Evil Season (17 page)

Well-known sculptor Howard Solomon was Dean's father-in-law, who had created a large metallic structure in the town of Ona in Hardee County: Solomon's Castle. He built it and they came. The “castle” became perhaps the county's only tourist attraction.

Solomon's creation had eighty stained-glass windows and had been built to look like a sixteenth-century Spanish galleon. The castle had a restaurant next door.

The eatery was run by Alane, Solomon's daughter, and Murphy's brother, Dean.

Being around Solomon always made Murphy want to be an artist, always started him thinking artistically. Murphy tried to emulate Solomon with his own works of art.

Solomon would always claim that he appreciated Murphy's work, and on more than one occasion, Solomon purchased one of Murphy's sculptures.

Dean and Alane didn't believe the appreciation was real, however. Murphy's brother and sister-in-law thought Solomon felt sorry for Murphy, and this was Solomon's method of being charitable.

Alane noticed that Dean's brother never showed up in good shape. It was never a happy thing. Murphy was inevitably destitute, and looking for work at the restaurant until he could “get back on his feet.”

Murphy remembered: “In 2003, for one day a week for a few months, I was working off some debt for my brother—he was selling me a car and had loaned me some money—at the restaurant. It was really a fun place to work.”

Dean sold him a car on credit to help him get on his feet, a red Geo Metro convertible. His brother bought him clothes at Walmart and a pair of shoes at a shoe store.

As always, Murphy's visits to Solomon's Castle became irritating. Murphy wasn't good when it came to social prompts and cues, boundaries and taboos. There were times when he didn't know how to act.

Dean and Alane were slightly uncomfortable with some of the things Murphy was saying in front of their children, such as “God has chosen me” and “Big things are going to happen to me.”

With his brother's help and guidance, Murphy moved out of the Solomon's Castle home and into his own place, an efficiency apartment in the Port of Tampa.

Things were good. He was only three blocks from the bay. He was employed again at a Regis shop, but not the one he'd worked at before. It had been time to start over, anyway.

The women at the old place were scared of him.

It was a woman by the name of Marguerite Bradley who gave Murphy the chance. She knew he had been through psychological turmoil after a bad divorce, but she still took him on.

There was a brief period, two or three days, when Murphy felt almost optimistic. He was going to put all of his troubles behind him and make a fresh start.

“Then my agitated behavior began again in Tampa, and it got to the point where I felt like I had supernatural powers.”

Elton Brutus Murphy was a “majik man,” which was “magic” spelled in a magic way. He was the hero whose exploits were woven surreptitiously into the fabric of the world's greatest literature, the world's greatest music. He was inspiration itself.

Then it went sour.

It was the same delusion he'd suffered in the Tallahassee jail. It seemed everywhere he went, he was inadvertently causing accidents to happen with his mind.

When he walked down the street, cars crashed. He'd look at a waiter carrying a tray and it would drop. He'd look at a lovely set of legs in high heels and the woman would trip.

Murphy had this power now and he spent long hours contemplating how best to use it. He experimented with different methods of making chaos out of order. He drove on the interstate and stared at cars until they swerved out of control.

He believed he was a god, and it was during this stretch that Murphy first referred to himself as “The Lord God Elton Brutus Murphy.”

Best title ever.

Murphy had been living in the efficiency apartment near Tampa Bay for two or three weeks when he found himself in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Brandon. He was in the Spiritual section, browsing, when he met a guy named Dave Gallant.

“What book are you looking for?” Gallant asked.

“I don't know,” Murphy replied, open to suggestion.

Gallant recommended the books of Zecharia Sitchin, an author born in Azerbaijan, who served with the British Army during World War II. Sitchin believed that the ancient Sumerian culture was created by the Anunnaki, ancient astronauts, who came to Earth from the planet Nibiru. This planet revolved around the Sun in our solar system, past Neptune, in such an elongated orbit that Nibiru only appeared in Earth's sky every few millennium. Sitchin's pseudoscience hit Murphy where he lived. Here was an explanation for bizarre phenomenon that he, the Lord God, had been aware of for years. And Murphy and the man who'd recommended Sitchin became fast friends: conspiracy-theory buddies. Gallant had read all of Sitchin's books and was willing to teach Murphy the truth.

