Abomination: Devil Worship and Deception in the West Memphis Three Murders

by Ramsey, William

One night, Jim became convinced that Satan was wrenching his soul from his body. He was so frightened that he climbed into bed with his dismayed parents. He was 17. "Just watch me during the night while I sleep," he asked, "and wake me up if it looks like I'm having any trouble."

  Although his parents were puzzled, Jim made no secret of "the voice" at school. He told classmates who teased him about his "invisible friend" that it was no figment of his imagination. The friend, unbidden, would appear and make him do things, Jim said.

  When one girl asked Jim if it was true that he sacrificed cats, he said yes, that he liked to taste the blood because it was sweet. What about dogs, she asked. Their blood was just as good. What about humans?

  "Haven't got to them yet," Jim replied.231

  Jim, Ron and Pete would wear their scariest clothes to the indoor mall in Joplin and shout “Satan loves you” to frightened shoppers. Jim Hardy signed junior yearbooks with “In Satan’s name we pray.” Strangely, committed Satanist Hardy became student council president, and stated openly that his life would not be complete until he killed someone. They looked for a suitable victim, and found one in overweight outsider Steve Newberry. They planned to commit the crime on Halloween. Steve Newberry’s mother suspected something was amiss, and decided to take her four children out of town that weekend. Their plot to kill was open and notorious: other students heard them discussing their desire to kill Newberry in the school lunchroom.

  With the three teens still stalking Steve Newberry, Jim Hardy invited him to go kill some animals in the woods over the Thanksgiving Day weekend. This would be the third attempt to kill Steve in a month, the plot referred to by Jim as “the action.” While they did not follow through with their plan to kill Steve, they did find a suitable location: an abandoned well they called the “Well of Hell.” On December 6th, 1987, all the teens re-visited the Well of Hell, where they beat Steve to death with baseball bats. After it was over, Jim Hardy stood over his dying body and said “Sacrifice to Satan.” They then bound his hands with twine, weighted his body with a 200 pound stone, and dropped him into the well. They cleaned the area as much as possible and hid the bats in nearby brush.

  Schoolmate Lance Owens had gone to Pete Roland’s house the morning after the killing for a ride to school, and Pete had told him all about the murder. In art class, Jim Hardy also excitedly told Lance "We did it! We did it!” Steve Newberry's youngest sister, 14-year-old Christina, called her mother from school that afternoon with disturbing news: three friends of hers had overheard Jim Hardy and Pete Roland laughing in the hall. They bragged about stabbing an overweight person to death. All three teens were arrested the next day. One of the officers noted that the accused teens exhibited no remorse. At Pete Roland’s trial, Dr. Carl Raschke, author of Painted Black, testified on the subject of Satanism.

  Jim Hardy, Pete Roland and Ronald Clements received life imprisonment for the murder of Steve Newberry. By Detective Mike Randolph's count, a dozen or more students had heard the killers make references to human sacrifice before Steve died, and some had even heard Steve Newberry mentioned by name. Ray Dykens said: "It was right under a lot of people's noses, evidently, and nobody noticed it, or if they did, nobody took it seriously." A few investigators remain convinced that there is more to the slaying than just the death of Steve Newberry. Dozens of adults around Jasper County related to authorities bizarre occurrences they hadn't considered reporting until after the killing: naked people chanting in the woods, dog heads hanging from cave entrances, kids in robes killing animals in an old schoolhouse, a slaughtered rabbit on a front porch with "Die" written in blood, piles of skinned dogs with their hearts cut out, satanic graffiti everywhere. The Hardy Boy murders reek of a networked Satanic coven.

  From his cell Jim [Hardy] wrote Pete Roland a letter recently, and admitted that Satan had tricked them.

  "I don't even know why we killed Steve," he says now. "It was like any other animal we killed."

  Jim never did feel the surge of power he thought Satan had promised him in exchange for the ultimate proof. Not long ago, the voice came back, the one that told him to do it now.

