Bad Teachers: Texas | Kathryn Murray, Brittni Colleps, Cassie Dowden, Haeli Wey

0:23 Hey everyone, quickly before we get into today's episode, it's holiday time y'all. And with that, you're going to hear more commercials than normal. And this is why I do offer a Patreon with commercial free early releases. Please consider that if you don't like commercials. The cost is minimal in the commercials you hear. If you're in taking the free version of this episode, they're just kind of the nature of the beast. We have to have that in order to produce this podcast. So there is another option. You can go to patreon.com slash exposed podcast files and take advantage of commercial free. early release episodes. And with that, welcome back to Exposed Scandalous Files of the Elite. I'm your host, Jim Chapman, and I am back with another Bad Teacher Series episode. We are going to cover three teachers today out of Texas, and we're going to start out in Houston, Texas, where on February 11th of 2012, parents are gone. There's an eighth grade boy. He's 15 years old and his little brother is 12 years old.

1:35 The little brother walks into a bedroom and he finds a condom. He also finds a tan bra. And at that point, he hears a woman's voice underneath the covers. He recognizes this voice as a teacher by the name of Miss Murray. She is his older brother's English teacher at Memorial High School, and she has been teaching at that school for three years. Now, not only had Miss Murray taught there. She also attended Memorial Middle and Memorial High School. Very well-known teacher, even though she hadn't been teaching for what you would consider an extremely long time. Now, within two weeks of this incident, she is fired. And also within two weeks of that, she is under arrest.

2:21 Prosecutors would later talk to the judge about her arrest. And say they entered her bank account and discovered she was buying plane tickets to Mexico where her brother lives. So within a year, she was back in cuffs because that same boy that we're going to talk about today ran away from home and police would find him. Get this. at her father's house at 3 o'clock in the morning. Now, I'm going to be honest with y'all, we don't have a 200-page police report on this one like we had on the last episode that we covered, but we do have newspaper articles, a teacher's file. a registry listing, and reporting from the local news. The story is simply shocking. Now, according to the sex offender registry, Catherine Murray was born March 29th, 1983, which would make her 28 years old when all of this went down in 2012. The registry lists her as a white woman, five foot six, blonde hair, blue eyes, and she's a very attractive 28-year-old. It shows a her picture back when all this went down. Now, judging by her sex offender registry photo, let's just say it looks like the stress got to her. I guess a couple of years in jail are going to do that to you, but we'll get there. Now, where she was born, I don't really have a whole lot of information on that, and I don't have any information on where she went to college, but she obviously did, and she was an English language support teacher at Memorial Middle School,

3:55 and she would also tutor boys after class. Now, this particular boy who she was tutoring, he was from Costa Rica, and she was teaching him English. Now, I want you to think about that for a second. This kid is in a new country, doesn't even speak the language very well, which is why he's being taught by a tutor. And he is thrust into this investigation by someone who was put in a position of trust over him. I mean, I couldn't imagine what this kid was thinking. Now, according to the affidavit, the after school time is where the first sexual contact happened, where a kiss actually got reported, and at least two sexual encounters occurred. So let's really dive deep into what happened with this entire situation. On Tuesday, February 7th of 2012, investigators say the relationship started between this student and teacher in her classroom after school, this 15-year-old from Costa Rica. Then on February 9th, just two days later, the boy goes and he tells someone that he was, quote, in love with Miss Murray, unquote, and that they had kissed in her classroom. Now, this gets back to another teacher four days later. That teacher reports it to the principal. So on Friday, February 10th, at a school dance, now this was before the other stuff

5:27 was reported, the boy's father drops him off. And get this, at this point, Catherine Murray and the student leave the school dance. They go to a hotel room for about two hours. where they would have sex. And this time frame would later be proven by surveillance video both at the school and at the hotel. That's how we know it was at least two hours. Now, on Saturday, February 11th, the next day after this dance, Catherine Murray actually goes to the boys' house. The parents are gone, and that is the night that the 12-year-old walked into the bedroom and saw his older brother, with this teacher, saw the condom and the tan bra lying there and recognized that voice as Miss Murray. And of course, what do you think a younger brother is going to do when he discovers his older brother in bed with the teacher? Well, you're probably right if you guess tell mom and dad.

