When Haylee Reay Cole woke that frigid February morning in 2006 her life would never again be the same.
Already, there were a few clues that things were off kilter when she went downstairs to find her father — not her mother — waiting to take her to school.
Her mother, 42-year-old Tamara (“Tami”) was always the one to wake her and get her ready for school, but not that Wednesday.
Tami was gone, her father, Brad Reay, 46, explained to her. She’d run off with her boyfriend and might be gone for days, he said.
Boyfriend? Gone? None of this made sense to Cole, then 12.
Why would her mother suddenly leave? And if she had gone, why would she leave her purse in the kitchen, keys, and cellphone on the dresser and car in the garage?
Cole’s head began to spin, she said, as she attempted to piece events together. The night before had been perfectly normal.
Tami attended her daughter’s basketball game like always, and afterward, the two ate dinner together in the stands. Then they stopped on their way home at the Walmart where Brad worked as an assistant manager to get some toilet paper and other sundries.
Cole was home and in bed around 9 p.m.
Last night had been a little strange, however. She’d woken to find her bedroom door shut, which was always open at night. Then, her dad poked his head in to check on her holding an armful of clothes.
Cole asked him what he was doing to which he replied, nothing, and to go back to bed. He said that he loved her and laid down on her bed until she fell back asleep.
This bugged her because he would never do laundry in the middle of the night. Plus, the laundry room was downstairs next to her mother’s bedroom. She wondered what was going on.
Slow Spiral
That eerie morning was the culmination to what had already been a weird week, starting the moment her parents had sat her down to say they were getting a divorce.
Up until that moment, Cole thought life was going well.
They’d been living in Pierre, South Dakota, for about a year and a half. Tami, a Lander girl who had always been a stay-at-home mom doing only the occasional odd job, had recently taken a job in the shoe department of Kmart now that Cole was older and active in sports.
Where her mother seemed happy to have finally asserted her independence, Brad was taking the looming divorce hard, Cole said.
He was different. He’d always been a workaholic who was rarely home, but now, he was home a lot more. His voice had also become more soft-spoken, and he wasn’t getting much sleep.
Once, Cole found him sitting upright in bed with his arms crossed against his chest and a far-away look on his face.
He also wanted to now spend more time with his daughter. Before, he wasn’t an involved dad, and their time together was typically spent doing things he liked to do such as fishing and hanging out with his friends.
The two went on drives together where Brad tried to guilt-trip her about what “her mom was doing to their family,” Cole said.
Looking back, Cole, now 32 and living in Lander, can see all the warning signs of domestic abuse. Back then, however, she was a confused teen wondering where on earth her mother could be.
When her father told her to get in the car to go to school, she did. She also heeded his advice not to tell anyone about her mother’s disappearance because it was personal, family business.
Down to the Office
Meanwhile, others in Tamara’s world also took note of her disappearance.
A couple hours into the school day at Georgia Morse Middle School, Cole was called down to the office. Her grandmother, Bonnie, and aunt, Raquel Burns, were calling from Lander, wondering about her mother. They couldn’t reach her, which was odd because they spoke on the phone every single morning.
Bonnie then called Tami’s co-worker, Brian Clark, at Kmart to see if she’d shown up to work. She was due for a 10 a.m. shift but failed to show, Clark said, so he called the Pierre Police Department to report her missing.
Cole was sent back to class.
About an hour or two later, Cole was called back down to the office. This time it was Troy Swenson, a detective with the Pierre Police Department, who had questions for her about her mother as well as her parents' relationship.
Cole hesistated; she'd been warned by her father not to talk about family business.
Detective Swenson, now retired, still recalls that initial conversation with Cole nearly 20 years later.
She seemed like a tough kid, he thought, and he regretted questioning her as perhaps the sole witness into what was increasingly looking like foul play.
“Haylee was obviously the last person to see her,” Swenson told Cowboy State Daily by phone from his home in South Dakota, “so I went there and interviewed her and got all the information from the night before.”
Swenson said right away he felt pretty confident that Tami had not willingly run away.
“They were a close family, and I knew this mother would just not leave her 12-year-old daughter and jet off into the sunset,” he said.
While Swenson interviewed Cole, two other detectives headed over to the Reay house to do a welfare check on Tami. When nobody answered, they peeked through the window into the garage and saw Tami’s black Dodge Durango with a “reddish brown stain on the door,” according to court documents.
Events Unfolding Rapidly
Detective Swenson soon met up with the other detectives at the Reay house where they asked and were granted consent from Brad to go inside. Along with what appeared to be blood on the car door, they also saw a blood droplet on the floor with a strong bleach smell emanating from inside the vehicle.
Brad claimed he'd heard a vehicle pull into the driveway around 1 a.m. that morning. He told investigators he looked outside and saw Tami's Durango parked in the driveway, without Tami in it, while another vehicle drove away. He said he pursued the vehicle in the Durango, but was unable to catch up with it, court documents state.
