In a world where most astrologers felt like stuffy, serious mystics behind crystal balls, Danielle kind of felt like a friend. I liked how she was blunt and she would call me out on my self-sabotaging behavior. She wasn't just telling me to sit around and wait for the planets to realign. And in a lot of ways, I think her approach helped astrology become as mainstream as it is today.

For many fans, Danielle was more than just entertainment. She was this anointed being. Danielle herself felt this way. During her interview with Vader magazine, she said that, quote, magic was literally in her blood. She believed her psychic intuition was a birthright that was passed down from the line of, quote, Native American medicine women in her family that her father once told her about.

And as mainstream interest in Danielle's astrology and love of her brand of astrology grew, her Twitter account raised up to 100,000 followers.

This platform soon outgrew giving away free advice for likes. So between 2016 and 2017, Danielle built a menu of spiritual healing services. Astrological readings, guided meditations, spells, cleanses, and rituals were all sold on her website. The least expensive options were just $2.99, while monthly packages could be priced at $150 a month.

Sometimes videos and PDFs were included, but mostly Danielle was paid to send energy to people, like daily vibes to her subscribers' homes. They were assured that these would activate automatically after purchase via a spiritual link to their aura.

And it became clear that this was a lucrative new path for her. People started to notice Danielle's lavish success. After years of struggling emotionally and financially, Danielle leased an expensive car and started carrying around designer bags. Some followers who had been there since the beginning started questioning their spiritual guru making all of this money off of healing.

More experienced astrologers even started calling out Danielle's self-proclaimed divine calling, but that didn't stop her. What did it matter if she was making money if she was really helping people? This was a dangerous path though, because after this, Danielle started to offer other stranger kinds of spiritual packages.

So in 2018, Danielle announced a new type of healing series. She would now lead programs designed for victims of sexual assault. She wrote on her Twitter that this would, quote, "...help with sexual addictions and be paramount for those in any form of sex work and sexual abuse victims."

This caused a ripple of concern in Danielle's community. People weren't sure how Danielle's love for astrology qualified her to mediate severe trauma. And the criticism only got worse when word got out that during one of her tantric healing sessions, Danielle implied that it was possible to attract sexual assault. Fans were shocked and disturbed.

This woman who they looked up to for guidance was clearly out of her element. And if she couldn't be trusted to help heal the wounds of an assault, could she be trusted really to help heal anything else? Danielle's response to any of this criticism was defensive and borderline vitriolic.

In one thread, Danielle concluded that her words were, quote, "'Not offensive by any means to any of the students or to the people who saw the post, because the work had changed Danielle's own life for the better, so how could it be offensive?'

Gradually, frustrated rants and clapping back at negativity became frequent occurrences in Danielle's feed. The humor and healing that fans fell in love with became totally overshadowed by Danielle's battles against perceived haters. And this seemed to be the beginning of her descent down a very dark path. After the break. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp.

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The negativity infiltrating Danielle's life wasn't just virtual. Former friends of Danielle's with whom she'd cut ties with were hearing from mutual parties that Danielle was tapping into black magic from elaborate occult rituals in order to get revenge.

Some of these accusations claimed Danielle was trying to hex people by attaching their photo to a cow tongue with nine nails. I'll add here that that's not really a common part of alternative spiritual practices. I know a lot of people in pagan and Wicca groups were quick to come out and say that that's not what they do. This seemed unique to Danielle at the time.

And Cecil never witnessed any of this reported behavior while the two were living together. At least that's what he said. He claimed that the Danielle he knew was still focused on healing and writing in her journal, but she was also starting to grow distant from him at this time. Together, they had their first child.

which Cecil remembered as a physically and mentally difficult pregnancy for Danielle. Physically, she was diagnosed with a pregnancy complication called preeclampsia, which impacts blood pressure and can cause severe headaches. Mentally, Danielle appeared to be in a very dark place.

Cecil tried to encourage her to talk about it with him, or at least a mental health professional. The mental strife she was feeling was not uncommon for new mothers. Maybe this was a form of postpartum depression, of which symptoms included persistent depression, sharp mood swings, loss of appetite, insomnia, self-isolation, reduced ability to think clearly, and thoughts of harming yourself or your baby.

