Episode 121: "The Devil on Trial" - the Warrens, Satanic Panic, and the ultimate bad guy

In The Devil on Trial, David Glatzel speaks about his "possession" in the early 1980s. I expected him to say, "It was all a put-on" or "I was forced to do this." 

What he says is something entirely different. 

⚠️ Spoilers lie ahead!

➡️ Were Ed & Lorraine Warren leading the situation on?

➡️ Was Arne really possessed and it was Satan who killed Alan Bono?

➡️ Were David and his brothers systematically drugged?

Links:

https://www.netflix.com/title/81487924

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/war-conjuring-disturbing-claims-behind-a-billion-dollar-franchise-1064364/

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/18107905

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Arne_Cheyenne_Johnson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Sellers

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14175977

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14303981

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My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th! 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the Netflix documentary "The Devil on Trial," which explores the 1981 murder trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, who claimed he was possessed by the devil and acted in self-defense. The documentary features interviews with key figures, including David Glatzel, who was allegedly possessed by a demon. Carl Glatzel, the eldest brother, expresses skepticism, suggesting the family's story was fabricated for financial gain. The documentary also raises questions about the legitimacy of Ed and Lorraine Warren's involvement and the possibility of David being drugged or mentally unstable. The discussion centers on the trope of haunted houses in horror stories, where financially struggling individuals find a large, supposedly haunted property. Sara expresses skepticism about the supernatural elements, suggesting that while inhuman spirits might exist, the events often resemble sensationalized stories rather than true accounts. The speaker also highlights Carl, the eldest brother in a documentary, as the most logical in his skepticism, implying the story is fabricated. They encourage listeners to form their own conclusions and hint at further exploration in future episodes.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Netflix documentary, The Devil on Trial, Arne Cheyenne Johnson, demonic possession, Ed and Lorraine Warren, David Glatzel, exorcism, cancel culture, conspiracy theories, mental health, self-defense, trial outcome, paranormal, DeFeo murders, haunted house, possession, exorcism, inhuman spirit, demon, Satan, horror tropes, skepticism, fabricated story, Carl, documentary, supernatural, evil forces, true story.

