For reasons unknown, Gallagher decided to bypass McKeown and write this crucial document himself. A couple hours later, around three thirty p.m., a secretary from Gallagher’s office called the Northport Village Police Department with the press release he had typed up. Officer Art Molin answered the phone and recorded Gallagher’s secretary as she read the statement to him. After the call was finished, Molin gave the recording to Northport Village Clerk Rita Salerno, who rewound the tape and made the following transcription:
Today, July 5, 1984, homicide detectives arrested one Richard Kasso who has no known address and by his own admission lives in the streets, but whose parents reside at 40 Seaview Avenue, Northport, N. Y.
Kasso was arrested on the charge of murder Second Degree in the stabbing death of one Garry [sic] Lauwers, age 17 years of 15 West Scudder Place, Northport. Lauwers, unemployed, had been missing, although not officially reported as such, since June 15, 1984.
Kasso, also 17 years of age is a member of a satanical cult and worships and partakes in rituals honoring the devil.
It is believed Lauwers stole 10 bags of a narcotic commonly known as angel dust from the defendant Kasso.
Kasso learned of the theft and sought revenge against Lauwers. The revenge turned out to be the death of Lauwers.
This came to the attention of the Suffolk County Police Department as a result from a call from the Northport Village Police Department. The Northport Village Police on Sunday, July 1, 1984 had received an anonymous phone call indicating that a body was buried in a wooded area commonly known as “Aztaki [sic] Woods” in the Northport area. The wooded area is known to the Northport police department who conducted a preliminary search and additionally made attempts to identify the anonymous caller. The searches on Sunday and Monday were unsuccessful. However, they felt that a continuing investigation should be made and Chief Robert Howard requested aid from the Suffolk County Police Department.
On Tuesday afternoon, homicide detectives and canine units from the Suffolk County Police Department responded to the wooded area described. Because of inclement weather and heavy rains no search was made.
Again on Wednesday, July 4, 1984 at about 1:30 under the direction of Chief Howard the search was reinstituted. At about 2 p.m. a canine [K-9] dog located a skeletal remains of a human body buried in a shallow grave in this wooded area in another direction than that which was searched by the Northport Village Police.
The remains were tentatively identified as the victim, Gary Lauwers and indications revealed that he had been stabbed numerous times. The condition of the body indicated that it had been left in the woods for approximately two weeks and further, had been recently buried. The body was pronounce [sic] dead by the medical examiners [sic] office and removed to the morgue for future examination.
Homicide detectives and Northport Village police officers, under the direction of Northport Village Police Chief Robert Howard conducted and pursued an intense investigation.
Information uncovered, revealed that the defendent [sic] Kasso stabbed the victim numerous times and dragged his body, thinking he was dead, to the place where it was located. When Kasso began to leave the site, Lauwers sat up and according to Kasso, stated I love you mom. These are the last words uttered by the victim.
At this point, Kasso returned to the where Lauwers sat and inflicted further stab wounds into the facial area, cutting out his eyes.
Kasso further indicated that on this last stabbing of the victim he heard a crow cry out. This was an indication to him as a satin [sic] worshipper, that the devil had ordered him to kill Lauwers.
Investigation is continuing to determine if and how many accomplices were involved in this murder.
Additionally, detectives of the Suffolk County Police Department are presently searching for the murder weapon believed to be in the waters off the Northport Village dock area.
James Troiano, age 18, of 2 Barry Drive, East Northport, was also charged with murder Second Degree in this crime.
Aside from resembling a middle school book report more than a proper press release, the document’s contents were incredibly troublesome. Gallagher had merely assumed Ricky was part of a “satanical cult” based on the demonic overtones contained in his confession, but he presented this hunch as fact by saying it in an official Suffolk County Police statement—despite a total lack of evidence.
Molin and Salerno, however, were unaware of this. They printed up dozens of copies of their transcript and sent them to various news outlets. Back at Suffolk County Police headquarters, William McKeown had no idea this was happening. A copy of Gallagher’s release made its way to his desk shortly after it was phoned in to Northport, and he was horrified by what he read.
