For others, like Ricky Kasso and Pat Toussaint, it was a strange piece of local history to be worn as a badge of honor.
“Their plan was to dig this skull up,” Richard Schock recalls, “and that would get Ricky and Father Time in touch with their main man, ‘Satin.’ They would then go to the Amityville Horror house to invoke ‘Satin’ and demons by reading incantations on the lawn. I guess they were reading from The Satanic Bible, or whatever. He was a kid who was tripping out of his mind and was probably barely literate. He probably thought Ozzy was into this, or some bullshit like that. . . .”
Bullshit or not, the Suffolk County Police Department was about to become very familiar with what was happening inside their local cemeteries.
Chapter 21
SOMETIME IN EARLY APRIL 1984, a Northport resident reported the grave-digging and vandalism to the Suffolk County Police Department, which immediately opened an investigation. Around the same time, Northport Village Police Officer Anthony Iannone received a tip from a confidential informant that Randy Guethler might have been behind the incident, as several teenagers had seen him with a skeletal hand in the halls of Northport High School. Iannone immediately passed this information on to Suffolk County Detectives Douglas J. Varley and Joseph Saukas, who, on April 8, 1984, decided to confront Guethler directly at his home on Woodbine Avenue.
Randy was very intimidated by this visit, due to his friendship with Detective Varley’s son, Robert. After a brief conversation, Randy broke down and confessed—but not to the crime Varley and Saukas were there to investigate. After all, he and Gordon had robbed the Morrell mausoleum in Northport Rural Cemetery, not Crabmeadow Burying Ground. This revelation momentarily confused the detectives, but they remained silent. Randy told Varley and Saukas everything, and even rode with them to Northport Rural to point out the crypt. Later, the two had Randy sign a written confession and placed him under arrest, charging the sixteen-year-old with felony body stealing.
Varley and Saukas were happy solving a crime they didn’t even know had occurred, but this still left the Crabmeadow case to be closed. While Varley and Saukas continued their investigation, and Randy Guethler prepared for his upcoming court appearance, life carried on as usual for the rest of Northport. As it got warmer, the local youth returned downtown to stake their usual claim in the New Park. Despite the playground—known to locals as “the wood forest”—originally having been built for young children, very few kids under the age of ten dared to go anywhere near it.
“As soon as I began riding my bike downtown when I was around nine or ten years old, I knew from the get-go that Cow Harbor Park was completely dominated by very dangerous teenagers,” recalls Brendan Brown, the boy chased by Ricky on Cherry Street. “By that point, I had already been told, ‘Don’t you ever go into that park.’ It definitely wasn’t a place where even adults in this quaint, pretty little town could bring their kids. That general air of full-blown violence at the drop of a hat was very real. It was like Lord of the Flies.”
The New Park teenagers also enjoyed stealing anything in the area that wasn’t literally nailed to the ground. Johnny Hayward and his friends often broke into liquor stores to steal cases of vodka. Sometimes they would sneak into local bars while they were open, quietly rolling kegs of beer out the back door. On other occasions, the young bandits would return after the bar had closed for the night and steal the cash registers. As they were leaving, Hayward would rip the telephones out of the wall, later selling or trading them for drugs. If they ran out of stolen booze to drink, Johnny would steal from the Budweiser delivery trucks when they came to town.
Stealing had become sport for the New Park teenagers, and Johnny Hayward’s antics were quickly becoming legendary. Unfortunately, his best friend was about to commit a theft that would alter the lives of every single man, woman, and child in Northport forever.
Chapter 22
ON THE CLOUDY, WINDSWEPT EVENING of April 21, 1984, a few of the New Park kids walked to Dave Johnson’s house for a party in his basement. Ricky Kasso was there, and he brought Gary Lauwers along with him. Ricky also brought a special treat—several bags of angel dust he had just picked up from the South Bronx. Stuffed inside Ricky’s leather jacket pocket was a bundle of little manila packets containing crushed mint leaves sprayed with liquid PCP. Each packet was stamped SUDDEN IMPACT in red ink—a crimson testament to the drug’s potency.
