The Misery Machine - The Case of Danielle Ayoka
Episode Date: April 16, 2026This week, Drewby and Yergy head to California to discuss the case of Danielle Ayoka, a prominent astrology influencer and "divine healer" who gained notoriety following a double murder/s*ic...ide in Los Angeles on April 8th, 2024, the same day as the recent solar eclipse. On the days leading up to the events of today's story, Danielle posted increasingly cryptic and alarming messages on Twitter, calling the eclipse the "epitome of spiritual warfare" and warning that the "apocalypse is here."Support Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/themiserymachinePayPal: https://www.paypal.me/themiserymachineJoin Our Facebook Group: https://t.co/DeSZIIMgXs?amp=1Instagram: miserymachinepodcastTwitter: misery_podcastDiscord: https://discord.gg/kCCzjZM#themiserymachine #podcast #truecrimeSource Materials Available Upon Request.
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According to a new report from the L.A. Times, Danielle Johnson was an influencer with 100,000 followers on...
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ex formerly Twitter, who mostly talked about astrology online.
The report goes on to say she made posts saying she was worried about the eclipse and called it,
quote, the epitome of spiritual warfare.
Danielle Johnson was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on September 25, 1989, to mother
Sharonda Cole and spent most of her early life in Maryland.
Danielle's father was never in the picture, and Sharonda later admitted that raising Danielle alone
was a constant struggle.
Around the time that Danielle was 13 years old,
Sharonda began to struggle with substance use,
which resulted in Danielle developing mental health issues.
She felt abandoned and that her mother chose drugs over her.
On top of that, she became paranoid about her health.
Whenever she had a headache,
she thought it was a brain aneurism and began to panic.
Danielle moved in with her uncle in Virginia,
where she graduated from high school in 2007.
She later enrolled in the psychology program at Norfolk State University.
There, she sang in the choir and learned to play the piano.
Her roommate, Maya Johnson, claimed that Danielle was a bit odd.
Allegedly, she would constantly talk about her dreams and try to explain them.
She also claimed that she had visions of the future.
Eventually, Danielle began practicing Reiki.
Reiki is a Japanese energy healing technique that practitioners believe reduces stress
and promotes overall wellness.
Light touch is used or holding the hands just above the body to facilitate healing.
Danielle later dropped out of college and moved back to her uncle's place where she kept studying Reiki.
December of 2010, she created a Twitter account under the name Mystic X Lipstick, where she presented herself as a spiritual healer.
She chose the surname Mayoka, which is a Yoruba name, meaning one who causes joy all around.
At first, her posts only revolved around Reiki healing, but later branched out into astrology and
other remote healing techniques. In 2012, when Danielle was around 23 years old, she met Cecil Rice
on Twitter. Cecil was not the kind of guy who was into astrology or spirituality. If anything,
he found Daniel's posts funny. They texted back and forth a lot and discovered they lived really
close to each other, so they decided to meet in real life. Cecil admired how resilient Danielle was.
In his words, she definitely lived a rough life, but it wasn't something that was weighing on her.
She didn't carry it like she had been through a lot. It was a very important.
positive, hopeful, graceful person. Danielle and Cecil eventually got married in 2014 and moved to his
hometown of Springfield, Ohio. Year later, in 2015, they welcomed a baby girl. Cecil recalled that
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Right around that time, Danielle's brand started to explode, as he put it,
social media was coming to that stage where you could make money.
And to both of our surprise, people really connected with what she was doing.
Samuel Reynolds, a Santa Fe based astrologer, shared with Rolling Stone,
that Danielle's followers saw her as a spiritual homegirl,
someone who was pretty and fly and had it all together.
She understood all the spiritual things like Reiki, astrology,
numerology, kind of like Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched,
except on Twitter.
Around this time, Danielle also reconnected with her mother.
Sharonda was happy to be back in Danielle's life
and thrilled to meet her granddaughter for the first time,
but Danielle wasn't just reconnecting.
She played up her newfound psychic persona and convinced Sharonda to come under her guidance.
In 2015, Danielle started her infamous T-time threads on Twitter.
In these posts, she would pick a zodiac sign and talk about its good and bad traits,
usually in a sarcastic tone.
Her followers seemed to love this style and many of them replied saying how accurate she was.
