Bradley Cadenhead: The Boy Who Became 764

He was fifteen, working alone in a bedroom in small-town Texas. Strangers on other continents would carve his username into their own skin. The FBI now calls what he built a terrorist network.

In April 2018, Bradley Cadenhead’s father opened his bedroom door and found him on the floor.

He was twelve, curled into himself, crying, saying things that didn’t hold together, with shallow cuts running up both arms.

His father started making calls that afternoon. The crisis line said the soonest evaluation it could offer was three months away. He didn’t wait.

He drove Bradley to an emergency room, and from there, a hundred miles to a psychiatric hospital in Wichita Falls, and when that place sent the boy home, he found another, and then another. Each one kept him for a few days, adjusted his medication, and handed him back.

“The doctors at each place changed his meds and sent him home,” his father, Jeff, said. “We tried every way we could to get help for him.”

Such a Good Child

Bradley grew up at Washington Street Baptist, a church on the west side of Stephenville, a Texas town of twenty thousand set in dairy country southwest of Dallas. His family was there every Sunday without fail. “ From the day Bradley was born, they never missed,” said Mike Halbert, who taught the boy’s Bible study. They fit right in.

He was a shy, withdrawn boy. He was about six when the other children at that church started in on him. It got bad enough that his mother stopped going. His father wouldn’t hear of his son missing a Sunday, though, and kept bringing him, and the disagreement over it settled into the marriage and stayed. So Bradley kept going back, week after week, to the same building, the same rooms, and the same children.

The bullying followed him to Henderson Junior High. By fifth grade, he was erupting into sudden outbursts of cursing, a classmate, Tyler Garrett, remembered, always keyed up over something he wouldn’t name. That was the first anyone saw of the anger that a court would name three years later. It made him a bigger target.

The behavior led to more bullying, his classmates said. By seventh grade, it was constant. Caleb Cantu, who had the locker next to his, watched it every day: everyone saw Bradley as an easy target, and he wouldn’t fight back; he’d take it. By his early teens, he was isolated, and the breakdowns had started.

At home, the family that fit right in was quietly coming apart. In 2016, when Bradley was ten, his parents separated; his father filed for divorce and kept custody. His mother moved out and, she later admitted to authorities, spent that season drinking and partying. The one person holding the boy up was a half-sister who, their mother said, took on a parental role.

That was the year he started cutting himself.

It was also the year he found the videos. He came across them while playing Minecraft, a game about building small safe worlds out of blocks. Real footage, people being tortured, bodies coming apart, the kind of thing most people shut off in a half second and spend the rest of the day trying to unsee.

He told a psychologist, years later, how it started. A friend talked him into watching a video of a man being beaten and stabbed in the face with a screwdriver. He watched it, and he called his father, crying.

Some time after that, he decided the video must not be that bad, and he watched it again. When someone invited him into a chatroom where the videos were worse, he went. He kept going back. A probation officer asked him once why he watched. He gave three words.

For shock value.

By ten, he'd gone numb to almost everything around him. The gore broke through when nothing else could. It was proof, at least, that he could still feel something.

The cutting did the same work the gore did. He couldn't stop the divorce, the bullying, being shipped from one hospital to the next. He could decide when to cut and how deep. That much was his.

Whatever the church had put in him drained out with the rest of it. He started acting up in Bible study, in the same rooms where the other kids had first turned on him.

One afternoon, Halbert, who had known him since the day he was born, stopped him. “Bradley, I remember the day you accepted Christ as your savior,” he said. “Was it real? What happened?” “I just don’t care anymore,” the boy told him. The man who’d known him his whole life had nothing to say back.

What His Teacher Told the Police

By eighth grade, what he used to watch alone he was watching in the open. In computer class, he pulled up the gore and watched it at his desk without turning the screen away. Cantu, the boy from the locker, saw it, and it was the gore more than anything that told him something in Bradley had gone truly wrong.

That September, students reported to school officials what Bradley had told them. He wanted to bring guns to the school, he’d told them, and kill children. His teacher told police she didn’t feel safe with him in her room; she’d listened to him talk about building bombs, about putting silencers on guns, about the killing videos he watched at home, and she’d started to wonder what he was working himself up to.

James Phelps, the one boy who'd gotten close to him that year, saw it differently. He didn't think Bradley hated the world for no reason. He thought Bradley hated it because of everything going wrong in his own life.

Bradley was charged with making terroristic threats. A juvenile judge gave him a year of probation. As part of the case, he underwent a psychological evaluation: disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, the label for a child whose anger never really switches off. It found he was affected by the fight between his parents, and it noted suspected child neglect by his mother.

The summer before ninth grade, custody was transferred to his mother, with both parents agreeing, and Bradley moved into her apartment.

He started at Stephenville High in August 2020 as a freshman, when school returned to in-person instruction for the first time since the pandemic. He lasted about a week. He’d wake in the morning and be sick, vomiting from the dread of it. Then he stopped going.

His father kept trying. Every morning, he stopped at the apartment to get his son up for school on his way to his maintenance job at the addiction recovery center across town. Bradley never answered the door.

