“You cannot bring him here,” the psychiatrist replied firmly. “In fact, you shouldn’t even bring him to Huntington. You have a desperately dangerous situation on your hands, and Huntington Hospital is simply not equipped to handle it.”
The psychiatrist recommended Long Island Jewish Medical Center’s Schneider Children’s Hospital in New Hyde Park, thirty minutes away. Once Dick and Lynn drove Ricky there, the emergency room doctors confirmed that Ricky had pneumonia and admitted him. Over the next three days, Ricky was given two psychiatric evaluations. During both, he was asked if he was considering harming himself or others. Ricky mentioned the pending charges against him and said that if he were convicted and sent to jail, he would kill himself.
After Ricky made this comment, one of the two psychiatrists immediately suspected the hospitalization was a ruse on his behalf to gain sympathy from the judge presiding over his grave-digging case—never mind the fact that Ricky was clearly suffering from pneumonia, and the psychiatric evaluation had been requested by Dick and Lynn, not Ricky.
Despite this, the damage was done. The doctors made note of Ricky’s suicide remark but observed no psychosis, delusions, or hallucinations exhibited by him. With his history of drug abuse in mind, they asked Ricky if he wanted to sign himself into the psychiatric ward. Now realizing he had a say in the matter, Ricky had a sudden change of heart. He declined to be committed, leaving the doctors with no choice but to write him a prescription for antibiotics and send him on his way.
On Saturday, May 5, 1984, the hospital told Dick and Lynn that their son was ready to be discharged. Shocked by this decision, Lynn quickly reminded the psychiatrists of her son’s drug use, criminal history, and his alleged suicide attempt in South Oaks. The doctors, however, were not swayed.
“We carefully reviewed your son’s case,” one of the psychiatrists told Ricky’s parents, “and we do not feel that he is a danger to himself or society at this time.”
“But we’re afraid of him!” Lynn told him. “Can’t you see that?! We just know he’s going to do something!”
“I understand your frustration, Mrs. Kasso,” the psychiatrist replied. “Your son most likely has an antisocial personality disorder of some kind, leading to his difficulty adhering to a structured environment. However, he has exhibited no psychotic behavior to us. He’s not presently hallucinating, nor is he delusional. The hospital simply cannot commit him against his will without the approval of two psychiatrists, and we just don’t find him to be a threat right now. In the meantime, his pneumonia can be treated at home.”
With this, Dick and Lynn were now at the end of their rope. They had no further options to explore, other than bringing Ricky home and hoping for the best.
* * *
The same day Ricky was discharged from the hospital, a young woman leaving her job at Abraxas Hair Salon in Huntington noticed something peculiar lying under a nearby mailbox. At first glance, the strange, rust-colored object appeared to be a dirty toy ball. As she bent down for a closer look, the stylist found the rotting visage of Joseph B. Morrell staring back at her.
The Suffolk County Police Department was called, and Detective Doug Varley raced to the shopping center on East Main Street. When he arrived, Varley figured Morrell’s skull had been placed under the mailbox only after the perpetrator had already dropped the hand inside and subsequently realized the head would not fit through the slot. Varley’s hunch paid off. When the mailbox was opened, he found Morrell’s hand waiting inside.
While evidence technicians went to work dusting the mailbox for fingerprints, Varley went inside the salon to interview the stylist and her coworkers. When a shopkeeper from an adjoining store asked who the head belonged to, the detective smiled.
“Some guy from upstate is waiting back at the precinct for it,” Varley chuckled. “He rode up on a black horse, wearing a cape and swinging a sword. . . .”
Chapter 24
AS ALWAYS, RICKY’S FIRST FEW days back home went well enough. Things were quiet, and he often hung out with Jimmy, who had recently been released from prison, or with Wendy. The two often watched movies together, usually The Man with Two Brains, or one of the Pink Panther films Ricky had loved as a child. These few tranquil days gave Dick some measure of hope, but after a short while, the two started butting heads again, and Ricky was out of the house.
It would be the last time he ever lived at home.