But honestly, most of what Danielle said in those threads was pretty general.
The trait she pointed out were things you could easily find in almost anyone, which made it easy for people to feel like the posts were describing them perfectly.
Still, people connected with Danielle over how approachable she was.
According to Danielle Arias, who goes by Sun, Moon, and Stars on Twitter, there's a certain demographic of people that are looking for an unfiltered, no bullshit perspective like, this is the shit, this is what you need to fix, and I think she provided that.
But most of Danielle's competitors were skeptical of her approach.
According to astrologer Amy Tripp known as Star Heel Online,
Danielle never really understood astrology.
Amy first connected with Danielle in 2014,
and this was right around the time that Danielle was changing her whole brand
from remote energy healing to astrology.
Amy said,
She said things just to say things.
Danielle also started appearing on podcast to share her thoughts about astrology.
I would say astrology is basically the interpretation of the energies of the planets at the time that you were born or in like the current moment.
So obviously nobody's like, yeah, the literal in Pluto is defining this right now.
It's the energy that Pluto represents.
It's the energy that Pluto like invokes in us.
So the easiest way that I like to describe it is that like with the moon, you know, the moon controls the tide.
The moon controls people's emotions.
Like when there's a full moon, there's higher crime.
there's more births.
Eclipses, there's more births, there's more deaths.
So, you know, we are made of, like, over 70% water.
And so with that, like, the energies of the planets that they represent,
pulling our energies to form us a certain way, almost like a cookie cutter shape.
And that's how you get your birth chart.
And then, like, that's also how, like, the collective energy is formed,
like, every day with, like, the transits.
Like, so where all the planets are, like, you know, the sign
and then, like, you know, whatever degree they're in, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's basically that.
I feel like, you know, there is definitely like a physiological effect.
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Of the planets, you know, just like we have, you know, benefits from the sun and there's things
that happen to us from the sun and from the moon.
The other planets playing to that as well that are in our orbit.
Many people seem to enjoy Danielle's content, but others noted how some of her claims raised
some red flags.
In 2016, she had an interview with the fader where she said, I come from a line of Native
American medicine women from my father's side. With the strong Native American roots in my family
and me coming from a line of shamanists, that magic is literally in my blood. Now, it should be noted
that Danielle's father was never in the picture. She never knew him and grew up without him,
being raised by her mother and her mother's brother. She never knew any of his family based on
her research. So how is she so confident that she came from a line of Native American shaman?
Around 2016 or 2017, Daniel started presenting herself as a Jack of All Trade spiritual healer.
She began selling rituals and cleanses on our website, charging $150 a month for a series of
healing audio recordings and PDFs and $1.99 per cleanse for specific astrological signs.
She also started a Netzi page under the username Rich Girl Magic and made over 800 recorded sales
with 105-star reviews.
Daniel described these cleanses as a remote energy work.
service that is designed to help each astrological sign overcome the hurdles holding them back
from their full potential, explaining that they were one-time use and automatically linked to your
aura once purchased. Some of her followers started accusing her of scamming them, but for the most part,
people were still paying Danielle for random thoughts on their zodiac signs. On her website, she wrote,
Daniel Ayoka is a certified Reiki master teacher who is also trained in over 10 different
alternative healing modalities. At a young age, Daniel had a near-death experience at three years old,
which served as her right of passage into shamanism. Coming from a rich lineage of indigenous
shaman and medicine women, Daniel's spiritual gifts began to blossom. Daniel began her tutelage
with her personal healer in 2011 after beginning her own healing journey. Daniel also claimed that
she had clients all over the world. She reported that she combined science, alternative healing,
developmental psychology and statistical research on the impactful physiological effects that
emotions and trauma have on our overall health and well-being to deliver her healing practices.
By this point, Danielle had over 100,000 followers on Twitter, but she couldn't help but be problematic.
Some of her tweets promoted views that some found offensive.
The tweet, which she posted on February 2, 2017, and then retweeted on September 17, 2019, reads as
follows, and I quote, imagine not being embraced in the LGBT community or in the straight
community and only be accepted in the straight community if it is sexualized.
Two days later, she replied to the same post, which read, when I tweeted this a few years ago,
it was because I feel like there was a lot I was learning about myself in the LGBT space I'm in,
and the spaces others are in within the community as well. Being bisexual has been something I've been
learning to navigate since I was a teen.
