Articles by various newspapers including The Washington Post at the time of Ricky Kasso’s arrest speak of “Satanic cults” as the foregone cause of Gary Lauwers’ murder. The Knights of the Black Circle, which Ricky Kasso supposedly started, “left their marks” on a playground and its surroundings in the form of “upside-down crucifixes in blue spray paint, a sign of the anti-Christ; a two-foot-wide pentagram, an inverted star symbolizing the Devil; and the name of their favorite rock stars.” The article even goes so far as to fall back to the old mainstay of pointing fingers at things like ’70s metal icon Ozzy Osbourne and his infamous biting the head off a bat on-stage incident.
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The presence of such conclusions in mainstream outlet articles like The Washington Post and The New York Times shows how deeply the Satanic Panic had seeped, no matter how absurd such conclusions might seem to modern 20/20 hindsight. The Washington Post even states that Suffolk County police already decided, at the time of the article’s writing, that Kasso and more than 20 other teenagers weren’t merely some kids going overboard on drugs in the woods, but were part of a “loose satanic cult.” And, the story went, Kasso’s friend James Troiano was present at Lauwers’ ritual killing. As Rolling Stone reports, it indeed seems like Troiano was present during the murder, but that’s where the very non-supernatural truth ends.