Ricky’s brief hospital stay bought Gary some time to come up with the money he owed, but by the second week of May 1984, the Acid King was back on the streets of Northport, looking to collect. This was bad news for Gary, who had recently lost his new job as a dishwasher at Feed & Grain, a classy restaurant on Main Street. The owner had fired the boy for dyeing his hair pink, leaving him significantly short on cash. One day Ricky and Jimmy found Gary downtown in the New Park.
“When are you gonna have my money?” Ricky asked.
“Saturday,” Gary replied.
This wasn’t good enough.
Ricky balled up his fist and punched Gary in the face, giving him a black eye. Gary tried to run, but Ricky jumped off one of the gazebo walls, landed on him, and started ripping up Gary’s faux leather jacket with his bare hands. Gary took a few more punches from Ricky before he was finally able to slip away.
He didn’t make it far.
As Gary tried to flee, Jimmy tackled him, landing a few punches of his own. Once confident that he had adequately defended his friend’s honor, Jimmy released Gary from his grip and let him run off.
Later that night a party was held in Corey Quinn’s backyard clubhouse. Just like he had at Dave Johnson’s house, Ricky passed out after a few hours of smoking and drinking. Gary Lauwers wasn’t there to take any drugs from his pocket, but Johnny Hayward was.
“Everyone please note this,” Johnny said in a deliberate and measured tone. “I am going to take two hits of mesc from Ricky and pay him tomorrow. I am not stealing, as I am telling everyone here and now what I am planning on doing.”
As Johnny went to reach into Ricky’s jacket, Albert Quinones grabbed his hand.
“No!” Albert said. “That is why Gary is in the shits with Ricky. You will not be doing the same thing.”
Albert released his grip.
“Uh, sure . . . ,” Johnny replied, slightly taken aback.
The once jovial mood of the party evaporated. Johnny said his good-byes and left.
* * *
As spring 1984 dragged on, Ricky sank deeper into drug use and his dark obsessions. By now he was making several trips a week into the South Bronx to get angel dust. He was also praising Satan to nearly anyone who crossed his path. One night, while riding around with some friends in Kings Park, Ricky’s devotion to the devil nearly caused a violent confrontation. Ricky’s friend Roy Jackson was riding in the back seat with him, along with their mutual friend Ursula. Roy started talking about a recent motorcycle accident that had nearly taken his life, and at one point he pulled out a pocket Bible, claiming his faith in God had saved his life. Ricky turned to Roy and said, “You should burn it.”
Roy lashed back at Ricky, emphasizing that the Bible had saved him physically and spiritually, calling Ricky a few choice words in the process. Ricky didn’t care. Bent on taunting his friend, Ricky began chanting, “Satan . . . Satan . . . Satan . . .” Finally Ursula intervened and broke up the fight before it got out of hand. However, despite the unsettling nature of Ricky’s mocking, she wasn’t afraid.
“Ricky was just high,” she insists. “I don’t believe he meant it outside of the common adolescent ‘666’ focus that was popular then. The Satan hype was, unfortunately, big and regarded as ‘cool’ at the time. ‘Shout at the Devil,’ ‘Hells Bells,’ et cetera. One of the guys I knew self-tattooed ‘666’ behind his ear. Ricky wasn’t Charles Manson or anything. . . .”
Ricky’s antics were not limited only to his social circle. One afternoon in mid-May, a group of parishioners from the Northport Baptist Church on Elw
ood Road ventured downtown to hand out pamphlets. One of them, a college student named Jim Edwards, saw Ricky and his friends on Main Street and thought they looked like prime candidates to hear the good word. When Edwards handed Ricky one of the tracts, Ricky looked at it, raised his arms, and screamed, “I am Satan! God will burn!”
Edwards soon realized Ricky was a lost cause, and left.
One of the few people to challenge Ricky on his self-professed belief in Satanism was his friend Corey Quinn.
Ricky approached Corey one night while high on PCP and tried to sell her on the idea of devil worship. Corey might have been young, but she was not falling for it. She ignored Ricky, telling him to go away. The next day, after Ricky’s high wore off, she confronted her friend.
