Eclipse Murders: An Astrology Influencer's Dark Spiral

Written By Kaelyn Moore

On April 8th, astrologer Danielle Johnson took her own life, and killer her fiance and youngest child. It wasn't until someone found her twitter feed that it became apparent she was fearing the coming eclipse.

TW: Suicide, brief mention of sexual assault

Want HSP Stickers? https://shop.heartstartspounding.com/en-usd/collections/all

Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to ad-free listening and bonus content. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after-show called Footnotes.

Apple subscriptions are now live! Get access to ad-free episodes and bonus episodes when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror.

SOURCES

Mystic Lipstick Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/danielle-johnson-astrologer-murder-suicide-story-1235039610/

TRANSCRIPT

April 8th, 2024. 7:30am. 

A squad car pulls up to an apartment on the 6200 block of Variel Avenue in Woodland Hills, California. The suburban community sits just north of LA in the Valley. Though it’s technically part of the city, a short stretch of hills separate the communities, making them feel like totally different places.

An LAPD Homicide detective steps out of the car and though this is another day on the job for him and the other detectives from another precinct who arrived shortly after him, his heart immediately drops. A trail of bloody footprints is leading out of one of the apartments. 

He was responding to a call that came in from a neighbor. Not even an hour earlier, they had observed everything the officer was seeing right now. Bloody footprints leading up to a door that was left open. The detective followed the prints through the door, knowing what was coming next. The caller had already made the grim discovery.

There, on the floor, was the body of 29 year old Jaelen Chaney, a knife laying right next to him. 

I’m sure that homicide detectives in LA have really seen it all, but there was something about this scene that was kind of perplexing

Eventually a full investigative team is in the apartment, and as they walk through the rooms, they notice tarot cards, crystals and other spiritual tools maniacally scattered throughout. The home was also in a state of complete disarray. Bags full of trash, piles of laundry, and stacks of unclean dishes littered the space with unsanitary clutter. 

And that’s when they get a call. Two other bodies had been found, one in a car that had crashed into a tree at over 100mph (KPH) and a child that had been pushed out of a moving car on a highway, both deceased were confirmed to have lived in the apartment with Jaelen. 

It’s not long before the body in the car is confirmed to be Danielle Johnson, a self proclaimed healer and tarot card reader who went by Mystic Lipstick on social media. Not an unusual profession for someone in Los Angeles, but how did she, her partner, and one of her children wind up brutally killed. 

It’s not until someone finds Danielle’s twitter that the case starts to take shape

Pinned to the top of Danielle’s account, is a tweet from her on April 5th that read in all caps:

WAKE UP WAKE UP THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE. EVERYONE WHO HAS EARS LISTEN. YOUR TIME TO CHOOSE WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS NOW. IF YOU BELIEVE A NEW WORLD IS POSSIBLE FOR THE PEOPLE RT NOW. 

THERE IS POWER IN CHOICE. THERE IS POWER IN CHOICE!!!! REPOST TO MAKE THE CHOICE FOR THE COLLECTIVE

Then, just below that, the final tweet on the account was reposted from twitter user @QTHESTORMM. It read

ALERT: THIS IS THE FINAL WARNING.TURN NOTIFICATIONS ON. DO NOT LOOK AT THE ECLIPSE. SOMETHING BIG IS COMING …

That day, the day Danielle and two of her family members were found dead, was the solar eclipse. 

So, what happened? How did we get here? After a short break

Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore. 

I wanted to make a quick note about this story before we jump back into it. This case in particular caught my eye because I felt like a lot of misinformation was being spread about it right after it happened. I remember reading the headlines back in April. “Tarot cards and feathers found in apartment of woman who killed her family and herself.” “Woman on murder spree feared the eclipse” 

I felt called to look into it more, because I had actually followed Danielle on social media for quite some time. I turned to astrology in my early 20’s as a way to make sense of my life, I’m sure many of you can relate. And I found Mystick Lipstick. I loved her grounded approach and no nonsense way of calling out my behavior and telling me what was in store for my life.

But as time went on, I watched as her postings got more concerning. Earlier this year I finally felt like they were getting so out of hand that I had to unfollow her, and within a week, I found out she was dead.