“My English teacher would have killed me if I wrote like that,” McKeown later told an interviewer.
Unaware that Gallagher’s press release had already gotten out, McKeown immediately went to work editing the document. While a number of issues in the release were cleaned up, McKeown’s revision wasn’t without errors. He incorrectly identified the Lauwers family as residents of East Northport, and the misspelling of Aztakea Woods remained. Most crucially, McKeown wasn’t privy to Ricky’s or Jimmy’s confessions, and had no idea that neither of them had made any reference to a “cult” in their statements. As such, Gallagher’s fanciful allegations made it into McKeown’s version. Two hours after Gallagher’s secretary called the original draft in to Northport, McKeown’s updated statement was released to the press.
He had no idea how much damage had already been done.
When Chief Howard, who was currently on a monthlong vacation, stopped by headquarters to check on things the next morning, he found a copy of Gallagher’s press release sitting on his desk. When Howard read the document, he immediately ordered his department to stop handing out copies.
“There is no way I would have released that,” Howard later said during an interview. “Our procedure for press releases is based on that of Suffolk County’s. You are never supposed to give out the substance of an admission, confession, or any statement by a defendant. Based on procedure, it was wrong.”
Despite Howard’s best efforts, it was now far too late. In the fifteen hours since Rita Salerno transcribed the phone call from Gallagher’s secretary, the department had already handed out nearly fifty copies of the press release. To make matters even worse, McKeown’s updated release never even made it to Northport. Now, nearly every major newspaper in the tristate area had a copy of the original and had already written articles based on the flawed document for their morning editions.
Mark J. McGuire, a young reporter for the Northport Observer, had accurate details of the case—thanks to the friendship he enjoyed with Chief Howard—but his articles on the murder wouldn’t be released for another week. Being a weekly paper, the Observer’s next issue wouldn’t hit newsstands until July 12.
Newsday, however, was already printing that day’s edition, and for just thirty cents, the residents of Long Island could gawk at the front page boasting, “2 Held in Ritual Killing of Teenager in Northport.” The large spread featured a photo of the New Park’s wood forest playground, almost comically adorned with SATIN graffiti, a shot of a dazed Jimmy Troiano being led into a police car, and a curious portrait of Ricky Kasso.
No photos were taken of Ricky during his arrest, and his official mug shot hadn’t been provided with either press release, so Newsday got creative. Someone in the newsroom remembered Rex Smith’s interview with Ricky for Inside Newsday only three months before and grabbed a copy of the Sony U-matic videocassette containing the segment. When Ricky appeared on screen to discuss his recent grave-digging arrest, the tape was paused, and a Newsday photographer snapped a shot of the boy, clad in a leather jacket and a bandanna wrapped around his head, his eyes calmly turned to Smith. This would do for now. No one on staff knew it, but another shot of Ricky would come later in the day—one that would make history.
The Newsday article unsurprisin
gly contained all the sensational and inaccurate statements contained in Gallagher’s bungled press release. After all, they had no reason to question its veracity. When staff writers Jim O’Neill and Dennis Hevesi called the Suffolk County and Northport Village Police Departments for further comment, things got even worse. O’Neill and Hevesi were unable to reach Gallagher but spoke with Detective Lieutenant Dunn, who was still reeling from the shock of hearing Kasso’s confession in person. While speaking with the reporters, Dunn began to dramatically exaggerate the key details of Gary Lauwers’s murder.
“You’ve got a whole group of Satanic worshippers,” Dunn boldly claimed. “This was a sacrificial killing. They built a roaring fire in a field near the woods. They cut the sleeves out of his shirt and burned them, and they took his socks off and burned them. I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but this was what they did. It’s pure Satanism. They were chanting while they did this. Just before they killed him, they forced him to say, ‘I love Satan.’ After he did say that, they killed him. Then they dragged him into the woods. Around two weeks later, they came back and buried him.”
Suffolk County District Attorney Patrick Henry joined in on the circus, telling reporters, “This act of degeneracy makes other murders look like a day at the beach.”