After entertaining himself by playing a few Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden records backward to look for demonic messages, Ricky sat on a couch and got high with his friends. Earlier that evening Gary had asked his friend Ellie Love if she wanted to buy some pot with him, as he only had three dollars. Love gave Gary seven bucks and said she would wait for him to return. He never did. Instead Gary bought the weed and walked downtown to sell some to Ricky, who bought a bag, completely unaware that Gary had ripped off a mutual friend to get it.
Later, Ricky rolled a large joint, mixing in some of the PCP-laced mint leaves when Dave wasn’t looking, as his friend didn’t approve of harder drug use in his home. Ricky smoked the “super joint” and eventually passed out while the party continued around him. Gary saw this as a golden opportunity and reached into his friend’s pocket, swiping ten bags of dust. If sold to the right person, the packets could bring him ten bucks apiece. Considering Ricky had passed out around several of his friends, Gary figured he would never get caught. He left the party, stolen packets in tow, and walked over to a friend’s house. There, he smoked a bag of Ricky’s PCP but didn’t enjoy the high. He gave away four of the little envelopes and walked home. The next morning, Easter Sunday, Gary woke up, got dressed, and walked downtown to the New Park with the remaining five bags of dust in his pocket.
He didn’t make it past the parking lot.
Ricky was there waiting and immediately confronted Gary about the theft. He made little effort to conceal his guilt. Searching Gary’s pockets, Ricky found the five envelopes. With one swift punch, he told Gary he had two weeks to pay him back. Gary ran off, leaving Ricky in the parking lot, fuming. For Ricky, this was the ultimate betrayal. After all, he and Gary had known each other since second grade and even played on the same Little League team together—and this was how he chose to honor that bond?
A few moments later a van pulled into the parking lot. Inside were two Cherry Street families who had bought ice cream from a Main Street shop and drove to the New Park to sit and eat. Just as the van entered the lot, Ricky jumped onto its running boards. Filled with anger, he took his frustration out on the two families by pushing his upper body through the front passenger window and hissing at the van’s occupants. Brendan Brown, who was sitting in the back seat, was shocked by the reappearance of the teen who had chased him for his bike.
“His eyes were tremendous,” Brown recalls. “I remember how he just didn’t care at all that he was in somebody else’s car.”
Sitting in the passenger seat, one of Brown’s neighbors pushed Ricky as hard as she could, trying to get the boy out of her van. She quickly realized she wasn’t strong enough to move him, but Ricky soon gave up. He jumped off the van and walked back to his friends, cackling with each loping step his lanky legs took. Much to the surprise and disgust of the van’s occupants, Ricky’s friends joined in with his menacing laughter. Brown’s neighbors quickly turned the van around and headed back to Cherry Street, far away from the dirtbag kids of the New Park.
* * *
In the days following Gary’s theft of the dust, Ricky seemed to be waging an internal war. On one hand, he was still trying to better himself by stopping into the Place to speak with Tony Ruggi and Suzi Strakhov, but on the other, Ricky was feeding his darker obsessions by continuing to read about Satanism and the occult. On April 24 both worlds collided when Ricky found a list of “the dignitaries in Hell” inside a book at the Northport Library and decided to show it to Tony. He made a photocopy of the page in question, stuffed it into his pocket, and walked over to Main Street. After playing guita
r together for a few minutes, Ricky pulled the folded list out of his pocket and laid it before Tony.
“What do you think of this?” Ricky asked.
“What is it?” Tony replied.
“It’s a list of the most powerful demons in Hell,” Ricky said. “I found it in a book.”
Tony pushed the sheet of paper back in Ricky’s direction.
“Don’t you want to know who’s on there?” Ricky asked.
“Nah,” Tony replied. “There might be someone I know on that list.”
Ricky laughed—something Tony was always happy to hear.
“Do you think it’s true?” he asked sincerely.
“Ricky,” Tony replied, “just consider who’s supposedly in Hell to see these people and then came back to write that list.”
“So, this is all bullshit, then?” Ricky asked. “I guess people will believe anything—especially if it scares them. . . .”
