METAL MADE ME DO IT

The most depraved, despicable, and disturbing acts ever blamed on hard rock

By Brandon Geist
Photo by Anna Dickson

When, on April 16 of this year, the news broke that a madman had shot up the campus of Virginia Tech, we were all full of questions. How many people had been killed? Who was the gunman? How could this happen? And—at least for everyone in the Revolver office—how long until we find out that the shooter listened to metal and the music we love takes the fall?

Because it’s gotten to that point: Ever since 1985, when the PMRC (the Parents Music Resource Center) targeted nine metal bands—including Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe, and Mercyful Fate—in its list of the so-called “filthy fifteen,” heavy music has been a favorite scapegoat for the moral majority. It’s simply easier to point the finger at some long-haired “freak” in a band than to try and unravel the intractable knot of familial dysfunctional, mental illness, substance abuse, profound alienation, and, possibly, pure evil that actually precipitate a tragedy.

Since Marilyn Manson and Slayer, the artists on this issue’s cover, have been demonized probably more than any other hard rockers, we’ve compiled this very disturbing list of some of the worst atrocities ever laid at the feet of metal. Note the absence of the Virginia Tech massacre—turns out the shooter listened to Collective Soul. Wouldn’t it be great if crappy music could shoulder the blame all of the time?

I
On April 20, 1999, seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, armed with semiautomatic weapons, went on a shooting rampage through Columbine High School, killing 12 students and one teacher and wounding 24 others, before committing suicide. In the weeks following the massacre, both members of the murderous duo were inaccurately identified by the press as members of the “goth” subculture, and despite the fact that Harris’ own website celebrated obscure industrial-metal groups like KMFDM and Rammstein and even explicitly took umbrage with the commercial nature of Marilyn Manson’s work, it was the latter artist that the media chose to blame. Inundated with death threats and fearful for his life, Manson contributed a powerful column to Rolling Stone, denying any culpability in the killing or ties to the assailants, whom he referred to as “dipshits.” Two years later, he appeared in Michael Moore’s Academy Award–winning pro–gun control documentary, Bowling for Columbine; asked by Moore what he would say to Harris and Klebold if given the chance to talk to them before the bloodbath, Manson answered simply, “I wouldn't say a thing. I would just listen to them…and that's what nobody did.”

II
On June 22, 1995, California teenagers Joseph Fiorella, Jacob W. Delashmutt, and Royce E. Casey lured 15-year-old Elyse Marie Pahler into a secluded eucalyptus grove, where they choked her with a belt, stabbed her to death, and then allegedly had sex with the corpse. Casey, whose confession months later to a local clergyman led to the discovery of Pahler’s body, explained that he and his friends had intended to make the “perfect sacrifice to the devil” so that their metal band, Hatred, would be given the “power” to “go professional.” The three killers—who all pled no contest to subsequent murder charges and are currently serving sentences of 25 years to life—also revealed that they had plotted the crime over two months of listening to Slayer and following the band’s “instructions.” This last bit of information led the aggrieved Pahler family to sue the speed-metal legends and their management, label, and other related businesses for having “knowingly distributed harmful material to minors” and encouraged acts of violence with songs like “Postmortem” and “Dead Skin Mask.” Filed in 1996, the lawsuit was finally thrown out in 2001 by Judge E. Jeffrey Burke, who stated, “I do not consider Slayer's music obscene, indecent, or harmful to minors.” In an interview with The Washington Post from prison around the same time, Delashmutt also effectively exonerated the band, explaining, "The music is destructive, [but] that's not why Elyse was murdered. She was murdered because Joe [Fiorella] was obsessed with her, and obsessed with killing her.”