It's a scary but treatable diagnosis. Treatable, that is, with traditional doctors, not with Danielle's healing rituals. But Danielle didn't ever formally seek help. And soon she and Cecil separated without officially getting divorced. This next phase of Danielle's life seems chaotic.

Perhaps a reflection of her internal life. But she moved to New York with their daughter where she pursued a relationship with a tarot card reader in Tribeca and the two quickly got engaged.

Then she decided she wanted to pursue music on top of her spiritual career. So she moved her daughter and her new fiance to Los Angeles after she made an alternative R&B album called Venus. Her online postings remained vitriolic throughout, accusing those around her of being gaslighters and criticizing various unnamed enemies.

But her advice to her followers remained somewhat grounded and affirming. Like, quote, So despite her emotional spiraling, she kept her followers and she was still making money selling her spiritual services.

By the end of 2020, Danielle added a new member to this spiritual community, Jalen Chaney. He was an Air Force Munition Squad armament technician, and he had recently bought some of these spiritual services from Danielle while he was stationed abroad in Italy.

By the fall of 2021, around a year after meeting, Jalen and Danielle had become much closer. He joined a virtual coven she was running and she told people that she promoted Jalen to coven master. And Jalen's spiritual background mirrored Danielle's in some ways, and perhaps that's why she was so drawn to him. He too had left organized religion. He had joined the military to live his dream of exploring the world. To the

To those who knew Jalen, he was an EDM loving, Comic-Con attending nerd with charisma who could light up a room without even trying. Jalen dreamed of being a storm chasing meteorologist, but for now he was a Reiki master, also like Danielle. He set up a spiritual storefront with Danielle's help and offered aura baths, timeline shifts, and quantum healing energy baths, all under her guidance.

Eventually, Danielle told Sharonda about Jalen. He wasn't just a friend or a new relationship. She said that Jalen was her twin flame. Sharonda had witnessed Danielle dive deeper into the relationship. She was using spells and sex magic and tantric healing to strengthen their soulmate connection. She even went to Italy to visit Chaney when he was on base.

And all of that sounds lovely, but Jaylen's friends and family were shocked when they found out Jaylen was dating Danielle. See, they only knew Jaylen as a gay man. He had come out to his friends and family prior to this and had exclusively dated men before.

And that really affected his relationship with Danielle because Danielle considered Jalen her twin flame. So she discredited his existing sexual attraction to men as trauma from his difficult childhood. And she would push back on a lot of the things Jalen would say that she found to be homosexual in nature because as she saw it, it wasn't aligned with his true higher self.

So some in Jalen's life couldn't help but wonder if he was really interested in dating her or if he was being manipulated by someone who claimed she was helping him. Though one friend did tell reporters he didn't see anything strange about their relationship when he met Danielle in person.

Other friends and family noticed Danielle's emotions were becoming more unstable than before during this time. Danielle was always known to be very emotionally expressive. Sometimes her, quote, big feelings were known to explode, as told by Maya, her former roommate. But lately, Danielle kept getting into explosive fights.

During one heated incident with Sharonda in their home, Danielle broke a glass and threatened to take her own life by swallowing the shards. At this time, her new relationship was also going full force, so her former fiance moved out of their shared apartment in May of 2022, leaving Danielle and her daughter there. She felt like her relationship with Jalen was now free to become official.

But that summer, Sharonda was witnessing her daughter's mental health decline even further. She was now living with Danielle in Woodland Hills and Jalen had moved in with them. So Sharonda watched her daughter detach from what she described as real life outside of Jalen and astrological things. She could see Danielle was focusing her psychic powers on paranoid fears instead of healing.

Danielle renamed herself the Queen of the Underworld, and she started inviting demons and dark spirits into her home to ward off all of those she believed were trying to harm her and her new relationship. One of those people was Jalen's own mother, Juanita. She felt that Juanita was doing black magic to tear the couple apart, so she coerced Jalen into distancing himself.

Juanita was, of course, worried about her son, who she felt was being pulled away from her by Danielle. So Sharonda tried to encourage Danielle to seek professional help for what she understood to be erratic behavior. But again, Danielle was only willing to work with those in the metaphysical spiritual world, not Western medicine doctors.

