Analysis: Murder at the Devil's command
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
UPI religion correspondent
Published 1/17/2002 7:36 PM
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- "It could have happened here," Satanism expert Carla Alexander said Thursday when told that a young German couple had confessed to murdering a man on the Devil's orders.
The gory details prosecutors told a court in Bochum, Westphalia, reminded Alexander, a lay theologian, of much she had heard and read during decades of research in the United States.
Daniel and Manuela Ruda, he a car salesman, she a waitress, and both had heads half shaved, Satanic symbols branded into their skins, tongues pierced. They slept in coffins, where they also consummated their marriage. And that is where they killed Frank Hackert in the Westphalian town of Witten, hitting and stabbing him 66 times with a hammer and machetes, respectively.
The sixes, actually three of them, are the numbers of the Evil One, according to the last book in the Bible: "This calls for wisdom; let him who has understanding reckon the number of the Beast, for it is a number; its number is six hundred and sixty-six" (Revelation 13:18).
Police later found Hackert's remains by the caskets, along with other pieces of evidence pointing to ritual murder. The English words, "When Satan lives," were smeared in blood on the window; human skulls lay about the place.
The Rudas' ongoing trial has attracted more than just morbid fascination around Europe, more than the usual interest a particularly revolting crimes would generate. And that is because the so-called Gothic subculture that includes Satanism, sadomasochism and neo-Nazism has become a highly visible element in postmodern society on both sides of the Atlantic.
Carla Alexander, who under another name has exposed this phenomenon to such an extent that she changed her name in fear of retribution, has an enormous archive filled with evidence of bloody rites honoring the Devil on this side of the Atlantic.
She estimates that tens of thousands, ranging from serious Satanists to youthful dabblers, are involved in acts such as black masses, animal and -- in some cases -- human sacrifices.
"There is never enough evidence for the latter to lead to a trial," she said. "On the other hand, bones of dismembered bodies are frequently found at the Myles Standish Forest in Massachusetts," said the Rev. Ingo Dutzmann, pastor of First Lutheran Church in Boston.
Dutzmann said he has often given pastoral care to Satanists trying to abjure the Devil.
The young German couple standing trial in Bochum confessed to using Hackert, a former colleague of Daniel Ruda's, as a human sacrifice to Satan.
"Satan asked for it," Manuela Ruda, 23, testified. She and her 25-year old husband intended to sacrifice more victims. Next to Hackert's remains lay a list with 15 names and the words: "Rejoice! You will be next." The list included the name of the president of a local evangelical congregation.
Since the Middle Ages, Satanists have been accused of offering up humans, especially children and virgins, to the Devil. There were rumors then, as now, that young girls and boys were especially bred for this purposes.
Western law enforcement agencies have never been able to verify reports that Eastern European women received substantial sums of money for being impregnated to provide babies for Black Masses in the West and especially the United States.
But Alexander, who holds a Master of Theology degree from a leading New England seminary, insistS that there were at least five so-called breeding stations close to major U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
The Rev. Larry Nichols, Protestant chaplain at Rhode Island College and pastor of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Smithfield, R.I., confirmed that such breeding does occur.
"Last summer a nurse from California came to one of my services with a baby girl," he relates. "She told me that she had run away with the child belonging to a couple of young Satanists who had bred it with the express purposes of having it sacrificed in a Black Mass."
According the pastor, who has built up a nationwide reputation with his writings on cults, the girl's parents were arrested. "Another couple adopted the child."
Carla Alexander said that virgins raised to be sacrificed could easily be recognized by the long, black nail of their ring finger. "They are 12 to 13 years old and readily admit to being Lucifer's brides."
In Germany, Manuela Ruda, nee Bartel, was about that age when she left the punk scene to graduate to Satanism, the Berlin daily, Die Welt, reported.
She began posing as a model for sadomasochistic pornography, had her canine teeth pulled, her lips pierced and cuts inflicted all over her body -- cuts with which she prided herself as if they were jewelry, according to the paper.
