LUKE WOODHAM
In a more recent and similarly bizarre chain of events, a group of highschoolers in Pearl, Mississipi banded together with a pact for sowing destruction in their small Bible Belt town. After killing his 50-year-old mother with repeated stab wounds early in the morning on October 1, 1997, Luke Woodham arrived at 7:55 A.M. to the Commons Room of the town high school and proceeded to open fire with a .30-30 rifle on the crowd of fellow students in the building, methodically executing two girls and wounding two others during the shooting spree. According to Joel Myrick, an assistant principal who later caught him, Woodham calmly walked down the hall “like he was out on a Sunday stroll.”57 After tackling him outside after he left the building, Myrick demanded of the boy, “Why did you do that?” Woodham, who held a job as a delivery boy, replied, “I’m the one who gave you the discount on the pizza the other night.”58 He later stated, “The world wronged me and I couldn’t take it any more.”59 As it turned out, Woodham’s attack at Pearl High School was not his the first explosion of violence from the otherwise quiet and introverted student. A diary/manifesto was later found which detailed previous actions: “On Saturday of last week, I made my first kill. The victim was a loved one, my dear dog Sparkle. ... I will never forget the howl she made. It sounded almost human.”60 Woodham and another accomplice sprayed solvent down the dog’s throat, stuffed it in a sack before dousing the bag with lighter fluid, lit it, and drowned the creature in a pond. Describing the sack sinking into the water, Woodham wrote, “It was true beauty.”61
Police later discovered that Woodham was part of a group of boys led by Grant Boyette, an 18-year-old the others referred to as “Father.” Allegedly he prayed to Satan and admired Hitler and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The watchword of the group was: “We can’t move forward until all our enemies are gone.”62
Another boy involved in the group, Allen Shaw, claimed that in addition to talking about killing, Boyette and his followers worshipped demons and attempted to summon them to do their bidding. Supposedly the ultimate goals for the seven-member group of outcasts were money and power. Conspiratorial plans for mayhem had been concocted where they would cut the phone lines before utilizing homemade napalm to torch the high school. The boys would eventually escape to Cuba via Louisiana and Mexico after slaughtering their enemies.
In the aftermath of the killings and subsequent discovery of the group, the townspeople of Pearl desperately attempted to make sense of the carnage in their midst. With no clear rationale for the behavior of Boyette and his disciples, it was easy for the predominantly Christian community to arrive at supernatural explanations. As the father of a 15-year-old in the town told the Los Angeles Times, “It’s the grip of evil is what it is.”63
FINLAND
In Norway, the Black Metal crime wave reached a low ebb when the most active members landed in jail following the police crackdown. With the majority of the trend setters either dead or growing too old to play with matches, the blaze of church burnings flickered out, although sporadic attacks do still occur.
Nevertheless, the scene continues to grow internationally and the grotesque glamour of Black Metal finds new legions of adherents. Such is the case in Finland, which has had a small but thriving Black Metal scene of its own for many years. Finnish groups like Beherit and Impaled Nazarene have enjoyed considerable success worldwide, paving the way for many fans to form their own bands and follow in their footsteps. And just as in Norway, segments of the Black Metal subculture also wed themselves to an especially virulent strain of teenaged Satanism.
Ari Soronen, an officer connected with the Finnish Criminal Police, estimates that there are about 200 Satanists in Finland. It seems likely that the word “Black Metal fans” could be substituted for “Satanists” here, for even though Finland also has a small contingent of law-abiding black magicians (Finland’s most famous public Satanist actually holds a job as a customs official), the teenage Satanists comprise the majority. They wear the distinctive Black Metal make-up, which gives cause for some Finns to call them “penguins,” and they flock to music festivals where their favorite bands play. Most of them do nothing illegal, but that does not mean they shouldn’t be taken seriously. Soronen is especially concerned about the young girls in the scene. “I have spoken with girls as young as 12 that have been sexually abused,” he says.