Welcome to Con-sara-cy Theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't, and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about the Netflix documentary, The Devil on Trial. It references the trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, aka The Devil Made Me Do It trial. So far as anyone knows, in terms of recorded court cases, it's the first time in known court cases in the United States where a defense attorney has argued that the defendant could not be held personally or criminally responsible for a murder because he was possessed of the devil. This man, Arnie, was involved with the sister of a little boy who was like 11 or 12 at the time, named David Glatzel. Supposedly, Glatzel gets possessed of a demon. He goes off the rails in this demonic possession. The family takes him to an exorcism, which involved Ed and Lorraine Warren, BT Dubs, but I'll get there. In the course of this exorcism, Arnie challenges the devil, the demon, whatever it is that's inside of David, like, "Hey, you're picking on this innocent little boy, if you really want to do something, come and come at me, bro. And then the devil takes him up on the invitation, I guess, like the true blood vampires, you have to invite the vampire in, otherwise it doesn't work, so he takes Arnie up on the offer, and a few months later, when Arnie kills his landlord, he decides that it happened because the devil made him do it. If all of that sounds super wackadoo, well, you're in for quite a ride. I released an episode, it was actually at the very end of last year, December 30-first of last year, episode 102 Who were Ed and Lorraine Warren, anyway? And I've talked about this trial in some detail in that episode. I'll drop a link to it if you have not checked it out already. I highly suggest that you do. In that episode, when I was questioning, like, well, who were these people anyway? Because they were all over the place during the Satanic panic, but they never really went away. Anytime that you saw ghost stories or documentaries about the paranormal on TV, they were usually there. Those Conjuring movies are based on stories that Ed and Lorraine Warren were involved in to varying degrees, so they've had a little splash of fame even now. And I wanted in that episode to question some of the things that other people have questioned. It's not like I'm the first person to ask these things, but a number of commentators have said, like, some of the math is not mapping, some of the dates, some of the things that they claim to have done are just simply not adding up. Now, I did not get into every accusation that's been leveled against Ed and Lorraine over the years. I tried to stick to here are the things that they officially claim on their official website about their own history, and look at, are these things valid, or have they been debunked? There's a woman named Judith Penny who came forward in 2014 claiming that Ed Warren had abused her and groomed her. She alleges I want to be super clear and use words like allegedly and supposedly. Here she alleges that she started a sexual relationship with Ed Warren when she was only 15, and that he was like in his late 20s or early 30s by then. She claims that the affair between them lasted for like 40 years, and that she lived with them in their home, and that Lorraine was completely aware of what was going on between them, and just kind of turned a blind eye to it, like, well, this is my husband's live-in girlfriend slash sex buddy, and we're making all this money, so who gives a shit? Penny also alleges that she became pregnant with Ed's child in May of 1978 and that Lorraine arm twisted her into having an abortion. Penny claims that she had been instructed to tell people that she had been essayed by a burglar, because that would be better than causing some kind of public scandal that might damage the image of the Warrens. She also claims that Ed was physically abusive towards Lorraine, and at least on one occasion knocked her unconscious. Some people say that this woman is just coming forward in 2014 because she wanted to try to get on the gravy train of the Conjuring movies. That first movie, called The Conjuring. Came out in 2013 and it made some buku bucks. So, there are people who say, is this woman legit, or did she just want to try to grab some money by saying, "Hey, these people did terrible things to me, and therefore I should be able to get some money out of them now that I know that they have crazy, insane cash, like Hollywood money. Now, let's.. if you'll pardon the pun, it's right there, and I do have to go for it, like pun intended, pun not intended. Let's play devil's advocate about all of this. Just because somebody comes forward and says I accuse it doesn't automatically make it true. We really don't have, or should not have, in this country guilt by accusation. You're supposed to have a fair trial, a right to a fair trial. You're supposed to have due process, but the court of public opinion works much differently. And it's my assertion. You can think this is crazy if you want to. You're in a podcast about conspiracy theories. Hello, I think that cancel culture is something that has really been manipulated, and I think it also originated with the intelligence agencies, because it makes it that much easier to get rid of somebody who's a fly in the ointment. Yeah, sure, it gets used on other people that maybe don't matter to the geopolitical structure, but anytime that they want to get rid of someone who's not playing ball with them or who did something that they disagree with, they can obliterate someone's reputation at the snap of a finger, the stroke of a pen. It's so simple now, because you have people in the younger generations that are just like the minute that somebody comes forward and says anything negative, burn them to the ground, burn them to the ground, and salt the ashes. I have also warned you before that I think the day is coming as the intelligence agencies run out of women who were even alive at the same time as Jack Kennedy. I think the day is coming where you will have some woman who comes forward that literally was not even born. There was no overlap whatsoever between the time that she has been alive and the time that JFK was alive, but she will still claim that the two of them had sex. That day is coming, and then even after it's exposed to be false, people will keep right on believing it, because you're telling them something titillating and salacious, and they want to know about celebrity sex lives, even after it's been debunked. That day is coming. What they'll also do is start scouring the graveyard. It'll be like nobody ever knew this, but my great great grandma had sex with JFK, and I found a secret diary. All of this bull crap is coming. Hide and wait, wait and see. It's coming. So, I don't give automatic credence just because somebody comes forward and says I have a nasty sex story. Don't you want to automatically believe me? It's like, well, we need to hear the evidence of it first, just because you tried it out with an accusation doesn't automatically mean it's true. It could be. Let's hear the evidence. So, I didn't choose to get into this Judith Penny thing in that episode, because I just don't know. I chose to look at their timeline and look at their involvement in all the satanic panic stuff, and just question, like, well, Who were these people, really? And what was their deal? Were they legitimately trying to be helpful to people, they were true believers, or was this just a cash cow for them? So one night, when I saw this documentary on Netflix, I was really tired, and I thought, I just want to watch something I was planning to watch, like an action movie or a rom-com, and I stumbled upon this, and I was like, "Ooh, this, this looks cool, I want to check this out. And what really sealed the deal for me was that David Glatzel himself, the little boy who was supposedly possessed of Satan, shows up in this documentary to tell his side of the story, and I was like, "Oh, I can't wait. I was expecting that he would say I was bamboozled, I had, I was arm twisted, I was manipulated into doing all of this, so the content of the documentary surprised the hell out of me, pun intended, pun not intended. Spoilers are here, I can't avoid it. In order to review and talk about and assess this documentary. If you have not seen The Devil on Trial, I recommend that you check it out. It's only maybe 80 or 90 minutes long, so it's not.. it's not something that's going to take up a lot of your time, and it is interesting. It's worth watching. I will say that straight away. Now, secondarily, before we get into The Devil on Trial, let's talk about current affairs. What's going on with the antivirus, aka rat aids? What's going on with Ebola? The last that I heard, there was a doctor and his wife that were, I think, in the DRC, and the man had contracted Ebola, and they were looking at the wife and one of the. I guess medical assistants or someone to see if they were carriers who were asymptomatic. I had a friend who asked me, like, are you worried about all of this? Like, he's looking at me like you're the conspiracy theory nut, are you worried about this or what? And I'm like, well, it's just like what I say on the podcast, you are an adult, you have to come to your own conclusion. I don't give advice, I don't tell anybody what to do, because it's not like I have some magic eight ball or some magic line to God Almighty telling me here's exactly what's about to happen, and frankly, I'd be scared of anybody who claimed that they did. We're just trying to make our own educated best guesses as far as what's coming next. Is it possible that we're being set up for another pandemic, another of some kind? Are we being set up for two weeks to flatten the curve, everybody go home, hand sanitizers in short supply, and people are dying, and nurses are supposedly overrun with patients, but they have enough time to make TikTok dance videos. Are we being set up for this kind of bizarre fear-porn theater again? It is possible. It's possible that this is some other form of a psyop, just to kind of test the waters to see how many people will comply and how many will not? I saw a meme just last night, supposedly, because it's like we've already got the story that antivirus person to person transmission can involve sexual secretions, so it could turn into an STD, and that's why people have started calling it rat aids, but now we have some additional fear porn for the men in the audience that if you contract antivirus, it might cause your genitals to shrink. I don't know where this is headed again, no pun intended, but I don't know if we're getting ready to go on lockdown. I don't know if we're not. We just have these two potentials: the Ebola outbreak, and then the Hantavirus outbreak. It may fizzle out and go nowhere, or then again they may tell us that we're living in yet again another once in a lifetime, once in a generation, once in a century type of event, and everybody may have to go back home. I just don't know. As I told you in the last episode, I just think it's smart to be prepared, not scared. Don't live your life in a state of panic like Chicken Little, but also keep an eye out on what's going on. Don't get caught with your pants down. I saw an interview a while back with Bob Proctor. I've talked about it before on my various podcasts, and I'll talk about it here too. It was an interview from back in the 80s, and this guy was like, so in order to keep a positive attitude, you just ignore the news, you were, you refuse to read the paper, or what? And Bob Proctor was like, no, it's not that I ignore the news or I refuse to read the newspaper, I just decide which stories that I will and will not become emotionally involved with, and that's such a savvy response. And I think, especially now, all these years into the future, it's even more important to decide what you will and will not emotionally become involved with. The podcaster David Bayer talks about not getting entangled with your problems, because problems come and they might stay for a season, but they're really not meant to stay forever, but the more that you entangle with that problem, the more you're guaranteeing that that problem is going to stick around. So that's more or less the way that I look at it, in order to try to stay sane, to keep one foot in front of the other, to live my life, and to have quality of life, to have some happiness, is to not fixate on it, and to say, do I want to get emotionally entangled right now with rat aids? Not at this particular moment, I don't, because I need to record this podcast episode and get it published. I need to eat lunch. I need to do this and this and that for the next book that I'm writing. Like, I have things to do in my life, and I can't sit around and become paranoid, because it may go somewhere, and then again it may not. I wish that I could give you some firm answer, other than I would keep an eye on it, and have a game plan, but my God, you should be doing that for a lot of things. If you live in an area with tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, etc. Just like you would have, I would hope, a master plan about what would we do in the event of a natural disaster, you should have a game plan about an unnatural disaster in case there's another pandemic. How are we going to handle it? What did we learn from the Rona that we could apply to this, and maybe make it through the storm a bit better? And then, if you have that plan and you don't need it, thank God. In the meantime, let's get. Down to business, and talk about the devil on trial.

Just a reminder, Sara's award-winning biography of Dag Hammarsk: Decoding the Unicorn is available on Amazon. Her next nonfiction project, Simply Dag, will release on july 29 To learn more about her other works, please visit Sara causey.com Now back to the show.