Felix

He was fifteen, and he stopped leaving his room. That January, his mother got a call: either unenroll him from school or face truancy charges. She pulled him out. No one made him go anywhere again.

He hadn’t been alone in that room, though. He’d been in the gore communities since he was ten, and by now he knew them from the inside, and the gore was never all they were. They were where the other thing lived too.

Groups were already there, running children the way he would come to run them. CVLT was the best known, coaxing and threatening kids into cutting themselves and worse, and it was talked about for it. Researchers who track these networks say CVLT was not even his first; before it, there was a smaller, more obscure group called Greggy’s Cult, which coerced children into degrading themselves on livestream. He’d spent years inside those rooms before he ran any of them himself.

He knew what he was making. He would tell a psychologist later that he modeled what he was building on Greggy’s Cult because of the attention it drew for blackmailing kids into hurting themselves, and that he meant to take it to a whole different level, a lot worse. Worse on purpose. Worse was what got noticed.

That January, he opened a Discord server and named it 764, after the first three digits of the Stephenville zip code. He set his own name aside. He was Felix.

Felix moved through the servers posting images that turned people’s stomachs, and when they recoiled, he posted more. He ran off the ones who complained and kept the ones who liked it.

The method itself wasn’t his. He’d taken it from CVLT, and it was simple. He went to the rooms where the lonely kids were, the gore channels, the servers for the sad and the strange, and he was kind to them first. Then he asked for a photo, one with a face and a body in it, the kind that can’t be taken back. After that, they were his.

Every time one balked, he reminded them what he could do with the photo, and so they did the next thing, and the next was always worse than the last: a nude, then a cut, then the family pet, then a blade against their own arm on camera. Shame was the leash, and he only pulled it tighter. He ran it harder than the people he’d learned it from.

Later, he told a probation officer that he didn’t actually care about the child sexual abuse material. He claimed to keep it by the terabyte, and he used it the way he used everything, as a tool: it drew the other predators to him, and it held his victims down.

In the chats he wore it like a name. “im known for being a pedophile,” he wrote in June. “Felix the cp god,” someone answered, and he kept the title.

He said his extortions were wild. He said he could groom “e whores.” He claimed he’d cleared twenty-five thousand dollars in a day selling images, a claim the police captain who worked the case said was very unlikely. The number didn’t matter. Being the worst one in the room was the only currency the room paid in, and he wanted the most of it.

What he wanted was to make people do things. He pressured a ten-year-old for nude photos.

He told a user who had just survived a suicide attempt to try again, and offered a guide, ten ways, very descriptive, because they were, he said, too stupid to do it right, and said what he really wanted was to watch someone do it over video. “you know you gonna g2 jail right ... thats manslaughter by web ... its a crime,” another user said. “have you seen the s--- ive been doing for almost a year now,” Felix wrote.

They called him a god. They called 764 a legendary group. Strangers he would never meet carved his username into their own arms and sent him the photo. A man filmed himself smoking heroin in his honor. He was on Discord around the clock.

For a while, no one could touch him. He’d been reported to the FBI fifteen times, he said, and nothing had come of it. He’d burned through four hundred accounts and always came back.

When a moderator tried to throw him out of a room, he posted more of what had gotten him thrown out and typed “try harder” underneath. And when a user warned him that the images could send him to prison, he answered in seven words. 764 without cp and gore is pointless.

The Afternoon of August 25

It ended over the one thing he wouldn’t stop doing. Three days after he typed that, Stephenville police got a report that child sexual abuse material had been uploaded from somewhere in town, one of fifty-eight such reports tied to him. This one they traced. It led to a two-bedroom apartment and a door his father knew well.

On the afternoon of August 25, 2021, the knock came from the Stephenville police. They had a warrant. He walked out of the apartment, hair sticking up in every direction.

The room they entered was the one he never left, and it smelled like a place where a boy ate and slept and ran a world. They took the laptop. On it were twenty images of prepubescent girls. There were pictures of children who had carved I heart CP764 and Brad is a pedo into their own skin. There were recordings of kids being groomed, and the video of the man and the heroin.

He’d turned sixteen four days earlier. Almost everything on the laptop, he’d done at fifteen.

Jeremy Lanier, the captain who works on crimes against children for the Stephenville police, called this case the most disturbing he had ever seen. The child pornography, he said afterward, was probably the least serious of the crimes Cadenhead had committed; what the boy was really about was manipulation. Asked how Cadenhead responded to the investigation, Lanier said, “He couldn’t have cared less.”

He was certified to stand trial as an adult. In March 2023, he pleaded guilty to nine counts of possession with intent to promote child pornography, and that May, a judge in Erath County gave him eighty years. He was seventeen.

His lawyers have spent the years since trying to undo it. Every court has said no. The claim was always the same: the right psychologist could have explained him, a lonely, abused teenager who therapy and medication could still bring back. The same judge who sentenced him rejected it without a hearing. Texas’s highest criminal court agreed without comment. In February 2026, a federal judge in Fort Worth called the last petition a rehash of everything already denied. He is twenty now, in a Texas prison. The sentence stands.

