Abomination: Devil Worship and Deception in the West Memphis Three Murders (35 page)

Rod Ferrell, sticking tongue out for the cameras

 

For two years, Ferrell held the record as the youngest inmate on death row until September 1999, when the Florida Supreme Court reduced his sentence to life in prison, without parole.

 

 

“The Hardy Boys”

Carl Junction, Missouri

December 1987

 

“Why me, you guys? Why me?” Steve Newberry asked his former friends as they bludgeoned him to death with baseball bats. “Because it’s fun, Steve,” came the reply from the darkness. It didn't take long for the police in Carl Junction, Missouri to follow rumors and whispers to the perpetrators. Asked why they committed the brutal and pointless crime, Jim Hardy, Pete Roland and Ron Clements, they said they did it partly out of curiosity, partly because of their faith in Satan.

The rumors of Jim Hardy’s sadism and occultism swirled around the city of Carl Junction for years. He had threatened to kill his father in one of his rages. He visited libraries with his blood brother Ron Clements to read every book on Satanism and witchcraft they could find. They repeated demonic chants and drew pentagrams in notebooks and buildings. His practice of Satanism included self-mutilation. He also frequently tortured and killed small animals, returning now and then to worship near their decomposing bodies by playing heavy metal music and chanting prayers. He had a preference for killing kittens. Occasionally, other youths joined in the rituals, but eventually, a "core" group developed, consisting of the defendant, James Hardy, Pete Roland, and Ronald Clements, who also joined in the Newberry murder.
²²⁹

Jim Hardy often preached Satanism to other, younger students at school.

 

I would kind of just pray to God and Satan at the same time to see who was more powerful, and little by little, I fell out of God and started falling into Satan....You can’t just dabble. It sucks you in real quick.”
²³⁰

 

They believed Satan could give them what they wanted: power. Both agreed that Satan ruled the world. Jim and Ron frequented local forests to listen to Slayer, smoke dope, and kill animals. “Satan is my lord,” Jim Hardy proclaimed. Ron changed his name to Alex, after the central character Alex DeLarge of “A Clockwork Orange.” In April of 1987, Ron Clements and his mother attended Ozark Mental Health Center, where he told the counselor he was consumed with violent thoughts. The social worker noted the teenager’s interest in Satanism and the occult.

 

Jim Hardy met another boy, Pete Roland. They shared a love for torturing animals. After their killing sprees, the woods around Jasper County were littered with carcasses of dead animals. One day, they burned a dog alive in an abandoned dryer. “That dog was running around inside and it’s the first time I ever heard a dog scream...It sounded just like a human screaming.” Roland said. Independently, Jim Hardy, Pete Roland and Ron Clements began hearing voices in their heads, commanding them to do evil.

 

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.