No Gary, your Dad was not the Zodiac Killer. Gary L. Stewarts The Most Dangerous Animal of All

I’m no expert on the Zodiac killer, but I have read Graysmith’s books and least have a sense of how complicated the case is and what kind of evidence would be required to confirm the killer’s identity. A new Netflix documentary recently came out confirming Graysmith’s claim that Arthur Leigh Allen was the killer, and while I am not convinced that it definitely wasn’t Arthur Leigh Allen, the claims put forth in that documentary are so damning that I find them suspicious. Either way, there are lots of reasons to think that Arthur Leigh Allen might have been the Zodiac, and until concrete evidence arises, Allen will be the measuring stick for all other Zodiac suspects.

I think I have mentioned this before, but I am very busy these days, and I am having to rely on audiobooks from my local libraries to get any reading done. Unfortunately, my Libby account doesn’t really offer many books that fit in with the theme of this blog. The horror is all modern, and the occultism is all new-age. When I checked the true crime section, I found The Most Dangerous Animal of All, a book by a man who believes his father to be the Zodiac Killer. I thought it might be worth a read.

This book sucks. There’s nothing remotely convincing about any of the author’s claims, and many of these claims have been proven to be false. On reading about the author after finishing the book, I realized that there is a 4 part documentary on this book that basically proves that it’s complete bullshit. His dad was in Austria when the Zodiac did most of his killing. Even if the claims in here were all true, Allen is still a better suspect.

Ok, so the book is bullshit, but so are many of the books I enjoy. Is there anything interesting about this at all? Well, the author claims that his father was good friends with Anton LaVey and that he jammed with Bobby Beausoleil. His dad was a convicted paedophile (that much is beyond doubt), and so these links cast darker shadows on the high Priest of Satanism and Charlie Manson’s pal than they do on the author’s sicko father.

Also, the author is a whiny little weiner. Most of the book is about his boring, pleasant life with a nice family and how he acted like a wanker when he met his birth mother. He also repeatedly brings his faith into the story and makes himself sound like a twat. If the author’s father was actually in the Zodiac’s vicinity, it’s a real pity that the Zodiac didn’t murder him too. A child wouldn’t have been raped, and this awful book would never have been written.

All Serial Killers are Satanic Pawns of the CIA: David McGowan’s Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder

There’s no such thing as serial killers. Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez and the likes were all framed by the government. None of these men committed all of the murders of which they were accused. They were all part of CIA mind control operations. Satanic ritual abuse and murderous Satanic cults exist, but they are just part of the US government’s mind control agenda.

This book starts off with a lengthy section describing different sex crimes committed against children. There really are a lot of sickos out there. The author claims that many of these crimes were committed by the US government to make their victims more susceptible to mind control. He points out that a high percentage of serial killers experienced sexual abuse as children. This was some bleak reading as proof of this. Paedophiles are truly the vilest form of life. Admittedly, I couldn’t help but giggle when a Satanic ritual abuse “victim” described how they were forced to play “poopoo baseball”

The next and longest section of the book details the crimes of America’s most notorious serial killers. McGowan includes all of the big ones with the noticeable exception of the Son of Sam. This is not because he thinks that David Berkowitz was any different to the other killers discussed but because he believes that Maury Terry said all that needed to be said about Berkowitz and his accomplices in The Ultimate Evil. This is fair; that book is exhaustive, and I’d imagine most of McGowan’s readers have probably read Terry, but the phrase “programmed to kill” actually came from one of the Son of Sam letters.

I went through a bit of a serial killer phase as a teenager, so I knew about John Wayne Gacy and Bundy, but most of my serial killer knowledge is limited to the names and lyrics of Macabre songs. I was aware that Edmund Kemper had a horrible temper and that Dahmer used to work in a chocolate factory, but although I knew that Richard Speck had done something outrageous, I didn’t know the specifics. It turns out this Speck guy killed 8 student nurses and was sentenced to life in prison. Some serial killers get murdered in prison due to their reputations, but Richard Speck managed to keep himself alive by injecting himself with estrogen and growing a pair of tits. In the late 80s, a lawyer snuck a video camera into the prison where Speck was locked up and made a video of him wearing blue satin panties, snorting cocaine and giving blowjobs to other inmates. What the heck Richard Speck ?