6:32 That's exactly what he did. Mom and dad then confront older brother and he admits the teacher had been at the house and they had sex. So on Monday, February 13th, that is when a teacher reported the rumor that I told you going about with Catherine and this student kissing. Now at the time, I would imagine his parents are trying to figure out what they're going to do on their end with this information about the teacher being at their house. Now it's easy to say, That they should have reported it right away. And I'm not saying that I disagree with that. But as a parent, I'm sure they were trying to look at every single angle. Make sure they weren't being lied to by their kids. I mean, this is really major shit, right? And it's a big thought process, 100%. I would have reported it right away, personally.

7:25 But I understand... They're wanting to get all their ducks in a row before they do that. So in just short order, two days after the school gets wind of this rumor about a kiss between teacher and student, they fire Catherine Murray. And shortly after that, on Thursday, February 23rd, charges of sexual assault of a child are filed with the police department. She gets arrested that afternoon. Her bond gets set at $ 250, 000. And this news just kind of goes everywhere. There are reports that came out, obviously, that she was tutoring him after school and that they had exchanged text messages. And the parents of other students were even interviewed and they were expressing their shock at this teacher-student relationship that was exposed. As I said, this girl went to middle school there. when she was young and she went to high school in the area. So people knew her. Unlike most of the cases that I cover, she was caught really fast. Classroom kiss on the 7th that was already being talked about on the 9th. dance in a hotel on the 10th with the condom and the bra and the brother walking in the room. On the 11th, the faculty received the report from another teacher about the kiss rumor. And on the 23rd, she was arrested.

8:49 So you're talking two weeks from start to finish, which is a nice change of pace for most of the cases that I cover on Bad Teachers. So she's in jail on that $ 250, 000 bond and a probable cause hearing is held and the judge orders no contact. So she can't be within 200 feet of his house. And of course, the defense, they would claim, hey, that bond is too high. And the prosecution shoots back and they say something kind of surprising. And that's when they brought up. that she had emptied her bank account and bought a plane ticket to Mexico where her brother lives. They wanted that bond said hi because they were worried she was going to haul ass to Mexico. And obviously, y'all, she had a good inclination. She was going to get arrested and she was making plans to leave the country. No doubt about it.

9:43 But the judge kind of surprisingly, he cuts the bond. You would think he would have at least held the bond at 250. He cuts it to $ 50, 000, which she posts and she gets out of jail. And keep in mind, she's charged with a second degree felon. sexual assault of a child, which can get you two to 20 years in jail. So on July, 2012, her rap sheet gets a little bit longer. As far as charges were concerned, they had two more counts of sexual assault of a child And they also add a count of improper relations with the student. And that's because at this time they sat down and they interviewed the actual student and he told about more things that they didn't know about. So all of this is a waiting trial or a plea of some sort and everything kind of disappears out of the news. It's a flash in a pan, right? Until January 25th of 2013, when Catherine Murray is arrested again.

10:45 It's three o'clock in the morning on a Friday, and she is found with the same boy who had run away from his parents' house. Police actually found him at her father's home, and they caught him. He's 16 by this time, and he's trying to leave out the back door. And this is a full year, y'all, after all this went down originally. So she adds another charge to her charges and that is harboring a runaway charge and her bond on that case is reported at $ 100, 000. But this also revokes her existing bond because she had stipulations not to be around this kid. So it's off to jail for her and she's stuck there this time. Now, one of my biggest frustrations with the court system is Or please, if you've listened to this show for any amount of time, you know that I hate plea bargains when it comes to sex cases. And it's primarily because anything you're charged with, you never stay charged with. They end up dropping charges to get you to plead guilty, etc. In this case, it would be no different. The harboring charge of a juvenile that she had added eventually did get dropped when she copped a plea. Now, in December of 2013, she does plead and she pleads guilty to just one count of improper relations with a student. and one count of sex assault of a child. Everything else is dropped, and for that plea, she gets sentenced to a whopping one

12:18 year in jail for each count. So, two years total. Now, the crazy thing about all this is, even though her sentences were back-to-back and not concurrent, meaning they didn't run at the same time, they ran one after the other, you still get good time, which at this time in Texas was a day for a day. So even though she was sentenced to two years in prison, she ended up spending only a year in jail from everything that I reviewed. And that is the court system at this time in the mid 2000s. It just seemed like you could get away with anything. What a ridiculous sentence that was handed out in Texas after a 28 year old teacher had sex multiple times. with a 15-year-old student. Crazy.

