Helltown (26 page)

Satisfied with the alibi, he started the engine, turned up the heat, and continued on his way to Mother of Sorrows church.

Spencer Pratt had not always been a Satanist, but he had always been a killer. He’d grown up in Shaker Heights, an affluent suburb of Cleveland. His father had owned a shoe factory, which made him a wealthy man when it became one of the manufacturers and suppliers of boots to American soldiers fighting in World War Two. Spencer, Cleavon, Earl, and Floyd had all attended the same prestigious private school. While Spencer was a stellar student, and Cleavon a mediocre one, Earl and Floyd were both born with chromosomal abnormalities linked to inherited mental retardation and were enrolled in the special education program. They weren’t trusted to walk home unsupervised, so at three o’clock each afternoon either Spencer or Cleavon—they rotated the responsibility every other day—would escort them. There were two routes you could take. The first kept to the sidewalks. The second cut through a hundred-acre swath of undeveloped woodland. The latter was quicker and more scenic, but a group of bullies often hung out along the path and would throw rocks and sticks at Spencer if he were by himself. That’s why he only cut through the woodland when he had Earl and Floyd tagging along. Everyone in school knew Earl was not only big and strong but also a lunatic. They knew if you teased him he would break your arms or legs if he could catch you. He earned this reputation when he was in grade four and beat up a kid two years his senior so badly the boy didn’t return to school for a month. Kids would taunt Earl and pelt erasers at him from a distance because they knew they could get away with that; Earl could never remember faces long enough to hold grudges. But no one risked getting up close and personal with him.

On the day Spencer committed his first murder at thirteen years of age, he was walking through the woodland with Earl and Floyd. It was warm, sunny, June, a few weeks before summer vacation commenced. They didn’t run into the bullies but instead came across a girl named Genevieve. She was in special ed with Earl and Floyd. Whenever Spencer stopped by the special ed classroom to pick up his brothers, he would try to tap Genevieve on the head because it set her off yelling and banging around the room like a human tornado.

Spencer spotted Genevieve in the long grasses off to the sides of the path, her shirt held in front of her like a pouch, holding a dozen or so freshly-picked wild berries. He called her name in a singsong way which also drove her nuts. Earl and Floyd joined in, repeating everything he said and chuckling stupidly at their ingenuity. Genevieve shouted at them in the inarticulate gibberish that passed as language for her. Hands held up, palms facing outward, as if he were an ambassador of peace, Spencer got close enough to tap her on her head. She threw her arms into the air, dropping all her berries at the same time. She spun in circles swatting the air and herself until she tripped on her feet and fell. Spencer stood over her, watching her dissolve into a blubbering mess on the ground. He didn’t feel guilt. He didn’t feel pity. He didn’t feel disgust. He didn’t feel anything but curiosity—curiosity at what it would be like to kill her. That’s all he remembered thinking in that moment.

He knelt beside her and plugged her snot-dripping nose with his thumb and index finger. She wailed and tried to pull away. He placed his other hand over her mouth, pressing her head into the ground. She flailed her arms and legs and was surprisingly strong. Earl and Floyd shouted at him to stop. He ignored everything except Genevieve’s eyes. He stared into them and saw that she understood she was dying. This gave him a great satisfaction. Then, eventually, her eyes glazed over and she went still.

That’s when Spencer returned to himself, when his nerves kicked in. He wasn’t remorseful at what he’d done; he was scared white at getting caught.

He told Earl and Floyd that they would all be in really big trouble if they didn’t help get rid of Genevieve’s body, and so they obeyed him without question. The three of them carried her to a waterhole where Spencer had gone swimming once, and where his mother had banned him from going ever again, telling him swimming unsupervised was how little boys died. The waterhole was the third the size of a baseball field and filled with sludgy brown water. They loaded Genevieve’s pockets and backpack with rocks and sank her in the middle of the pool.

For a few weeks it seemed as though her disappearance was all anybody talked about. Spencer often overheard his parents speculating what might have happened to her, while the kids at school had their own more fantastical theories. Yet after a month or so Genevieve became old news. She was gone, she would never be seen alive again, she was best left forgotten.

Spencer didn’t kill again for six years. He thought about doing so on most days. He might see a girl in the supermarket, or riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, and he would imagine getting her alone somewhere and suffocating her to death as he had done to Genevieve. He never followed through with these fantasies, however, because he was too afraid of getting caught. Killing Genevieve had been a spur of the moment action. He knew he had been very lucky. Someone could have seen him and Earl and Floyd cut through the woodland that June afternoon, or seen them while they were disposing of her body. The waterhole could have dried up and revealed her skeleton and perhaps some link to Spencer. Earl or Floyd could have talked.

In the end it was the move from home to his dorm at Case Western Reserve University which kicked him into action. The freedom he found living on his own at college intoxicated him and gave him the confidence he had until then been lacking. He had a private room. He had no curfew. He could come and go as he pleased, no questions asked. He could do anything and everything he wanted.

