Chapter 14

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLES

Southeastern  Ohio  has  had  a  long  history  of reputed  satanic  activity.  Tiffin  police  chief Griffis  told  of  a  24-year-old Fairfield County woman  who  claimed  to  be  a  victim  of satanic worship.   Raised   in   an   upper-middle   class environment,  “Jane,” 11  years old  at the  time, told how she was approached by a stranger just two weeks after her father had died.

“He  asked  me,  ‘How   would  you  like  to  have everything you ever wanted?’”  This, she said, was her first contact with Satanism.

“It  began with  meetings in  private homes  where anonymous black-robed figures burned black candles and chanted...

“[The  cult members]  gradually introduced  her to the  drinking of  animal blood  and the ceremonial slaughtering of pigs and goats.”

Jane acknowledged  she was high  on drugs most  of the  time that  she was  involved in  Satanism. “I don’t think  any of it  really registered with  me until it  was all over.  It was different.  It was weird...Everything was brought on so gradually. It was not repulsive when they got to the killing and stuff.”

At age 13,  she was taken to a  gathering of about 100  practitioners in  an open  field in  a remote area of  northern Ohio. “This  one lady was  being initiated and they told her to go home and get her baby,” she said. “The leader of the ritual ordered the woman to hand him her child. And she obeyed.”

After she  saw the leader  cut the baby’s  throat, she panicked and ran.  “I still have nightmares, I don’t feel safe.”

One mother  of a victim told  ABC-TV’s “20/20” how children recruited into cults were given knives to kill the younger children and infants present. “If they refused to do  it, usually the child’s father or mother would actually take the child’s hand and make them kill the [other] child.”

A  similar case  was reported  linking child abuse with murder.  “The children were  given knives and      told  to   go  and  stab  those   bodies,  and  my      grandchildren  told  me   that  they  couldn’t  do that—that  it  wasn’t  possible,  that they could only  get their  knives to  go in  about that far. Then   the  adults   put  their   hands  over  the children’s hands and shoved the knives in.”

The  question  was  asked  whether  there  was any      reference to the  devil. The interviewee responded

“Yes.”

Another case, under police investigation, involved young boys describing murder.

Q: Tell me what you were asked to do?

A: I was asked to stab him.

Q:  To stab?  And this  was in  front of the other people who were there? Were you given a knife?

A: Yes.

Q: And were  you told what would happen  to you if you didn’t? Do you remember what they said?

A: This will happen to you.

Q:  So  you  either  stabbed  him  or you would be stabbed is about what it came down to?

A  guardian  present  at  the  interview  told the reporter, “It’s a hard, hard thing for him to say. He’s more apt to act  it out.” With the guardian’s consent the boy used a doll to demonstrate what he did.

Q: So you  were given the knife and  then what did you do?

[The boy demonstrated.]

Q: Did you push the knife all the way in deep? Did you see what happened to  the child that was stuck with the knife?

A: Yeah.

Q: What do you remember?

A: A lot of blood.

According to  Dale Johnston, Thomas  Tyack, Robert Suhr and Jeff Hilson III,  Logan, Ohio is the home of  the  devil,  or,  at  the  very  least, of his disciples.

“In  the  Logan   situation,”  Hilson  said,  “The scenario ran  something like this.  A symbolic cut is made, usually with a sword or a large knife. In the  case of  Schultz—cut across  the chest. It’s very  significant. The  heart in  the Schultz case was  defiled. It  was stabbed.  I imagine  if they could  have gotten  it  when  the heart  was still beating, they  [would] usually extract  the heart. They would  pass it around. As  grisly as it might sound, they ingest the heart.”

Todd’s  father, Don,  says he  saw Hilson  waiting near the  courtroom. “I don’t  know why he  didn’t testify if  he’s supposed to  be so smart  that he knows everything...But  my guess is  that he would have been laughed out of the county.”

“He was  there ready to  testify,” Suhr said.  “I was decided as a whole that the case was in such a posture that no rational judicial panel would come to  the  conclusion  of  guilt.  And  to  put this additional evidence  [forward] would only  tend to panic the community.”

Schultz  doesn’t  think  Hilson  knows  what he is talking about. “I don’t care who it is or whatever you  wanted  to  kill.  If  you  are  going to eat anything at  all for a ritual,  you don’t kill it. If you even  put it in a refrigerator  and left it there  from the  fourth (Oct.  4) to  the 31^st, it would be spoiled rotten.

“You  can’t even  buy  hamburger  and have  it two weeks  later; you’d  be sick  as a  dog, it’ll  be spoiled green—let alone, put it out in the ground someplace  for the  maggots and  everything to eat and  crawl   all  over  it.  No,   Mr.  Hilson  is just—well, I’d hate to  have him teaching my kids anything.”

“[In]   keeping   with   the   notion  of  satanic defilement,” Hilson reiterated,  “the cut would be made in  the gut area—the rays  coming out of the left side, the dark  side of the [Catholic] cross [This]  really signifies  the trinity—the satanic trinity,  Lucifer, the  fallen angel,  the head of the    world   in    their   way    of   thinking, Beelzebub—which  is  like  his  second in command [and] the  third part of the  trinity is like Amon Ra or Baal.”

Schultz  feels the  teenagers were  killed by Dale Johnston because of  jealousy, jealousy brought on because of his alleged “affair with her.” “There’s no doubt  in my mind  that he was  jealous of her. I’m sure that she [Annette] was going to tell what he  had been  doing all  those years  and he  just killed them to cover it up.”

Because of the unemotional  way Johnston had acted during the search and  trial, Schultz was sorry he didn’t kill  Johnston. “That may  not be what  you wanted to hear, but that’s the way I felt, yeah.

“Dale  Johnston  [is]  one  of  these  people that wanted everything his way, ‘I’m Dale Johnston, you do  it  my  way.  This  is  the  way it’s gonna be because I’m  me and you’re you  and I’m the boss.’ [At the  trial] his attorney had  told him to keep his  mouth  shut,  not   to  talk  to  anybody  or anything...

“You  look at  that and  wonder ‘how  can a man be even on  trial and stand  there and smile  like he did.’ I think that a lot of time when he looked at me and smiled, that he  was saying ‘Yeah, I killed your  kid and  there is  nothing you  can do about it.’ I really think he feels that way.

“[When] you’ve  killed one, it’s  not difficult to cover it up by killing somebody else. And where it took  place—let’s  remember  that  there’s nobody around for a mile. You  could go out and shoot all day and nobody would probably hear it.”

Questioned  about  the  defense’s  version  of the crime, attorney Robert  Suhr explained, “It’s sort of  ludicrous to  believe that  someone would take these  kids out  to his  farm, where  there is  an active  strip mine  going on—approximately  55-75 feet  deep, and  kill these  kids, then  take them back to Logan.

“If someone had the idea  of doing away with these kids, their bodies could  [have been] put down the strip  pit  and  buried  under  a  little  bit  of overfill  and by  morning  they’d  put 75  feet of stuff  over top.  Adjacent to  Johnston’s farm  is almost 2,000 acres of federal forestland. There’s nobody around his house.

“I believe  those kids were  in the cornfield  and were killed there, that,  at some later time—some few  hours later  in the  dark hours,  a cult  did return,”  Suhr  said.  “They  performed a ceremony using the  bodies, using the cutting  of the limbs and that sort of thing.

“There  are estimates  by experts  that this would take  people  knowledgeable  in  this stuff, five, six, seven hours to do  all this cutting. It just doesn’t wash the way it is,” Suhr said.