From the bookstore the pair relocated to a coffee shop. They found that they had other things in common as well. Both had recently done stints in jail. Additionally, Gallant, like Murphy, believed himself in possession of superpowers.

Gallant described how he could make himself invisible. Murphy said, hey, he could do that, too. So they went to a mall and walked up and down without anyone being able to see them.

“I'm invisible now.”

“Yeah, me too.”

They laughed like children. They could see
each other,
of course, because they shared residence on the higher plane.

In the following days and weeks, Murphy used his power of invisibility to commit small acts of larceny. He'd go to the mall or a flea market and swipe stuff right in front of people, and the vendors wouldn't be able to see.

One day at a mall kiosk jewelry store, Murphy deftly plucked six rings from a rotating display.

He stole a thick silver necklace off a flea market table while the vendor was looking right at him! Murphy returned the next day and, needing something to put on his necklace, he stole a silver skull off the same table.

During this sticky-fingers period, Murphy actually read the Sitchin books that Dave Gallant recommended, and he became a firm believer.

Murphy decided to worship some of the ancient astronauts from Nibiru: Marduk, Nergal, and Enki. Gallant worshipped Nergal exclusively, because he believed that his powers came from Nergal.

Murphy still heard the voices, but now they were spiritual in nature. Now he knew there was a logical explanation for them. The messages he received came from the ancient astronauts, from the gods—so he felt less anxiety when they boldly tempted him.

 

 

During the summer of 2003, Murphy was on administrative probation, which meant that he did not have to visit his probation officer regularly, but he did have to write him once a month and keep him informed of his whereabouts. His other court-ordered obligation was to attend monthly psychological counseling sessions with a guy named Michael White.

White wasn't a doctor. He had a master's, had undergone state testing and supervision in Florida, and had worked as a counselor for ten years. Before that, White spent a decade as a New Hampshire law enforcement officer. White treated Murphy from May till December 2003.

During that time White never found Murphy delusional or hallucinatory, and Murphy certainly had never claimed to be God or a god. Murphy showed up early for his sessions and never seemed confused. White tested Murphy for overall function, and Murphy scored well within the normal range.

“I didn't inform him of my psychological issues,” Murphy later admitted.

In the meantime, on the sly, Murphy's delusions inflated his ego even further. Sometimes he thought he was a god, and sometimes he thought he was
the
God.

Murphy grew comfortable with the voices in his head. He felt less like the victim of a worldwide conspiracy and more like the controller of that conspiracy. In his mind the voices repeated their ultimate demands: kidnap, rape, kill.

 

 

If the voices wanted him to kidnap, he would—and he knew who the victim should be, a twenty-one-year-old woman at Regis named Julie. Murphy sighed just thinking about her.

“To me, Julie was the most beautiful and sexy woman in the world,” Murphy remembered.

His plan was to take her at gunpoint. He knew where he could steal a gun. He would keep her for a week or so, rape her as often as possible, and then kill her.

There was a part of Murphy's freaky psyche that knew the plan was wrong and argued against it. It was a small and diminishing part, but it was there nonetheless.

“You just have a crush on her, and you can't have her because she has a boyfriend,”
the angel on this shoulder would say.

“Rape her and kill her,”
the devil on that shoulder responded.

It only aggravated matters when Julie's boyfriend turned out to be a creep and she came to work with a black eye.

Not long after getting the shiner, she announced she was engaged to the asshole. Murphy plotted to kill him as well. He built voodoo dolls out of Barbie and Ken. He had about a dozen dolls that he kept “imprisoned in a hamster cage.”

He playfully poked the sweet Julie doll with needles. He cut the male fiancé doll with razor blades. He tied tiny nooses and hung them. If he got caught, he'd call it rough sex. Murphy believed the voodoo was working.