Eventually, the night before Halloween -- one of the Satanists' high holidays -- she gave her soul to the Devil and promised to serve him beyond her death.
How did she find her match? Through an ad in an underground newspaper. It read, "Pitch-black vampire seeks princess of darkness, who despises everything and everybody and has bidden farewell to life."
The young man who had placed the ad was Daniel, who evidently had an apparition during a high school class, Die Welt related.
A pale, bony figure calling himself Samiel ordered Ruda to seek the second half of his soul. Ruda responded by drinking his own blood and reading the Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey, the late founder of the California-based church of Satan.
Ruda also gave himself a new -- English -- name: Sundown.
The pair met, clicked, and began driving about in Daniel's Opel bearing the inscription "Corpse Processing Plant Bunker Gate 7, 85221 Dachau" (Dachau is the Bavarian town made infamous by a Nazi concentration camp).
The car's rear window showed a pentagram, the Satanists' symbol. The trunk bore the words "Grave Beauty."
Thus clearly recognizable as ghouls, the Rudas commuted between concerts featuring Gothic metal music and graveyards, where they slept and dug up bones and skulls.
Why didn't anybody pay attention?
Because there are so many of that ilk around Europe and indeed America, clergymen concerned with aberrant cults suggest.
Ingolf Christiansen, who investigates occult groups on behalf of the territorial Lutheran Church of Hanover and the German federal parliament, estimated a as many as 7,000 hard-core Satanists in the country.
But this may just be the tip of the iceberg, judging by the growing number of incidents, especially in Eastern Germany, Poland and other countries of the former Soviet bloc. Cemeteries and churches are being desecrated, pastors attacked.
"Youthful Satanists fill the chat rooms and discussion forums of Christian Web sites with blasphemies," said Martin Mandt, an editor of Jesus-Online in Wetzlar, Germany.
Internet surfers frequent Satanic sites, such as the Chain Saw Massacre Club, the Church of Satan and the Temple of Seth. Many sites provide links to neo-nazi and sadomasochistic addresses, featuring in the most extreme cases photographs of aborted embryos in garbage cans.
Why this advance of Devil worship, especially in the Eastern part of Germany? Even before the Berlin Wall came down, the Rev. Theo Lehmann, a prominent pastor in then Communist-run Saxony, told this correspondent that U.S. Satanist organizations were recruiting among the young in East German jails.
"There they have easy prey," he said. "The inmates were brought up without any values, without recourse to the church in broken homes in soulless housing projects."
According to Lehmann, huge amounts of Satanist literature weree smuggled from the United States through West Berlin to the crumbling German Democratic Republic. "Our prisons and housing projects literally became seminaries for Satanist priests."
That was in 1989. Thirteen years on, they are evangelizing westward.
In the United States, Carla Alexander is not surprised. She had been watching Satanism grow steadily since the 1960s.
"There are five kinds of Satanists," she told UPI.
"First, there are the generational Satanists, who do practice human sacrifices. Their members come from usually upper-class families, who have served the Devil for centuries."
Adds the Rev. Nichols, "They have been around since the Middle Ages."
"Second, there are the non-traditional, first-generation Satanists, who pursue the occult quietly, seek no trouble and don't harm anybody physically," Alexander said.
"Third, you have the official Satanists like the Church of Satan and the Temple of Seth, who are in reality atheists who worship Satan as a mere symbol of evil," said Alexander.
"Fourth, there are individual Satanists, usually neurotics who commit mass murders or practice cannibalism and claim in court the Devil had ordered them to do so.
"Finally, you have the youthful amateurs, usually products of broken middle-class homes. Often Heavy Metal music extolling the Devil, death, drugs and sex leads them to seek the company of Satanist congregations," Alexander said.
The Rudas in Bochum presumably belong to one of the last two groups. "But even the amateurs tend to move up the scale," Alexander said.
This is why the Rev. Thomas Gandow, the German Protestant Church's leading expert on sects and cults, used the Rudas' case to appeal to the public: "It's high time to begin taking this menace seriously."
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
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