Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - College Student Murders Her Own Mother - The Sydney Powell story

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

This is the story of Sydney Powell, the Ohio woman who murdered her own mother.

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My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos. Watch the Hulu original series. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for Bumno subscribers. Terms apply. So this girl is having such a hard time keeping her grades up in school. She literally unalives someone over it.

Now, her name is Sydney, and Sydney's in high school. She's a really good student. She gets good grades. She's a high achiever. She mentors other younger students. She is absolutely killing it. So it's no surprise when she graduates high school and gets an academic scholarship to a nearby university about an hour away from where her family's house is.

But then, in the fall, when school starts, she moves into the university. university dorms and starts going to classes. And pretty quickly, she discovers that university is much harder than high school. The workload is more, the expectations are higher, and poor Sydney is having trouble keeping up. And she's not used to this. Failure at school is not her thing. And sometimes she goes back to her family home to visit her parents, who will just call her mom mom and we'll call her dad, dad. She goes back to visit and mom will ask her like, hey, how are you doing in school? And Sidney lies. She's like, I'm doing great, mom. And And this goes on for months. She struggles and then she lies to her parents about it. And by the end of her freshman year, things still haven't improved. In fact, at this point, she's doing so terrible she's failing some of her classes, which puts her scholarship at risk. But still, she bottles it all in and goes home for the summer and doesn't tell her parents that anything is wrong. Then it gets worse. Fall semester starts. Sophomore year, Sydney goes back to college and goes back to living in the dorm. But at this point, the school has put

put her on academic probation. And soon enough, she's falling behind in her classes again and she can't keep up. And of course, when her parents ask her how school's going, she continues to keep it from them. She's just too afraid to admit that she's struggling. She just doesn't want to disappoint them. And then pretty quickly, the semester ends. And boom. Sydney has failed three out of the four classes she took that semester.

And that's when she gets an official notice from the school saying her enrollment has been suspended. and she has lost her scholarship. And Sydney, she doesn't know what to do. She's never disappointed her parents before. So she goes home for the holidays, and she still refuses to tell them anything. And she keeps pretending as if nothing is wrong, like, school's going great.

In fact, she doesn't tell anyone about her suspension, not her parents, not her best friend, no one. And she keeps this lie going. And a month later, when school's back in session, she just goes back. Even though she's been suspended and is no longer enrolled, she returns to her dorm and acts as if she's still a student and just keeps on living there. And she attends sorority meetings and she attends classes sometimes,

as if nothing ever happened. And then eventually the school admins find out she's doing this. Like they just straight up kick her out of the dorms. Like they evict her and they deactivate her key card. And so poor Sidney, she doesn't know what to do. I mean, she can't move back home because then her parents will know she failed college and they'll be disappointed in her. So instead of going home, she decides to keep the lie going. And she rents out a room at a nearby hotel and she just starts staying there.

All the while, her parents have no idea any of this is going on. Until. One day, Sidney's dad is at work and he's trying to log in to the university's online portal so that he can take care of Sydney's tuition. But oddly, he can't log in. So he reaches out to a school admin and they get on the phone and the school admin drops a bomb on him. He says, sir, you can't log in because Sidney is no longer enrolled.

And dad is straight up shocked. He says, oh, how could our honor student be suspended from school? Now, their whole family uses one of those 360 location sharing apps. So he looks at it and he sees that Sydney is at his house, the family home. And dad decides to go home and confront her and figure out what's going on. So he does. He drives home and he confronts her. And he tells her what the school told him.

And Sidney, just thinking on her feet, she kind of half admits that she's having some trouble. but she continues to lie and say that everything is fine and that she's still taking some classes, which just isn't true. So they talk it out a bit and dad seems to be understanding, but he has to go back to work, so he leaves. Then Sidney's mom comes home, and this is where things get crazy. Sydney's mom had also left work early to come home to talk to Sydney, and when she gets there, she immediately calls the school admins to talk to them about the details of her daughter's suspension. But they're not available and the school tells her they'll call her back. Then mom goes and confronts Sidney.

She wants to know what the hell is going on. Why did she get suspended? And they get into an argument. And pretty quickly, it gets heated. And it escalates. And soon, they're yelling at each other. And in the middle of all that, suddenly, the phone rings. And it's the university returning mom's call.

So mom gets on the phone with the admins and they start chatting. And then, out of nowhere, bam, Sidney hits her mom over the head with a cast iron skillet. And mom screams, and Sidney hits her again and again until mom goes down. And this whole time, the college admins are still on the phone, and they can hear all this violence going on in the background. And they start freaking out. But then, click.

The phone goes dead. And while mom is down on the floor, Sidney, she's not done. She grabs a steak knife from the kitchen, and she starts to be. She starts stabbing her mom. She stabs her over and over again. Two dozen times. She eventually unalives her. And while this is happening, the school admins are still trying to call back and make sure everything's okay. And then finally, on the third try, someone picks up the phone. And it's Sidney, but she's pretending to be her mom. Like, Yes, this is Sidney's mom. And the admins don't buy it. They're like, uh, no, this sounds like

Sydney. And so Sydney quickly hangs up. And the admins are like, what the fuck was all that? And they call police and ask them to go over there and do a welfare check. So then police head over to Sydney's house. Meanwhile, Sydney, she's still at home, standing over her mom who she just unalived. And she has no idea what to do. So she starts to panic. She's got to cover this up. And she pretty quickly comes up with a plan. First, she breaks a nearby window in the house. Then she starts preparing a story to tell to the police about how some random bird. just broke in and unalived her mom. And within a few minutes, police arrive. And body cam footage shows them trying to usher her out of the house as she's trying to tell them this bullshit story. We heard a bag. But unfortunately for her, pretty quickly, police see wounds on Sidney's hands,

indicating that she broke the window in the house herself. So then, bam, they arrest Sidney and here's her mugshot. And she's charged with murder, she goes to trial, and she's found guilty, and she's sentenced to 15 years. 15 years to life all over some bad grades. Shout out to Ohio.