Dove Cameron Details Murder of Childhood Friend, Lasting Trauma

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Trauma leaves its mark. Childhood trauma most of all.

When Dove Cameron was just a little girl, her friend was murdered.

This terrible tragedy should never have happened. And Dove should never have found out the way that she did.

This horror has left a lingering mark upon her psyche for life.

A vicious crime and a trauma that will always follow her

During a recent episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, Dove opened up about a life-altering childhood trauma.

When she was 9 years old, her childhood friend, Hayley, died.

Hayley’s father, Steve, killed both of his daughters and himself.

Both girls grew up in Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Dove had known Hayley from the time when both girls were only 2 years old. Losing a friend of 7 years would be a horror for anyone, but for a 9-year-old, it’s essentially her entire life.

“Some little girls they meet each other, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s like you, and it’s funny,’” Dove recalled of their childhood similarities.

Growing emotional multiple times during the interview, the actress and singer admitted that she “rarely talks about this.”

Dove clarified: “Not because it’s a problem to talk about, but just like it’s so not the first thing that people usually ask me.”

She remembers Hayley’s parents going through a “messy” divorce. The girls still hung out, but even as a child, she could tell that something was wrong.

“I had stayed with her dad for like quite a lot of the summer before [the murder] happened,” Dove described. “And I think even at 8, it was like a dark energy. He was a very angry man.”

She wasn’t supposed to learn about the murder this way

Dove was home sick from school as a third grader and picked up the landline phone, overhearing a call that her parents received from Hayley’s school’s principal.

“She basically said like, ‘This is going to be a really, really disturbing call. Hayley and [her sister] Kelsey are gone. Steve is gone, and he took the girls with him,’” Dove recalled.

“I think they heard me like express some sort of child noise, like a gasp,” she admitted.

Dove continued: “And then I they came in and and we just like didn’t get out of bed for two days.”

She acknowledged: “It was so impossible to process.”

At the time, Dove’s parents tried putting her in therapy to cope with the trauma of her friend’s murder.

“I was very very very very very disturbed by knowing someone for all that time and being like raised around them,” she described.

“And,” Dove continued, “then realizing that they are capable of doing something so harrowing,”

She characterized the trauma of losing her friend by saying that it had “fissured” her brain, forever altering how she processes things.

“I still have issues,” Dove acknowledged.

What happened?

On November 22, 2004, Steve Byrne murdered his daughters, Kelsey and Hayley.

Police found both girls in their bed without an immediately apparent cause of death. Their killer had taken his own life with a gun.

One of the biggest motives for family annihilators is a sudden loss of control. Children growing up and changing, a divorce, losing a job. Sometimes, there is an element of revenge against a survivor — like an ex-wife.

According to Byrne’s attorney, he believed that the legal system was unfair to fathers. He was also apparently furious about his ex-wife’s move following their acrimonious divorce.

There is a depth of evil in people that most never suspect until it springs to the surface.