The documentary opens up playing a tape with some kind of guttural growling and yowling, and a disclaimer pops up to tell us that all the photographs and all the audio recordings that we're about to see and hear in this documentary are real. Nothing has been faked, wink, all of this is real. We also straight away see David Glatzel as a grown ass, like 50 some odd year old man, and he tells us, when I was 11 years old, I was possessed by the devil. And here's another surprise: Arnie Cheyenne Johnson himself shows up in this documentary, and straight away he tells us that someone else had to let him know that there had been a stabbing, that he had killed someone, because it was like he was in a fugue state and had no idea that anything like that had happened. David says that he is really not fond of being remembered as the little boy who was possessed. He tries to keep it a secret when he can, doesn't like to talk about it, but he says that he's come forward for this interview because his family has been portrayed in certain ways that he would consider to be not accurate, so he claims that he's using this documentary as an opportunity to set the record straight and speak for himself in his own words, David describes himself as being a quieter kind of kid, but he had a good life. He enjoyed playing with his brothers, like hanging out and playing with his brothers, that was the thing to do, and they really liked it. The middle brother, Alan, pops up at this time to introduce himself and also talk about how they have an eldest brother named Carl, and he says that Carl was not easy to get along with, and he also describes Carl as having been an idiot. So now Carl pops up, and in some respects this is getting a little bit comedic. If it were a movie or a mockumentary, it would be hilarious, actually, because you have one brother shit talking the other, and then that brother pops up to shit talk him back, so Carl pops up, and he's like, well, David and I like to help my dad in the garage, but Alan didn't, he was a mama's boy, and he didn't like to get his hands dirty, he knew how to bake a really good cake, I can tell you that, David says that they were not what you would call an all-American family, but they were as normal as they could be. He says that all the trouble started when his older sister, Debbie, got a house in Newtown and was planning to move into said house with her boyfriend, Arnie. Arnie pops up to say that he and Debbie were happy, they were excited to move in together, and they were planning to be married that spring on july 2, 1980 Debbie finds a house in Newtown for the two of them to rent. The family goes to help the two of them move in, as you would. This is a pretty typical thing that families would do, so the parents, and then the three boys go to this house. David gets out, and he said it was a weird house, and there was just something about it from the get-go that made him feel kind of squeamish, kind of weird. Now, Debbie pops up, and it looks like her addition to this documentary is from something that was pre-recorded from something else, but she says that she gives each of the brothers some type of chore to do. She gives David a broom and sends him to the master bedroom and tells him to go up there and sweep. Debbie goes off to continue other cleaning chores in the house, so presumably it sounds like they rented a place that needed some TLC, I guess. The landlord didn't even bother to do any kind of make ready. It was kind of like you can come in here, but keep in mind it's dirty and you're going to have to do some of your own elbow grease. So Debbie goes off to do said elbow grease, and David comes out of the room looking distraught. Alan, the middle brother, recalls David saying, "I want to go home, and the mother saying, "Well, we still have things to do. We will go home later, but right now we can't. We're still working. No, I want to go home now. David himself says that he just wants to get away from the house, away from the property altogether, but at that time he doesn't tell anybody why he feels that way. Alan says they get home to have dinner, and the mom is part Hungarian and part Italian, and is this fabulous cook, puts a good dinner on the table, and David is just sitting there like freaked out and acting abnormal, so Alan. Asks him, what's up with you, man, and that's finally when David starts to recount. Well, here's what has actually happened. David says that he's in this master bedroom sweeping, and he's alone, but not really, because he feels a presence. And then all of a sudden something knocks him backward onto the bed. He turns and looks, and he sees what appears to be the devil as he would look from a Halloween costume. He claims that the Halloween devil tells him, "Beware, because I want your soul. He tells Arnie that he needs help, because the devil says he's going to come for me. And Arnie asks him, "Did you touch anything in the medicine cabinet, and David is like, "No, this is for real. So David tells this story around the dinner table, and nobody believes him, and allegedly even his own mother says, like, "Maybe you just fell asleep and dreamed the whole thing, but let's knock it off for now and go to bed. And David is still scared. He says that he looks out the window and he sees a figure, but then when he looks back, the figure is gone. So he just lays awake most of the night with his eyes open, freaking out. The mom calls the parish priest and asks him to come over and do a house blessing. So he comes over, does the house blessing at the Glatzels house, which is, it's a little strange that you would do the house blessing there, but then not also go where supposedly this boy saw the Halloween devil, that that seems odd to me. But anyway, in keeping with the documentary, the priest goes over and does this house blessing, and they're thinking, well, whatever he saw, it's cleared off, it's cleansed, and even if he just imagined it, maybe this will help him to feel better. At 3am David wakes up and starts screaming, and he's yelling things like, "Oh my god, he's coming for me, he's going to punish me, he'll get me for 30 to 40 seconds. David says, "It's like the whole house shakes like they're in an earthquake, and the lights start flashing on and off, and he's saying things like this is him, he's here for us, don't go outside, because the evil is out there. Enter now a man named Chris McKinnon, who is the grandson of Ed and Lorraine Warren. We see a little video clip from the 80s of them making their circuit, and this guy's like, oh, it was so cool to me what they were doing, but at the same time I was the weird kid who had grandparents that were ghost hunters. Chris brings up the Amityville horror, and he says that's really when my grandparents became world famous. And we see a clip of Ed telling an interviewer, we've been inside of all kinds of haunted houses, and on a scale of one to 10, Amityville is a 10. We see a video clip of the two of them on the old game show to tell the truth, and interlaced with that is the grandson saying it's really crazy how something so horrifying can turn into a blessing, and I'm like, hmm, isn't it though. Ed and Lorraine set up their kind of command post with a PO box and say, like, if you are having trouble, you can write to us, and I just want to stop for a second and do a bit of editorializing here, because that is really a prime plum position to be in, if we're just thinking about this from a business perspective, because I think that's important to do in this case, you have people writing into you saying, "Here's my situation, will you come help? And then they are in the driver's seat about whether or not they go there. Does this sound salacious enough? Does this sound interesting enough? Whether you are in it because you're a true believer or whether you are in it because you see dollar signs, having your potential customers come to you and knock on your doorstep and put you in the power position of deciding, do I want to interact with you or not. I'm just saying, guys, from a business perspective, that's exactly what you want. Debbie gets a hold of Ed and Lorraine Warren, and Ed asks if David has been seen by a doctor, they say no, which it would seem to me now. Okay, I'm going back in my Gen X mind, because the 80s were a totally different time. The discussions around mental and even physical health were much different. You got to remember this was the time where you walked into a McDonald's and they still had cheap metal ashtrays on the tables, because people would smoke, you know. You'd be running around at your birthday party back in the 80s, and people would be smoking and drinking beer in front of the kids, and it just was very normal at that time. But it would seem to me that, you know, if somebody was saying, I'm seeing images of a Halloween devil, and it's telling me terrifying things that you would at least want to ask the question, Could there be a mental health problem? Could there be something going on? Anyway, Ed and Lorraine Warren show up, and they bring some man with them who is supposed to be a medical doctor, and based on what they show in the document. Henry, it sounds like he does only the most basic of examinations of David, like hold out your tongue and say, "Ah, let me look in your eyes