 

 

During that same time Murphy and Gallant had a brief spat. It was over something trivial. Murphy didn't even remember anymore what it was about. Murphy built a Gallant voodoo doll and threw it out the window of his moving vehicle.

Soon after that, Gallant was hit by a car and needed hospitalization. Murphy went to visit him and Gallant looked really bad, like “death warmed over”—not that he ever looked that great. Gallant was fifty-four years old at the time and had had a couple of heart attacks and open-heart surgery. When Gallant recovered, he and Murphy once again became friends.

Gallant was a good friend—and a great landlord. For rent and for food, Gallant charged Murphy only $50 per week. “What a deal!” Murphy exclaimed. The food was pretty much free. Gallant enjoyed feeding Murphy the meals he enjoyed the most. “And for me that was steaks and liverwurst-and-onion sandwiches,” Murphy said.

“Dave Gallant thought he had a unique relationship with the spirit world, and I know for a fact that he does,” Murphy recently explained. “He used a Ouija board in an untraditional manner to contact the beyond.”

Gallant drilled a hole in the middle of the Ouija planchette. He inserted a pen through the hole and placed the planchette on a sheet of paper.

“He'd contact a particular spirit or soul, and as the planchette moved itself, the pen drew an image or signature,” Murphy explained. “It was fascinating watching the planchette move by itself and draw the picture.”

Murphy loved to watch, of course, but soon enough his ego troubled him:
I should be able to do this,
he thought. After all, he wasn't a mere mortal— and this was small potatoes. He was a god, and he should be able to do whatever he wanted with a Ouija planchette!

It was best to practice alone. In solitude he set up the planchette with the pen and put it on paper. Then, brow furrowed, eyes unblinking, he stared at it and concentrated with a determined focus. Nothing. He tried again the next day. Nothing. The day after. Zip.

One time he tried it with a major storm raging outside, rolling crescendos of strong thunder, cascades of rain blasting the windows. Murphy still couldn't make the damn planchette move.

He took the frustration well, and tossed the planchette onto his bed. At that precise moment lightning hit a tree about one hundred feet from Murphy's apartment. He could look out the window and see the tree smoldering as he fixed himself a healthy snack.

Fifteen minutes later he reentered his bedroom and gazed down onto his bed, where the planchette was, “and, lo and behold, there was a huge ink blotch in the shape of a tornado” on his comforter.

The pen was completely empty of ink.

“It was a significant sign,” Murphy explained.

My dry spell is over,
he quickly concluded.

He placed the planchette on the paper on a table and efficiently summoned up a soul. He stared at the planchette and, “lo and behold,” the pen emptied itself of ink and formed a growing blotch on the paper. The ink “steadily flowed” onto the paper. As before, the blotch formed the shape of a tornado.

This is nothing short of a miracle,
Murphy thought.

He was not only transforming the pen into a bridge to the eternity, into the soul's method of communication, as Gallant had done, he was also getting the pen to drain out all of its ink and make a tornado. That was one-up on Gallant for sure.

 

 

Every day Murphy practiced his voodoo and his Ouija skills. The images created by the planchette were, under Murphy's mind power, becoming increasingly complex.

“I summoned my own soul just to see what would happen,” he recalled. He used a red Magic Marker in the planchette that day. The resulting image was of a three-headed dragon complete with wings and a tail. Murphy was astonished.

The image was both exciting and disturbing, but it made him feel good because it reinforced the fact that he was unique—unique in the universe. The disturbing part was that something so hideous would be symbolic of his own soul.

What a monster I must be, deep down inside,
Murphy worriedly thought.

The dragon was so well done that Murphy couldn't have drawn it as well if he'd set down to create it in the customary fashion. His artistic skills weren't that great. The dragon was beyond his scope, or what he perceived to be his scope. Murphy was starting to believe strongly again that he had no scope. He was omniscient and his power was absolute.

Murphy knew most readers were going to think he was perpetuating a hoax, that the planchette's behavior could be explained by some trick, a sleight of hand. But, as Shakespeare wrote,
This above all: to thine own self be true,
Murphy knew he was telling the truth. That was all he cared about.