A lot of the reasoning presented here is utterly ridiculous. The book was written in 2004, just a few years before smartphones became ubiquitous, and the writing here makes that obvious. Whenever I would read about a killer I hadn’t encountered before, I would check their wikipedia page, and in most cases that would make it very obvious how hard the author was trying to put his slant on things. I’d like to assume that a person wouldn’t get away with this kind of distortion of the truth anymore, but unfortunately it seems that more people are buying into this type of shit than ever before. This kind of thinking is a direct precursor to the Pizzagate conspiracy and that kind of nonsense. As soon as you point out how the research is flawed, believers will accuse you of having being duped by the same system that created these “satanic” killers. Some of this book is verifiable fiction too. When discussing Aleister Crowley, the author discusses the story about Crowley performing a ritual that killed his friend and drove him crazy… the one that Dennis Wheatley made up. McGowan also assumes the existence of the Hand of Death, a Satanic cult of assassins that existed only in the mind of Henry Lee Lucas (more on that in matter in a couple of weeks),

The book’s central premise is total madness anyways. The message is that serial killers are made, not born. I get the appeal of that idea. It’s hard for me to accept the fact that some men enjoy murdering children, but it wouldn’t make me feel much better if I found out that it was actually the government putting those sick desires into its citizens’ heads. Also, the notion that the American government is organised enough to do stuff like this is ridiculous.

Programmed to Kill really only covers American killers. I assume other countries do have serial killers, but I can only think of a few. It does seem a bit odd that America has so many. I read an article that claims that the amount of serial killers has been dropping in the last few decades. The CIA must be devoting their attention elsewhere.

This is a ridiculous book. It could only be convincing to a person with no way of verifying the claims made within. I mainly read it because I knew it mentioned the 4 Pi cult, but it didn’t contain anything about that mysterious group that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. It did put me onto a few other books about Satanic killers. It also forced me to spend a lot of time thinking about how horrible human beings are, and I started getting nervous leaving my house.

The Unabomber’s Manifesto

I’ve read quite a few true crime books this year. It’s an interesting field, but I’m wary of including too much of it here. All the books I’ve discussed here have had satanism or cult connections. This week I’m going a bit further afield and looking at the Unabomber’s manifesto. The Unabomber was not a Satanist nor an occultist, and though not my usual fare, I imagine most of my readers will have at least mild interest in this extraordinarily intelligent, yet completely delusional, mass murderer.

Industrial Society and Its Future – FC (Ted Kaczynski)

For those of you who don’t know, Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard educated Math professor who left his job lecturing at the University of California, Berkeley, to live a life of seclusion in a cabin in the woods. While he was there, he decided that technology was the root of nearly all human unhappiness and that by killing a bunch of influential scientists, he would kickstart a revolution that would destroy all technology and end human suffering. In 1995, after spending almost 2 decades terrorising America, he sent a manifesto to the Washington Post and told them he’d stop bombing innocent people if they printed it. It was actually the wording in the manifesto that led to his arrest. His brother recognised familiar phrases in it and told the FBI.

The above paragraph probably makes this dude seem absolutely crazy, but a lot of his ideas are frighteningly prescient. We all know that technology is undoubtedly fucking people up. Ted came up with this stuff in the 70s, so he wasn’t even thinking of social media and smartphones, but he specifically foretold how advancing technology would gain a stronger and stronger hold on how people would think and act. We’ve gotten to a point now where technology has such a hold on every aspect of our lives that the idea of getting rid of it seems completely impossible.

I think that’s the thing that makes Ted crazy. His goals were noble but utterly ridiculous. He may have been a mathematical genius, a skillful craftsman and a philosopher, but he had no self awareness. He thought a hairy weirdo living in a bush was going to stop people from using electricity.

The other problem is that technology is also pretty useful. I’d love to see people spending less time looking at their screens, but I also think that cancer treatments for sick children are neat. Kaczynski was a “survival of the fittest” kind of a guy. I suppose that kind of belief is easier to accept if you’re a little frigid with no friends or family.

Reading this manifesto reminded me of 2 books. One of these was Kiss Maerth’s The Beginning Was the End. Like the manifesto, that book describes humanity falling from grace. For Ted the fall began with the industrial revolution. For Oscar it was when monkeys started to eat each others’ brains. The effect has been similar. Humanity’s accomplishments are unhealthily great, and both authors want a return to a more natural state. The other book this reminded me of was Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Kaczynski is more optimistic about the future of humanity as he believes in a hope for salvation, but that hope now seems so misplaced that his manifesto felt a lot like reading Ligotti’s thoughts on how humanity is cursed and doomed by its own intelligence. These would be 3 good books to read together if you wanted to have a really bad time.