That’s to say, there’s a lot more to this case than what the newspapers reported on. It’s a story of spirituality gone wrong, but it’s also a story of postpartum depression, of childhood trauma, and being manipulated by people who say they can help you. And we’re going to get into all of it today. 

Before we do…hello to everyone who is watching this episode on YouTube or Spotify. I’ve been looking forward to filming the podcast for a while and those of you who are members of the Patreon High Council know we’ve been filming our weekly footnotes for a couple of months, but this is the first HSP episode with video. So I’m glad to welcome you into one of the many dark corners of our Rogue Detecting Society headquarters. For those listening–I’ll still write every episode like we’re audio only so you’re not missing anything other than everyone’s favorite cursed monkey, Gordy who is hiding out in the background. 

Now, I really want to get into this episode, so let’s go ahead and take our quick break for those of you listening to the ad supported version of the show, and then let’s get right in. And thank you to everyone in our darkly curious community for being here.    

Danielle Johnson’s path to astrology was not written in the stars, necessarily. She took a circuitous route there. 

Danielle actually studied psychology at Norfolk University in 2010. And her friend and roommate, Maya Johnson, said she and Danielle were regular worshippers at their Baptist church. Apparently, Danielle attended in the hopes of repairing her relationship with her mother, Sharonda Cole. 

Sharonda had Danielle when she was sixteen and gave away custody of her child while she was struggling with addiction. The father had left them and Sharonda didn’t feel she was in a place to raise a child. 

So she sent Danielle to live with her uncle in Virginia. He was a Navy vet living with his wife, a situation that seemed more stable than what Sharonda could give. And though her mother felt like she was making the ultimate sacrifice to help her daughter, Danielle never really saw this as anything other than abandonment. 

And after this ‘abandonment’ is where Danielle first started to struggle with anxiety. She became a hypochondriac, assuming she had a brain aneurysm when she’d get a headache. No one seemed to know where this anxiety came from, and no one knew what to do about it. 

Danielle tried bible study in college as a way to heal from her childhood, but she didn’t feel like organized religion was working. She didn’t even feel like the psychology she was learning about in class was helping her make sense of her life, and so her junior year, she abruptly dropped out of college.

Instead of finishing her degree, she dove into practices aimed to heighten the psychic abilities she felt like she had had since she was three years old. Numerology, shamanism, Reiki, and astrology became Danielle’s way of discovering herself. She created a Twitter account, @mysticxlipstick, to share her healing journey and tips with the world.

Quickly friends and family started to see how important mysticism was becoming to Danielle, who was blossoming back into a bright, funny version of herself. Reiki, described as a spiritual practice that involves laying on hands and channeling "life force energy" for wellbeing was not only solo therapy but it was what Danielle used to rebuild her relationship with her mother. She would practice on Sharonda, who started to see Danielle as her own personal spiritual healer. It seemed like these alternative practices were starting to repair generational trauma, it was everything she had been looking for.

And other parts of Danielle’s life were starting to improve as well. In 2013, Danielle stumbled across Cecil Rice on Twitter. Cecil was a straight-laced Proctor and Gamble employee, not a spirituality guy at all, but he was attracted to Danielle’s “positive” personality in spite of her “rough” past. Over DMs the pair realized they lived close enough to take their virtual romance IRL1. By 2014, Danielle and Cecil were married in Springfield, Ohio.

A year later in 2015 Danielle’s @mysticxlipstick account was finally taking off. Her meme-worthy astrological observations made her a social media star .She became a must-follow account, featured in interviews and guest columns for places like Popsugar.com, Fader Magazine, and The Scottie And Sylvia Show. 

Danielle, who also started going  by Ayoka, was exposed to thousands of new fans obsessed with her “spiritual homegirl” approach, as one loyal follower described her. And this is when I found her. She was teaching zodiac-curious millennials like myself how to read birth chart landmarks like their north node and sun sign to discover their purpose before apps like Co-Star even existed. In a world where most astrologers felt like stuffy, serious mystics behind a crystal ball, Danielle kind of seemed like my friend. I liked how she was blunt and she’d call me out on my self sabotaging behavior. She wasn’t telling me to sit around and wait for the planets to realign. And in a lot of ways, I think her approach helped astrology become as mainstream as it is today.

