Chapter 1: What led to the death of Google executive Forrest Hayes?
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Santa Cruz is a small coastal town in California. It's at the northern end of Monterey Bay. It looks like paradise. Look at that beach. Look at these mountains. Breathe that air.
It's a place where the blind could go sightseeing. And then in recent years, it's become a place that's become more and more favored by the people over the hill in Silicon Valley, that being the people with money. Forrest Hayes started life in the Midwest, in Dearborn, Michigan, and he went out to Silicon Valley, where everything was happening.
He was hired by Google. He had five kids.
And then one day, a friend of his emailed him a picture of a boat that was for sale, and a couple days later, he bought it. The two things he loved were his family and being on his boat. He called it escape. I think that some part of him really wanted to, like, taste that other side of life, that kind of darker side, wilder, more exotic side of life.
On the night of November 22nd, 2013, Forrest Hayes was on his yacht, and he didn't come home that night. And his wife became concerned, and she called the captain they retained for this yacht.
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Chapter 2: Who was Alix Tickleman and what was her connection to Forrest Hayes?
At some point, she comes to him, and it looks like she tries to revive him a bit by patting him on the face and talking to him.
holding his head as he slumped forward on the chair.
And you or I, if we found ourselves in that situation, would have been on the phone to 911 saying, oh my gosh, something terrible's happened. We need help. And she does none of that.
Instead, Clark says the video shows the woman trying to remove any evidence that she was ever there, wiping fingerprints and cleaning up her drug paraphernalia. While he slumped over on the floor?
While he's on the floor.
She's stepping over him?
She is literally walking around the cabin of the boat, stepping over him, grabbing her glass of wine, carrying it around the boat cabin with her.
Clark says that portion of the video, with Hayes on the floor of the cabin, goes on for seven minutes.
And that's seven minutes that emergency medical personnel could have been there, could have done something, and could have reacted to the situation to save Mr. Hayes' life. But instead, she does nothing, nothing to call for help or to fix this. And that's the crux of the case.
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Chapter 3: What evidence did detectives find on the yacht?
It may have the look and feel of a startup, but with nearly 4 million members worldwide, this is big business. What is Seeking Arrangement? SeekingArrangement.com is a sugar daddy dating website. So we match wealthy guys and girls looking to pamper and spoil and, of course, younger men and women looking to meet those wealthy people.
CEO Brandon Wade, a boyish 43-year-old, says he's become a multimillionaire from all the arranging he's been doing. Is seeking arrangement about arranging sexual relationships for money? It is about finding romance and passion.
I'm unapologetic about the fact that sex is involved in a romantic relationship and money is involved in a romantic relationship, but that doesn't make the romantic relationship prostitution. Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark, the point man in the Hayes death case, strongly disagrees. It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to take a look at that website and figure out exactly what was going on there.
The titles of the individuals are Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies. There's no innocent connotation there behind any of that. What is budget? That's what he's willing to spend? That's his sort of lifestyle. So he could be going out for dinners, paying for that, going on trips. Okay, so does a woman think you're going to spend $3,000 on me? A sugar baby thinks you're going to spend $3,000?
Yeah, on the relationship. Okay. Yeah. Wade is proud that his membership ranks include employees of leading Fortune 500 companies, including, he says, from Google. Was Forrest Hayes a typical client of yours? I would say he is an average client of ours. Married, tech executive, looking for some sort of arrangement. Yep, 40% of the guys are married.
It's unknown if Hayes was fulfilling the, quote, expectations, unquote, of any sugar baby's lifestyle requests, which range from $1,000 to over $10,000 in monthly sugar daddy gifts. Can you tell us anything about Alex Tickleman's profile on Seeking Arrangement?
Well, the only thing I can say is that it looked like any other normal profile, so it was approved, and there was no indication that she was soliciting money for sex, at least not with that profile. After Hayes' death, investigators began tracking Alex Tickleman on social media. Fearing she might leave town, they hatched a plan to catch her using seekingarrangement.com. Reporter Stephen Baxter.
When she posted on Facebook something to the effect of, I plan to go back to Georgia, that's when they decided to really go in and pursue her on the same website, just the way Forrest had, and pose as a John and lure her back to Santa Cruz.
We started seeing chatter from her that indicated she was either gonna move out of the country or out of the state.
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Chapter 4: How did the investigation uncover Alix Tickleman's past?
This is a woman you were in love with. Yeah, I mean, obviously I was devastated. You know, I turned white. As the news sank in to his complete amazement, Chad realized that just hours before Alex met up with Forrest on that fateful night, she was with him.
We were hanging out that day, actually, and she told me that some of her longtime high school friends were in Santa Cruz and had a boat, and she had planned to go hang out with them. Later on that night, she actually woke me up out of bed with a phone call. She was really frantic on the phone. She sounded very upset. What was she talking about?
She talked about how her friends had started doing heroin and a bunch of hardcore drugs on the boat and made her uncomfortable and that she had to leave.
But you believed on that call that she sounded genuinely upset? Crying, sniffling, I mean, upset, upset. Because the truth, he now knows, was much worse. And it's left him wondering whether he ever really knew who Alex was.
Who is Alex Tickleman, right? Who is she?
Reporter Michael Daly did what police investigators did. And using the tools of Forrest's employer, he Googled her. This, the police discovered, was Alex Tickleman's Twitter account. Calling herself AKKennedyXX. One X short of triple X, baddest bitch, model, stylist, hustler, exotic dancer. Those are her words. These are the pictures to go with the words.
This has the charming inscription, to death do us part. You might start believing less in coincidence on seeing that. But to Daley, Alex's postings looked more like someone trying to create an image rather than someone obsessed with killing. That's because he came across this photo. My beautiful mother and I out to lunch, no makeup face. And this is a young woman who wants to be with mom.
Alex posted it just months before her arrest for Forrest's death. It makes you think that there's a fuller story. So how did it come to this? Childhood pictures show a cute blonde tomboy who appeared to have all the advantages in life.
Growing up with her sister, Monica, who would become an investment counselor, her mother, Leslie Ann, and her father, Bart, a CEO for a technology company, and a pretty good poker player. And he, at one point, found himself playing with some of the best poker players in the world, and he won like $400,000.
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