Ricky left the Place and walked half a mile up Main Street to the Midway. Also heading there were Detectives Varley and Saukas of the Suffolk County Police Department. Word had finally reached them regarding who was behind the grave-digging inside the Crabmeadow Burying Ground. They had been searching for Ricky, having first stopped at his parents’ house to arrest him. When Varley pulled up to the Kasso house on Seaview Avenue, he was immediately greeted on the front lawn by Dick Kasso.
“Mr. Kasso,” the forty-four-year-old detective began, “I’m Detective Varley with the Suffolk County Police Department. Do you know why I’m here today?”
“Yeah,” Dick answered. “You’re here because my son’s a piece of shit.”
Despite Kasso’s soured view of Ricky, he was ill-prepared for what Varley was about to tell him.
“Mr. Kasso,” Varley continued, “I’m here today because we have reason to believe your son is responsible for robbing a grave over by 25A.”
Kasso was stunned. Drugs? High school rebellion? Theft? These were all unsavory, yet common things among teenagers—but grave robbing? Dick Kasso couldn’t think of a more disgusting label for his son—his own namesake. Once Ricky was caught, it would certainly make the newspapers, and every Suffolk County citizen with a Newsday subscription would see the name “Richard Kasso” associated with the act of desecrating someone’s final resting place. How would this affect him as an educator? Sure, he could write off having a rebellious punk of a kid to his coworkers and students, but how would they react to reading about what Ricky had done in the Crabmeadow Burial Ground?
Varley left the Kasso residence feeling sorry for Dick.
“It appeared to me at the time that Mr. Kasso was a man frustrated about Ricky’s troubles with the police and was fed up with it all,” Varley says.
Later that day Varley and Saukas finally caught up with Ricky at the Midway and arrested him. While searching his pockets for identification or weapons, Varley found Ricky’s photocopied list of demons.
“I pulled that stuff out of his wallet,” Varley recalls. “It was Satanist material. Beelzebub was on there. So was Baal, along with a little session on how to call all these demons up. Shit you’d get out of the library if you looked hard enough. He told me all about who was who and their ranking in Hell.”
Back at the station, Ricky made the surprise move of immediately confessing to the allegations against him. He told Varley and Saukas that he was a Satanist and had planned to use any remains he would have dug up in an occult ceremony.
“His attitude was odd,” Varley says. “He thought little of being arrested and was mostly sneering through the process. I remember Ricky telling me and Joe about some cult of devil worshippers in the city who drank beer from skulls and used bones for their rituals. I think he liked the idea that he was impressing us with how weird he was. I remember getting the feeling that this was a totally lost kid.”
Since there was no evidence to suggest Ricky had stolen anything from the grave, the detectives gave him the lesser charge of violating the public health law. This was only a misdemeanor compared to the felony charge levied against Randy Guethler. Ricky was given a court date of June 18 and was released from custody.
“Shortly afterward, I was interviewed on a radio show regarding the grave robbing,” Varley recalls. “As soon as it aired, I was getting calls from all sorts of crackpots. One called me from England, offering to conduct cleansing rituals in Northport. Finally, my supervisors said, ‘Enough, Dougie . . .’ ”
To this day, Doug Varley is convinced that Ricky and Randy robbed more graves than the ones they were caught for. However, with his superiors telling him to back off due to the negative press Northport was receiving, no one can ever be sure.
* * *
Word of Ricky’s arrest eventually made it to Inside Newsday, the fledgling broadcast television branch of one of New York’s biggest newspapers. The story caught the eye of Rex Smith, a thirty-two-year-old reporter who had been with Newsday for three years before moving from the newsroom to their new TV division.
“At the time, it just seemed like one of those weird Long Island stories,” Smith recalls. “A teenage grave robber? Really?”
Smith assembled a three-man camera crew and traveled to Northport in search of Ricky, using an old yearbook photo as a guide. After several failed attempts, Smith finally called the Northport Village Police Department and asked Chief Howard where he might find the accused grave robber.
“Probably at the Midway,” Howard told Smith. “You can always find him there.”
Smith and his crew then drove to the infamous head shop on the hill, and sure enough, they saw Ricky walking out of the Midway just as they were parking.