and your ears with a flashlight, let me listen to your chest with a stethoscope. And this doctor proclaims that David is healthy, and he doesn't see anything wrong with David physically or mentally, not really sure how much you would glean from the most basic of exams like that, but okay. Next, we're able to hear audio from some of the tapes that were recorded, we're told between the Warrens and the Glatzels in the summer of 1980 It sounds like to me now you will have to listen for yourself and come to your own conclusion, but it sounds very much to me like both Ed and the mother are leading David along, telling him pretty much what they want him to say, like this is very tiring for you, isn't it? Don't you want this to be over? Don't you want this thing gone? And then the mother chimes in, and she's like, well, we're not lying to you, because we're at our wit's end, we're tired of this thing, we want it out of here. And it's like, why is the kid not speaking? Ed says that he and Lorraine have to see things for themselves in order to know what they're dealing with, and to know that it's real. They have to be able to see some kind of physical manifestation of the ghost, the demon, whatever, for themselves, and so he wants to try to use religious provocation to get the thing to show itself. And at the Glatzel House, his thing is, if you're really here, then you should knock on the table three times, and that will tell me that this is real. There are three bangs, which Alan, the middle brother, describes as sounding like someone was trying to knock a sledgehammer through the kitchen floor. Lorraine claims that she sees a dark mass standing next to David. Nobody else in the room can see it, but Lorraine can, and she tells the parents that this is not a ghost or some human spirit that's out of a body right now. This is a demonic entity. The grandson comes back to tell us about Ed Warren and his five stages of escalation. When there's some kind of demonic activity, number one, you have to give it permission again. So we're kind of going back to like the true blood vampires, you have to give it permission in some way. Number two, infestation, which would be like the haunted house phase of things. Then comes oppression, where the thing is inside your house with you, it's in the space, and it's trying to wear you down. Obsession is where you're getting some kind of targeted psychological attack, the thing is trying to get in your mind and break you down. Then comes subjugation, which is where you start to lose control. This entity or demon, whatever it is, has started to at least partially take you over. And then the last stage would be demonic possession, where you are no longer in control of yourself. The demon has totally taken you over, and that basic idea is how we come up with a defense, like, well, the devil made me do it, because if you believe this idea that a person can lose their free will, this demon, this entity, this ghost, whatever, has gotten inside of the person, and they no longer have the ability to choose between right and wrong. They no longer have their own free will. Then you can make the argument theoretically. Here, you know, I'm using a lot of air quotes and talking about theoretically. You can theoretically make the argument that the devil did make them do whatever it was. Ed tells the mom, like, you're going to have to collect evidence, because he will need an exorcism. You will need to get the archbishop involved, and the mom is like, well, we've already had a priest out here to bless the house, and Ed's like, no, that's not going to be sufficient. You're going to need to have enough evidence, so that they know that this is legitimate, and they can do an exorcism, because just having somebody walk through and do a normal run of the mill house blessing is not going to cut it in this case, so because of Ed's request that they document everything they do, they get a Polaroid camera, they get tape recorders, and they basically tell the other kids like somebody needs to be keeping an eye on David at all times, and so somewhere along about August or September, he's getting really weird, and you can hear in these audio recordings where he's just like, and the mom's like, "Who are you? What is your name, sir? At one point, I did. If it sounds like I'm laughing, it's because some of the content is laughable. I can't really bury the lead on this one too much. Some of it is laughable. For example, at one point on the recording, the mother says, "I'm your mother, and the supposed demon, or the Halloween devil, the literal Christian devil, whatever it is that's inside of David, supposedly says, "You're a douchebag. Bag, so we're miles away from that's much too vulgar a display of power. Father Kara, we have the devil in this case saying you're a douchebag. The middle brother finally starts talking about the dad, because this was also when I started to wonder, like we're hearing a lot about the mom and the siblings, and then Arnie as the future son-in-law. Where's the dad? We know he's in the picture, but where's the dad? And we have to get, like, I don't know, maybe 30 minutes into the documentary before it's even like, okay. Well, so here's what's up with the dad. And according to the middle brother, the dad is not really buying into all of this the way that the other family members are, according to Alan, the middle brother. The dad thinks that David is going through something mentally, and that the family is egging it on. He's a little bit more like, if you quit giving fuel to the fire, he'll quit doing it. Ed and Lorraine hear these videos, or yeah, hear the hear the audio, and they see the photos, and they decide that David must be possessed. The middle brother also tells us that the church is not handing out exorcisms like candy. You have to provide evidence, and you have to go through a lot of paperwork. We also hear randomly from a Russian Orthodox priest who would not even be considered Roman Catholic, going by the name Father Maximus, that it was not easy to get exorcisms, especially back when Ed and Lorraine were in their prime. There's a video clip of Ed saying something very interesting, because he's like, you can poo poo ghosts and haunted houses and the devil and devils lowercase if you want to, but they do exist, and you have to remember that the skeptical public is the best way for the devil to keep going. The skeptical public would be the devil's best friend. Alan, the middle brother, talks about a cardinal showing up dressed in all red, and also driving a bright red Porsche. I sort of feel like that Cardinal, in and of himself, should be a character in something. I may have to do that, because that's such a flamboyant thing. It just sounds really interesting to me. That's just a writer's mind making a digression. So Alan comes back on and says that after a month of this they finally get the clearance by the church to do a minor exorcism. Arnie says they get into the church and the priest warns them that the exorcisms can be so intense that sometimes deaths do happen, so the exorcism begins and they're starting it out pretty similar to a mass, they're saying, like the Our Father and Hail Marys, the room goes ice cold, so we're told, and David starts hissing. David says he can't remember anything other than going to the church and hearing a few of the opening prayers, and then it like all goes black or blank for him in his memory, but we're told that he starts hissing and growling and calling the priest all sorts of names, and in the audio that's provided, which is supposed to be the real audio of David actually speaking, he calls the priest, or the devil, the Halloween devil inside of him calls the priest, and I do quote here quite literally, fat dick pork chop. This is not the erudite Mephistopheles from Goethe's Faust, saying, "I'll make a wager if I can corrupt Faust, then the earth will belong to me. This is not even the devil from The Exorcist, like I said earlier, that's much too vulgar a display of power. No, no, no, no. This Halloween devil says things like Fat Dick pork chop. Alan claims that David is on the floor, writhing around, he's bending his body into unnatural positions. He also says that Arnie takes a crucifix and places it on David's forehead, and that while it is placed on his forehead, it actually starts to sizzle like an egg in a frying pan. It starts to sizzle on this boy's forehead. Arnie says that David's tongue swells up to the point where he can no longer breathe properly, and there's fear that he could asphyxiate at that point. Arnie says that he gets so fed up and so frustrated with everything that that's when he says, "Leave this little boy alone and take me on, come bother me and leave the kid alone. Arnie says that he immediately becomes ice cold. Lorraine looks at him with fear, and says, "Oh my God, what did you just do? And Ed looks at him and says, "You can't do things like that. Now that David is shed of the demon or the Halloween devil, whatever it was, he feels like he just wants to get back to normal, playing with his brothers and being the good boy of the family. Like he's had this time where he caused everybody a lot of misery, so now it's time to be a good boy and stay out of trouble and just enjoy life. A police detective, Glenn