The actual manifesto is pretty boring. It’s thorough, but quite repetitive. A sparksnotes version would probably be sufficient. I can’t be sure, but I feel like his ideas might have been influential on whoever wrote the Matrix.

Kaczynski killed himself a couple of years ago. I’m sure that living is prison is shit, but you can’t help but wonder if his decision to commit suicide was affected by seeing his prophecies coming to pass. It was a sad end to a sad life. He was a psychopathic murderer, but he clearly had severe mental health problems, and there’s stories that he was a victim of an evil science experiment when he was a teenager.

It’s a pity he murdered innocent people, otherwise I’d think he was pretty cool.

The Beast of Jersey: A Satanic Rapist and Truly Horrible Person

Edward ‘Ted’ Paisnel was a serial rapist, and he committed his horrid deeds while dressed in a terrifying costume which included a rubber mask, a disgusting wig, nail studded wristbands and a nail studded trenchcoat. When police searched his home, they apparently found a black magic shrine dedicated to Gilles de Rais. Most of his victims were children. One of them had a mental disability. Ted Paisnel was as bad as any horror movie villain.

This book, The Beast of Jersey, was written by Ted’s wife. It’s a weird, exploitative, horrible piece of writing. She plays up the Satanic side of things, referencing witchcraft and Dennis Wheatley and including several chapters on Gilles de Rais without ever providing any solid evidence that Paisnel was seriously into that stuff. He supposedly had a few books on the topics, but surely that doesn’t mean a person is a Satanist. She goes so far as to suggest that the reason he got caught was because a car he stole contained a crucifix in the back seat and that this might have had an effect on his evil powers. Also, on top of accusing her husband of being a wizard, she also claims he was gay. This claim is based on the fact that he only raped his victims anally. She also alludes to the fact that he refused to sleep in the same room as her. I’m no expert on the psychology of rapists, but I’m pretty sure that anally raping a female does not make a person gay – it makes them an anal rapist.

I have nothing but disdain for rapists and child molesters, but parts of Ted Paisnel’s story are a little bit funny. When he was caught by the police with his wacky costume in the back of a stolen car, he told the cops that he was going to an orgy. Also, there’s a part in the beginning of the book where Joan describes finding a story that Ted had written. It was about a child being pecked to death by a chicken. LOL. I wish I could read it. Apparently, he wore an eye-patch for months after watching True Grit because he wanted to be like John Wayne. What a freak.

There were some other interesting parts to the book that I hadn’t read anywhere else. During the second World War, Ted worked as a cobbler for the German forces that had invaded Jersey. He later claimed that the real nature of his work was as a midwife/pallbearer for the countless Russian sex slaves that the Germans had smuggled onto the island. Ted wasn’t clear about whether he had to murder their babies or just dispose of their corpses. It seems very unlikely that there is any truth to this story.

Ted’s wife ran a care home for orphans and children in need, and although Ted worked there regularly, he apparently never abused the kids there. I find that hard to believe. Joan spends a lot of time defending herself in the book, but I don’t trust her. Ted Paisnel was apparently one of three men on the island of Jersey who refused to be fingerprinted during the search for the sex maniac, and the police apparently chased him to his house on the night of one of the attacks. Joan knew about this, but didn’t put 2 and 2 together. Honestly, the fact that she even put her name to this horrible book is enough to make me suspicious of her. If my partner was the real-life cross between Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, I’d move to another country and change my name, not try to profit from it. She seems to have been really good at being oblivious. You’d have to wonder about the poor kids who were in her care.

I don’t really buy any of the black magic/Gilles de Rais stuff in this book. It’s not necessary. Ted Paisnel was as horrible as a person can be. Reading the accounts of what he actually did was deeply upsetting. He seemed to relish the fear and discomfort of his victims. He was a sick piece of scum. He was let out of prison 10 years early and went to live on the Isle of Wight because he didn’t feel welcome on Jersey anymore. He died 3 years later of natural causes. Seems a real pity that he wasn’t given a taste of his own medicine by a disgruntled vigilante.