13:10 And this is why I do this show. Let me go to the next one. So this one's a little bit different in that the students were a little bit older. 18 years old at the time, but still in high school in Texas. And this case centers around a first-year English teacher, basketball coach, and dare I say freak at college. Kennedale High School in the Fort Worth, Texas area. Her name was Brittany Collips. Now, Brittany was a married mother of three. Her husband at this time was a specialist in the United States Army. And at the time of these encounters, her husband was actually away in Fort Polk, Louisiana. Now, you may think, how messed up is that? That's what I thought. until I got to the end of this one, and you'll see why. Now, this one does not start out with a little brother walking into a room like the prior case did. This one starts out like most of the cases that I cover as far as how people get caught. And that's with teenagers talking. That's what they do. And I'm not talking about just one boy.

14:20 I'm talking about five guys, all football players and track athletes, who were all 18 years of age at the time and seniors at this high school. So how did all of this start? Well, according to trial testimony, the relationships started with text messages, as they always do. One student described an initially ordinary text about a baseball game time that this teacher, Brittany Collips, sent to him. And that, y'all, classic grooming right there. We see it in almost all these cases. The teacher reaches out to the student and she's trying to start a dialogue to see how he responds, right?

15:05 And then it escalates, it gets more flirtatious, and that's when the videos and the nude pictures start flying. No different in this case. The student said that escalated to nearly 100 messages a day, followed by explicit content, nude photos, and agreements to meet for sex. Now, in the trial, hundreds of pages of text were introduced, and it was discovered that some were sent while she was in class. She described herself in messages as a quote, anything goes in sex kind of girl. Sounds classy. In other reported messages, she said, quote, I like pulling hair, biting, scratching, spanking, and I even like being choked. She discussed past partners.

15:57 She talked about how much she likes sex toys and said nothing is off limits and when it comes to sex with her. Actual messages. So, she was having sex with this one student, and that happens for a while, and then one day, this student reaches out, texts her, and said he wanted to come over, that she had something he wanted. She was cooking spaghetti at the time, and she's like, oh yeah, you can come over and eat some spaghetti too. So, this student heads right over, but he brings four friends with him. Now, Brittany allegedly did not expect the four guys to come with him, but hey, Brittany was down for it. She's an anything goes in sex kind of girl, right? She didn't have a problem with it, said she didn't expect it. But I have some questions about that because she had made arrangements for a friend to watch her three kids that night. Now, one of the students who Later described how everything kind of went down. She cooked the spaghetti they all ate.

17:01 Then the mood shifted. They said she brought out sex toys, showed them the sex toys. Then she modeled lingerie for them. And at that point, the group moved outside to the backyard where they played truth or dare. That's something you want to play with your teacher, right? One of the dares, according to the testimony, was a student to have sex with. Brittany Collins. And that was a pivot point. They go upstairs to the bedroom and what followed was described in court as group sex. Four of the students were with her at the same time. Oral sex and intercourse were and rotating two and two. A fifth student using another student's phone, he filmed every bit of this. And that video later became the centerpiece of the trial. They had the full freaking video on display in this trial. Prosecutors played it for that jury. Now, Collips would look away from the screen when this was being recorded, but she had a distinctive tattoo on her lower back. Imagine that.

18:09 And that helped identify her in the footage. Now, students testified that these encounters, this one and others, were voluntary on their part. This was the only foursome that she was charged with. But remember, she was having sex with students, I guess, one-on-one on multiple occasions. And they did say in court they didn't see themselves as victims. One described feeling happy to be at the house. After all this went down, they talked amongst themselves about keeping it on the down low so she wouldn't get caught. And when school officials later asked questions of these students, at least one student initially denied everything, saying... later that he was trying to protect her. Shirley Bush, who was Collip's mother, actually testified at the trial. Can you imagine your mother having to testify at a trial about you having group sex with four high schoolers? Yes, they were 18, but they're still in high school. She testified she was disappointed in her daughter, who she described as a model child, star softball player in high school, etc., And she asked for mercy for Collips and especially for the three children.