Brad was then taken to the police station for further questioning but denied having anything to do with his wife’s disappearance, say court documents.
As he was being questioned, crime scene investigators went to work on the home, recovering enough evidence to arrest Brad for first-degree murder and book him into the Hughes County Jail.
Later that day, for a third time, Cole was called down to the principal’s office. This time she was met by a Department of Family Services worker who explained she wasn’t going home but instead would be picked up by a temporary foster care mom.
The foster mom stopped by a store so Cole could purchase some toiletries and clothes.
“I went to her house that night,” Cole said. “I didn’t have access to my cellphone or have any contact with anyone.”
It was a terrifying night for Cole, and in the morning, she was greeted at the foster care house by Swenson and her teachers from the middle school.
“That’s when they sat me down and told me that they think my mom had been killed by my dad,” she said.
She remembers feeling scared, confused and very isolated because she was not allowed to watch television as the story unfolded on the news.
Swenson, who would become close to Cole and her family and years later would attend Cole’s wedding in Lander in 2017, had children himself and felt terrible delivering the news to this vulnerable girl.
“To no fault of her own, she just lost her mother and her father,” he said.
He described Cole as “a strong kid.”
“She was almost too strong, you know,” he said, admitting he was worried about her.
Murders in Pierre, South Dakota, were rare, let alone killings this personal. It was a lot for both he and the town to take in, Swenson said.
Cole spent the day at a friend’s house, waiting for her grandmother and family to make the 553-mile drive from west-central Wyoming to Pierre. It was the first contact she’d had with them in 24 hours and was relieved when they finally arrived and took her home.
Body Found
As Brad remained in custody, a large-scale search for Tami ensued in the surrounding area. Two days later, her body was spotted near the Oahe Dam by a National Guard pilot in an overhead helicopter.
Cole said the pilot was about to run out of fuel and almost turned around but followed a hunch.
“He said, ‘Just one more second, I have this feeling she’s over here,' ” Cole recalled.
He was right, and would later tell people that he felt like Tami was directing him to her body.
An autopsy revealed that Tami’s throat had been slashed and she had been stabbed more than 30 times, according to court documents.
Brad was charged with first-degree manslaughter and aggravated kidnapping in addition to his first-degree murder charge, according to the Argus-Leader.
Botched Attempts to Throw off Investigators
Brad’s in-jail communications with his twin brother, Bret, helped investigators fill in the remaining pieces of the puzzle.
Recorded conversations and photocopied correspondence between the brothers later revealed Brad’s botched attempts to pin the murder on Brian Clark, with whom Tami was having an affair.
During one visit, Brad held a letter up to the glass window in the visiting room while Bret jotted down the contents, according to reporting by The Daily Republic.
The letter was later mailed to the Hughes County prosecutor, magistrate judge and others, claiming to have been written by a cousin of Clark with explicit details about the crime intended to frame him. Media reports outlined certain details in the letter that claimed Clark “flipped out and started stabbing her” and that “he stabbed her in the back five times, then her throat.”
As investigators noted, these are details that only the murderer could know.
A notepad later discovered in Bret's car contained what appeared to be a narrative describing the murder and a reference to a cousin, according to court documents.
In another conversation, Brad told Bret that he needed something gone. He later gave his brother a map supposedly directing Bret to the best fishing spots in the Pierre area, according to local reporting.
The map, however, directed authorities to three garbage bags containing blood-soaked bedding, clothing and a cleaning agent.
Bret was arrested and charged with four counts of accessory to a felony, which were reduced to two counts after Bret agreed to plead guilty and testify against his brother.
Blame The Daughter
Brad had one more ace up his sleeve, which was revealed by his defense attorney at the start of his nearly three-week trial beginning on Jan. 6, 2007.
His daughter actually killed Tami, his defense alleged, and Brad initially took the blame to protect her.
Brad claimed he woke up to find Haylee standing near Tami’s dead body holding a knife. He said she appeared to be in a catatonic state as if in a trance with blood smeared on her hands and face and also pouring from her nose.
“Haylee, what have you done?” Brad said he’d asked her, according to court documents filed in his appeal.
He then washed her hands and face, cleaned up the scene and disposed of Tami's body to protect his daughter from being charged, he said.
Even the jury couldn’t believe it, former Hughes County prosecutor, Todd Love, told Cowboy State Daily.
He’d tried the case for the state, and later, ended up marrying Cole’s aunt, Holly, whom he’d met through the course of the trial.
Love remembered that the defense had been slow to reveal their strategy but were forced to do so by the judge on the day of the trial.
“Nobody was too surprised,” Love said, “because we had heard rumblings that he might try that.”
Later, when Cole went to school to study criminal justice, she understood her dad's ploy and realized she had no reason to be scared.