Jalen also felt like something was wrong with his relationship. He and Danielle were constantly fighting as their neighbors often heard. Danielle locked Jalen's Twitter account to protect him from spells, another move that just took away his autonomy. He ended up texting his brother in November of 2022. I've been dealing a lot personally with my girlfriend that I don't really care to share right now because it's not appropriate.

Jaylen also expressed concerns to Sharonda over FaceTime, asking if he should leave Danielle. And when Danielle found out that Sharonda told Jaylen on social media to run away as fast as he could from Danielle, she kicked her mother out, which forced her into a homeless shelter.

By 2023, Sharonda and Danielle had lost contact entirely. The last time Sharonda saw her daughter was coincidentally when they both were sitting in LA traffic. Sharonda didn't even know her daughter was pregnant at the time.

And Danielle and Jaylen's daughter, Soleil, was born around October of 2023. Knowing that Danielle struggled with her first pregnancy, Cecil Rice made sure to reach out to Danielle when he found out. He could tell that she was being standoffish, but from what she told him, her biggest concern with the pregnancy was losing weight after she had her second baby.

She also told him that they should start looking into how to get formally divorced so she could marry Jalen because remember, they didn't ever get divorced after they separated. But Cecil's biggest fear about Danielle and her mental state was coming to fruition. Other people who were closely following Danielle's state of mind on social media could tell that things were changing and Danielle's mental state was getting darker.

And it's around this time that I rediscovered her Twitter. I'd been on and off Twitter for a few years. And when I logged back on earlier this year, I was kind of shocked at what my feed looked like.

In between my usual memes and horror movie updates, I saw a post that was about how CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was going to open a portal to another spiritual realm on April 8th. There was another post about how there were Tesla time machines under the Cheyenne Mountains that were going to activate and shift us to another timeline.

And I was shocked that all of this was on my feed, but I was even more surprised that this was all coming from Danielle. She seemed totally unrecognizable from the spiritual best friend that I had known her as. And in the weeks leading up to Danielle's death,

She was frequently sharing this kind of doomsday conspiracy theory content from accounts belonging to fringe movements like QAnon. Her feed fully transitioned away from grounded spirituality advice to disturbing misinformation surrounding all sorts of things like

U.S. livestock, the CIA, NASA, Madonna, Kurt Cobain leaving behind deep state clues, baby trafficking in the 1800s, and secret media messaging.

But it seemed like the majority of her fear was being placed onto the fact that April 8th, 2024, North America was anticipating a total solar eclipse. A solar eclipse, as a quick refresher, is what happens when the moon crosses between the earth and the sun, partially or fully blocking the sun's light. It's a normal natural phenomenon, but it also holds a lot of significance in the astrological universe.

The eclipse is known to usher in new beginnings and new endings, and remarkable life transformations are supposed to happen during this time. But there's nothing written in the stars about needing to fear for your life during an eclipse.

And still, the first week of April, Danielle pulled her oldest daughter out of school. She also began putting out a series of alarming tweets about the forthcoming solar eclipse, claiming it was going to make people violent, it was bringing forth the apocalypse. On April 4th, 2024, she wrote, quote, "'This eclipse is the epitome of spiritual warfare. "'Get your protection on and your heart in the right place.'"

On April 5th, Danielle warned her followers that they would need additional spiritual protection, which she was offering for a fee, to make it through an incredibly serious time where it's important that you stay calm, healthy, and grounded. She made it clear that there would be consequences, but that she was there to guide her community through it.

The Stay in Control Eclipse Flash spell was supposed to combat the fact that the lunar eclipse was lining up with the nodes of fate by burning all misfortune and unfair outcomes out of here. That spell, whatever it was supposed to do, would be effective for six months. And she was also offering direly needed extra protection for free activated by Only Alike.

And to be fair, people were liking these posts. I think she was drumming up some real fear inside of people that the eclipse might be something dangerous. But if you're turning to someone you previously trusted to spiritually guide you and they're saying that the world is going to end on April 8th if you're not careful, if you don't do these little spells and protections, guess what? You're probably going to want to do the little spells and protections.

More after a short break. Have you ever stopped to wonder just how close you've come to danger without even realizing it? Every single day, we encounter countless people on the street, in the grocery store, at the gym, never truly knowing who they are or what they're capable of. But what if one of those seemingly ordinary people was hiding a dark secret? What if one of those seemingly ordinary people was hiding a dark secret?

