Jennifer Hyatte had a very difficult upbringing with her first ever memory being in a courthouse as her mom and dad divorced. In Emory County, Utah Jennifer and her sister were put through a difficult custody battle. Her father quickly remarried and his two young daughters weren’t present for the wedding, which ultimately caused friction. There isn’t a lot of information on Jennifer’s early life, but she did describe her life in a 34 page manifest.
After her parents divorced and her father remarried, Jennifer says she and her sister were sexually abused by someone in her fathers new family which went on for four years. They never told anyone. Jennifer found solace in horses. Her aunt owned several horse stables and that’s where Jennifer fell in love with a thoroughbred horse named, Weaver. Unfortunately she only got to heal with Weaver for a short while, before the horse had moved to a new stable. “Well that’s it, I backed away from horses for good” Jennifer writes.
At 15 her attention turned to alcohol, drugs and dating older men. Her boyfriend was 25 and she was a 15 year old child. While staying between her mom and her dad, she learned how to sneak out and cover her tracks. Jennifer would sneak out of her mom’s house and take her car and learned how to change the odometer on her mom’s car.
The summer before her senior year, in Utah, she met her first husband. She wrote a day before the wedding, at 3 months pregnant and 18 years old, she found him with another woman. She went on with the wedding and they would later welcome 3 children together, 2 sons and a daughter. Jennifer says the marriage was abusive at times and drugs were being used in the household.
In 1996 she remembers her first taste on cocaine. “I was hooked.” She also writes that after she tried it once, she needed more and even described being sold off when she and her husband didn’t have money to support their habit. She then went on a six month binge, which ended when she came home one night and her children didn’t even recognize her. By 1999 Jennifer’s husband was arrest twice for drug charges, including a meth lab in the couples 3 bedroom home and DUI in the forth degree all within a 2 week span. With her husband going away she felt lost with “no self esteem, no character and no substance,” she wrote.
She moved on in her life with a large man who was nice and a bit of a push over. They quickly married and Jennifer says 30 minutes after she said “I do” she met a friend of the groom at the reception named Travis. She was smitten and the two quickly began an intense affair even sneaking off to casino vacations. Even after Jennifer’s second husband found out, the two continued the affair. Her second husband then filed for divorce and Travis quickly moved in. That quickly fizzled out quick due to the fact that “Travis was too much of a kid himself and me with 3 kids it wasn’t working out” Jennifer wrote.
Jennifer needed a vacation so she decided to visit her friend Tina in good old Music City, Tennessee. She fell in love with Tennessee and eventually decided she wanted to live in Tennessee. In 2001 she and her 3 children packed up and moved to Big Sandy, west of Nashville near Land between the Lakes (check out our episode on Carla Atkins and Vickie Stout). In 2004 she started a job as a nurse at the Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville, Tennessee. That’s where she would meet her third husband.
She fell in love with inmate George Hyatte. George was a seasoned prisoner. At 17 he had already been through drug and alcohol counseling. He escaped between 2-5 times, including once when George and another inmate used a knife made from a toothbrush and was able to escape. Jennifer was caught giving George extra food and special attention.
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