I had wanted to read this book for a long time, but copies online were too expensive. I came across a cheap copy on my holiday to Ireland last month. It included a Dublin Bus ticket from 1995 that the last reader had used as a bookmark. I generally prefer ebooks at this point, but I have to admit, it felt pretty cool to read a 40+ year old book that hasn’t been cracked in almost 30 years.

The Son of Sam a Satanic Assassin? Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil

The Ultimate Evil: An Investigation into America’s Most Dangerous Satanic Cult – Maury Terry

David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, was a lunatic who shot and killed a bunch of innocent people. When he was arrested, he admitted to all of the killings. After the arrest, a reporter named Maury Terry started researching the murders and became convinced that David Berkowitz was actually involved with a Satanic cult and that he did not commit the murders alone.

While on his killing spree, the killer (at least one of them) sent letters to the police and the press referring to himself as “the son of Sam”. Berkowitz later claimed that Sam was an ancient demon that had possessed his neighbour’s dog. The neighbour’s name was Sam Carr. Terry became convinced that Sam Carr’s actual sons had been Berkowitz’s accomplices.

I’m no expert on this case, but that idea doesn’t seem absolutely unfeasible to me. Berkowitz was well known to the Carr family, and both sons died unnatural deaths shortly after Berkowitz was arrested. Some people who know lots about the case also believe that Berkowitz did not act alone, and it seems impossible to prove that the Carr brothers were not involved.

I knew that the claims in The Ultimate Evil were controversial before I read it, and I went in assuming that most of it was complete bullshit. I knew that there was a Netlix documentary series about it, and I thought that this series was going to be an exposé on how Terry’s ideas were all nonsense. There’s some stuff in the book (Terry’s decoding of the Son of Sam letters and the Roy Radin stuff) that seemed like utter nonsense as I was reading them, but some of it was actually quite convincing. When I watched the Netflix documentary, I expected it to provide refutations of these ideas, but it doesn’t.

Berkowitz started off claiming he acted alone, but he changed his story after spending a bit of time in prison. To this day he claims that he had accomplices. He doesn’t seem like a particularly reliable person though. He clearly enjoys attention, and the Satanic cult claims were probably the most efficient source of attention for an incarcerated murderer in the early 1980s. Both the book and the Netflix documentary series make it seem like Berkowitz was merely telling Terry exactly what he wanted to hear. This muddies the water, but it doesn’t actually discredit all of Terry’s evidence.

Much of what Terry says is clearly conjecture, but I don’t think the idea that Berkowitz had accomplices should be immediately disregarded. Those Carr brothers were definitely weirdoes. Both were scientologists, and one supposedly had a thing for murdering animals.

The Netflix documentary alludes to the fact that this book fed into the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and it features clips of Maury Terry being interviewed alongside my old friend Phil Phillips. I wanted to be able to write-off Terry’s theory about the role of Satanism in the murders, but if you look at the letters, the killer(s) clearly had some interest in occultism. I don’t buy any of the “large, organised network of powerful Satanists” nonsense or any of the crap about the links between the Son of Sam and Charles Manson, but Berkowitz did seem to have some connections to occultism. Nevertheless, Terry’s efforts to bring attention to his work by jumping on the Satanic Panic bandwagon seem to have backfired. There’s a couple of parts where he mistakes Iron Maiden lyrics written on walls for Satanic prayers. When he’s trying to decode the letters he does the old “reading it backwards” trick, and at one point he even references James Blish’s Black Easter. So much of this book is dumb that he interesting parts seemed pretty uninteresting.

One of the main reasons I wanted to read this book was because I had read it contained information on the elusive Four Pi cult, an evil group of weirdos led by “The Great Chingon” that I previously came across in Ed Sanders’ The Family and Gavin Baddeley’s Lucifer Rising. The only information in here that Terry adds is that the group split up at the end of the 60s because some members were too horny. Rereading the passage in question, I realised that Terry’s source was actually Peter Haining’s The Anatomy of Witchcraft, a book which David Berkowitz annotated and sent to the Ward County Sheriff’s Department when they were investigating John Carr’s death. (Needless to say, I have already started reading that book for a future post!)

I actually read the revised edition of The Ultimate Evil. It has a little bit extra on Roy Radin’s death and a few other things. Both editions of this book are extremely long, extremely detailed and ultimately extremely boring. The Netflix documentary is a much clearer way to understand Terry’s ideas. There’s really no need for anyone to slog through this unenjoyable mess (that does, admittedly, make a few good points.)