III
As we all know too well, on December 8, 2004, former Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell Abbott was shot dead onstage while performing with his band Damageplan at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio. Fan Nathan Bray, club employee Erin Halk, and band security guard Jeff "Mayhem" Thompson were also killed in the melee before the murderer—a mentally disturbed ex-Marine named Nathan Gale, who left a note saying, “There is a band using my name the bands [sic] name is Pantera… They’ve talked about me and laughed at me”—was shot dead himself by James D. Niggemeyer, the first police officer to arrive at the scene. Dime’s death was a devastating blow to hard-rock fans around the world, and insult was added injury when the press began to imply that the metal scene itself was partially at fault. The most extreme of these accusations was posted by William Grim, contributing editor of the popular conservative website theiconoclast.ca, just days after the killings. In a moronic article titled “R.I.P. Dimebag Abbott and Good Riddance,” Grim concluded that “the squalor, inhumanity, filth (both in the metaphorical and hygienic senses), depravity, ugliness, and ignorance of everything that heavy metal represents…creates a mindset among its devotees in which Mr. Abbott's assassination was an event that was all but waiting to happen.” Not ones to take abuse sitting down, metalheads responded in droves, most notably Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn, who penned the song “Aesthetics of Hate” (off this year’s The Blackening) in response. Sample lyric: “No silence against ignorance/Iconoclast, I hope you burn in hell.”

IV
Over 14 months in the mid-1980s, Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. the Night Stalker, terrorized the state of California. His M.O. was breaking into homes in the middle of the night, shooting the man of the house, then raping and torturing the women and children, sometimes mutilating their bodies postmortem. Besides being a complete waste of life, Ramirez was also apparently a big fan of AC/DC—he left a band cap at one of the crime scenes, and when the police finally apprehended him after he had already claimed 16-plus victims, he was allegedly wearing an AC/DC T-shirt. During his trial, the avowed Satanist, who often drew pentagrams on his palms, asserted that the rockers from Down Under and particularly their song “Night Prowler” (on 1979’s Highway to Hell), which describes a man sneaking into a house late at night, inspired his killing spree. (The song is actually about a teenager slipping into his girlfriend’s place while her parents are asleep.) As the press jumped on the story, rumors spread that the band’s name stood for “Anti-Christ Devil’s Children.” Ramirez was convicted in 1989 and put on death row, where he still awaits the gas chamber.

V
On December 23, 1985, after hours of drinking, smoking, and listening to Judas Priest’s 1978 album, Stained Class, 18-year-old Raymond Belknap and 20-year-old James Vance took a shotgun to a nearby Reno, Nevada, church playground and enacted a suicide pact. Belknap blasted himself in the head and died instantly, but Vance, though he blew off most of his face, amazingly survived. Horribly disfigured, he lived for three more years (during which he fathered a daughter) before dying from complications with his injuries. In the aftermath, the families of the two boys took Priest to court, seeking $6.2 million for the band’s alleged “product liability” on the grounds that the Stained Class song “Better by You, Better Than Me” included the repeated subliminal message “Do it!” which had compelled the boys to commit to their horrific act of self-destruction. “Well, do what?” vocalist Rob Halford famously responded to the accusations on the stand. “Mow the lawn? Have a drink?” Not surprisingly—after a two-week trial that included many close listenings to the song—the court found in favor of the band. “These two young men lost their lives because of their tragic involvement in drugs and alcohol and dysfunctional family units in which they weren't given proper care, attention, or guidance,” said the ever-eloquent Halford after the decision. “I'm not making light of a tragic situation, but this trial was just an attempt to shift the burden of guilt to someone else's shoulders.” Even so, the story—told in detail in the 1992 documentary Dream Deceivers—has been replayed many times, including, for example, when Ozzy Osbourne was sued in the late Eighties for allegedly motivating California teenager John McCollum to kill himself with the song “Suicide Solution.”

VI
On the night of January 17, 1998, members of the Italian metal band Beasts of Satan gathered under a full moon in the woods north of Milan and stabbed 19-year-old Chiara Marino, the singer of another local hard-rock band, as part of a satanic ritual. They then pushed her into a five-foot-deep pit that they had dug days earlier, where she landed on the body of her 16-year-old boyfriend, Fabio Tollis; he’d been bashed in the head with a hammer after coming to her defense. Interred there, Marino’s and Tollis’ bodies weren’t discovered until six years later, when Beasts of Satan leader Andrea Volpe was arrested for shooting his ex-girlfriend Mariangela Pezzotta in the mouth and then allegedly burying her alive. Volpe and his confederates were tried and convicted in 2005, and the case was the focus of the tellingly titled documentary Death Metal Murders, which was broadcast in the States on the Discovery Channel last year. Interviewed in the film, Glen Benton, frontman of one of the Beasts of Satan’s favorite bands, Deicide, tried his best to separate metal music from the sickos who take its often gruesome imagery all too literally. “Don't blame people like me and [Marilyn] Manson,” he argued. “We never said, ‘Hey, we're going to be role models for all your kids.’ That ain't what this is about. It's about entertainment.”

