The man who helped write a brutal obituary for his mother that went viral online says he has no regrets and sang Ding Dong the Witch is Dead when he heard she had died.
Patrick Reddick and his sister Katherine Reddick, a teacher, co-wrote the scathing obit outing their late mother Marianne Johnson-Reddick, who they said was an “evil and violent” child abuser who made their lives a living hell. The obituary, published in the Reno Gazette-Journal on Sept 10, quickly went viral around the world.
Reddick told the MailOnline he smiled and felt overwhelming relief when he learned his mother had died. Since her death, he has been sleeping better knowing she can’t hurt him anymore, he said.
He and his brothers and sisters are planning a party at the end of the month to celebrate their mother’s death.
“While she neglected and abused her small children, she refused to allow anyone else to care or show compassion towards them. When they became adults she stalked and tortured anyone they dared to love,” the scathing obit read. “Everyone she met, adult or child was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.”
The obituary, which has since been yanked from the paper’s website, went on: “On behalf of her children whom she so abrasively exposed to her evil and violent life, we celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the after-life reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty and shame that she delivered on her children.”
Reddick beat her children when they returned from foster care in a children’s home on the weekends, and made them sleep on the floor while she ran a prostitution business from home, Mr Reddick said. He does not keep photos of his mother because they make him nervous.
When Patrick Reddick returned to see his mother for the last time, he was so scared he asked doctors to sedate her and wore sunglasses so she wouldn’t recognize him if she woke up, he said.
Patrick Reddick also revealed his mother had been a former nun. Not all of her six surviving children were on board with the vicious obit, since two of his siblings turned out “exactly like” their mother.
The obituary was designed to “shame her”, he admitted.
“She thrashed the maternal instinct out of her children and replaced it with the hate she had for us. We wanted people doing this to their kids to ask themselves: Do you want this to be your legacy? Do you want this to be your obituary?” he said.
The Reno-Gazette Journal reports Reddick died from bladder cancer and was a ward of Nevada. She died alone in a trailer park, surrounded by her 13 cats.