BEHERIT
FINNISH HEADLINE: “HUNDREDS OF TEENAGERS ARE COMMITTED TO WORSHIPPING EVIL”
Merja Hermonen, a researcher with a clerical background, more or less agrees with Soronen’s assess-ment of the situation: “I have no reason to doubt that the stories about sexual abuse are true, but I don’t think things like that had anything to do with rituals as such. These kids are more into graveyard vandalism, and in a few cases some of them tried to dig up human bones. But there are just a few cases, and I think the scene is stabilizing at the moment.”
FINNISH HEADLINE: “DEVIL WORSHIPPERS ATE PART OF THEIR VICTIM: THE LEADER
OF THE GANG AND A 17-YEAR-OLD GIRL CHOPPED UP THE CORPSE ”
Sami Tenetz writes about Black Metal for the Finnish Heavy Metal magazine Suomi Finland Perkele. He also plays in the band Thy Serpent. Despite the fact that it isn’t a Black Metal band, Thy Serpent still attracts some of the corpsepainted crowd to its shows. “There aren’t many true Black Metalers around. Most of them only follow the trend because it has criminal associations. Their mental state is really bad, but that is usually because of problems at home, and not because of Black Metal or Satanism,” he says.
Unlike the scene in Norway, the crimes connected with Black Metal in Finland emanate from the fans, not the prominent artists. Despite its small size, this confused scene has produced one of the grisliest events to arise anywhere out of the Black Metal phenomenon. In one of the most notable cases in Finnish court history, four young Black Metalers murdered a friend in a scenario which featured overtones of Satanic sacrifice, cannibalism, and necrophilia.
At the time of this writing, the court case is not yet resolved, with some sentences (including a life sentence for the main defendant) being appealed. Therefore, those that could shed some light on the subject are politely but firmly refusing to give any comment. Reporting on the case is further complicated by the fact that the court has implemented a forty-year secrecy act on the entire legal proceedings. This means that many details will unavoidably remain sketchy. It is possible to piece some elements together, but the result is hardly a complete picture.
Hyvinkää is typical of the small towns that exist as satellites around larger cities, a commuter-friendly train ride away from the capital of Helsinki. Like other towns in the south of Finland, where the Swedish influence has been the strongest, it also has a Swedish name: Hyvinge. On November 24, 1998, a severely mutilated male human leg was found at a garbage dump in the town. Subsequent discoveries of other body parts in similarly inappropriate places made it possible to eventually identify the body of a young Black Metal enthusiast. After investigating the affair, the police finally arrested four of the victim’s closest friends, some of whom had even lived with him, who were charged with murder.
FINNISH HEADLINE: “JARNO ELG EVEN TORTURED HIS DOG TO DEATH”
A bizarre tale began to unfold in the Finnish media. On November 21, 1998, a gang of five black-clad youths visited a mobile Christian teahouse. Having become agitated after arguing with the Christians, they returned to the dreary apartment in Hyvinkää where a couple of them lived. Their apartment building is situated in a block that is perhaps the closest to a slum that the town has to offer, an area well known to the police as the source of many a domestic disturbance call. The locals sarcastically refer to this depressing section of Torikatu Street as “Luotikuja” (bullet alley). After arriving at the shabby apartment, the five youngsters listened to Black Metal records and drank heavily. The quintet were notorious imbibers of a drink called “Kilju,” a beverage brewed by adding yeast to orange juice and letting it ferment. Kilju smells ba
d and tastes worse, and, as can be imagined, this moonshine is only popular with those who demand nothing more than high octane from their liquor. To satisfy the thirst of the Black Metalers, there was usually a vat of Kilju going in the apartment.
FINNISH HEADLINE: “LIFE SENTENCE FOR THE MAIN DEFENDANT IN THE DISMEMBERMENT HOMICIDE—WERE THE VERDICTS SEVERE ENOUGH?”
As the party got wilder, the details become hazy. The little information that is available to the public is contained in the application for a summons, a document penned by the District Attorney of Hyvinkää. It should be kept in mind that this is a statement from the prosecutor, and as such represents only one side of an ongoing court case.