19:24 She said they need their mom. It's not their fault. She also recounted that when she had cancer, her daughter, who was pregnant at the time, shaved her head in solidarity. So she's not a terrible human being here. But she makes some really bad choices. Now, on cross-examination, her mother did acknowledge that her daughter had told her that Collips and her husband... had previously been involved in group sex. So, her and her husband were swingers, and they would swing with other couples, and this came out in the trial. But she actually told her mom that. Another weird conversation. Now, Christopher Collips, her husband, the guy that was in the army that was stationed in Fort Polk, or at least he was there during these incidents, he also took the stand.

20:16 He said they were married nine years at the time, and he testified that the past year had been, quote, pretty rough. He was angry, he said, after seeing the video, and that what she did was morally and ethically wrong. But he followed that up with, It's between me and her and God. Now, when defense counsel asked whether the couple had engaged in sex with others, he starts crying in the middle of court and he answers, yes, sir. He clarified that their prior group sex with other adults was legal and that he stood by her and said he was working to forgive her. and asked the jury for probation so that he and the children would not also be punished. He described telling the children that, quote, mommy did some bad things and made some bad choices and might have to go away, which made them cry.

21:09 And he also noted she had saved his life earlier in the relationship. A family friend also testified the three children had acute allergies and asthma. and that Collips was their primary caregiver. And even one of the students involved urged minimal punishment limited to loss of her teaching certificate. Now, in this case, she actually gets some decent time at the end of all this for the crime. She gets convicted on 16 counts, and she's sentenced to five years after just one hour of deliberation. So no plea deal here. for her. This was all done by a jury. Now, a little information on this chick. She said she had zero regrets about this upon her conviction. The way she saw it, these kids were 18, and her opinion was, hey, if you want to revoke my teaching license, that's fine, but prison time is ridiculous. As a matter of fact, I want you to listen to this clip of Brittany on 2020 just after her sentence, and you tell me if it sounds like it's something she regretted.

22:22 Your kids are what ages? Eight, six, and five. How did they react to the idea that you would possibly go to jail? You know, it was really hard. They started crying and, you know, saying, Mommy, we don't want you to go to jail. When you think about where you are now, you're 28 years old, you have three children, you're a schoolteacher. How did you wind up in this mess? Sometimes people just hit rough patches in their lives, you know, personally, emotionally, whatever the case may be. And I think that's what happened to me. I mean, for that period of my life, I just disregarded everybody else and pushed everybody away from me.

23:04 Your husband had no idea this had happened. Right. And her husband even spoke up on the episode in this clip. I was mad. You know, I wanted. I really just wanted to run away. To hear that she had slept with five of her students must have been tough. It was tough. It was. It was the toughest thing I've ever had to hear. It was the toughest thing I've ever had. To go through. You saw that tape. Yes, I did. What did that do to you? It pissed me off.

23:46 It made me mad. He was hurt? and he had every right to feel that way. Do you think what she did was wrong? I think it was wrong against me and our marriage, but I don't see the crime outside of that. What if these boys had been 16 or 17? That's a different story because that's illegal no matter if they're students or not. The boys, as everybody calls them in this situation, are not boys. They're grown men. A lot of people don't know what unconditional love is. A lot of people don't know how to love unconditionally. That means without conditions. And that's my love for Brittany.

24:33 Did you think about leaving? For a little bit. You think there was outrage over the fact that this involved multiple people? Yeah, I think that's the case. That you looked like a sleaze in their minds. Right, I think that had a lot to do with it. So you don't think she should be punished at all? We're not children. get old enough, she has to look them in the eye and tell them what she did. That is punishment. The young man that she had sex with, are you angry with him? I am angry, but me and God are working on that. So five years sounds like a lot, right? But if you've listened to this, series long enough, you know she didn't spend five months in jail. She was actually released in December of 2014 after serving a little less than half of her sentence. And that is a crazy case right there. Now, I'm not saying... She should have got five years in jail. All these guys were adults. But she's in a position of authority. I think three years would have been sufficient for that. But I'd be curious what you think. So let me know. We're going to move on to the next one. And that is a teacher by the name of Cassie Dowden. Now, let me tell you about Dowden. She was then 25 years old, and she worked as a physical education assistant at Sabine Elementary.