“Hey, Ricky!” Smith hollered as he jumped out of the car. “You got just a minute?”
“Whatever,” he replied nonchalantly as he walked over to Smith.
Smith’s crew set up, aiming the camera at Ricky, with the Midway displayed prominently behind him. During the brief interview, Ricky brushed off the arrest.
“I went through a phase a little while ago where I was into devil-worshipping,” he told Smith. “I was into drugs and stuff.”
Surprisingly, Ricky didn’t boast of his supposed connections to Satanic cults who drank beer from human skulls, as he had to the Suffolk County Police. In fact, he backpedaled when pressed on the issue.
“The cops exaggerated the Satanic stuff because they found a picture of the devil in my wallet,” Ricky claimed.
When the interview ended, and the equipment was packed up, Smith left Northport empathizing with Ricky.
“He seemed to be one of those forgotten suburban kids,” Smith says. “He was probably wearing the same clothes all week, eating donuts and chips, and living off the goodness of other kids’ parents. He didn’t exude any evil sensibility to me at all. He was more like a stoner, actually. Later, I was told that when he was high on PCP, he got frenetic and vicious, but this was just a normal teenage pothead, in my view—a kid who probably would have managed to get himself straightened out before his life got into big trouble. . . .”
Despite what Ricky told Rex Smith, his Satanic “phase” was far from over. On the night of Monday, April 30, 1984—while Gary Lauwers was celebrating his final birthday alive—Ricky and Pagan Pat traveled twenty miles outside of Northport to the Amityville Horror house, hoping to have a celebration of their own. It was Walpurgis Night, an evening Bram Stoker once described as being a time when “according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad—when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. . . .”
Much to their disappointment, however, Ricky and Pat would have to revel in this macabre holiday sans human skull. And while a few sleepy-eyed residents of Ocean Avenue may have been inconvenienced by the duo’s hooting and hollering on the front lawn, no members of the DeFeo family rose from the grave to walk the earth. Nor did Satan—or “Satin”—make an appearance.
After a few minutes, Ricky a
nd Pat gave up and returned to the pedestrian streets of Northport.
Chapter 23
THURSDAY, MAY 3, 1984
“DAD, I’M SICK. I THINK I have pneumonia. Can I come home?”
Dick Kasso gripped the telephone in his hand and thought long and hard about what Ricky was asking. He wasn’t eager to have his drug-dealing, knife-carrying, grave-robbing son back in the house, but Ricky’s illness might lend itself well to a possible recovery plan.
“You can come home,” Dick said, “but only if you check yourself into a psychiatric hospital and get some help.”
Ricky, tired of sleeping on a pile of trash behind the Midway, agreed, and walked back home. He arrived hoping to lie down on a bed for the first time in months. However, when he went upstairs to relax, he discovered his parents had given his bedroom to Kelly, who had previously shared one with Jody. Dick and Lynn told their son he could have the couch in the basement playroom. Ricky didn’t put up a fight and went downstairs to stretch out, his cough growing worse.
Once Dick was confident that Ricky was out of earshot, he turned to his wife and said, “You know, I think he’s finally going to get his act together.”
Normally, Lynn would have been surprised by Dick’s sudden display of optimism regarding their son, but by now, she was worn out.
“Don’t expect this to be permanent,” she told her husband. “He’s going to do this again.”
“No, no,” Dick replied. “I think this is going to be it. He even agreed to go into a mental hospital.”
“No, Dick,” Lynn insisted. “Please. I’ve watched it. He is going to do this again and again and again. . . .”
Despite her skepticism, Lynn called Huntington Hospital and asked if her son could be admitted into the psychiatric ward once he was brought in to be treated for a possible case of pneumonia. Lynn was told Ricky could only be admitted if a psychiatrist approved. She was given the phone number of a highly recommended doctor, whom Lynn called, asking if she could bring Ricky over for an evaluation. She told the psychiatrist about her son’s recent grave-robbing arrest, his obsession with Satan, daily hallucinogenic use, and his habit of carrying a knife around the house.
The Acid King Page 11