  Softly he repeats the words he insists Satan whispered inside his troubled young mind:

  Just open the door once and I promise I'll never let you go.232

  Adolfo Jesus Costanzo

  El Padrino

  The Matamoros Killings

  (1989)

  On March 14, 1989, Mark Kilroy, a promising, young college student at the University of Texas in Austin, went missing in the border town of Matamoros, just south of the Texas border. Out drinking, he became separated in the early morning from his group of inebriated friends and could not be found. The next day Kilroy’s family spearheaded a wide-ranging search for their missing son.

  Four weeks later, on April 9th, a strange event led police to the killer of Mark Kilroy. The nephew of a drug runner in Matamoros casually ran a local police roadblock maintained by police and supported by Mexican federales. Instead of stopping and arresting the lawbreaker, Mexican police secretly followed him to a ranch, where they searched for drugs. While scouring the ranch for evidence of crime, a customs official showed the ranch caretaker a picture of Mark Kilroy. To the surprise of the local police, the caretaker confirmed that Mark Kilroy had been at the ranch, and directed the police to a storage shed located at a corner of the property. What investigators would find inside the shed terrified the Mexican police and transformed the investigation from drug trafficking into mass murder.

  Melted candles, cigar butts and empty liquor bottles littered the floor inside the darkness of the shed. To the local police, this indicated a use in black magic operations. A history of witchcraft pervaded the border towns of northern Mexico, reaching back to the Spanish conquest. Police soon recognized that the group who owned the ranch not only dealt drugs, but practiced black magic. After interrogating the landowners, they confessed to killing Mark Kilroy. More than fifteen bodies were found at the ranch. Many of the victims were horrifically disfigured. The ranch owners implicated Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo as their brujo, or black witch. His accomplice was a Texas college student---Sara Villareal Aldrete. While she claimed Costanzo taught her everything she knew about magic, she more than likely learned to practice witchcraft from her family or childhood friends. Recognizing police were looking for them, both Costanzo and Aldrete fled to Mexico City. Eventually cornered in a hideout, Costanzo directed a disciple to execute him with a hail of machine gun fire.

  Adolfo Constanzo practiced palo mayombe, a darker version of Caribbean santeria. Born in the Caribbean and raised in Miami, Costanzo spoke both Spanish and English. He came from an intergenerational witchcraft family: his mother was known in the local community as a Santeria witch, and her mother was rumored to have been a witch in Cuba. Mutilated animals littered the neighborhood where Costanzo grew up; his mother wanted to keep the other residents quiet through fear and intimidation. At fourteen, his mother considered young Adolfo a psychic prodigy. When Adolfo moved to Mexico City, he carried with him an intimate knowledge of mind control, New Age principles, and psychic techniques. Costanzo provided psychic and astrological readings to the Mexico City glitterati for thousands of dollars a session. In reality, he was more than a mere practitioner of Caribbean magic and/or the New Age---he can best be referred to in general terms as a Satanist.

  The Matamoros crime “family” were drug runners who sought the assistance of Costanzo to overcome obstacles in their illicit venture in the face of mounting pressure from rivals and police. The sacrifices they carried out were conducted with extreme brutality and cruelty---one victim was skinned alive. The practice of Satanism, including practices of bloodletting and torture, created fear and terror in the hearts of its drug running competitors and insured personal loyalty and control of the Matamoros group by Costanzo.

  Beast of Satan killers

  Daniel and Manuela Ruda

  (2002)

  In 2002, a German couple killed a man---st
abbing him 66 times in a Satanic ritual in a trial that fascinated and horrified Germany. Daniel and Manuela Ruda never denied killing their victim, but argued it was not murder because they were acting on the Devil's orders. They beat the man with a hammer, then drank his blood. The decomposing body of the dead man, Frank Haagen, was found in the couple's flat with a scalpel protruding from his stomach and a pentagram carved into his chest. The couple showed no remorse for their crime and shocked the court with their extroverted behavior, striking defiant poses for photographers.

  Note the pentagram on Manuela’s ring finger

  Accounts of the gruesome killing, which occurred in a room full of human skulls, cemetery lights, and a coffin in which Manuela slept, were covered in detail by the German media.

