Image via Complex Original
What's the most disturbing movie of 2012? It's West of Memphis, the amazingly thorough, profoundly affecting documentary from director Amy Berg and producer Peter Jackson (he of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey fame). Released in a limited number of theaters last week, the staggering 147-minute film investigates the whole story behind Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin, better known, collectively, as the West Memphis Three. And if you're unfamiliar with said story, West of Memphis will surely punch your gut, heart, and mind with equal force.
Frankly, the same goes for those who've been following the West Memphis Three for years now. Berg's documentary examines the trials, imprisonments, wrongful accusations, and everlasting traumas caused by the deaths of three young boys in May 1993. At the time, Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin were all pegged as the killers, due to their apparent interests in the occult and Satanism, when, really, they were just antisocial, anarchy-loving Goth kids.
As West of Memphis fascinatingly shows, the subsequent years following their initial ties to the deaths brought forth evidence and developments that opened the case up beyond devil-worship and into more horrifyingly personal terrain. Which isn't to say that Hell's overseer is an altogether innocent bystander in the world of true, nightmarish crime. To get a spine-tingling look at just how (indirectly) culpable Lucifer is, read all about The 10 Craziest Real-Life Crimes Committed in the Name of Satan.
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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)
10. Sean Sellers
In September 1985, when only 16 years old, Oklahoma City resident Sean Sellers shot a convenience store clerk to death. Why? The guy wouldn't sell him any booze, so it seemed like as good a time as any to see "what [murder] felt like." Then, the following March, Sellers killed both his mom and stepfather while they were sleeping and tried to make their bedroom look as if someone other than Sellers himself broke into their house and murdered them.
After his arrest, Sellers told lawyers and jurors that his studies into Satanism led to his soul being possessed by a demon called "Ezurate," and that he'd read Anton Lavey's The Satanic Bible "hundreds of times." In jail, he converted to Christianity and went on several talk shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show and Geraldo, to discuss the downfalls of devil-worshipping.
On February 4, 1999, Sellers was executed via lethal injection. For his last words, he recited part of the Christian song "Set My Spirit Free": "Set my spirit free that I might praise Thee. Set my spirit free that I might worship Thee."
9. Christa Pike
While most of her peers were getting ready for the prom and looking at colleges, West Virginia teenager Christa Pike was worshipping the devil and committing homicide.
In 1995, Pike, 18, was in love with Tadaryl Shipp, whom she met through Job Corps, a Knoxville, TN, program that assisted low-income kids by housing them and teaching them career skills. Together, they messed around with the occult, and when fellow student Colleen Slemmer, 19, started talking to Shipp a bit too much for Pike's liking, she conspired against her with Shipp and friend Shadolla Peterson.
On January 15, they brought Slemmer to a vacant steam plant where, for about 30 minutes, they physically assaulted her, sliced her up, and carved a pentagram in her chest. Finishing the job, Pike finally crushed Slemmer's skull with a slab of asphalt paving and kept a piece of the skull as a souvenir. Back at school, Pike showed the skull fragment to classmates, and, merely 36 hours after killing Slemmer, Pike, Peterson, and Shipp were arrested.
8. Elyse Pahler
In March 1996, the body of 15-year-old Elyse Pahler was found in Arroyo Grande, CA, not far from her house, after one of her murderers, Royce Casey, confessed to the crime. The reason Casey came clean is where the story gets really bizarre: He had recently converted to Christianity. Prior to that, he was a Satanist, and, along with friends Jacob Delashmutt and Joseph Fiorella, raped and killed Pahler eight months beforehand as part of a ritual "sacrifice to the devil."
But, wait, it gets worse. The three friends were part of an upstart heavy metal band, named Hatred, and they claimed that killing Pahler was meant to give them the "craziness" to "go professional." Elyse's parents later blamed the popular metal group Slayer, specifically the band's songs "Postmortem" and "Dead Skin Mask," which provided Casey, Delashmutt, and Fiorella with the the guidance to efficiently rape, kill, and "commit acts of necrophilia" on Elyse. However, in an interview with the Washington Post, Delashmutt rebuked the Slayer charges and instead blamed the murder on Fiorella's obsessions with Pahler.
7. Manuela and Daniel Ruda
What's true love? In the warped minds of German couple Manuela and Daniel Ruda, it's killing a man together to appease the horned man downstairs.
Back in early 2002, the married lovers (Manuela, 23, and Daniel, 26)—who met through a heavy metal magazine's advertisement section—stabbed their buddy Frank Haagen 66 times, beat him with hammers, drank some of his blood, and stuck the lifeless, decomposing body, which had a scalpel poking out of it and a pentagram carved on the chest, in a coffin that rested next to Manuela's bed.
The Rudas were eventually caught at a gas station during a time period after Haagen's murder in which they armed themselves with a chainsaw and awaited, or kept themselves "prepared," for Satan's next commands. Manuela's later court testimonies included the reasoning that she and Daniel killed Haagen as "Satan's instruments" to "make sure the victim suffered well." She also claimed that time spent amongst a vampire cult in Britain led to her acquiring the taste for human blood.
6. Richard Ramirez
Before media outlets officially dubbed him "The Night Stalker," Richard Ramirez was called both "The Walk-In Killer" and "The Valley Intruder," since his first few victims were found dead inside their homes. By the end of his spree, the El Paso, Texas, native killed 13 people and almost killed five others. And his methods of execution were especially revolting.
One victim, 44-year-old Maxine Zazzara, had a "T" carved onto her left breast and her eyes gouged out; another woman had pentagrams drawn onto her thigh with lipstick; others had their throats slit after being sodomized.