For many fans, Danielle was more than entertainment. She was anointed. Danielle, herself, felt this way. During her interview with Fader, she said that “magic [was] literally in her blood.” She believed her psychic intuition was a birthright passed down from the line of Native American “medicine women” in her family that her father once told her about. As mainstream interest in astrology and love for Danielle’s brand of astrology grew, her Twitter account raced up to 100,000 followers.

Danielle’s platform soon outgrew giving away free advice for likes. Between 2016 and 2017, Danielle built a menu of spiritual healing services: astrological readings, guided meditations, spells, cleanses, and rituals were sold on her website where the mantra “create your reality” was within reach. The least expensive options were $2.99, while monthly packages could be priced at $150/month. Sometimes videos and PDFs were included but mostly, Danielle was paid to send energy, like “daily vibes,” to her subscribers' homes. They were assured these would activate automatically after purchase via a spiritual link to their aura. 

And it became clear fast that this was a lucrative new path for her. People started to notice Danielle’s “lavish” success. After years of struggling emotionally and financially, Danielle leased an expensive car and carried designer bags. Some followers who had been there since the beginning began to question their spiritual guru making real money off of healing. More experienced astrologers called out Danielle’s self-proclaimed divine calling. 

But that didn’t stop her. What did it matter if she was making money if she was really helping people? This was a dangerous path, though, because after this Danielle started to offer other, stranger kinds of spiritual packages.

In 2018, Danielle announced a new type of healing series. She would now lead programs designed for victims of sexual assault. She wrote on Twitter that this would “HELP with SEXUAL ADDICTIONS and be paramount for those in ANY form of SEX WORK. and SEXUAL ABUSE VICTIMS.” This caused a ripple of concern in Danielle’s community. People weren’t sure how Danielle’s love for astrology qualified her to mediate severe trauma.

The criticism only got worse when word got out that during one of these tantric healing sessions, Danielle implied it was possible to “attract” sexual assault

Fans were shocked. This woman who they looked up to for guidance was clearly out of her element. And if she couldn’t be trusted to help heal the deep wound from an assault, could she really help heal anything else?

Danielle’s response to any criticism was defensive and borderline vitriolic. In one thread, Danielle concluded that her words were quote “not offensive by any means to any of the students or to the people who saw the post.” because The work had changed Danielle’s own life for the better.

Gradually, frustrated rants clapping back at negativity became frequent occurrences on Danielle’s feed. The humor and healing fans fell in love with became overshadowed by Danielle’s battles against perceived haters.

This seemed to be the beginning of her descent down a dark path. After the break

The negativity infiltrating Danielle’s life wasn’t just virtual. Former friends of Danielle’s with whom she’d cut ties were hearing from mutual parties that Danielle was tapping into black magic from elaborate occult rituals in order to get revenge. Some of these accusations claimed Danielle was trying to hex people by attaching their photo to a cow tongue with nine nails. I’ll add here that this is not a common part of alternative spiritual practices. I know a lot of people in Pagan and Wicca groups were quick to come out and say that’s not what we do. This seemed unique to Danielle at the time.

Cecil never witnessed any of this reported behavior while the two were living together: he said the Danielle he knew was still focusing on healing, and writing in her journal. But she was also growing distant. Together they had their first child, which Cecil remembers as a physically and mentally difficult pregnancy for Danielle. Physically, she was diagnosed with a pregnancy complication called preeclampsia which impacts blood pressure and can cause severe headaches. Mentally, Danielle appeared to be in a “dark space”. Cecil tried to encourage her to talk it out with him, or a professional. The mental strife she was feeling was not uncommon for new mothers. Maybe this was a form of postpartum depression, of which symptoms include persistent depression, sharp mood swings, loss of appetite, insomnia, self-isolation, reduced ability to think clearly, and thoughts of harming yourself or your baby. A scary but treatable diagnosis. Treatable, that is, with traditional doctors. Not with Danielle’s healing rituals.

But she didn’t ever formally seek help, and soon she and Cecil separated without officially getting divorced.

The next phase of Danielle’s life seems chaotic, perhaps a reflection of her internal life. But, she moved to New York with their daughter where she pursued a relationship with a Tarot Card reader in Tribeca. The two quickly got engaged.