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The Minds of Madness has everything you need to satisfy your darkest cravings. The Minds of Madness is available wherever you get your podcasts or visit mindsofmadnesspodcast.com for more information. Around 3.40 a.m. early in the morning of the day of the eclipse, April 8th, a neighbor awoke to terrified screams coming from Danielle and Jalen's apartment.

Inside, Danielle had stabbed 29-year-old Jalen Chaney to death with her eight-month-old and nine-year-old child present. After the fatal stabbing, Danielle got herself and her children into her Porsche SUV. By around 4.30 a.m., her car was speeding on the 405 freeway in California and had reached Howard Hughes Parkway. Her older daughter was holding her infant child when Danielle opened the door and heard

and pushed both children out of the moving vehicle onto the road. A witness watched as this happened and called 911. But Danielle kept driving. I don't know what was going through her mind. If she was trying to get somewhere before the sun rose, if it was all fear of the impending eclipse that day, I don't know. But she was driving at a speed of almost 100 miles per hour by the time she reached the city of Redondo Beach around 5 a.m.,

That's when Danielle intentionally drove her SUV into a tree at the intersection of Pacific Coastal Highway and Vincent Street and was killed instantly.

When emergency services arrived at the site where Danielle's children had been forced out of the car on the 405, they found Danielle's oldest daughter had superficial injuries, including cuts and bruises, but she was alive and safe. However, her eight-month-old daughter, Soleil, did not make it.

Later on, Cecil and Jalen's mother went over to the apartment when they heard what happened, and they saw how uncharacteristically unkempt the state of the apartment was. It was obvious to both of them immediately that Danielle and Jalen were really struggling for some time. Maybe Danielle had just done a good job of talking down Cecil's anxieties on the phone, but when he saw her apartment, he immediately knew how bad her mental state had gotten.

And on the afternoon of April 8th, Sharonda got a call from the LA County Medical Examiner's Office who told her what happened to Danielle. They made her aware of the death and the car crash and the injuries of her grandchildren and the murder of Jalen. Even with Sharonda's existing concerns for her daughter's mental condition in mind, she still could not fathom how her daughter did this.

Authorities concluded that the incidents were all connected and there was no further threat to the community, but that didn't stop the greater Los Angeles County area from being rocked by the news. But as everyone starts getting the news of what happened, the moon crosses in front of the sun, blocking out sunlight for a few minutes, and then it continues on its path.

The world doesn't get shifted into a new timeline from a Tesla time machine buried in a mountain. CERN doesn't open a portal to hell. The universe doesn't cease to exist. We all continue living. After word of the tragedy hit the public and the inner circles of Danielle's following, both outsiders and fans tried to make sense of what had happened.

And this is where the media really starts to twist the story. It was really easy for them to latch onto Danielle's alarmist tweets about the eclipse in the days leading up to her death as explanation for how she could perpetrate something so shocking. Many people unfamiliar with Danielle perceived the incident as an act of extremist cult-like spiritual beliefs finally boiling over from the echo chamber of social media to produce real life consequences.

People wondered if astrology was demonic or dangerous, despite the fact that many people in the astrology world came forward to say that Danielle did not represent them. But even in Danielle's inner circle, spirituality was an inextractable factor in decoding what went wrong.

Friends and fans admitted to ignoring the signs leading up to Danielle's mental break that they'd witnessed online. Many latched onto a new age term, spiritual psychosis, to try and make sense of the situation. The concept of spiritual psychosis combines psychosis with hyper-spirituality, marked by a person seeing hallucinations or visions of a mystic nature and an all-encompassing obsession with psychic and spiritual matters.

Danielle's family was never able to get confirmation of the suspected postpartum depression diagnosis, though they believe that that's what was going on. And if that's what it was, it could have been treated in time. It could have changed the trajectory of Danielle's life.

But I don't really want to sit here and armchair diagnose Danielle. I don't think that's really useful. I just wanted to shine light on the fact that when we see headlines about the woman who feared the eclipse and killed her family, we know that there's a lot more to the story and the people involved.

So I guess I'll leave you with this, but don't be afraid to check in on your friends. If they've been posting concerning things online, if they just gave birth and are having scary thoughts, or even if they just haven't been themselves, that can really make all the difference.

Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research by Marissa Dow. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? You can check out heartstartspounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.

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