764 did not go with him. New leaders stepped in almost at once, among them a North Carolina teenager who had been there from the start, and the boy from Stephenville had built something that no longer needed him.

The Face He Chose

In June 2021, for one of his accounts, he had chosen a new profile picture: a photograph of Peter Scully, an Australian serving a life sentence in the Philippines for raping and murdering children, one of the most notorious child predators alive. That was the face he wanted looking back at the people he spoke to. Not a mask to hide behind. A face to be known by.

There is an old and well-documented turn in the mind of a child who cannot get away from being hurt. When you are small and it will not stop, one way out is to stop being the person it happens to and become the person who does it. You take the power by putting on the face of the one who holds it.

Bradley had been the one it happened to since he was six, in a Sunday school room, and this is where it went. He looked for a face to wear and reached past ordinary cruelty for a man who did the worst thing he could think of to the most defenseless people alive.

It took five years to go from victim to predator. At ten, he could only decide whether to watch someone else suffer. By fifteen, he had decided what happened to the children he pulled into his rooms. Choosing the predator's face was the last step, the point where committing the acts wasn't enough anymore. He wanted to be a predator, not just act like one.

At his sentencing, the head of the county’s probation department told the judge, “I don’t know if he knows where the internet ends and real life begins.” Everything he was lived on one side of that line. On the other side was a door he never answered.

Years earlier, the court had come close to naming a piece of him. That eighth-grade evaluation, the anger that never switched off, was accurate, and it was only the anger. No diagnosis in the book covers what he did with it. The label said why he was full of rage. It did not keep child sexual abuse material as a tool, or talk a stranger into carving a username into a stranger’s arm. That he built, and kept building, because it worked.

His father, in a statement to the Post, said Bradley was only fifteen when he committed his crimes, and that he didn’t say it to excuse it but to point out that his son had also been a victim at some point. He knew exactly what it was to be a lonely kid staring at a screen for something to make the day survivable. He had been that child. Then he built a machine to hunt them.

The FBI now warns parents about 764 and the groups that took its shape. The children these groups look for, the warnings say, are the isolated ones, the depressed ones, the ones drawn to the dark corners of the internet, the ones aching to belong.

One of them was fourteen, in Oklahoma. She had downloaded Discord because her middle-school art teacher wanted students to share their work on it. A fan of horror stories, she drifted from there toward the gory corners, and that is where someone friendly found her. He was warm. He paid attention. He drew her out of that room and into a place that felt, at first, like somewhere she finally belonged.

She was reaching for the same thing he’d reached for at ten. To feel something. To not be alone. To matter to someone. The person on the other side knew exactly what that felt like.

He had been her.

Then he asked her for a photo, and once he had it, she was his: she cut herself on camera, and she killed her pet hamster on a live stream, sobbing, while he yelled at her and dozens watched.

If you read “The Suicide Chef,” you’ve already seen what happens when someone finds a room built for harm and exploits it. This is the case of the boy who built the room. Thanks for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed it, please pass it along to a true-crime-following friend.

References

The narrative is drawn from court records in Bradley Cadenhead’s Erath County prosecution and his subsequent state and federal habeas proceedings, together with the FBI’s public advisories on 764 and contemporaneous investigative reporting by The Washington Post and Texas news outlets. Quotes from family members, classmates, church members, and officials follow statements they made in court records and to those outlets.

Legal authorities

Cadenhead v. State, No. 11-23-00119-CR, 2023 WL 7198519 (Tex. App.-Eastland Nov. 2, 2023) (direct appeal voluntarily dismissed).

Ex parte Cadenhead (Tex. Crim. App. Feb. 5, 2025) (state habeas application denied without written order on the findings of the trial court and independent review).

Cadenhead v. Director, TDCJ-CID, No. 4:25-cv-00184-P (N.D. Tex. Feb. 17, 2026) (federal habeas petition denied; certificate of appealability denied).

Tex. Penal Code § 43.26 (possession or promotion of child pornography).

Investigative reporting

Boburg, S., Verma, P., & Dehghanpoor, C. (2024, March 13). On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm. The Washington Post.

Boburg, S., & Dehghanpoor, C. (2024, September 9). On social media, a bullied teen found fame among child predators worldwide. The Washington Post.

Vanden Berge, S. (2023, May 17). Wondering about that 80-year sentence given to an Erath County teen? Here’s what you didn’t know. Beneath the Surface News.

Peer-reviewed references

Frankel, J. (2002). Exploring Ferenczi’s concept of identification with the aggressor: Its role in trauma, everyday life, and the therapeutic relationship. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(1), 101-139. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481881209348657

Klonsky, E. D. (2007). The functions of deliberate self-injury: A review of the evidence. Clinical Psychology Review, 27(2), 226-239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2006.08.002

Ray, A., & Henry, N. (2025). Sextortion: A scoping review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 26(1), 138-155. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380241277271

Wolak, J., Finkelhor, D., Walsh, W., & Treitman, L. (2018). Sextortion of minors: Characteristics and dynamics. Journal of Adolescent Health, 62(1), 72-79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2017.08.014