For reasons that are unclear, the group turned against the fifth member, subjecting him to a series of punishments and humiliations. As the situation escalated, the apartment became the scene of what the application for a summons calls “...sadomasochistic acts requiring the subjugation of the victim, such as burning the victim with hot metal and leading him on all fours like a dog around the apartment.” The victim was also urinated upon. Alternately fainting and regaining consciousness, the victim was stabbed with scissors and “...his mouth was shut with a piece of duct tape, which the victim however was able to tear off. He begged the subjugators for mercy and promised them not to tell anybody about their acts. [...] As he went on moaning, his whole head, including the mouth and the nose, was taped.” (When visiting the building, we found that sound easily carries through the doors and walls of the apartments, so forcing the victim to keep quiet would be very important.) He was then stabbed to death.
After the victim died, the group “...started to carry out the rituals of Satanic worship known to them. They mutilated the corpse with scissors, dug out the inner organs, especially the heart out of the chest, cut off the genitals, as well as practiced cannibalism, necrophilia, and the disgracing of the victim’s sawn-off head by drilling the eyes, and other acts included in Satan worship.” (It should be mentioned that the District Attorney, Erkki Koivusilta, feels that the murder was not a ritual in itself, but was an emulation of things the gang had picked up in books and horror films.) After they finished their grisly business, the youths sawed the remains of the victim to pieces and then spread them to dustbins and garbage dumps around the area—where they were eventually found, leading to the arrest of the four killers. The man unanimously pointed to as the leader of the quartet was 23-year-old Jarno Elg, who apparently wielded considerable influence over his 17-year-old girlfriend and two male friends, respectively 20 and 16 years old.
The police have stated to the media that the murderers bragged about their acts to friends. The rumors supposedly spread like wildfire through the little scene, but were kept within it, partly due to fear of the killers but also because of a code of silence similar to the one found in biker gangs or the Omerta code of the Mafia. All the participants in the crime were deeply involved in Black Metal. This as also true for the victim, who had played in a Black Metal band called Utuk Xul. He had an unsavory reputation in the Black Metal scene, and yet was apparently admired by several others—some say simply because he was old enough to be looked up to by younger kids.
Finnish society reacted to the crime in a similar manner to how Norway did when first confronted with the criminal excesses of its own Black Metal scene more than five years earlier. Finnish newspapers screamed out headlines full of phrases like “Ritualistic Murder” and “Satan Told Me To Do It.” Jarno Elg was described by a journalist at the influential Hufvudstadsbladet newspaper as one of the two most hated men in Finland. This was probably not an exaggeration.
On the road that led Jarno Elg to the apartment in Hyvinkää, his life seems to have taken a serious detour. His career as a glue-sniffer and aspiring alcoholic led to psychiatric care at the young age of 11. He tried hashish the following year. By the time he was 16, young Jarno was drinking daily and devouring books on Satanism. This diet of Kilju, psychoactive chemicals, and teenaged Satanism was bound to go awry. In 1992, Elg and a friend decided to set fire to a medieval church in his neighborhood. The church was made of stone, so they set fire to the altar, the organ, and whatever else they could get to burn. When the fire department arrived, Elg did not try to escape, but instead cheered at the firemen.
Jarno Elg has been described as a bully type, but he seems to have been charismatic enough to gather a small circle of alienated youngsters around him. The clique were outsiders even to the Black Metal scene, and in the Hyvinkää apartment they cooked up their own version of Satanism, stirring various Wiccan and New Age flavors into the pot, and acting out rituals on a nearby hill. Money was made by shoplifting, and Elg seems to have had plenty of time to construct a world of his own and gradually slip into it.
In a side story that did little to help his image, it turned out that Jarno Elg had killed his dog in the same apartment on Halloween, twenty-one days before he turned on his friend. The killing of his unfortunate canine companion followed a similar pattern to that of the later murder: its head was taped before it was abused and stabbed with scissors. It is difficult not to see the killing as a rehearsal for bigger, badder things.