Then, she decided that she wanted to pursue music on top of her spiritual career. She moved her daughter and new fiance to Los Angeles after making an alternative R&B album titled Venus. Her online postings remained vitriolic throughout, accusing those around her of being gaslighters and criticizing various unnamed enemies. 

But her advice to her followers remained somewhat grounded and affirming like, “Stop trying to resonate with those whose actions, thoughts and character are beneath your vibration. You’re too good for them. Move on and find people who resonate with the new you.” so despite her emotional spiraling she kept followers and still made money selling her spiritual services. 

At the end of 2020, Danielle added a new member to her community. Jaelen Chaney. he was an Air Force Munitions Squadron Armament technician, and he had recently bought some of these spiritual services from Danielle while he was stationed abroad in Italy.

By the fall of 2021, around a year after meeting, Jaelen and Danielle had become much closer. He’d joined a virtual coven with Danielle where she told people she promoted Jaelen to coven master. 

Jalen’s spiritual background mirrored Danielle’s in some ways, and perhaps that’s why she was so drawn to him. He, too, had left organized religion. He had joined the military to live his dream of exploring the world. To those who knew Jaelen, he was an EDM-loving, comic-con attending nerd with charisma, who could light up a room without trying. Jaelen dreamed of being a storm-chasing meteorologist but for now, he was a Reiki master, also like Danielle.

He set up a spiritual storefront and offered aura baths, timeline shifts, and quantum healing energy baths under Danielle’s guidance. Eventually, Danielle told Sharonda about Jaelen: he wasn’t just a friend or a new relationship. Jaelen was her twin flame. Sharonda witnessed Danielle dive deeper into the relationship: she used spells, sex magic, and tantric healing to strengthen their soulmate connection. She even went to Italy to visit Chaney on base.

All of that sounds lovely, but Jaelens friends and family were shocked when they found out Jaelen was dating Danielle. See, they only knew Jalen as a gay man. He had come out to his friends and family prior to this and had exclusively dated men

And that really affected his relationship with Danielle. Because Danielle considered Jaelen her twin flame, she discredited his existing sexual attraction to men as a trauma from his difficult childhood and pushed back at things Jaelen would do that she found to be “gay”, because as she saw it, it wasn’t aligned with his true higher self.

Some couldn’t help but wonder if he was really interested in dating her, or if he was being manipulated by someone who claimed she was helping him. Though one friend did tell reporters he didn’t see anything strange about their relationship when he met Danielle in person.

Other friends and family noticed Danielle’s emotions becoming more unstable than before during this time. Danielle was always known to be very emotionally expressive. Sometimes her “big feelings” were known to “explode,” as told by Maya, her former roommate. But lately, Danielle kept getting into explosive fights more often. During one heated incident with Sharonda in their home, Danielle broke a glass and threatened to take her own life by swallowing the shards.

With Danielle’s new relationship going full force, her former fiance moved out of their shared apartment in May 2022, leaving Danielle and her daughter. Her relationship with Jaelen Chaney was now free to become official. 

But that summer Sharonda was witnessing her daughter’s mental health decline even further. She was now living with Danielle in Woodland hills and Jaelen had moved in with them. Sharonda watched her daughter detach from what she described as “real life” outside of Jaelen and Danielle’s astrological persona1. She could see Danielle was focusing her psychic powers on paranoid fear instead of healing. Danielle named herself “the queen of the underworld,” inviting demons and dark spirits to her home to ward off all those she believed were trying to harm her and her new relationship. One of those people was Jaelen’s mother, Juanita. She felt that Juanita was doing black magic to tear the couple apart, so she coerced Jaelen to distance himself 

Juanita was worried about her son, who she felt was being pulled away from her by Danielle. Sharonda tried to encourage Danielle to seek professional help for what she understood to be erratic behavior, but, again, Danielle was only willing to work with those in the metaphysical spiritual world, not Western medicine doctors1.