Cooper, claims that N and Lorraine Warren came to him at the police station and told him what happened at this exorcism, and that she's very worried because Arnie, she calls him out. Arnie Cheyenne Johnson has challenged the devil to take him on, and you cannot do that. And I foresee something violent happening, a death or an attack with a knife. Glenn said that she did not act bizarre, she didn't act like she was drunk or on drugs, and he said that he felt like she really thought that what she was saying was true, that she believed and was sincere about what she was saying to him. The older sister, Debbie, takes a job at a dog kennel because she's a dog groomer, and her boss there was a man named Alan Bono, and the two of them get to be friends. This job at the kennels also comes with an apartment, and they decide to go and live there, which I mean, okay, after you've gone through all of this hassle to try to rent a house and you've gotten everybody over there to clean it, and then your brother claims to have been possessed by Halloween devil, I guess theoretically you would give up on that place and go somewhere else. So now we fast forward to about five months after the exorcism of David, and it's now february 16 of 1981 and Arnie is talking about how he and Debbie and Alan had been having lunch that included a bit of a liquid lunch, drinking wine, and Arnie thinks that Alan is getting a bit inebriated, apparently Arnie's sisters were with them at this time, and he feels like, according to the documentary, in his own words, he feels like Alan has not said or done anything really terrible. He's just getting boisterous, that's the, you, the word that he uses in the documentary, boisterous, and he wants to get Debbie and his sisters away from him because he's had too much to drink. We don't really know what that means. We can try to speculate and read between the lines about what he's, what he's intimating there. But anyway, he says that he goes to turn and walk down a staircase, and that's all that he personally remembers. Later that evening, David says that Debbie calls the house, and when she's on the phone crying, and hasn't even said anything to him yet, he has a vision of a man laying on the ground, dead. Alan, the middle brother, says that David tells him Alan Bono is dead, and he's like, "What do you mean, and he's like Arnie killed him because he's possessed. The beast is the one that did this. The middle brother Alan says that David freaks out, and he's like, he's possessed of the devil. They take a bureau, they lock themselves into a room, and take a heavy bureau and put it up against the door, because David is scared that Arnie will show up possessed of Satan, and try to kill the both of them. A bolo has been put out for Arnie, and the ambulance driver, after taking Alan Boto to the hospital, sees a man matching the description and calls the police, and Alan says, had it not been for that ambulance driver calling in and responding to that bolo, then me and David could be dead today, because they still apparently believe that Arnie was possessed of the devil and was coming to kill the two of them. We meet Martin Manila, who was the defense attorney for Arnie. He claims that he was not a big believer in anything paranormal. He was trying to gather information about how to put on a defense for Arnie, and the Warrens told him it really wasn't Arnie who did this, it was the demon who took over Arnie's body. Martin says that his partner tells him that he thinks the Warrens are crackpots and that he should stay as far away from the case as possible. Martin says he goes to their little museum thing, where they have all kinds of relics, including the Annabelle doll and the Warrens play some tapes for him of various possessions, so-called demons on on audio, and he finds the recordings too, so he says in this documentary to be credible, a journalist named Mike Allen, who was working at a radio station at the time, played some of the audio tapes of the possession, and he said that he expected there would be a backlash, that people would say, "Oh my god, we can't believe that you played these tapes, but instead he got phone calls at the station of people saying, when are you going to play them again? In an interview with the Warrens, there's a reporter who asks Ed, what would you say to somebody who responds, I just don't believe in any of this, and Ed's reply, I think, is very telling, whether he meant it to be funny or not, it's very telling, because he said. Is well, I would hope that that person is not on the jury. Now we finally get back to Carl, the eldest brother, and they're showing him some old family photos, and people are happy and smiling, and it's summertime, and they're in their bathing suits, and everything looks very like apple pie. And Carl says, yeah, we're happy in these photos, and everything looks great, but it was a different story behind closed doors. According to Carl, he felt that his mother was running her own agenda, and if things did not go her way, she'd throw a hissy fit and have a temper tantrum. He further says that in public she would portray herself as this very devout, holy, pious kind of Catholic, but then in private she really was not. He further alleges that she did not even go to church until everything started happening with David, and then when Lorraine Warren came into the picture, and he flat out says I wasn't buying it. Carl says he was 15 when his brother David was supposedly possessed, and that he has never spoken on camera before, but he's like an innocent man got killed, and they're trying to play it off like the devil did it, and I just don't believe it. I don't think any of that's true, because I was there, I saw everything, and I lived it. We flash back now to July of 1980 Carl says he remembers Ed and Lorraine Warren coming up, and Ed asked him, "What's going on here? And Carl says that he told him, "I think my family's nuts. Carl also alleges something that I picked up on myself. I mentioned it earlier in this episode, as you're listening to these audio tapes, it sounds very suggestive, because Carl said that he was standing there watching them sitting around the kitchen table, and Ed would talk about, well, if a person is possessed, here's how they would behave: they would be kicking, biting, clawing, scratching, writhing around on the floor, there would be cussing, and really acting a fool, and Carl thought to himself, well, why are you discussing all of that when we're sitting right here? It's kind of like you're giving this kid the power of suggestion, or you're handing to him on a silver platter. Well, here's how hypothetically a possessed person would be. Hey, hypothetically, wink, and he's like, you know, if it was genuine, why would you have to do that much? Leading of the witness, Carl says that a couple of days later, everything that Ed said. Well, here's what a possessed person would supposedly hypothetically do. And then David is mimicking everything that he's heard Ed say that a possessed person would do. Carl says he felt like the whole thing turned into a show with cameras and audio types. He said that for the first week of the Warrens being in the picture, they were there every night, and then thereafter it dwindled somewhat, but they were in the picture a lot. And he brings up another excellent point. He's like, instead of focusing their energy on trying to get this little boy some help, they seem to have their energy focused on recording him. Now I'm sure their defense for that would be we had to record him, we had to document it in order to get him the help he needed. He quote unquote needed an exorcism from the Catholic Church, so in order to get him that help, we had to film him, we had to record what he was saying and doing. It was just a necessary part of the process, but I feel that Carl is making a super valid point here. It's like, are you helping the kid, or have you turned him into a possibly money-making spectacle? The next scene is something that really, really struck me the first time that I watched this. I'm going back through it a second time, so I can sit here and review it and give you commentary about it, but the first time that I was sitting watching this at night, I was like, oh yeah. So Carl talks about this evening where David and his mother are in an argument. David is supposedly possessed, and his mother is trying to get him to sit down and be quiet and calm down, and he's calling her names and calling her a bitch, and you're fat, and you're ugly, and you're terrible again. Very benign insults for the devil. Again, we need to think about this. You're talking about the worst villain ever. Take Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mussolini, any genocidal dictator, and multiply them out times infinity. Take any serial killer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, HH Holmes, Jack the Ripper, put all of them together, multiply them out, and the Christian devil is still worse than they are. The most evil and heinous baddie of all baddies ever, and he's gonna sit around and be like, 'You're fat, you're ugly, you're a fucking bitch. How is that the best he can do? It's pretty lame, isn't it? As far as devil insults go, so David is sitting there and he's cussing, using very benign, you know,