VII
On July 24, 2004, Chilean black-metal fan Rodrigo Orias attacked a Catholic priest, 74-year-old Father Faustino Gazziero, as he finished performing mass for hundreds of churchgoers at Santiago's Metropolitan Cathedral. Orias slit the cleric’s throat, killing him, then smeared the priest’s blood over his face, stabbed himself in the chest, and attempted to commit suicide by slicing his own jugular. (He was rushed to a hospital, where doctors saved his life.) Just a year before the killing, Orias had reportedly asked Dark Funeral vocalist Emperor Magus Caligula to burn an inverted cross on his arm with a cigar, so that he could have the mark tattooed. Asked by the Swedish mag Close-Up if he thought his band’s music could have caused Orias’ rampage, Caligula answered, “I don’t think so… He probably would have harmed someone even if he hadn't been listening to [us],” but added that he was “somewhat impressed. [Orias] deserves some credit. You’re not supposed to say that, but I don’t care.” Not surprisingly, the Chilean press didn’t share the sentiment, and according to Blabbermouth.net, the murder resulted in the sort of anti-metal “media frenzy unseen in Chile since the Church banned Iron Maiden from performing in Santiago [in the Nineties] due to the band's ‘demonic’ overtones.”

VIII
On April 10, 1994, while their friends Daniel Paul Rabago and Johl Dawson Brock stood guard, teenagers Michael Hayward and Jason Van Brumwell tore through a Eugene, Oregon, Dari-Mart convenience store. Hayward, armed with a 1.7-pound metal bar, went to the rear cooler, where employee Fran Wall was restocking beverages, and brutally beat her to death. Then he and Brumwell pummeled store clerk Donna Ream, who somehow survived the attack, despite losing half of the blood in her body. Arrested months later, these four boys, who had allegedly planned to carve satanic symbols into their victims’ flesh, revealed that they were big metal fans and had listened to Deicide in a church parking lot before the attack. Rabago even stated during his police interrogation, “I did it in the essence of [Deicide’s] Glen Benton and [then–Cannibal Corpse vocalist] Chris Barnes.” After the criminal trial—Hayward and Brumwell were sentenced to life in prison and death, respectively, with Rabago and Dawson testifying against them in exchange for plea deals—Wall’s family and Ream leveled civil lawsuits at Decide’s label Roadrunner and Cannibal Corpse’s label Metal Blade. According to the book Lords of Chaos, “the cases were settled out of court, with the labels paying substantial sums while ‘expressly not admitting guilt.’”

IX
On May 6, 1993, the mutilated bodies of three 8-year-old boys—Steve Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers—were found, stripped naked, hogtied with their own shoelaces, and half submerged in a muddy creek in West Memphis, Arkansas. Byers, the most savagely attacked of the three, had had his skull fractured and his genitals cut off. Seriously botching the investigation and hastily deciding that the crime was part of a satanic ritual, the police arrested three local teens—Jason Baldwin (16), Jessie Misskelley (17), and Damien Echols, an 18-year-old metalhead who was identified as the ringleader. During Echol’s trial, the prosecution focused on his long black hair, black clothing, and love of Metallica as evidence of his purported satanic leanings, and even though all the physical evidence pointed away from them, the so-called “West Memphis Three” were all convicted in early 1994, with Echols sentenced to death. The boys’ plight was publicized in ’96 by the powerful documentary Paradise Lost and four years later by its sequel. Directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (who went on to make 2004’s Some Kind of Monster) and featuring the music of Metallica (which the band gave to the filmmakers for free), the docs present the injustice of the case in gripping detail and were broadcast on HBO. Yet despite a great public outcry and the persistent efforts of hard-rock musicians like Henry Rollins (who put together the stellar fund-raising compilation Rise Above, featuring Black Flag covers with guest vocalists such as Slayer’s Tom Araya, Slipknot’s Corey Taylor, and Clutch’s Neil Fallon), the West Memphis Three remain in prison and continue to appeal their convictions.