That whole situation was a little odd because on another Twitter account, she proudly displayed
a pride flag.
We'll get into discussing that account later as well as how some of her posts don't actually
make sense and they often conflict with one another.
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In 2018, Danielle started a marketing series specifically for survivors of SA.
She was criticized for targeting victims without any formal training.
And in response, Danielle wrote a lengthy post claiming that,
she herself was a survivor of long-term essay as a child.
Now, Sharonda has said that Danielle has never reported any essay as a child,
but folks like her college friend Maya and her ex-husband Cecil both confirmed that
Danielle had disclosed this to them in the past.
In the tweet, she outlined that she was essayed by a family member, a teenage girl, and her best friend.
Now, as a result of all of this, Danielle's longtime followers began drifting away from her.
One follower said,
It didn't feel right in my spirit.
I'm a Christian and I felt her energy was really dark.
She was opening up doors that you shouldn't walk through
and she didn't seem very well.
Now, according to some followers, Danielle was doing dark magic
and placing hexes on them using cow tongues and feathers.
Later, two TikTok influencers also reported that Danielle
had been working with demons,
including taking somebody's picture and putting nine nails on it
a cow's tongue as part of a hexing ritual.
In 2018, Danielle and Cecil separated but never officially divorced.
Cecil said, we did great as friends, decent as co-parents.
We had grown apart and wanted different things out of life.
After the breakup, Danielle moved to New York City.
She was in a much better financial position than Cecil and got full custody of their daughter.
In 2020, Daniel started a new relationship with a novelist and tarot card reader.
The two got engaged even though Danielle was still married to Cecil.
Danielle, her fiance and her daughter later relocated to Los Angeles.
Danielle also tried to get into music.
That's the other Twitter account we were talking about earlier.
In fall of 2020, she released an album named Venus under her stage name Ayoka.
She described her music as a sleek, alt-rmb sound.
She was really aggressive in promoting it, but she soon found out that music wasn't as easy as her social media persona.
Despite all of her efforts, her YouTube channel only got about 170 subscribers.
and her SoundCloud just over 200.
People were mostly supportive in the comments,
but she eventually dropped doing music altogether.
Sometime in late 2020, Danielle connected with Jalen Chaney, better known as Jay.
He was an Air Force technician stationed at Aviano Air Base in northeastern Italy.
Jay was a diehard Star Wars fan, and just like Danielle, he was interested in horoscopes.
His Facebook profile listed his interests as extraterrestrial intelligence,
radio communication, spiritual metaphysics, and expanded consciousness.
Even though Danielle was still engaged, she started getting inappropriately close to Jay.
Eventually, Jay started calling himself a Reiki Master on Twitter,
and in 2021, he registered Saturn's Guidance LLC and created a website
where he offered orabaths and timeline shifts,
which he described as a type of energy work associated with quantum healing.
In the fall of 2021, Jay joined an online coven that Danielle promoted,
voted on social media.
In the meetings, she taught her followers spells
and how to make their own sigils and magic symbols.
She pointed Jay to the role of high priest.
According to Sharonda, Danielle became convinced
that she and Jay were twin flames.
Now, if someone says this to you, just please run.
She recalled, she did a lot of spell work
for her and Jay's relationship,
a lot of sex magic, a lot of tantra,
everything she could find in order to make this relationship
successful. There was just one problem with her plan. Jay was gay. Yet somehow Danielle convinced him
that he wasn't and that some stuff from his childhood created the part of his personality that he thought
was gay. According to Sharanda, this wasn't even the first time Danielle had pursued a gay man.
It was a pattern. Sharonda later told Rolling Stone that, and I quote,
she was always scanning him saying, oh, that was gay of you to say. Why did you say that?
It came down to her needing to snuff out every whiff of his higher self.
They eventually started an online relationship that quickly escalated.
Danielle flew to Italy to meet Jay in person,
and whenever he came stateside on leave, she would travel to see him.
Ultimately, Jay decided not to re-enlist in the Air Force.
He moved in with Danielle in the summer of 2022 instead.
Danielle's mother, Sharanda, and Danielle's half-brother were also living in the same apartment.