you're fat, I don't like you, go get out of my fucking face,

same. That frankly, any teenager or teenager would love to be able to get away with saying to their mom, we have all been there before, where we're like, man, I would cuss her up one side and down the other if I could get away with it, but I can't. Most kids think I can't. Well, kids nowadays probably can, because they run the goddamn house, but back and murder, if you had done that, you would not be on the planet anymore, but he's got a built-in excuse because he's possessed. It's not really me doing it, Mommy, it's the devil. So, Carl is watching this scene play out where the mom is trying to get David to mind. David is cussing her, and he said at that point the dad gets tired of it. So, dad comes through the room, gets a hold of David, smacks him around a little, sits him down on the couch and says, I'm telling you now, sit down, shut up, and knock it off. And he said, sure enough, the devil sat down and was very quiet for the rest of the night. And aside from being kind of hilarious, it's also telling, because if you were really the Christian devil, the ultimate baddie of baddies, wouldn't you have just like thrown the dad across the room in this big display of power and machismo, you would, you wouldn't listen to the guy and sit down and be quiet. That to me was like one of the hugest moments in this whole documentary, where I just laughed. I was like, this right here tells the tale, doesn't it? Something else interesting, not funny, but interesting, is that Carl was there and saw Alan's body, which I didn't know prior to this documentary. So, he's talking about how he and his dad are outside working on a truck when all of a sudden the mom runs out of the house screaming and frantic, and she's like, "Debbie, hysterical, we've got to get over to the kennels, something bad has happened. So they just pile in the truck. No, hey, I got to go get my jacket, I got to go get a different pair of shoes. They just bail into this truck and take off. They get to the kennels and Debbie's crying and she's talking about how there was a fight. Alan's body was still laying on the ground, and so Carl went over there and turned him over, and he sees four stab wounds at that time. Alan Bono was still breathing, so he's Carl's telling him, "Just hold on, we'll get help, just try to hang on. So he feels helpless because he's not even an adult yet. He has come up upon this man who is about to die. He knows that the man is not going to make it, and he feels very helpless in the situation, and just describes it as a terrible feeling, which I imagine it would be if you saw someone like that who was a crime victim in the final moments of their life, and you knew there wasn't going to be anything you could do to help them, you wanted to, but you just couldn't, it was too late, that would be a terrifying and awful feeling for someone, for a full-grown adult, let alone a teenage boy. Now, Carl's side of the story, furthermore, is that he never felt like there was anything connected to David. Never thought there was anything connected to demons. He describes it as Arnie being highly possessive of Debbie. There had been some rumors going around that maybe Debbie was having an affair with Alan Bono. Now we hear again from Glenn, the cop. He claims that Debbie came to his office and says, I'm hearing rumors that this murder was about a three-way love triangle between myself, Alan Bono, and Arnie, but it wasn't. She, he says that she told him that she had a relationship with Alan Bono, but that relationship has ended, and this stabbing doesn't have anything to do with it. Another interesting point is Carl says that on the first day of the trial, his parents gave him some walking around money, and told them to cut school for the day, like take some pocket money, the world is your oyster, go out and do whatever you feel like doing today, and that also struck me as bizarre, because again, okay, thinking back to the 80s, we had much, much less supervision, much less helicopter parenting, no surveillance, no cell phones, none of that crap. But at the same time, it would have been very unusual for a parent to say, "Here's some walking around money, cut school, go do whatever the hell you want all day. Carl says they did it as a bribe because they were petrified that he would get involved in the story and contradict this devil made me do it defense, so it was kind of like we want to keep you away if you're at the arcade or the Pizza Hut or the comic bookstore or wherever, then you're not involved in the trial. In the documentary, Carl outright says this was all fabricated. We see a video clip from the news media of Walter Flanagan, the state's attorney, talking about how the case has been publicized, particularly by the Warrens, and he says in this interview, I would suspect for their own financial interest, the judge in the. Trial intervenes and says that he does not feel that demonic possession is an acceptable defense, and not just he feels, but also looking at legal standards and legal precedent, he felt that it just wasn't justifiable for the defense to say the devil made this guy do it. Arnie says that he was shocked when that happened, and David, in his own weird way, brings up something valid. He says you have to go into court and swear on a Bible to tell the truth, but then you're not allowed to bring anything else supernatural into the equation. You're not allowed to bring God or the devil into it after you've just sworn on a copy of the Holy Bible. To be fair, he is making a point there. The radio news reporter said that there were five or six priests in the courtroom, and as soon as the judge said that he was not going to allow any kind of evidence or defense related to demons or devils or the Christian devil to be presented in the court. This reporter said that the five or six Catholic priests got up and marched out like it had been rehearsed or pre-planned, and he said they were never seen or heard from again. And the church quit commenting on anything related to the trial. Arnie's defense attorney tells him, if we can't say the devil made you do it as a defense. The only thing left is to argue self defense, which I was a little bit surprised that he wouldn't have tried for temporary insanity, but maybe that's too close to the devil made me do it, because then you'd say, well, I was driven temporarily insane by the devil or some demon of the devil, so they decided to go with self-defense, but that's a pretty thin argument, because Alan Bono was stabbed four times, and Martin, the defense attorney, is like, you might stab somebody once or twice, and then you're running away from them. In self-defense, you have have lashed out against them to save your own life, and then you're going to run, you're going to call the police, you're going to get to a police station, you're going to get out in public somewhere, you're going to try to get away from the assailant who's trying to kill you, but you're not going to keep it going and stab him four times. So it winds up that Arnie is not convicted of first degree murder, but is instead convicted of first degree manslaughter. Here's another little plot twist that you may or may not have seen coming after the trial. Carl says that his mother ends up going to wait for it, wait for it, Hollywood. He says they fly out to LA, they get picked up in a limo, they're taken to dinner with Dick Clark. Carl alleges that Ed and Lorraine Warren were running their own agenda, and they, according to Carl, allegedly said to David's mother, "You will be a millionaire. Now, David says that Ed and Lorraine told him that they were going to write a book about David's experience, and that they already had a ghost writer, pardon the pun, named Jared Brittle, who was, excuse me, Gerald Brittle, who was going to help them do it. Now we're back to Carl, and Carl says that yes, Brittle showed up and was asking a lot of questions, and as he's just asking the family about what happened with this and this and that. Ed interjects, but make it scary, and Brittle says something like, but I checked with the family, and they said that x, y, and z didn't happen. But Ed allegedly shakes his head, and he's like, no, make it scary, because people come to us wanting to be scared, and they're going to buy something that's scary. Carl says that a few months later, Ed and Lorraine show up with paperwork, and the mother is like, "Should we get a lawyer to look all of this over? And Lorraine allegedly says, "No, dear, it's okay, because William Morris' agency has a whole floor of lawyers, and as Carl points out, yeah, they do, but those lawyers would have been looking out for the Warrens and not for the Glatzel family. There's a recorded phone call between Judy, the mother, and Lorraine Warren from 1987 where the mother is like, "Hey, you guys put a lot of work into this, and I know that you need the money, but so do we. We went through a tragedy, and yeah, you worked on it, and you helped us, but we need the money, just like you guys do. According to Carl, whenever this book was sold, his parents received $4,500 whereas again, according to Carl, allegedly Ed and Lorraine made more than $81,000 and as he also points out, they're still making money because of The Conjuring films, even David, who asserts that he really and truly was possessed and saw this Halloween. Devil claims that Lorraine told him he would be quote a very rich little boy from having this book deal. David says that was a lie. They said that their mother said that she felt she had been hoodwinked, and Carl describes them as being very good con people. In 1985 Debbie and Arnie get married at the prison where he's serving his sentence. Arnie gets released from prison in 1986 and then he and Debbie remain together as a couple until she passed away in 2021 Arnie says that the whole ordeal brought him close to religion. He says that he is not possessed, he never had an exorcism, but he's not currently possessed, and he knows how to quote protect himself. Here's another plot twist, a twisty twist, twist. I remember my jaw dropping. It's not a wonder that they leave this to the end of the documentary, because of, like, oh holy shit. So, Carl says that after both of his parents