26:06 This was an ISD program in the 2018-2019 school year. It was her second year there, and she lived in Diana County. Texas. All this took place in 2018. Now, at the beginning of that school year, Dowden meets a male student who was then 16 when he was allowed to play basketball in the elementary school gym under her supervision. She told her then husband, Zachary, that she wanted to mentor that boy because he was having difficulties at home. And that mentoring initially involved both her and Zachary. So she was wanting them to essentially both mentor this kid.

26:50 But in the fall of 2018 and onward, Zachary, her husband, would kind of grow suspicious due to text messages that this student and Dowden would send back and forth to each other. And some of them would discuss staying late at school. He went to her and he starts warning her multiple times against anything that can even look like it's inappropriate. So he didn't think she was doing anything, but he's like, you know, it just doesn't look good and someone could construe if you're meeting him late after school that something's going on other than learning. He later confronted her about late night trips to Sonic together and he also found that she was secretly texting the student and had saved his number under a false name. All the red flags are up now, right? And this guy, he seemed like he had some pretty good intuition there.

27:47 Zachary described discovering this as his, quote, worst fears come to life. They later sought counseling, but his suspicions of all this continued. So by spring break, which is in March of 2019, that relationship had become sexual. The student had turned 17 a few months earlier, and it was around that time that Cassie Dowden, she admits to her pastor that she had engaged in sexual contact with the student, which you almost never see someone admit to that. At least she admitted to it, although it was horrible. The pastor then reports it to authorities. An investigator gets involved.

28:31 An arrest warrant affidavit is issued. They go talk to her husband and he says, man, I've been suspecting this for a long time. And in late May of that year, Dowden resigns from the Sabine ISD before the district officials knew about the investigation. So she knew it was coming, an arrest warrant. And sure enough, on June 5th, 2019, investigators do arrest Cassie Dowden, who was then 27. And she gets charged with an improper relationship between an educator and a student, which is a second degree felony, two to 20 years. Immediately after she's arrested, Zachary Dowden, he files for divorce, which this is the total opposite of the case before. We just covered with the group sex, right?

29:23 This guy's like, I ain't down with that shit. He files for divorce. A longtime friend later testified that Dowden was shocked by the filing. Westbrook, her longtime friend, told her, I've got to be honest with you. I don't blame him for feeling this way. You've done a terrible thing. Dowden says back to her friend that it didn't start out romantic or physical. And then she got really attached to this kid while switching medication and being extremely emotional that she still loved Zach and she regretted hurting him. She said, I just got caught up with it and it got the best of me. So on January of 2021, Dowden pleads guilty in a plea agreement. Now she's divorced as of this time. Her name at this point was Cassie Headley, 29 years old, and she cops a plea and pleads guilty and sentencing gets set for March 24th of 2021. At that sentencing, a judge sentences her to 10 years of deferred adjudication and a $ 10, 000 fine. So what's that mean? Simply put, she gets 10 years of probation, not one day in jail. She had to attend some sex education meetings for five years and had some other stuff that had nothing to do with going to jail involved.

30:52 Gets probation for all of this. Another one that just walked. And this was multiple times. occasions of sex. Now, with the offense that would eventually stick for her, get this, she didn't even have to register on the sex offender registry. Shocking. I got one more for you today, and that is Haley Way. And her name is spelled H-A-E-L-I And her last name is spelled W-E-Y. She's a former math teacher at Westlake High School in the Austin, Texas area. And she pleaded guilty in 2017 to two counts of an improper relationship between an educator and student. involving two 17-year-old male students. So let's go through the timeline. And I'll talk a little bit about her employment and background. Pre-2015, Wei was then in her late 20s. She taught math at Westlake High School and was also involved in in Austin Ridge Bible Church as a camp counselor. Now, in June of 2015, a very traumatic incident happened when a 15-year-old died in a boating accident at a church event that she was at. And Way's attorney would later say she was very close to this poor girl who died when she was 15 and that the death left her out of balance. I'm sure it affected her mentally on a very real level. But to use it for an

32:24 excuse for what I'm about to tell you about is messed up, to say the least. So let's talk about what she did. In June of 2015, Wei met one 17-year-old male student at a student ministry program. Now, she later accompanied both him and his family on a trip to Africa. According to the student's statement in the arrest affidavit, the relationship became, quote, more personal and on a deeper level in Africa. and became physical there. So she screwed this student in Africa with his own family there. And it was probably a mission trip, which is even more disgusting to me. Did she learn her lesson?