Hoping to find reasons as to why Ramirez went so bad, reports have cast blame on a cousin named Mike, a Vietnam veteran who showed a young Richard pictures he'd taken of tortured Vietnamese people, specifically decapitated women the young boy had earlier seen in other pictures giving Mike blow-jobs. Even worse, a 13-year-old Richard watched Mike shoot his wife to death, which left Richard covered in the woman's blood.
5. Beasts of Satan
"Beasts of Satan" sounds like a movie Rob Zombie would make after next year's The Lords of Salem. To earn such a to-the-point moniker, a group of individuals would need to really be something evil. And that's exactly the right way to describe the Italian threesome of Andrea Volpe, Nicola Sapone, and Mario Maccione.
In January 1998, the trio of young Satanists murdered Chiara Marino, 19, and Fabio Tollis, 16, after a long night of boozing and heavy metal music inside the metal-centric club Midnight Pub. In a sacrificial ceremony of sorts, the three perpetrators, all hopped up on drugs, stabbed Marino and Tollis to death, buried their bodies in the woods, and danced on the graves, shouting, "Now you're both zombies! Try to get out of this hole, if you dare!"
It gets worse. Six years later, Volpe shot his 27-year-old girlfriend and buried her alive. The reason: She knew too much about the 1998 murders and about Volpe's Lucifer-loving sect. Unfortunately for them, Volpe and Sapone were, in addition to occultists, morons—while en route to drowning the girl's car in a nearby river, they took large amounts of heroin and cocaine, crashed the vehicle, and were arrested. The police questioning soon led to the discoveries of their heinous acts.
4. Sharon Tate and the Manson family
It's referred to as the night when the free-loving, happy-go-lucky era of the 1960s officially died. Non-metaphorically, five innocent people were brutally murdered on August 9, 1969, by followers of charismatic and deranged cult leader Charles Manson. Famously, one of the victims was Sharon Tate, acclaimed director Roman Polanski actress/model wife. Technically, six people died that day—Tate was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant at the time.
Polanski, on that fateful day, was working on a movie in London. As for Tate, she was hanging out inside their Los Angeles home with three of her friends (the fifth victim was an unrelated driver who rode past the property as the murderers approached). Manson had ordered four of his young followers (one guy and three girls) to go to the house, where an associate formerly resided, and "totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can."
And so they did. Or, as Mansonite Charles Watson told one of Tate's houseguests, "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business." By the time Manson's minions left the premises, they'd killed Tate and her friends with multiple gun shots and stabbings. Tate, specifically, was stabbed 16 times after pleading for the life of her unborn baby.
3. Ricky Kasso
Fans of heavy metal music hate it when old people and conservatives blame their beloved tunes for destroying society and turning youngsters into deviants. It's been going on for decades now, and in many ways it can be traced back to the case of New York teenager Ricky Kasso.
At age 17, while wearing an AC/DC T-shirt, he murdered fellow teen Gary Lauwers in the Aztakea Woods of Northport, Long Island. Along with two other friends—who, like Kasso and Lauwers, were high on mescaline—Kasso was in the woods to dabble in occult practices, as part of their self-dubbed "Knights of the Black Circle" cult.
Tensions had long before mounted between Kasso and Lauwers, after the latter allegedly stole 10 bags of PCP from Kasso. On June 16, 1984, in the Aztakea Woods, unsuccessful attempts to build a fire prompted Lauwers to make up for the damp driftwood by using his socks and denim jacket's sleeves. Kasso said that they should use Lauwers' hair instead, which led to Kasso biting him on the neck. Then, over a reported three-to-four-hour period, Kasso and his two other friends stabbed Lauwers upwards of 36 times, burned his body, gouged his eyeballs out, and stuffed rocks down his throat.
As he was killing Lauwers, Kasso ordered him to "say you love Satan," but Lauwers said, "I love my mother." Kasso covered the thought-to-be-dead body with branches and leaves, but, as reports tell, Lauwers rose back up, said "I love my mother again," and prompted the assailants to continue their assault until he was confirmed dead.
On July 5, Kasso was arrested. Two days later, he hung himself in his jail cell.
2. Nikolai Ogolobyak
Think movies like Bully and Kids uncomfortably show teenagers' darkest sides? Count your blessings for the fact that nobody's made a movie about these sickos yet.
In 2008, Nikolai Ogolobyak (a former church choir boy) and his young Satanist followers Alexander Voronovic and Anya Gorokhova brought four peers (three girls and one boy, seen in the image above) into the woods surrounding a cottage in Russia's Yaroslavl region and, allegedly, made the four victims drink alcohol. Then, they stabbed all four kids 666 times each and, once they were dead, partially ate them. Most of the victims' remaining body parts were eventually found near Ogolobyak's apartment complex.
When arrested, one of Ogolobyak's partners-in-crime told the authorities, "Satan will help me avoid responsibility; I made many sacrifices to him." Another said, more bluntly, "I tried to to turn to God, but it didn't bring me any money. I prayed to Satan, and things improved."
1. Ripper Crew
Robin Gecht certainly worked his way up the serial killer ranks. Initially, Gecht learned the trade, so to speak, by working for John Wayne Gacy, but he eventually amassed his own group of homicidal colleagues (Edward Spreitzer, Andrew Kokoraleis, and Thomas Kokoraleis) and made a name for himself.
In 1981 and 1982, on the streets of Chicago, Gecht and his buddies drove around abducting prostitutes, forcing them into their van, and bringing them back to Gecht's apartment where they'd murder (or, rather, sacrifice) the women in gruesome Satanic rituals. Per the killers' own claims, they would cut off one of the prostitute's breasts and eat it as Gecht would read aloud from Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey's 1969 book The Satanic Bible.
And that's not all. Once they finished eating, they would take turns raping the area where the breast had previously been, before masturbating onto the breast and consuming it in little pieces.