have died, he starts going through their things, along with his wife, as one does nothing, nothing weird about that. You have to start thinking about what you want to keep, what needs to go to an estate sale, and so forth. He says that his mother had OCD, and like, wrote everything down, kept extensive journals. He finds an entry that says, well, the family had their medicine tonight, and everything was good, and of course he wondered, well, what does that mean? Is it a metaphor or a funny of some kind? What the family had their medicine tonight, and so everything was good. What, what does that mean? And so he and his wife decide to investigate it further to try to determine what the heck this lady's talking about. What they uncover is that the mother allegedly was putting salmonex in the entire family's food, and he starts thinking back that anytime that the mother served dinner, she always had her own separate plate that was kept away from the main bowl of food, so it was like she ate in a way that was separated from everybody else in the family, Carl says he believes that his mother was using Sominex to control the boys and their father, as Carl himself says, if at the end of the day everybody's tired and sleepy and exhausted, then they're all just going to lay down, there's not going to be any arguments or any trouble, because everybody's half asleep, as he also points out. When you are using sleep aids to that level, it's not something that you're just doing occasionally, which, that's what those medications, those over the counter sleep medications, are for occasional sleeplessness, occasional bouts of insomnia. Then, if you're using them every single night, and there's also no telling how much she was putting in there, allegedly, right? We don't know, but he's talking about the side effects of the long-term use or abuse of sleep aids being things like mood swings, weight gain, and hallucinations. So Carl wonders out loud, like, did my brother ingest enough of this, these over the counter sleep aids to the point where he did see things, maybe he was just flat out hallucinating, maybe he wasn't making it up and being a knowing bullshitter, maybe he really thought he saw this stuff, but it was because of these medications. David, on the other hand, refutes this, and he says that he does not believe that his mother would drug the family. He feels that his mother took good care of the family. To him, the truth is that when he was 11, he was possessed by a demonic spirit. So, what's really going on here? Because there are a lot of things to try and digest in this one short documentary, there's all the satanic panic stuff. One of the early episodes that I did was about the documentary Satan wants you, which was in turn about the book Michelle Remembers, and really like the kindling and the spark that set off the satanic panic. And then I've also talked about Maury Terry's book, The Ultimate Evil, and how he looked into David Berkowitz, Son of Sam, supposed satanic cults operating out of Yonkers, and various other points. So this is in its own way a part of the satanic panic lexicon. It's also part of the Ed and Lorraine Warren lexicon, and some of the accusations that have been leveled against them vis-a-vis, were they just faking? Were they preying on people who seem to have a sensational story that they felt like they could exploit for their own personal gain? Were they sincere about trying to help people because they really thought that they were demonologists and Christian warriors, or was that all fake? Because they saw a payday, was David being drugged? Was he having side effects from being on sleep aids all the time, and not knowing it? Did he have a mental illness of some other type? Was it fake? Was literally. All of it fake ass bullshit from start to finish. Did Arnie kill Allen over jealousy? Did they get into some kind of a drunken fight where two dudes are brawling with each other, but instead of it being a garden variety fist fight, it turns into a murder because one of them pulled out a knife and it went too far. It turned into a stabbing. The man died and was killed. Well, obviously, he was killed. The man was stabbed, and then he was killed. Like, was it a drunken fight that went too far for me personally? The most credible individual in the whole damn documentary is the oldest brother, Carl. When he's talking about it being fabricated, and how he found it very interesting that the supposed devil could turn it on and off whenever the dad came in the room and said knock it off, that's enough for tonight, cut this shit out. If you were really demonically possessed, especially by the Christian devil, the worst baddie in all of history, the epitome of all that is evil and heinous. You wouldn't just turn it off like that when somebody said, "Sit the fuck down and shut up, like they just.. I can't get there on this one. I cannot, and I want to be clear in saying that I'm not a skeptic of every single thing that defies explanation, because I think there are things in this world that defy explanation, and that can't be written off, like, well, if I can't see it, taste it, touch it, smell it, it must not be real. It's like the classic line from Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Think about it also this way, the human eye, human vision can only detect a tiny sliver of what is available on the electromagnetic spectrum. The human eye can basically see 380 to 700 nanometers in wavelength, and that little sliver is what humans call the visible light, but outside of that, you also have things like gamma rays, x rays, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, radio waves, which can be kilometers in length, so it's like when we start thinking about what the human eye can even see, and then we put that in comparison to all the wavelengths that there are that exist in the universe, it's ridiculously laughably small. I absolutely do believe that there are things that we would consider to be supernatural or paranormal. So, the people who have kind of made science their god and have said, if I can't, if I can't see it, taste it, touch it, smell it, it ain't real. I'm sorry, I think you're full of shit. I think that you have made your world very small on purpose, because you're scared of what the answers might be. Now, that's just my opinion, and it could be wrong. With that being said, I think there are a lot of people out there. I would even go so far as to say the majority, or the vast majority of people who set out a shingle, and they call themselves whatever - a psychic, a medium, a tarot card reader, a clairvoyant, an astrologer, a witch, a warlock, a sorcerer, a wizard, whatever. I think the majority to vast majority of those people are bullshit artists. Some of them may believe what they're saying. In other words, they may draw some tarot cards for you and give you an interpretation in a sincere frame of mind, meaning they are not knowingly lying to you, they're not knowingly bullshitting you, they're just making up some story in their head based on these cards, and then telling you that it's real, and you'll also notice that a lot of them don't do this free of charge. They set up a booth somewhere, or they get a storefront on the internet, and they charge for their services. I think it's that, like one in whatever. I would, I would hate to even try to put odds on it, one in 100,001 and a half a million. It's that one person out of the herd that really has the gift, you know what I mean. And if you've ever been around them, you get it, like they actually can tell you shit that's scary, accurate things you've never told another soul in your life. I remember reading an article once where a psychiatrist was asked if he believed in demonic possession, and he said, generally speaking, no. He was like, the it can always be explained away by problems in the brain. He said, I'm going to tell. Tell you the reason why I said generally no, and it's because I had one patient, one patient who makes me hesitate to make a blanket statement of no. He talked about this woman had had brain scans, and they could not find any physical anomalies, and this woman could speak multiple languages on command, and she also knew things about the psychiatrist that he had never ever told anybody that she couldn't have found out. This is before the days of Google, too, by the way. She couldn't have found it out through research; she just knew, and knew it on command. She could also speak in different tones of voice, and he, he thought, like either she is the world's most talented actress and magician and magical stage act, or she really is communicating with something beyond the human mind, something beyond the human senses, and it unnerved him terribly. That's the kind of thing that I'm talking about periodically, not every day, but periodically, you will come across somebody, and you realize they're fucking with something beyond the normal bounds. They're not pretending to be a devil worshiper or pretending that they have clairvoyance. They really do have something beyond the human senses, but again, I think the majority to vast majority of people who set out a shingle and say I'm a psychic and come to me and I'll tell you about it, they're full of it, some of them are knowingly full of it, and some of them are sincere, but they're still going to give you bogus information, now bringing all of this back around to this particular story of the devil on trial. Do I think that Arnie was possessed of the devil, and it was in fact Satan who murdered Alan Bono? No, I don't personally think so. Dr. Phil, of all people, brings up a really great counterpoint to the devil made me do it, defense, which is, if you really have lost your free will, if you cannot control your own mind and body anymore, and at any point in time you could spazz out, and the devil could take you over and kill people, you need to be locked up, you need to never ever ever have your freedom given back to you, because if the devil did it once, he could do it again. I don't believe in this devil force me to do it. Bullshit. Humans have free will, and I think in a lot of cases the devil is used as a construct precisely for defense. It wasn't me, it was the devil. Think about that movie with James McAvoy, where