The researcher Merja Hermonen observed the actual court proceedings for a week. While she is careful to point out that she never talked to the perpetrators herself, and thus can only offer her personal opinions, she kindly agreed to relate some of her impressions of the murderers. “They were seeking something, like young people often do. I even had the feeling that they were changing their statements along the way. It seems like they are very lonely people. They are emotional outsiders, some of them in very profound ways,” Hermonen explains.
Since those who could shed some light on the motive for the murder are unable to talk due to the court’s gag order, Finland is rife with rumors. Speculations regarding the motive range from jealousy over Jarno’s girlfriend, to drug debt or just downright sadism. Some say that the killing might have been the result of a game that got out of hand as a blood-frenzy overtook the participants. All these theories are impossible to prove or disprove and, seeing as some of them even contradict each other, they should all be taken with liberal doses of skepticism.
In a surprise development in the case, Jarno Elg gave an interview to the Finnish magazine Hymy in its October 1999 issue. In the interview he tries to explain the murder more as a result of drunkenness than of Satanism. He also denies eating part of his victim’s remains, claiming that the cannibalism was something that his group bragged about to his friends. And while it is nearly impossible to discern a motive for this sort of murder, it is almost as difficult to understand why someone would go around bragging about eating part of his friend. Unless, perhaps, the parallels to the suicide of Dead can provide some clue. And if that theory is taken one step further, the case begins to look like a peculiar form of Norwegian cultural export.
A chain of reasoning might be as follows: Black Metal bands like Venom intended their Satanic image as a joke, but the music they created was imported to Norway and picked up by teenagers who were inclined to take this form of showbiz Satanism at face value. Then the Norwegian bands upped the ante by creating a reality out of Venom’s weird fantasy world—a reality which commanded international respect in a youth culture that venerates not only those who “talk the talk,” but those who “walk the walk” as well. Thus Norway in turn exported something that was one step even further toward the extreme. And if the Finnish killers are indeed the spiritual children of the Norwegian scene, they seem to have been intent, consciously or not, upon doing their Norwegian models one better—or worse.
If the description provided by the District Attorney is accurate, the murder itself appears so violent that it borders on a horror fantasy, almost as if it were the most puerile and excessive Black Metal lyric made flesh. This point was not lost on the media either, who claimed that the murder was directly inspired by a song by the band Ancient.
Even with her clerical background, Merja Hermonen warns a
gainst emphasizing the Black Metal connection too strongly when making observations about the defendants from the Hyvinkää case: “They have the same problems as all other young people. Problems that aren’t resolved continue to pile up until something goes wrong. To blame Satanism is scapegoating. If you focus on Satan, you don’t see the real reasons—and then you can’t do anything about them.”
Whether or not Mrs. Hermonen is right will perhaps become clear in the year 2038.
IS IT A DREAM
THAT I THINK I SEE,
OR IS IT RAGNARÖK?
DO DEAD MEN RIDE
AS YOU SPUR ON
YOUR HORSES,
OR IS IT A RETURN HOME
GRANTED TO WARRIORS?
—“HELGAKVIDHA HUNDINGSBANA II,” THE POETIC EDDA1
13
RAGNARÖK
THE SIGNS OF CHRISTIANITY’S INFLUENCE ON WESTERN CULTURE ARE EVERYWHERE. God is regularly invoked in the speeches of the politicians, and references to his name flow throughout the streams of secular society. God is impossible to avoid. It is thus not surprising that those who proclaim themselves “fists in the face of God” (to borrow a phrase from Fenriz of Darkthrone), would end up attacking society as a whole.2 It is also not surprising that in their desire to crush Christianity they should adopt a new belief—real or symbolic—in other deities and demons. Spirituality is innate to the human psyche, and has a way of rearing its head even in the most rational and atheistic of people. The same person who rids himself of one theology may well harbor a desire for a new faith—one full of mighty and unforgiving gods, capable of smashing away the ruins of the old.
Lords of Chaos Page 41
