Murder Like Its 1996
A year of Fiona Apple, Dolly the Sheep, and murrrrrderrrrr
Welcome to I Know What You Did Last Thursday, a newsletter about murder, ghosts, disappearances, crimes, legends, spooky old houses that only have one attic light on, and all the other things that make life worth living. This week, we’re talking: crimes from 1996.
Pageant Girl
JonBenét Ramsey is in the news again this week, not because of any updates in her case, but because of a Netflix documentary that seemingly rehashes the details in a selective manner. As a ‘90s baby, news reports and tabloids about the 6-year-old found murdered on December 26th, 1996 were my first brushes with true crime.
Perhaps the fact that I was five years old at the time gives you pause—shouldn’t I have been playing with Barbies instead of watching 60 Minutes or whatever?
But the joke is on you—I was fully capable of playing Barbies while catching up on world events! Back in my day, children knew how to multitask.
It’s weird to be a little girl at the same time that another little girl around your age gains notoriety for being dead. The story of JonBenét, with all its macabre mystery, opened a tiny door in the back of my brain. Due to the fun combo of Being a Child and Undiagnosed Anxiety Disorder, it seemed like the sheer knowledge that this was possible—that a child could end up dead in her own basement on Christmas night—offered the universe permission to allow it to happen to me.
Of course I was unaware of the cultural context—that children are harmed by people they know, that most victims are not wealthy and white and therefore their murders do not receive the front page of the National Enquirer treatment. I just had the sudden knowledge that evil can and does occur every day, right under our noses, and often we never fully understand why.
As the writer Ashley Ray put it in her fascinating piece on this subject:
“JonBenet was 3 months older than me and like most girls born in 1990, I was obsessed with the photos of her that were all over the news and tabloids. How could something like that happen to a girl my age? At 6, I wasn’t into the details of the case, of course, I was just struck by this pretty girl who suddenly made me realize the world may not be such a nice place for little girls.”
When people meet me, they’re often surprised to learn that I write horror novels and can recite facts about the Manson family the way other people might list the U.S. presidents in order. I’m 4’11”, a woman, and am relatively cheerful depending on how recently I’ve eaten. That never made sense to me—don’t we all know that looks can be deceiving, and a polished surface can provide cover for a host of writhing, twisting things beneath?
I get asked often by those who don’t have any interest in true crime or horror why it is that I do. They tend to assume that I’m less sensitive than they are, but I think it’s the opposite. Inside, I’m still the same person who, in 1996, believed that I had uncovered a terrible secret message between the lines of magazine articles about JonBenét—that The Horrors were coming for us all and there was nothing we could do to stop them.
At the same time, that knowledge feels like a hidden power. By facing the worst that humanity has to offer head-on, by not flinching, maybe I’ll figure out how to keep myself and everyone I care about safe. I don’t mean that in a think-piecey “women like true crime because it teaches them how not to be victimized” kind of way. It’s more cosmic, wishful thinking. Like when I used to lay in bed after glimpsing the Ramseys on the nightly news, convinced that if I stayed awake long enough I could use force of will to shield myself from harm.
Am I aware that I am revealing my particular brand of mental illness to the internet? Yes! But hey, why else have a newsletter?
I can’t claim that there’s any moral high ground in obsessively combing Reddit threads about a 6-year-old’s tragic unsolved death from almost 30 years ago. I’m not pretending that I do it for any special reason other than to refresh the awful facts that I mostly know by heart anyway. It’s not like I’m going to get to the bottom of it! But the murder of JonBenét Ramsey taught me very early on about the ways that money and beauty can conceal deeply disturbing realities. While we may never truly know what happened to her, I understand why we keep looking back, as if there’s some other lesson to be learned. - E.K.
The Lords of Chaos (No, the Other Lords of Chaos)
Standard caveat: murder isn’t entertainment, no one deserves to die, murderers are terrible people, we should all spend more time bringing pie to our next door neighbors instead of reading about disembowlings on the internet, blah blah blah.
But we’re all friends/ ghouls here, so I am going to drop any airs of politeness (or, to be 1996 about it, I’m going to stop being polite and start getting real) and say it: 1996 year was an amazing year for crimes. A fine vintage, if you will!
I mean, the whole ‘90s were a fantastic era if the thing you were looking for in life was incredibly strange crimes. And boy, was I! I was 14 in 1996, lonely, Manic Panic-ed and oversized NIN-t-shirt-clad. And I thirsted for (reading about) blood.
But I was not interested in just any crimes, oh no. The serial killer boom of the ‘70s and ‘80s seemed terrifying and serious to me — it felt like an era when IRL boogeymen reigned.
No, I was here for the strange stuff. The kind of bizarre-o, funhouse crimes that get you locked up in Arkham Asylum forever. And the ‘90s provided that for me in spades. From Tonya Harding, to the Norwegian Black Metal Murders, to JonBenet, to the Menendezes and OJ, to Michael Alig, the crimes of the ‘90s were “the tragically ludicrous, the ludicrously tragic,” in the words of John Waters. The crimes of the ‘90s didn’t teach you to watch your back, lock your doors, and trust no one. Or they didn’t teach me that, anyway. They just taught me that life was pretty fucking weird.