  Manuela Ruda, aged 23, told the court that Satan had called her when she was 14. She said she shunned strong light and had become involved in vampirism at "bite parties" in London. After contacting willing blood donors on the Internet, she learned to drink blood at the "bite parties."233 They would bite all parts of the body except the jugular, which was strictly forbidden. Then Manuela delivered her soul to Satan, who had ordered the "sacrifice" in what she described as an aura of light and energy. Daniel and Manuela considered themselves merely Satan's instruments and had to "make sure the victim suffered well."234 After killing their victim, who worked with Daniel selling car parts, the couple said they attempted suicide during several days on the run. Daniel also bought a chainsaw, saying he did not want to be empty-handed when the Devil ordered him to kill again.

  14. CAUSE CELEBRE KILLERS

  Jack Abbott

  In the Belly of the Beast

  Born on a U.S. military base in 1944, Jack Abbott’s mother was alleged to be a Chinese prostitute. After spending most of his youth in refrom schools, Abbott got nabbed forging checks, earning him a five year sentence in the Utah State Penitentiary. While interred in prison in 1965, he stabbed and killed another inmate, adding another 5 to 20 years to his sentence. He escaped, but was soon caught and sent to the federal prison.

  While in prison, he spent his time reading; he preferred the works of classical philosophers. His literary skills increased, and after hearing about Norman Mailer’s interest in the Gary Gilmore murder case (which occurred in Utah in 1976-7), he sent a letter to the author offering expert insights into the federal criminal justice system. Mailer, impressed with Abbott’s letter, supported the release of the convicted murderer. Mailer also worked to get his book based on their correspondence published by Random House publishing. Mailer wrote that Abbott “had the makings of a powerful and important American writer and I have encouraged him in that direction.”235

  Mailer attended Abbott’s parole hearing and passionately argued for his parole as a now reformed aesthete. Released as a conditional parolee employed by Mailer in 1981, Abbott appeared on television and was lauded as a reformed killer. His book, In the Belly of the Beast, became a nationwide bestseller. Toasted by the New York literati, his book earned a review by the New York Times Book Review. He even stayed with Mailer at his house in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Strangely, Abbott dedicated his book to Carl Pazram, a serial killer responsible for twenty-one deaths and additional rapes. Six weeks after his release, Abbott stabbed to death Richard Adan, a twenty-two year old waiter, over an argument about the use of a restaurant bathroom. Norman Mailer, Susan Sarandon, and actor Christopher Walken attended his trial in Manhattan. Found guilty, he returned to jail with a fifteen years-to-life sentence. Denied parole, Abbott hanged himself with a shoelace and a bedsheet in 2002.

  The Vienna Strangler

  Jack Unterwager

  Nicknamed “The Vienna Strangler,” Jack Unterwager was not the average killer. The offspring of a prostitute, he rose above his poor, neglected childhood and became lauded by the literary elite in Vienna, Austria. What separated his murders from other killers was the attention paid to him by the Austrian cognoscenti. Living a life of petty crime which included pimping and burgalry, he committed fifteen separate offenses between the age of sixteen and twenty-five, landing him in and out of prison like an Austrian Charles Manson. A psychologist who interviewed Unterwager described him as:

  an emotionally impoverished, sexually sadistic psychopath with narcissistic and histrionic tendencies. He tends to sudden fits of rage and anger...His physical activities are enormously aggressive, with sexually sadistic perversion.236

  He was convicted of the murder of a prostitute in 1976 and earned a life sentence. Unable to read at the time of his conviction, incarceration provided time for study, and soon he began writing poems, short stories and plays about his criminal past:

  I wielded my steel rod among prostitutes in Hamburg, Munich, and Marseilles...I had enemies and I conquered them through my inner hatred.

  I was no knave, but a beast, a devil, an ungrateful child who was happy to be bad. I had no remorse.237

  Unterwager eagerly proffered himself to the credulous public as a victim of the system. Due to his notoriety throughout Austria and his growing esteem within the literary community, demands began for his release.