When Jim O’Neill called Chief Howard to ask if a Satanic cult really had been operating in Northport, Howard replied that he had only heard rumors over the years. He told O’Neill that the closest incident he could recall was the burnt goat fetus found in the New Park gazebo in 1981, which had been incorrectly attributed to the Knights of the Black Circle.
“Isn’t Kasso the same guy who was arrested for robbing graves?” O’Neill asked.
When Howard confirmed this, O’Neill had enough to satisfy himself that the cult angle was rooted in truth. All this—from Dunn’s melodramatic blow-by-blow of the murder, to Howard’s recollections of the burnt goat—would make it into O’Neill and Hevesi’s front-page article. The groundwork was now laid for a dangerous amount of misinformation to reach the public. Newsday’s story got picked up by the Associated Press, which made it available to larger outlets like the New York Post and the New York Daily News.
Using the Newsday article as their feeble foundation, the Daily News printed a story of their own. It was nowhere near as large as the front-page spread Newsday offered, but Jerry Cassidy and Stuart Marques’s article, titled “Nab Devil Cult Teen in Slaying,” contained enough sensational and lurid details to shock their considerable circulation base. The story featured the press release quote about Northport’s “Satanic cult,” attributing it directly to Gallagher, and combined elements of Ricky’s grave-digging arrest with the murder. Cassidy and Marques incorrectly claimed that Ricky had been arrested the day before wearing a pentagram and carrying “a list of the hierarchy in Hell.” The two topped off the story with a little bit of original research, mentioning Randy Guethler’s own grave-robbing arrest in April, giving the mistaken impression that Ricky had been his accomplice.
The Post went even further. While quoting Chief Howard in their article “2 L.I. Teens Seized in Bizarre Devil Cult Slaying,” reporters Maralyn Matlick and Joy Cook set the stage for the media’s biggest screwup in the case—connecting Ricky to the Knights of the Black Circle. Howard opined to the reporters that Ricky was “the head of the group” responsible for the “ritual killing” of Gary. Somewhat naively, Howard was merely alluding to the four teenagers known to be in Aztakea that night—Ricky Kasso, Jimmy Troiano, Albert Quinones, and Gary Lauwers—and not any organized “cult.” Unfortunately, Matlick and Cook rather deceptively placed Howard’s mention of this nameless “group” right next to his comments about the Knights of the Black Circle.
“There was a group of high school kids back in 1981 who called themselves the ‘Knights of the Black Circle,’ ” Howard was quoted as saying. “That group, we believe was responsible for the charred carcass of a goat we found in Cow Harbor Park.”
Granted, Howard was also briefly quoted as saying he believed that the Knights had “died out,” but in the very same paragraph, Matlick and Cook tacked on Howard’s mention of Randy’s and Ricky’s graveyard activities.
“Then earlier this year,” the quote read, “two cemeteries were broken into.”
For hasty or less intelligent readers, this careless clump of quotes implied that Ricky was the “leader” of the Knights of the Black Circle, had a three-year history of killing and burning animals, and had robbed graves. To hammer this spectacular imagery home, Matlick and Cook peppered their article with quotes from William Keahon, chief of the Major Offense Bureau at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office.
“He took a breathing young man,” Keahon charged to Judge Gerard D’Emilio, “mutilated him, and used him as a sacrificial animal. In my eleven years as a prosecutor, I’ve never seen such a hideous and vicious taking of a life.”
The arraignment was notable for another reason. That afternoon Tony Jerome, a thirty-two-year-old freelance photographer, grabbed his Nikon and drove down to Suffolk County’s 4th District Courthouse in Hauppauge, hoping to get a shot of the accused devil worshippers that he could sell to the newspapers. Shortly after he arrived, a white police van pulled up. The back doors swung open to reveal a group of prisoners chained together by their handcuffs. Once a Suffolk County police officer began to lead the accused criminals out of the van, Jerome and several TV news reporters got their first view of Ricky and Jimmy, who were easily the youngest ones in cuffs by several years. Ricky got up from the wooden bench inside the van, hopped down to the ground, and sauntered toward the courthouse entrance.