Jaelen also felt something was wrong with his relationship. He and Danielle were always fighting, as their neighbors often heard. Danielle locked Jaelen’s Twitter account to protect it from “spells” — another move that took away his autonomy. He texted his brother in November of 2022 “I have been dealing a lot personally with my girlfriend that I don’t really care to share right now because it’s not appropriate.” Jaelen also expressed concerns to Sharonda over Facetime, asking if he should leave Danielle. When Danielle found out that Sharonda told Jaelen on social media to “run away as fast as” he could from Danielle1, she kicked her mother out, forcing her into a homeless shelter. 

By 2023 Sharonda and Danielle had lost contact entirely. The last time Sharonda saw her daughter was coincidentally, while they both were sitting in LA traffic. Sharonda didn’t even know her daughter was pregnant. 

Danielle and Jaelen’s daughter Solé was born around October of 2023. Knowing how Danielle struggled with her first pregnancy, Cecil Rice made sure to reach out to Danielle when he found out. He could tell Danielle was being “stand-offish”, but from what she told him her biggest concern was losing the pregnancy weight after her second baby was born. She also told him they should start looking into how to get formally divorced so she could marry Jaelyn.

But Cecil’s biggest fear about Danielle and her mental state was coming to fruition. other people who were closely following Danielle’s state of mind on social media could tell her emotional state was changing and getting darker. 

So it’s around this time that I rediscovered her twitter. I had been on and off twitter for a few years, and when I logged back in earlier this year, I was kind of shocked at what my feed looked like. 

In between the usual memes and updates on horror movies, I saw a post that was about how CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research, was going to open a portal to another spiritual realm on April 8th. How there were tesla time machines under the Cheyenne mountains that were going to activate and shift us to another timeline. 

I was shocked it was on my feed but I was even more surprised that it had come from Danielle. She seemed unrecognizable from the spiritual best friend we all once knew her as. 

And In the weeks leading up to her death, Danielle was frequently sharing this kind of doomsday and antisemitic conspiracy theories from accounts belonging to fringe movements, like QAnon. Her feed fully transitioned away from grounded spiritual advice to Disturbing misinformation surrounding all sorts of things like US livestock, the CIA, NASA, Madonna being a devil worshipper, Kurt Cobain leaving behind deep state clues, baby trafficking in the 1800’s, and secret media messaging.

But it seemed like the majority of her fear was being placed into the fact that On April 8, 2024, North America was anticipating a total solar eclipse. A solar eclipse is what happens when the moon crosses between the Earth and the sun, partially or fully blocking out the sun’s light. It also holds significance in the astrological universe: the eclipse is known to usher in new beginnings, new endings, and remarkable life transformations. But there’s nothing written in the stars about needing to fear for your life during an eclipse.

And still, the first week of April, she pulled her oldest daughter out of school. She also began putting out a series of alarming tweets about the forthcoming solar eclipse, claiming it was going to make people violent, that it was bringing forth the apocalypse. On April 4, 2024, she wrote “This eclipse is the epitome of spiritual warfare. Get your protection on and your heart in the right place”1.

On April 5, Danielle warned her followers that they’d need additional spiritual protection, which she was offering, to make it through “an incredibly serious time” where “it’s important that you stay calm, healthy and grounded.” She made it clear there were consequences, but Danielle was here to guide herself and her community through it. The “STAY IN CONTROL ECLIPSE FLASH SPELL” was supposed to combat the fact that the “LUNAR ECLIPSE [was] LINING UP WITH THE NODES OF FATE” by “BURNING ALL MISFORTUNE AND UNFAIR OUTCOMES OUT OF HERE.” The spell would be effective for six months. She was also offering direly needed extra protection for free, activated by only a like.

And to be fair, people were liking these posts, I think she was drumming up some real fear inside of people that the eclipse might be something dangerous. But if you’re turning to someone you previously trusted to spiritually guide you, and they’re saying that the world is going to end on April 8th if you’re not careful, if you don’t do these little spells and protections. Guess what, you’re probably going to do the little spells and protections. 

More after a short break.

And still Around 3:40AM early on the morning of the day the eclipse was set to happen, April 8th, a neighbor awoke to terrified screams coming from Danielle and Jaelen’s apartment. Inside, Danielle had stabbed 29-year-old Jaelen Chaney to death with her eight-month-old and 9-year-old child present.