Danielle was becoming increasingly paranoid and increasingly controlling.
Even before Jay had fully moved in, she was already trying to manage him.
May of 2022, while he was still working out his next steps with the Air Force,
she made him lock his Twitter account saying her enemies were trying to put a curse on him.
As he moved in, it only got worse.
Danielle wanted him all to herself.
She accused his mom of doing black magic to interfere with the relationship
and cut off any contact between them.
Her paranormal beliefs grew darker as well.
She told people she had started inviting demons around her home,
stationing them on her roof at the front door and at the front gate to protect her.
She called herself the queen of the underworld.
Danielle would constantly yell at Jay whenever he brought up anything connected to his past.
At one point, she broke a glass and threatened to swallow the shards if he tried to leave.
It was Danielle's mother, Sharonda, who called 911.
Sharonda also pushed Danielle to get professional help, but Danielle believed all she needed was her own spiritual healing.
Jay soon grew tired of Daniel's controlling nature.
He began quietly reaching out to people around him looking for a way out of the situation.
And a text to his brother in November of 2022, he said,
I've been dealing a lot personally with my girlfriend that I don't care to really share right now because it's not appropriate.
He also asked Sharonda over FaceTime in front of Danielle whether he should walk away from Danelle,
Danielle in this whole situation.
Charonda told him to trust his intuition.
Eventually, Charonda told Jay to get away from Danielle.
As a result, Danielle kicked her own mother and half-brother out of the apartment and cut
them out of her life completely.
Not long after, Danielle became pregnant with Jay's child.
The couple welcomed a baby daughter named Soleil on August 31, 2023.
After the baby was born, Danielle and Jay moved into a high-end,
apartment in Woodland Hills. Their neighbors later reported that Danielle often seemed angry and distant.
Most of the time, she wouldn't even respond when people greeted her. They also said that they could
hear frequent fights with Jake that went on into the night. Around the same time, Danielle's
tweets were becoming increasingly bizarre. She began promoting just about every conspiracy theory that
appeared on her feed. Some of these conspiracies even contradicted each other, but that didn't seem to
slow her down. Some of her posts were also flagged as anti-Semitic and her online behavior became so
erratic that many of her followers began wondering whether or not she had lost touch with reality or
whether it was some kind of dark humor that she was now employing. Danielle became fixated on the
upcoming solar eclipse. She warned that would bring some kind of spiritual war and claimed she would be
doing a candle magic ritual to ensure safe passage through this eclipse energy for the next six
months. Shoulder followers to get their hearts in the right place and to pick aside because as far as
she was concerned, the eclipse was going to trigger an apocalypse and usher in a new world order.
She replied to the same post saying, we can do it, we can do it, can do it, believe. You magic is in
what you believe. I believe we can be free. I believe we can be free.
On April 8th, 24, just after midnight, Danielle's
neighbors heard constant yelling coming from her apartment.
That wasn't entirely unusual, but this time the noise was much louder than normal.
The shouting continued for hours, finally stopping sometime around 3.40 a.m.
During that time, Danielle had gone into a violent rampage inside of the apartment.
She broke several items, including her furniture.
She also attacked Jay, striking him repeatedly across his arms, hands, face, and back.
Then, inside the living room, Danielle stabbed Jay in the chest right in front of her nine-year-old daughter.
Jay collapsed onto the floor, landing face down as he bled out.
But Danielle did not call for help.
Instead, investigators later said she appeared to have performed some sort of ritual.
The police later found what some sources described as a voodoo doll,
along with other strange objects placed around Jalen's body.
Afterwards, Daniel threw the...
bloody knife onto the couch, grabbed her two daughters, and rushed them into her Porsche
Kayan. She sped out of the apartment complex, parking lot, and crashed through the security gate as
she fled. Around an hour later, at 4.30 a.m., she was racing down Interstate 405 near the
Westchester area when she decided she had to ditch her kids, too. She slowed down the vehicle,
opened the passenger door, and screamed at her nine-year-old daughter to take the baby
and jump out of the moving car.
The child who was obviously terrified refused.
Danielle became agitated and threw both of her children out of the moving vehicle.
At the time, the 9-year-old was still holding her 7-month-old sister.
Tragically, the baby was struck by an oncoming vehicle at full speed on the highway and was killed instantly.