“He was just trying to lessen his sentence to say that I did it, so he wouldn’t have to serve life,” she said.
The jury wasn’t buying it, Love said. In fact, one of the jurors dropped his notebook in disgust during the defense’s opening arguments.
He'd never seen that before, Love said.
Cole was unflinching, Love noted.
Cole took the stand and calmly answered the defense attorney’s questions for nearly 90 minutes.
A decade later, Cole discusses this in her 2016 TedxCheyenne talk where she pantomimes the underhand motion of a volleyball serve – not the overhead stabbing gesture the defense argued she'd mastered as a result of playing the sport.
Love recalled Cole not being shocked by her father’s betrayal at the time.
For the most part, Cole was “pretty reserved and shy” but sat across from her father in court and testified, never once backing down.
In the end, Brad was found guilty by the jury of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Cole never spoke to her father again, though her aunt Raquel went to visit Brad in 2011 in prison.
That conversation didn't go well. When Brad walked into the visitor’s room to see Raquel waiting for him at a table, he hesitantly sat down beside her: “You’re my visitor?” he asked.
“Yeah, Brad,” Cole said her aunt responded. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
Brad stood up and abruptly left. That was the last contact anyone in her family had with her father.
He later died of unknown causes in 2024 at the age of 64.
Ripple Effect
Cole knows the story well. She lived it; it’s her reality still.
The murder made national and international headlines and has been repurposed into numerous news articles, true crime shows and videos and podcasts.
Most recently, it was featured on an episode of Small Town Murder, a true crime podcast with a humorous slant hosted by two comedians.
After a podcast, Cole gets inundated by messages from friends asking if she’d heard it.
“I don’t listen to any of the podcasts,” Cole said. “I think it’s very rude for them to monetize off of the story.”
It also causes a ripple effect of wrong information as news stories and podcasts borrow from one another.
Sometimes they ask for permission, which Cole said she appreciates, but mostly they don’t.
“It makes me really angry because I’m living it, and they’re obviously doing it for the money,” she said.
Positive Message
Instead, she chooses to share her own story – not as a form of entertainment but as a means of helping other victims of domestic violence get the courage to leave their respective situations.
She also considers herself a living role model in that victims don’t have to be defined by the events that happened to them.
Cole made a conscious decision as a teen that she wanted to be her mother’s voice and to make her proud.
She knew she couldn't bring her mother back, so that was the next best thing.
And where the tragic events of her life marked the end of a chapter, a new one emerged out of the ashes.
New Beginnings
Following her mother’s murder, Cole went to live in Lander with her grandparents, Bonnie and Don Burns. She’d spent many summers at their place, so it wasn’t too big of an adjustment to move there full-time, she said.
More so, she felt loved and nurtured by her family and appreciated having good role models in both her grandparents.
The other students at the junior high school in Lander had been told by the principal about Cole’s situation, and Cole said they treated her well and didn’t make her feel like an outcast.
Nor did she allow herself to live her life as a victim.
When she was 16, she was inspired by a presentation at school by a Paralympian, who had just competed in the international Paralympic Games.
The message resonated with Cole, who thought that she, too, could share her story as a means of motivating others.
“I thought I can get up there and say I went through this traumatic event and here’s what I did,” Cole said.
Rather than falling into a spiral of bad behavior or drugs and alcohol, Cole focused on living a life that would make her mother proud.
She asked her principal for the opportunity to speak to the student body about her own story. He agreed and that was the start of her motivational speaking career.
Today, she continues to spread this message with speaking engagements at high schools and conferences throughout the state and nation.
Her message, along with advocating for victims of domestic violence was that just because something bad happens to you, you don’t have to let it define you.
Her Mother’s Voice
Today, at age 32, an educator and married mother of a son, Cole now understands the breadth of her mother’s sacrifice.
The two were very close, Cole said, but her mother never spoke to her about the abuse because she was a teen and she didn’t want to put her problems on her daughter’s shoulders.
“Now that I'm an adult, if I was in my mom's shoes, there's no way I would have stuck around that long,” she said. “I think she stayed for me.”
And though her father wasn’t physically abusive, Cole said it was clear he was mentally abusive and controlling.
When Tami finally asserted her independence and tried to get away, Brad killed her.
It's a haunting lesson to absorb, but one that inspires her to help others in crisis.
Her father’s actions now admittedly hit her much harder now that she’s a parent.
“It affects me much more because I think I could never do that to my kid because I literally would do anything for him,” she said. “It’s the opposite of what a father should be doing for a daughter.”
But again, she refuses to take it too personally because she’s not responsible for her father’s actions.
She returns to her overriding message spurs both her life and story: you have the choice to decide how you respond to a situation.
“You can either use it as an excuse, or you can make sure it doesn’t happen to somebody else,” Cole said, and she chooses to do the latter.
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