33:07 No. In July of 2015, she meets another 17-year-old male student at a summer camp. He didn't realize she was even a teacher at his high school until the school year began. So in August of 2015, the first student, he gets a text from Wei, and Wei says, hey, come to my home in Austin. He sneaks out of his house, goes to her house, I guess she picked him up, and they had sex in her bedroom. And he reported to having sex with her more than 10 times between roughly August and September of 2015, including in her car two or three times, one instance at a park in the area, and she also sent him photos of herself in underwear and also nude. Now, the sexual relationship ended after he heard a rumor she had gone on a hike with that second student that I just told you about.

34:06 So in mid-September of 2015, communications with the second student started hot and heavy. They began exchanging social media and text messages with Wei about just random things is what the student said. What's she doing? She's grooming him, right? Rumors circulated at the school that they were hooking up and Wei asked him to help stop the rumors. A friend of the student accessed his Instagram and found messages about meeting for a hike and then showed those messages to everyone at the school. What do you think is going to happen, right? Then around September 24th of 2015, even though this is all going around now at that school, this idiot teacher decides she's going to reach out and try to go hiking him. Texts from her would include messages like, are you into hiking? Asking him things like, does he know where Commons Ford Park is, which is a hiking park? Responses were, yep, we can meet there.

35:13 There are some secluded hiking trails, and I can bring my Eno, which is E-N-O, and y'all, that's basically a hammock. She later texted, delete our conversation from Instagram, please, and don't let anyone get a hold of your phone. The hike at Commons Ford Park lasted about two hours. On the secluded trail, she took out the hammock and the student said they had sexual contact, which included kissing and touching. When asked if he expected sex, he replied, yeah, adding that a teacher just doesn't hang out with a student to hang out well. He's smarter than most teachers. That's a fact. Then in late October of 2015, a student witness told school administrators she had seen text messages between Way and one of the students. Administrators contacted the parents who allowed sheriff's office to interview everybody. One victim later told his parents about the relationship. They contacted authorities. Way allegedly texted him and said, What did you tell them and why did you tell them? He described the teacher as getting dramatic, repeatedly texting and calling him until he responded. Yes, she was shitting in her pants. She was scared to death.

36:28 Around October 30th of 2015, she resigns from the school and the district notified parents and made counselors available. On December 15th, she voluntarily surrendered her teaching certificate And on December 17th of 2015, Travis County Sheriff's Office arrests Haley Way, who was then 28, on two second-degree felony counts of improper relationship between an educator and student. She was booked into the Travis County Jail, and her bond was a Somewhere between $ 75, 000 and $ 150, 000. I found different amounts in different newspaper reports. So somewhere between that. But she bonded out the same night. And of course, the court ordered no contact with the two victims. On February 3rd of 2017, about a year and two months later, Wade pleaded guilty to both counts in Travis County. Now, March 10th of 2017, she gets sentenced. The guy's name, the judge in this case, David Wahlberg, places her on 10 years of probation again.

37:39 The second time this has happened. And no sex offender registration required. Unbelievable. And this, again, is a beautiful teacher who could have had any man she wanted and was freaking married, and she's messing with two 17-year-old students. And you may find it interesting, she is now 38 years old, and she is an assistant personal trainer director at Planet Fitness. Four teachers covered today on bad teachers. There's so many of them out there. I just love blasting them when I get the opportunity. It's not to hurt them. It's for information so that we can do what we can to raise awareness for the teacher-student epidemic that is absolutely raging.

38:30 taking over our country right now here in the United States. So thank you so much for listening. Check out the Patreon, patreon.com slash exposed podcast files. We've got all kinds of stuff on there. Go to it. Check it out. We would love your support. I love those people. Could not do what I do without all of them. And until next time for exposed scandalous files of the elite, I'm your host, Jim Chapman. Much love.