Spencer found the person he would kill in the classified section of
The Plain Dealer
. Her adult-services advertisement read: “Sensual massage to forget your stress and worry. Black, busty, 24 y/o Monique will make all your desires come true.” He chose Monique over the other illicit masseuses after consulting the Rand McNally Cleveland Street Guide and confirming her address was a residential property far away on the other side of the city.

Spencer’s parents had bought him a brand new Mercury Comet as a high school graduation gift—this was still several years before his father would lose all his savings in a series of bad investments and declare bankruptcy—but he left the car in the college parking lot and instead opted for public transit. He had grown into a cautious man—perhaps because of so many years of waiting for the police to knock on his door and haul him off for the murder of Genevieve—and he was determined not to leave any evidence that could point back to him.

After getting off the bus at Detroit Avenue and West Fifty-eighth Street, he started along a quiet tree-lined street, his head down, his face hidden by his hoodie. The masseuse’s home-cum-workplace was a bungalow with a knee-high stone property fence. A white sign on the front lawn read, “Oasis Massage Clinic,” and below that in handwritten letters, “Please use side door.”

Spencer turned down the driveway. A placard on the side door invited him inside. The reception was dimly lit and smelled of lavender incense. A cash register and a telephone and some pamphlets sat on six-foot-long counter. Given that it was unmanned, Spencer figured the masseuse was with another customer. He was about to leave when Monique pushed through a beaded doorway. She was indeed black, but she was only busty because she was twenty-five pounds overweight. She wore a short skirt and tight top that did little to cover or support her braless breasts. She was definitely older than twenty-four, maybe early-to-mid thirties. Spencer, however, didn’t care. This wasn’t about what she looked like. It was more intimate than that.

“Hi,” she said pleasantly though with little enthusiasm. “I’m Monique. You can come this way.”

She led him to a dark room and told him to take off all his clothes and lie facedown on the table. Spencer never had a massage before, but he didn’t think Monique was adequately skilled at what she professed to do. She mostly trailed her fingernails across his back and along his legs like a bored student doodling in her notebook. The massage was advertised as an hour, but fifteen minutes into it she tickled her fingers up and down the inside of his thighs and said, “Time’s up, hon. Do you want something extra?”

He didn’t and told her so. She seemed surprised by this, but then shrugged, replied curtly that it was his loss, and left the room. He got dressed again and pulled on a pair of leather gloves he’d kept in his pocket until then. Monique was behind the reception counter waiting for him. He walked up to her, ignoring her protests that he was on the wrong side of the counter, and seized her around her plump neck. He was still skinny then, having not yet discovered weight training, and it took all of his strength to wrestle Monique to the ground. He pinned her shoulders with his knees and continued to squeeze her throat, preventing her from breathing or screaming for help.

Throughout this he stared into her eyes and saw in them the same understanding she was dying as he’d seen in Genevieve’s eyes, and once again this brought him a great satisfaction. Afterward he took a Polaroid of her lifeless face, so he wouldn’t forget it as he had Genevieve’s, then left her for someone else to clean up.

After earning his MD, Spencer wanted out of Cleveland and chose to perform his residency at UCLA. While in his first year there a friend invited him to a party in San Francisco. The venue turned out to be a strange little black house in which the owner, a man named Anton LaVey, kept a lion and a leopard as household pets. Spencer had no idea who LaVey was then, but according to the other guests he was a local eccentric: ghost-hunter, sorcerer, organist, psychic. He was also an intellectual who spent much of the evening ranting to those gathered about the stagnation and hypocrisy of Christianity. In place he argued for a system of belief, or black magic as he called it, that emphasized the natural and carnal instincts of man without the nonsensical guilt of manufactured sins.

Spencer left the party that evening a different man, for he had found in Anton LaVey all the answers he had been seeking for much of his adolescent life. He was not an outcast, a deviant, a sexual predator—or if he was, there was nothing wrong with any of that. Life was not about self-denial and the hereafter; it was about pleasure and the here-and-now.

Over the course of the next six months Spencer attended all of LaVey’s soirees, mingling with artists, attorneys, doctors, writers, and even a baroness who’d grown up in the Royal Palace of Denmark. LaVey continued his rants against Christianity, though he was not a soapbox preacher. He wanted to start a real revolution, one that would free people from the blind faith and worship that life-denying Christian churches demanded.

To accomplish his goals he knew he could not simply present his ideas to the world as a philosophy, which could be too easily overlooked. He needed to do something shocking, and so he ritualistically shaved his head in the tradition of medieval executioners and black magicians before him, formed a new religion he called the Church of Satan, nominated himself as the high priest, and declared 1966 Year One,
Anno Satanas
—the first year of the reign of Satan.