“That walk he was doing—that sort of lope—was the Northport tough-guy, dirtbag walk,” Brendan Brown says. “It was a sort of a march that everyone knew how to do here. It was because you were wearing Timberland-style construction boots and they were a little too heavy. The ‘dirtbag uniform’ was tan Timberland boots or black biker boots with corduroys or jeans, a concert T-shirt, a flannel shirt, and a denim jacket. I know what I’m describing has been rehashed and repurposed into a contemporary fashion, but here in 1984, not everybody wore that. That was an identifying uniform.”
As Ricky approached the courthouse entrance, he looked to his left and saw Jerome waiting with his camera. He leered at Jerome, growled, and continued inside. Jerome captured the exact moment their eyes met in a photograph that would soon become a pop culture icon. Ricky’s face, wide-eyed, mouth agape mid-growl, would confirm every paranoid suburban parent’s worst fears—these so-called “Satan kids” were out there. Long-haired dopers on a mission for Lucifer, all thanks to that god-awful devil music. Ricky’s borrowed AC/DC T-shirt all but underlined that notion. For those who hadn’t seen Ricky in a while, the photo was even more shocking once it graced the front page of nearly every major newspaper in the country. The manic and greasy-haired teenager didn’t even resemble the Ricky they knew. He looked so thin and evil. Given the context, most were ashamed to admit it, but there was no way around it—Ricky looked possessed.
By the time Ricky got into the courtroom, however, his demonic facade had faded. As Judge D’Emilio read the charges against him, Ricky scanned the room for any sign of his parents. Vincent and Mary Troiano were at the courthouse to support their son, but Dick and Lynn Kasso were nowhere to be found. Ricky’s parents would later tell the newspapers that a detective told them not to bother coming to the arraignment, saying it wouldn’t be worth the four-hour drive. When Ricky realized that no one was coming, he lowered his head and stood in silence for the remainder of his time in the courtroom. Judge D’Emilio ordered both Ricky and Jimmy to be held without bail pending a hearing the following week. When Robert Luckey of the Daily News photographed Ricky leaving his arraignment, the wild-eyed boogeyman of Northport had vanished and been replaced with the hollow shell of a teenager slowly realizing his life was effectively over.
Chapter 37
“YOU’VE HAD MURDERERS SLEEPING IN o
ur house! How could you do that with your little sister here?!”
Matthew Carpenter had no idea what his mother was talking about. This changed when she threw the copy of Newsday down onto his bed. Ricky and Jimmy were staring back at him under the headline “2 Held in Ritual Killing of Teenager in Northport.” Suddenly everything came together in his mind: Gary going missing, Ricky’s Satan talk, the warning not to carry a knife, the terrible nightmares. Ricky was a killer and Jimmy had, at the very least, helped—and he had let them sleep in this very room.
“You see what your friends do?!” his mother cried, hammering the point home.
Matthew panicked, fled the house, and ran to the pay phone down by the roundhouse. He dropped a quarter in the slot and dialed his girlfriend, Carol, asking her to meet him downtown. When she arrived, Matthew told her everything he knew about Ricky’s arrest and suggested fleeing Northport. Carol agreed, and with what little money they had, she and Matthew hopped on a train headed toward Manhattan.
Over on Seaview Avenue, just two doors down from the Kasso home, word of Ricky’s arrest reached Grant Koerner. When he saw the newspaper photos of his childhood friend wearing an AC/DC shirt, Grant’s first instinct was to run upstairs and take down some of the rock posters adorning his bedroom wall. He may have only been thirteen years old, but he was smart enough to see the storm coming.
A mile away, on Cherry Street, Brendan Brown was sitting in his backyard with his friend Adam, going through his tape case filled with AC/DC bootlegs and rarities. A few moments later, Brendan’s mother stormed outside in her nightgown, clutching a copy of that morning’s newspaper.
“Do you know these boys?!” Mrs. Brown cried out. “Do you know anything about these boys?! You don’t go in that park, right?!”
When Brendan looked at the photos on the front page, he froze. There was the “dirtbag” who had been menacing him for the past year. To make matters worse, Ricky was wearing an AC/DC shirt in the photos, and here was Brendan sitting with a whole cache of the band’s albums.
The Acid King Page 18