  Authorities decided to release him upon parole. After leaving prison, he attended opening nights and literary events, where he was fawned upon by his admirers. His book about prison life, Purgatory---A Trip to Prison, sold thousands of copies and was turned into a critically acclaimed film. Television and radio hosts coveted him for interviews. Intelligent, handsome and nattily dressed, he reached a level of celebrity envied by other lettered members of Austrian educated classes. Unfortunately, he remained a killer. Soon after his release, prostitutes began disappearing in Austria, and the police nicknamed the unknown assailant the "Vienna Woods Killer."

  Unterwager involved himself in the mysterious deaths. He interviewed police officers and prostitutes, including the police officer responsible for the “Vienna Woods” murder cases. Unterwager took perverse pleasure in calling the relatives of his victims. In one known message, he said:

  They lie in the place of atonement, facing downward, toward Hades, because otherwise it would have been an outrage.238

  A retired police officer noticed that the killings began after the parole of Unterwager. A serious investigation began by the Austrian federal police, with Unterwager as the main suspect. The largest murder hunt in Austrian history involved police from all parts of the nation. He was an unlikely suspect: his post-release life was comfortable, he was a successful writer and a darling of Vienna society. Friends in the media soon realized that an aura of police suspicion surrounded Unterwager, but many refused to believe he returned to killing prostitutes. They had invested time and energy working to rehabilitate Unterwager and his reputation and publicly maintained that the investigators were unjustly persecuting the convicted murderer.

  Unterwager obtained an opportunity to write about American crime, and left for Los Angeles, staying in seedy hotels, where prostitutes began turning up dead in the city with the same modus operandi. Three murders happened in Los Angeles in fifteen days. The three victims were tied with similar ligatures, using an intricate slipknot. Concurrent police investigations into a serial killer began in departments separated by over ten thousand miles. Eventually, the Austrian police realized that Unterwager may have killed women in Los Angeles.

  Working with the Los Angeles Police Department, the police in Austria obtained enough evidence to arrest Unterwager. Avoiding the police attempt to arrest him, Unterwager fled to Miami, Florida. He maintained his innocence to his journalism friends, stating that there was no credible evidence implicating him, and offering an alibi for each accusal of murder. He said that the authorities singled him out because they were jealous of his release and wanted him returned to jail, regardless of the evidence. American agents tracked him down, and after attempting to flee from federal officers, he was arrested. Afraid of the gas chamber in California, he agreed to be deported back to Austria, where public opinion remained positive. Arriving back in Vien
na on May 28th, 1992 with a smirk on his face, he intended to outwit the system. While incarcerated he frequently gave interviews with journalists and continued to profess his innocence. No one could believe Unterwager was guilty of the killings. He convinced many that he was being framed by a biased judicial system. Prior to trial, the supposedly innocent Unterwager slit his wrists in a vain attempt at suicide.

  Austria is not the United States; the country had no experience with serial killers. The largest serial murder trial in Austrian history began in June of 1994. In Austria, this was the trial of the century. An intelligent and composed Unterwager stated his “some other guy did it” (SOGDI) defense on the stand:

  I am counting on your aquittal because I am not the culprit. Your decision will affect not only me but the real killer, who is laughing up his sleeve.239

  During the two month trial, supporters of Unterwager began falling away as more evidence became public. Eventually all that remained in support were a few girlfriends and his attorneys.

  In Austria, on June 28th, 1994, Unterwager was found guilty of nine murders, including the three murders that occurred in Los Angeles. Of the eight member jury, six found him guilty, two could not convict. In the United States, he would have walked free; in Austria, he received life in prison, but the duration of the sentence would never be served: Unterwager hanged himself within six hours of the sentence, using a ligature similar to those used on the prostitutes he murdered. His most recent girlfirend wasn’t sure if she would be the next victim. Many of his followers remain convinced he was not capable of the murders. His conviction and death left many questions unanswered: how could so many educated, upper-middle class people be deceived? How did they believe the phony narrative provided by Unterwager for so long? Why did so many people support him, considering his lengthy arrest record that included the murder of a prostitute?