Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This TikToker Destroyed Her Life // The Mary Anne Oliver-Snow Story

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Mary Anne Oliver-Snow, a popular TikTok cosplay influencer known online as "Yandere Freak," accidentally shot and killed her friend Helen Hastings on in 2021, in Houston, Texas.

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What really happened? Now the TikToker calls herself Snow, and Snow is around 21 when this starts, living in Houston, Texas, and Snow is the kind of influencer who's mainly into cosplaying and dressing up like anime characters. And doing that, she's been able to build a large following. She has about 1.6 million followers on TikTok, not bad. She's also an only fan's model. So that's fun. So here's the thing about Snow.

She's the kind of influencer who sometimes likes to do edgy things for attention. Like one day in 2019, she gets this idea to go to a local cemetery and do a cosplay shoot. So she and some friends go out to the graveyard and they start taking pictures and videos and stuff and you can see her and a friend here sitting on top of gravestones. And later, Snow posts this footage online. And when people see the video, some of them get really upset. Like, some of them start criticizing her online. And like, here's a post on Reddit suggesting that she's trashy for doing this.

Now, eventually, Snow gets on TikTok Live to address the backlash, and basically she says she doesn't think it's that big of a deal because she wasn't attacking the gravestone or like taking pieces of it. In fact, her exact words were, I didn't know there were so many goddamn rules in a graveyard. Which, I'm sure people weren't happy to hear her not take accountability. But whatever, other than this graveyard incident, she's never been in any real kind of trouble,

not with the law, not in any serious internet drama, nothing like that. But then, in 2020, all that changes. And so, you remember 2020. Around March, boom, the COVID pandemic hits, and everyone starts social distancing and quarantining and staying. home more while we figure out exactly how serious this virus actually is. And Snow, she has a few friends online that she knows from TikTok. And they're all cosplay and anime enthusiasts as well.

And they also make video content. And she decides to let them move into the house that she's renting so that they can all live together during this lockdown period. And together as a collective, they'll make like cosplay content, sort of like a cosplay house. And that is where this girl comes in, Helen. Helen is 18, and of course she's also a cosplayer and she is a close friend of Snow's. And so she still lives with her parents during this time and she hears about this cosplay house idea and she doesn't want to spend all of lockdown living with her parents. So she moves in with Snow and the others and now there are seven people living in the cosplay house.

And for the next few months, they're having a great time. They're making cosplay content all day. They're hanging out. They're watching their favorite TV shows and drinking and getting high on a little Zaza. But then, in 2021, something crazy happens. One night, they're all at the house hanging out, and they've been drinking vodka and coax and getting high. And around midnight, they decide to watch some TV,

and they put on the show Gotham. And at some point, Snow notices that one of the characters, the penguin, has a gun. And this reminds her that she has a gun like that. Hers is a Glock and it's in her garage, one that her ex-boyfriend left behind when he moved out. So Snow goes out to the garage and she gets the Glock and she brings it back. And she shows everyone and she passes it around and a few hours go by.

And here is where shit goes horribly wrong. Because at this point in the night, they're all drunk and high. And one member of the group asks Snow to shoot them. And Snow's like, sure, because the magazine had been taken out of the gun. So she points the gun right at them and click. The gun is empty and so it doesn't fire. And I'm sure this was like a huge thrill for all of them. And some more time passes. And they're all still playing with the gun, I guess. And one of them puts the magazine back in. And Snow doesn't know this happened. And she doesn't seem to have a lot of experience with guns.

I'm taking. And at this point, Helen wants to get shot at as well. So she asks that Snow shoot her, and of course, the whole room thinks that the gun is still empty. So Snow is like, sure. And she points the Glock directly at Helen's head, and she pulls the trigger. And blam, the gun goes off, and Helen is shot. And the whole friend group freaks out, and one of them calls 911, and soon paramedics arrive, and they take Helen to the hospital. But about two days later, Helen, unfortunately, dies. And so police come and they take statements from everyone, and everyone tells them that it was just a terrible accident. And police, they don't arrest Snow that night, because, you know, she has no prior criminal record, so they do believe that it was, in fact, an accident.

But the next day, she's asked to turn herself in, so she goes to the station and she turns herself in, here's her mugshot. Now, pretty quickly, she gets out on bail while she waits for her trial to start. Now, you would think that because of this horrible tragedy that just happened at her house, Snow would try and lay low for a bit, maybe, you know, stay off the internet for a while. But that's not what she does. Around three weeks later, after the shooting, she goes right back to making cops. content, posting videos on TikTok and whatnot. And she doesn't just return to social media.

Snow starts going to multiple cosplay-related events, getting drunk, staying out late. She's ordered to wear an ankle monitor as a condition of her release, and at one point, she allows the ankle monitor's battery to die, which is a huge no-no. And of course, all of that goes against the conditions of her release. But she doesn't seem to care or even take this seriously. She's out here just living her life as if she didn't just shoot her roommate. In fact, she's not just making her regular cosplay videos. Snow is apparently making new videos, and some of them involve blood and murder.

Like in one, she's doing a cosplay where it seems like she's talking about a dead body? Will you help me hide a body? And in another one, she's singing about how wonderful it feels to see someone else bleeding with what looks like, bloody handprints on the wall, behind her. Now, it's obviously paint, but it's just not a good look considering what just happened. And several months go by. And see, after Helen's death, the cause of her death wasn't made public. Like her family hadn't said anything public and the media hadn't picked up on the story. So no one in the public, including Snow's 1.6 million followers, know that she killed someone. They just think that she's just

doing her normal edge lord content. In fact, some of Helen's friends who weren't there the night of the shooting were misinformed and were under the impression that Helen had unalived herself. That's how not public this story was. But about eight months after the shooting, some random anonymous internet detectives go looking through local court records and they find that Snow, this TikTok star, was involved in Helen's death. And they go check her page and they are very disturbed by the content they see. And word gets out and the story goes public and lots of people start criticizing Snow's behavior and they're all up in her comments like, you're so heartless or you're a murderer and all kinds of stuff. And eventually all the backlash gets to Snow and she stops posting content altogether

and she deletes all of her social media accounts. And from here, she kind of just, disappears completely from the internet. And ultimately, she was charged with manslaughter for the shooting, and eventually she takes a plea deal and she gets sentenced to five years probation.