The 9-year-old made it to the side of the road sustaining injuries that different sources described as ranging from moderate,
to Sirius. First responders rushed the older girl to the hospital while the baby was pronounced
dead at the scene. Danielle, however, was still driving south towards Redondo Beach. She was frantically
speeding and reached speeds of more than 100 miles an hour. Around 5 a.m., she slammed directly
into a tree. The impact was so powerful that the tree collapsed on top of the vehicle. Vescators
later concluded that she had done it intentionally. Residents nearby heard the
loud crash and quickly called 911.
An emergency cruise arrived, they found her already dead inside the wreckage.
Two hours later, at around 7.35 a.m., one of Danielle's neighbors noticed that the door
to her apartment was wide open.
She later recalled, their door was wide open.
There was blood on the floor leading into their apartment, and then a trail of it in the
hallway leading up to the elevator.
I saw some blood on the walls.
A woman's father called the police and told them that something was not right.
officers told him to go check inside.
What they found inside confirmed exactly what they feared.
It was lying face down on the floor surrounded by his own blood.
Walked out our front door into the left is their door and their door was wide open and there was blood all throughout their front door all the way to the hallway leading to the elevator and blood on the walls.
I went into the apartment. I stepped over blood puddles and checked on the body and saw that he was.
He was dead. He was face down.
An hour after the screams were hurt here in Woodland Hills, on the 405 freeway in Westchester,
a six-month-old baby girl was found dead in traffic.
Nearby, her nine-year-old half-sister who was injured.
How exactly the baby got on the freeway and how she died will be determined by the medical examiner.
Half an hour later, in a third crime scene in Redondo Beach, a Porsche slammed into a tree at a high rate of speed.
The driver thought to be going up to 100 miles an hour was killed instantly.
Police would later learn that she was the suspect in all of these stories.
The woman, they believe, murdered her boyfriend or husband, Jalen Cheney, the father of that little girl.
And then they say she left her children on a freeway where the baby was killed,
whether or not she lost control of the Porsche or drove the car purposely into that tree.
That remains part of the investigation.
Investigations telling us they're not ruling out that she might have died, might have died by.
As for the little girl who survived, the one who's thought to be about nine years old, she remains hospitalized.
We're told with broken bones. Her father who lives out of the state has been notified and detectives will be talking to her.
She is the only person who witnessed all of this and knows what really happened.
The police eventually determined that the three separate incidents were all connected,
stabbing, the children found on Interstate 405, and the fatal crash.
The only witness to all of this was Danielle's nine-year-old daughter.
She told the police about the argument and how her mother stabbed Jay.
Danielle's surviving daughter was later placed in the custody of her biological father, Cecil.
According to Los Angeles Police Department Lieutenant Guy Nolan,
There's just very little information we have other than there was a verbal altercation that turned violent and it ended in tragedy.
We've taken all the facts we can.
Without being able to interview her and without having something more tangible than a post on Twitter,
I don't know how much weight you can give to somebody saying there's an apocalypse and attribute it to one of the most horrific murders we've had in L.A.
While detectives were puzzled and those acquainted with Danielle could not fathom why she would have done something like this,
It wasn't until later when Sharonda was interviewed and reviewed Danielle's Twitter history
that it became clear her mental health had been going downhill for quite some time.
She was already dead.
The investigators were never able to say for certain what the exact motive was.
So many questions still unanswered, all that could be done now was to mourn.
Jay's mom, Juanita, created a go-fund me to cover funeral arrangements for her son and granddaughter.
The page reads, in part, we seek comfort in the cherished memories of Jalen and Baby Salé,
knowing they are forever loved and remembered.
Your donations will help cover the numerous expenses associated with this tragic loss,
including transport costs, travel expenses, burial and memorial costs,
and closing Jalen and Solace's financial accounts.
As of the date of this recording in March of 2026, the page raised 3,000,
$1,990 of its $60,000 goal.
On May 20, 24, the day that would have been Jay's 30th birthday, he was laid to rest alongside
his seven-month-old daughter at the Great Lakes National Cemetery in Michigan.
Danielle's funeral arrangements were never reported to the public. Her mother instead hosted a
Twitter space on April 12, 2024, to remember her as the person she was before her mental
health got to work.