“Ricky, do you really, truly worship Satan?” she asked.
“Yeah!” Ricky confidently replied.
Corey was still unconvinced.
“Ricky, c’mon,” she implored him. “Where does Satan come from?”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“Well, why do you worship Satan?” Corey asked.
“I don’t know,” he repeated.
Corey later told others that Ricky eventually said he didn’t worship Satan—or even believe in God, for that matter—despite his actions suggesting otherwise.
* * *
On May 17, 1984, tensions between the New Park teenagers and the residents of Northport finally came to a head. That night forty citizens crammed into the tiny Northport Village Hall to make their concerns known. One resident, Dorothy Luckas, spoke passionately, saying, “What the town created was a monster! The park has been a disaster at night, and if we stand a chance at having this corrected, we should do it!”
Another resident, Thomas Gaines, concurred.
“The park creates a very unsafe situation for younger children playing there after dark,” he said.
Luckas and Gaines seemed to be gaining momentum in their mission to have the park figuratively and literally cleaned up, but the meeting was suddenly hijacked by a few other residents who were more concerned with the unpaved parking lot at the end of Main Street.
“Why are we allowing valuable waterfront to be used for parking?” fifty-year-old Jacqueline Ingham demanded.
Before attention could be returned to the problem facing the New Park, other residents began arguing over the lack of available boat slips in the marina. While Northport had nearly three hundred slips, more than nine hundred were people on the waiting list—with some having been on the list for almost a decade. It soon became obvious to Luckas and Gaines that nothing was going to be done about the juvenile delinquents and vagrants destroying the park. The village council felt there were more pressing matters to attend to, and everyone was just going to have to deal with the rowdy teens for the time being.
This included Larry Decker, who owned Village Books on Main Street. One early morning, only a few weeks after the meeting, Decker went to open his shop and found the front door covered in what looked like blood. He suspected this was retaliation from the handful of teenagers who had stopped by the store over the past nineteen months in search of The Satanic Bible only to find that Decker no longer stocked it. Before Decker bought the business in 1982, it was known as Avatar New Age Books and Records and catered to the occult crowd in town. Once Decker took over, however, he decided to focus on stocking bestsellers and popular magazines.
Decker called the village police, who filed a brief report, but in the end they told him there was nothing they could do.
The problems with Northport’s teenagers would only continue to escalate from there.
Chapter 25
“WHERE’S MY MONEY, GARY?!”
Ricky barreled toward the boy with his fist clenched. It collided with Gary’s face, and a large pewter skull ring that Ricky had recently bought from the Midway sliced open his eyebrow. Gary fell to the ground, but Ricky kept after him, hammering his face with one savage blow after another. Finally Gary managed to roll away and reach his hand into his pocket. He pulled out his wallet and handed Ricky a wad of bills.
“Here!” Gary said, wiping the blood from his eye and nose.
Ricky counted the cash, quickly discovering Gary had only given him thirty dollars.
“There’s only thirty bucks here!” Ricky screamed.
“I know, I know!” Gary said. “It’s all I got! I’ll get you the rest soon, I promise!”
Ricky grabbed Gary by his jacket.
“Next time, I’m coming back for more—and it’s not gonna be just a black eye.”
Ricky then threw him to the ground and walked back down the path leading to Main Street. Gary waited for a few minutes before heading in the same direction. When he got up, he found Johnny Hayward, along with their friend Jane Allen, sitting on the large stone war memorial in front of the First Presbyterian Church. Johnny saw the fresh cuts and bruises on Gary’s face and told him, “You need to pay that motherfucker back.”
Gary wasn’t happy to hear his best friend defending Ricky and continued walking up the hill, farther away from downtown. Johnny turned to Jane and said, “Gary’s a good friend of mine, but he ripped Ricky off. . . .”
Gary walked up to the Midway, where he bought a knife to protect himself. There, he ran into one of his girlfriends, Michelle DeVeau.