After the fatal stabbing, Danielle got herself and her children into her Porsche SUV. By around 4:30AM, her car was speeding on the 405 freeway in California, and had reached Howard Hughes Parkway. Her older daughter was holding her infant child when Danielle opened the door and pushed both children out of the moving vehicle onto the road. A witness watched this happen and called 9-11.

But Danielle kept driving. I don’t know what was going through her mind. If she was trying to get somewhere before the sun rose, if it was all fear of the impending eclipse that day, I don’t know but she  was driving at a speed of almost 100 MPH by the time she reached the city of Redondo Beach around 5AM. That’s when Danielle intentionally drove her SUV into a tree at the intersection of the Pacific Coastal Highway and Vincent Street and was killed instantly.

When emergency services arrived at the site where Danielle’s children had been forced out of the car on the 405, they found Danielle’s older daughter had superficial injuries including cuts and bruises but was alive and safe. However, her eight-month-old daughter, Solé, did not make it.

Later on, Cecil Rice and Jaelens mother went over to the apartment when they heard what happened, and they saw the uncharacteristically unkempt state of the apartment when they went to collect their loved one’s things. it was obvious to both Danielle and Jaelen’s families that the couple had been really struggling for some time now. Maybe Danielle had done a good job of talking down Cecil’s anxieties on the phone, but when he saw her apartment, he immediately knew how bad her mental state had gotten.

on the afternoon of April 8th, Sharonda Cole was finally informed of what happened over a phone call from the LA County Medical Examiner’s Office. They made her aware of Danielle’s death by car crash, the injury and death of her grandchildren, and the murder of Jaelen. Even with Sharonda’s existing concerns for Danielle’s unstable mental condition in mind, she still couldn’t fathom how her daughter could’ve done this.

Authorities had concluded all of the incidents were connected and there was no further threat to the community but that didn’t stop the Greater Los Angeles County area from being rocked by the news.. 

But as everyone starts getting the news of what happened, the moon crosses in front of the sun blocking out sunlight for a few minutes, and then continues on it’s path. The world doesn’t get shifted into a new timeline from a Tesla Time Machine buried in a mountain. CERN doesn’t open a portal to hell. The universe doesn’t cease to exist. We all continue living. 

After word of the tragedy hit the public and the inner circles of Danielle’s following, both outsiders and fans tried to make sense of what had happened.

And this is where the media really started to twist this story. It was easy for them to latch onto Danielle’s alarmist tweets about the 2024 solar eclipse in the days leading up to the deaths as the explanation for how she could perpetrate something so shocking. Many people, completely unfamiliar with Danielle’s platform, perceived the incident as an act of extremist, cult-like spiritual beliefs finally boiling over from the echo chamber of social media to produce real-life consequences. They were talking about about an out-of-control, dark astrologist driven to kill mimicked the public outrage from concerned parents during the 1970s Satanic Panic, who were convinced that heavy metal would turn their children into the next Manson Family. 

People wondered if astrology was demonic or dangerous. Despite the fact that many people in the astrology world came forward to say that Danielle did not represent them. 

But Even in Danielle’s inner circle, spirituality was an unextractable factor in decoding what went wrong. friends and fans admitted to ignoring the signs leading up to Danielle’s mental break they’d been witnessing online leading up to the double murder-suicide. Many latched onto a new-age term, spiritual psychosis, to try and make sense of the situation. 

The concept of spiritual psychosis combines psychosis with hyper-spirituality, marked by the person seeing hallucinations or visions of a mystic nature and an all-encompassing obsession with psychic and spiritual matters. 

Danielle’s family was never able to get confirmation of the suspected postpartum depression diagnosis, though they believe that’s what was going on. If that’s what it was and it was treated in time, it could have changed the trajectory of Danielle’s life. 

But I don’t want to sit here, and armchair diagnose Danielle, that’s not really useful. I just wanted to shine light on the fact that when we see headlines about the woman who feared the eclipse and killed her family, we know that there’s a lot more to the story and the people involved

Don’t be afraid to check on your friends. If they’ve been posting concerning things online, if they just gave birth and are having scary thoughts, even if they just haven’t been themselves. It can really make all the difference.

Kaelyn Moore
Previous

The Horrors Of Pennhurst Asylum

Next

Italy, a Murder and a Mystery: The Most Haunted Island & The Maso Murders