Which brings us to the Lords of Chaos. No, not THOSE Lords of Chaos — that happened in 1993 in Norway. These Lords of Chaos where a gang of of teens growing up in suburban Florida (or, as it is sometimes called, America’s Norway) in 1996. These American Lords of Chaos were also not involved in anything as interesting as black metal. Instead, these Lords of Chaos grew out of a hang spot.
You may recall “hang spots” from your own adolescence — homes where you could do pretty much anything you wanted, even spill bong water on the couch, because your friend’s parents were either constantly absent or permanently deranged. For Lords founder and lead dumbass Kevin Foster, it was the latter (more on that later).
Foster had dropped out of high school; his friends who still remained were seniors, literally weeks away from graduating. They could have finished school and joined the Forest Service, or attended clown college, or gone to Norway to visit the actual Lords of Chaos. They could have even just moved two towns over and gotten a job at Starbucks. But instead, they did this:
One night, lead dumbass Foster corralled two of his dumbass friends for a classic antisocial teen boy bullshit vandalism spree: breaking car windows, setting fires, torturing animals, etc.
But they decided to get organized about it. Several days later, Foster gathered a group of five of his friends and decided that they weren’t just a bunch of idiots who had access to guns because Foster’s parents operated a pawn shop. No, they were a militia, called the Lords of Chaos. Foster gave them all ranks and nicknames — Slim, Fried, Mob, Red, Dog. Foster nicknamed himself God. They drew up a logo (pictured at the top) and wrote up a manifesto, which they later sent to a newspaper:
“During the night of April 12, the Lords of Chaos began a campaign against the world. Be prepared for destruction of Biblical proportions. The games have just begun, and terror shall ensue.”
I need to stress, this was three years before Fight Club! People have just always been this stupid.
So what was their agenda? Set more fires!
They burned down a Coca-Cola bottling plant (somewhat hilariously referred to in everything I read as “the historic Coca-Cola bottling plant”), using propane tanks stolen from a local hardware store. They had an unrealized plan to use a smoke grenade to shoplift clothes from Dillards (??), which they thought would allow them to sneak into Disney World on Grad Night (??), where they could then steal character costumes and go on a racist killing spree at the park (?????).
They also kept secret “idea notebooks,” much like another group of sociopathic teen boys who would make the news in a few years.
A few nights later, the Lords of Dumbass showed up at their high school after hours, looking to trash it; bu they were immediately caught by a teacher named Mark Schwebes.
Schwebes confiscated their vandalism supplies and said he’d be calling their parents the next morning. Their brilliant teen solution? Mr. Schwebes couldn’t call their parents tomorrow if they killed him tonight! After a few hours of getting amped at the hang spot, they went to Mr. Schwebes’ house, rang his doorbell, and when he answered, shot him in the face. He died instantly.
How long do you think a group of teenagers could keep the fact that they murdered a teacher secret? For the Lords of Chaos, it was two days. One member told his girlfriend, who immediately told police (hot tip to any teens reading: your girlfriend will not be impressed that you murdered anyone! Buy her a cute necklace at Claire’s instead).
As all this was going down, the rest of the Lords had no idea; in fact, they were plotting to rob a Hardees. But when they drove to the house of a boy who wanted to help with the Hardees heist — with a car stuffed with guns, natch — they were immediately arrested by cops who had been tailing them all day. 72 hours after the murder of Mr. Schwebes, the Lords of Chaos were arrested.
Even though Kevin’s weird mom testified on the stand that he was at home with her the night of the murders (I told you we’d come back to her!), the gang were all convicted, with varying degrees of severity; Kevin Foster got the death penalty.
So naturally, he did the next sensible thing, which was get his mom to ask some people to put a hit on the Lords who testified against him (I told you we’d come back to her!). Mom ended up spending five years in jail, and Kevin Foster sits on death row to this day.
It’s not that I’m nostalgic for 1996-type crime, per se. I can’t even quite explain why they clicked for me — maybe there was something more human about them than our current mass-death crime era. Every great ‘90s crime felt like a tragic opera, a parade of basic human flaws made flesh. As opposed to now, when most crimes just feel like an attempt to turn the real world into a slaughterhouse. Or, I don’t know, maybe I’m just getting old. — gabrielle
Spooky Shopping
Because I am a contrarian, when everyone started watching that Ryan Murphy Menendez brothers show, I decided to read Gary Indiana’s reissued novel from 1997 satirizing the trial and the Los Angeles milieu surrounding it. This book seems like it was designed in a lab for me to enjoy, and I had a great time. - E.K.
Stephen King’s Classic Rock Station, WZON
Yes, I am interested because I am obsessed with Stephen King, but it’s also just a pretty solid classic rock station! WZON (yes, it is named after The Dead Zone) has relatively short ad breaks, a diverse song selection, and local Bangor DJs who inform you of fun stuff, like when the town is giving away free sand! They’re playing Suzi Quatro’s “Stumblin’ In” as I write this! But yes, it’s also cool to listen to it alone late at night because then you feel like a troubled, stubbled, but ultimately lovable protagonist in a Stephen King novel, getting ready for your big hero moment by listening to Kansas. — Gaby