“Oh my God!” Michelle exclaimed. “What happened to you?!”
“Ricky,” Gary replied, spitting a wad of blood-tinged spit onto the ground. “He’s an asshole.”
Michelle reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a few Band-Aids and some bacitracin ointment.
“I’m leaving,” Gary told Michelle as she wiped his wounds. “I’m getting out of Northport. This town sucks. I’m sick and tired of this.”
Michelle understood why.
“All of us just wanted to get out of there,” she recalls. “I wanted to leave East Northport and move to Woodstock. We all just wanted to find our place in life. We all wanted to be somebody and have someone acknowledge us as people. If our families weren’t going to, we wanted other people to. I kind of relate us to The Outsiders. We were all just there.”
Outsider or not, Gary got out of there as quickly as he could. For the next couple of weeks, he avoided going downtown completely, spending his days hiding out in his bedroom or sneaking off to Kings Park. With Gary’s marked absence around Northport, Ricky grew more and more impatient for the money he was owed.
One afternoon in early June, Yvonne Lauwers found a very agitated Ricky Kasso knocking on her front door.
“Hello, Richard,” she said, stepping out onto the front porch. “Can I help you?”
“Is Gary home?” Ricky asked.
“No, he’s not here right now,” she replied, sensing tension in his voice. “Is there something I could help you with?”
“Well,” Ricky said, “Gary took something from me. He owes me some money.”
Yvonne wasn’t terribly surprised. After all, Gary had been in serious trouble before for stealing. She invited Ricky into her home, where they continued their conversation in the living room.
“How much does Gary owe you?” she asked.
“Well,” Ricky replied, “he owes me fifty bucks.”
He didn’t bother mentioning that Gary had already paid him thirty dollars.
Yvonne trusted what Ricky told her and reached for her purse.
“We’d known this kid since he was in grade school,” Nicole Lauwers-Law says. “So, my mother turned around and gave him fifty bucks.”
Handing Ricky the money, Yvonne looked him in the eyes and said, “Can you just let bygones be bygones and be friends?”
Ricky said okay, pocketed the cash, and left. Walking away from West Scudder Place, he enjoyed a moment of satisfaction, knowing he had just made thirty bucks profit off Gary. The feeling quickly dissipated, however. Street logic got the best of Ricky. Mrs. Lauwers hadn’t stolen the dust from him; Gary had—yet here was his mother covering for him. The tho
ught angered Ricky. No one was helping him solve his problems, so why should anyone help Gary?
“Just let bygones be bygones”?
No way.
There had to be some sort of retribution.
Ricky needed revenge.
Chapter 26
DURING THE EARLY DAYS OF June 1984, Ricky Kasso was having serious trouble finding a place to stay. Sometimes he and Jimmy would sleep in a friend’s station wagon when they were wheeling and dealing in Kings Park. If he couldn’t find a ride there, he would sleep in a public bathroom or behind the Midway. While the newspaper and TV coverage of Ricky’s grave-digging escapades brought him a kind of macabre street cred, he now found his friends reluctant to let him sleep on their couch. Their parents simply wouldn’t allow it.
Ricky eventually found an abandoned home on Grove Street to squat in. Coincidentally, the house was only a few doors down from the Schock family.
“One of our neighbors, a lovely old lady, used to check on Ricky when he’d crash there,” Richard Schock recalls. “She’d say to him, ‘Is everything okay? Can I give you some food?’ and he would scare the living shit out of her so bad she would call the police. She was a sweet, eighty-year-old woman and he would scare the fuck out of her. That was the point where I lost all respect for that kid. . . .”
After the cops chased Ricky out of the abandoned home, he stayed with Pagan Pat inside an old houseboat he had commandeered out by Scudder Beach. An elderly sea captain once owned the vessel, but after he had fallen ill and died, it sat abandoned until Pagan Pat began occasionally living in it. Around this time, something happened between Ricky and Pagan Pat that permanently destroyed their friendship. No one is certain what occurred between the two, but rumors quickly flourished and still abound to this day.
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