The Needled*ck In All Of Us

Imagine for a second that you are conducting a remote job interview with a chef candidate. In the middle of the interview, which is phone and not video, you hear her scream, then you hear crashes and more screaming, and then the line cuts out. That is what happened to a guy conducting an interview in March 2024, and the candidate was a 25 year-old woman named Jamie Wilson, or Jamie Wilson-Spray. I removed the Spray because the man entering her home and causing the screaming was her estranged husband, Jamie Spray. And of course, as these things go, he not only killed her, but raped her (gotta take one back sexually) and beat her as well.

There did appear to be some guilt regarding it, though, as he did confess to both his parents in odd ways afterwards. Just this week, he was sentenced — and despite getting hit on both rape and murder, he might be out in 20–25 years. Her parents are, you know, not exactly thrilled about that.

Since #MeToo, I do think we have gone too far on “men are useless,” “who needs men,” and all that stuff. Sadly, it had political ramifications too, because men feeling slighted and pushed out by dating apps and third-wave feminism pushed them into the arms of Rogan, Tucker, and ultimately Trump.

So while I would say that’s too far, and the whole Instagram Stories sub-culture of “women literally have to marry their hunters” is a bridge out there as well, the fact is that some men are fucking horrible animals. John Wonder, a case out of the Kansas City area, is vaguely similar to this one. I’d call these things the bottom of the masculinity pit. I think Wonder had kids. I don’t think this Spray guy did.

The background on this is “tale as old as time:” basically, the wife probably saw signs of how nuts he was and how her life was exceeding his life, and she bailed. This guy was a cook for a WSU sorority in Pullman, so he probably saw tight blond girls all week, most of whom would barely smile at him, at the same time as his marriage was collapsing. I am sure he became the weird version of male-radicalized where you hate women and the concept of women enough that this feels like the right end game. Sadly, more men reach that level than we admit. We think it’s just the purview of Dateline episodes, but it’s more than that. Whether you want to talk about incels or broader radicalization, there is a problem with men and anger. (You even see it at the financially-elite levels, where some of the richest guys on the planet have endless grievances about things.)

And of course, this guy put a camera in his ex-wife’s new house, and according to testimony during the trial, he saw a new guy show up there. He might have even seen a new guy exit in the morning, ya know? So now the radicalization is fully-formed, and this guy is gonna do something awful.

You’d think there are more checks in place here around morality, how this guy was parented, etc. — his parents testified against him at trial, which should say something — but unfortunately, there’s not. Some men just fucking snap. And it’s easy to dismiss them as crazy, which they probably are, but it’s harder to look at the bigger issues, in part because we don’t want to give empathy or understanding to a murderer. I get it.

With men, I personally think there’s a deep tissue tie back to having either “purpose” or “respect,” and when they lose one or both of those, the snapping process can begin. That’s why some of the destabilization of professional arc, including firing federal workers en masse, could have some real negative repercussions. Yes, maybe Dan was a cubicle jockey who stole your tax dollars. But that was “purpose” to Dan. If he loses purpose and comes home to less respect (“Where’s your salary, Dan? The kids need things!”), Dan is now a candidate for something awful.

We don’t always think this way, and maybe it’s extreme to, but we are seeing stuff like this more and more on both sides. Women groom, men snap. Are we listening to what’s really going on?