he's like, it wasn't me, it was Patricia. Only in this case, it was Satan. Well, it wasn't me, it was Satan. I think human beings rely on that a lot, because it's like it wasn't my bad deed, it wasn't that my mind thought this stuff up, it was the devil who did it. And then the devil forced me. I was totally innocent. There was a case around here that got a lot of play. I think I may have spoken about this on the air before, but there was a case around here in the Midwest back in the day of Sean Sellers. If you were anywhere in this kind of middle part of the country, Kansas or Oklahoma, either one, in the mid 80s, you heard about this. So, in 1985 Sean Sellers killed a Circle K convenience store clerk, and according to his best friend, this guy Richard Howard, Sean Sellers had said, I just want to see what it feels like to kill somebody, so when this convenience store clerk doesn't sell some beer to Richard Howard, that's when Sellers kills him. He also decides to kill his parents, so he shoots and kills his mother and stepfather with a 44 caliber boom stick while they were asleep in the bedroom of their home in Oklahoma City. Sean Sellers later says that he was a quote unquote practicing satanist at the time of the murders, and that he was under demonic possession. He claims that he read the Satanic Bible by Anton Levay hundreds of times when he was a teenager. He got very, very into satanism. He was also playing Dungeons and Dragons, and he was really not in control of his own faculties, Satan had taken him over, and so it was not really him that killed this gas station clerk and killed his parents, it was really the devil. Now, fast forward in time some years, and he claims he has a jailhouse conversion boy, howdy, and he says that he has become a Christian while he was in prison, and he reads the Bible. He's given himself over to Christ, and he has decided that he wants to try to minister, particularly, particularly to young people, to tell them Satanism is not anything that you want to get involved with. There were churches around here. I remember this so clearly. There were churches around here in the 90s that were trying to get him out. They were trying to get him some clemency and say, like, well, he has turned his life over to Christ, like he was involved with Satan, and the devil made him do these things because he was under satanic control, but it's fine now, because he's under the control of Jesus, and so we should just let him out of jail, and he'll become a preacher, and everything will be fine. And I could not believe that. I mean, even as a teenager myself, back in the 90s, a high school kid, I was like, this is bullshit. I was kind of like Carl from the documentary. I'm like, any fucking body can say I'm a convert. I have given my life over to God. And we also see this, by the way, I'm not going to name any celebrity names, but I think we might all know who I'm talking about. We also see this with celebrities when they get in trouble. There's one celebrity, for example, pretty recently, who's been awfully vocal about his conversion, and it even has a book out about it, and it's like it seems awfully convenient that you've had this conversion and you've written this book at the same time that all these women are coming forward with essay allegations, that doesn't mean remember what I said, we don't do guilt by accusation, it doesn't mean that it's true just because they're saying that it is. He has admitted this particular celebrity has admitted that he was basically an sex addict and was doing it all the time. He just claims that it was consensual and everybody was over the age of 18. I just find it awfully convenient that sometimes these dudes have these sudden conversions and become disciples of Christ when it's convenient for them. I was honestly relieved that he didn't get out of jail with all this bullshit, and there were Sean Sellers had some step siblings that had said that they just did not think that his conversion was true. A prison chaplain said that he thought that it was true, and that he really had turned his life over to God. But some of the step-siblings were like, kind of seems like he's doing this in order to get, get out of jail. He was executed by lethal injection back, I believe in 1999 So, that's how his story ends. Arnie winds up getting out of jail and really not even serving that much time, whereas Sean Sellers does wind up on death row and is executed in 1999 I absolutely think that you would have to look at this documentary and decide for yourself, was David lying the whole time, was this a put on? Was there a mental health issue at play? Was he being drugged? Was he having a mental health issue because he was inadvertently and unknowingly abusing sleep aids, and one of the possible side effects of that would be hallucinations. Maybe he really thought sincerely that he was seeing these things, and he thought that he was possessed, and it was causing him to act off the wall and goofy, and to use very childish middle schoolish insults, like fat bitch and fat dick pork chop, which it doesn't sound to me like, you know, the epitome of all evil is insulting you, and that's the best he can do. It sounds like a middle school kid. This is not addressed in the documentary itself. It may be in other paranormal stories about this particular situation. I don't know, but where did this, where did the devil come from in this story, and what I mean by that is they go to this rent house to clean up, and then David supposedly is in the master bedroom sweeping when he gets thrown back on the bed and attacked by the devil. Why was the devil there in the documentary? We're not told it's like, okay, so was somebody in that bedroom holding seances, were they conjuring, were they sacrificing animals to the devil? Like, why would Satan have just been hanging out in an old dirty ass bedroom in an old dirty ass rent house somewhere in Connecticut? Like, doesn't he have better things to do, the New Testament describes him as being like a lion who roams around looking for souls to devour. Is he doing that in a master bedroom in a dirty ass house in Connecticut? I'm just asking. Okay. And then also, why does he decide to bother David, an 11 year old kid, and then cause this kid to spew out a bunch of amateurish, silly insults at his mother, that seems to be very low on the priority list. For the Christian devil, we think about someone who has the power to cause, I don't know, wars, genocide, mass murder, mass casualty events, torture, bloodshed, the worst possible things imaginable, and he's picking on an 11 year old kid in a dusty ass bedroom, I don't buy it. This story also has a lot of classic horror movie and paranormal TV show tropes. The old dusty rent house. Think about how many episodes of that old show, A Haunting, start out in exactly that kind of way. It's super formulaic that the Amityville horror also starts out in a similar way. Once we get past the DeFeo murders, you have the classic story of a couple down on their luck, financially pinched, that need a house, and looky here, here's a house that's humongous, that's on the market for pennies on the dollar, and wouldn't you know it's eat up with fucking demons. So many episodes of a haunting start that same way. Single parent down on their luck, young couple just starting out, they have no money, and they luck upon some three story Victorian or some gargantuan house that would normally be way out of their price range. The realtor tells them it's a fixer upper, and that's why, but it turns out that it's full of ghosts who don't want them there, and or full of demons, or just the flat out Christian devil, Satan himself is hanging out in this old ass house trying to make their life a living hell, no pun intended. Then we have the devil made me do it. I'm not, I'm not even in complete control of my faculties anymore. So we were getting into the trope of possession, and it even escalating to the point where this man supposedly commits a murder, doesn't even realize what he's done, and is being sent to jail because he challenged the entity instead of minding his own business during the exorcism he makes this challenge and then like five or six months later somebody is dead and it's like it would seem like that's an awfully unrelated crime considering but okay we have the story of the house shaking like an earthquake, lights flickering on and off, pictures coming off the wall, everybody's terrified all the time, and they're walking on eggshells, haunted house type tropes. I mean, you get a lot of the good classic horror movie and horror TV show tropes out of this story, which is another thing that makes me think that it's just that it's a story. It might be a really interesting horror movie story. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that it's actually true. I keep coming back to what I said a few minutes ago. I think there are those times where you meet someone who generally genuinely has a gift or someone who really has had contact with some kind of inhuman spirit, because I do think those things exist. I don't mean like around every corner there's a demon lurking that's waiting to get at you, I just mean I do think that there are things beyond what we can comprehend, and some of those forces are probably forces for good, and some of those forces are probably forces for evil, and if you're tampering around with shit that you don't understand, you can potentially kick the door open for something to come into your life that you don't want to have any party to, but even in the logistics of the story, David doesn't do that. He just goes in a bedroom and holds a broom and sweeps. He's not in there with a pentagram on the floor and a goat skull and cat blood all over him. He's just trying to sweep a room. So I, to me, this is just one of those stories where it's like I can't get there. I just don't believe that it's true. I don't, I think for my money, the person who makes the most sense in the entire documentary is Carl, the eldest brother, who's skeptical of it all and calls it fabricated. As always, check this out for yourself, come to your own conclusions. In the meantime, stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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