Oct. 2, 2026

The Devil In The Dock

What happens when the Devil enters the courtroom?

For centuries, that wasn't simply a theological question. There were times when courts treated Satan, demons and witchcraft as very real forces capable of corrupting bodies, destroying crops, causing death and driving human beings towards terrible acts. But as society changed, so too did the Devil — and so did the law.

In this episode, we follow that extraordinary transformation through centuries of legal history. From the brutal machinery of the European witch trials and the strange familiars of English witchcraft cases, to the emergence of forensic psychiatry and the increasingly difficult question of whether someone was bad, mad... or possessed. We encounter a murderer who wrote to the Devil in his own blood, the tragic case of Anneliese Michel, the Amityville murders, the infamous claim that “the Devil made me do it”, and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

But beneath these extraordinary cases lies a much more unsettling question. When societies put witches, demons and the Devil on trial, what were they really judging?

Perhaps the Devil has never simply represented evil. Perhaps, changing shape from one century to another, he has also reflected the things we fear, the people we blame, and the explanations we reach for when human behaviour becomes almost impossible to comprehend.

So tonight, the Devil is in the dock. But by the end of this conversation, we may have to ask whether he was ever really the one on trial.

My Special Guest Is Naomi Ryan

Naomi Ryan is a criminal barrister and lover of all things macabre. After qualifying with a Masters in Law from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, she taught criminal law to undergraduates at St Hilda’s College Oxford and University College London before embarking on her career as a criminal barrister, where she both prosecuted and defended. She later moved into the Civil Service, where she has advised an array of senior government and legal figures on matters of constitutional, public and criminal law. She continues to work as an advisory lawyer whilst regularly giving talks about the darker side of legal history.

Listener discretion: This episode contains a very short audio recording connected to the case of Anneliese Michel which some listeners may find distressing. It is included not for sensationalism, but to provide context for the difficult evidence later placed before the court. At the centre of this case was a young woman experiencing profound suffering, and that should never be forgotten. If you would prefer not to hear the recording, please skip ahead when advised.

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0:00

The devil has appeared in courtrooms in some surprisingly literal ways.

In 1840, during a Shropshire house breaking case, a witness insisted that he had seen the accused, William Evans, close to the scene of the crime.

0:18

Evans denied it.

The witness's extraordinary response was that it had either been Evans or your enemy.

The newspaper helpfully explained what he meant.

The devil in Evans's shape.

0:35

It's an extraordinary little exchange, almost amusing to modern ears, except that for centuries, the devil's presence within the courtroom was anything but a joke.

The legal system, until very late, completely accepted that witches were a real thing that had real powers given to them by the.

0:58

Devil.

And once we begin following him through legal history, something fascinating happens because the devil changes.

There are courtrooms in which he is treated as a very real being, accused of meeting people, seducing them, bargaining with them, and bestowing supernatural powers upon them.

1:21

There are trials filled with strange animals, impossible acts and extraordinary confessions.

But behind those stories lie very real executions, very real miscarriages of justice, and very real human fears.

1:40

Fear of women and their bodies, fear of outsiders, fear of difference, fear of behaviour that society could not explain or control.

And then gradually, the devil begins to change.

It's that first move from bad to mad.

1:59

Suddenly, believing that you had encountered Satan might tell a courtroom something very different.

The question was no longer simply whether the devil existed.

It might instead become a question about you, about sanity, responsibility, culpability, and whether someone who committed a terrible act was evil, I'll or something altogether more terrible to define.

2:29

Yet the devil never entirely disappears.

He surfaces in a murderer's extraordinary pact written in blood, in the horrific death of a young woman following repeated exorcisms in one of the most infamous supposedly haunted houses in America.

2:47

In a murder trial where a lawyer attempted to argue that his client had quite literally been possessed.

And later, in another kind of panic altogether, when music, clothes, books, beliefs and simply appearing different could help transform people into the monster society was already frightened of finding.

3:11

But yeah, this idea of when a community wrongly attributes blame or suffering to an othered group via a woman they suspect of witchcraft or a Jewish person, it's such a common event over the course of our history, it can be really rather disturbing to reflect on.

3:33

And perhaps that is where these cases become about something much bigger than the devil, because every generation seems to remake him in its own image.

The sexually ravenous demon, the tempter, The deal maker, the voice of madness, the possessing force, the hidden Satanist, the excuse, the scapegoat.

3:59

And behind each version are people deciding what evil looks like and who amongst them might embody it.

So perhaps the most interesting question isn't whether the devil ever really entered A courtroom.

Perhaps it's what happened when people believed he had Who was believed, who was feared, who was protected, who was punished, and who had already been judged long before anyone delivered a verdict.

4:32

Tonight, we're going to follow the devil through centuries of legal history and ask what his changing appearances can tell us about justice, responsibility, prejudice and some of society's deepest fears.

And to do that, I'm delighted to welcome back a previous guest who took us into the extraordinary world where the supernatural and the law collide.

4:58

Criminal barrister and an absolute fountain of knowledge when it comes to the darker corners of legal history.

Naomi Ryan.

Hi, Naomi.

Thank you so much for coming back to the podcast.

Oh, it's a pleasure to come back.

5:13

Thank you so much for having me.

Do you want to start by reintroducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background?

Yeah, of course.

So my name is Naomi Ryan.

I am a criminal barrister working within the English legal system and I think the last time I saw you I was working in the house.

5:34

But I have since gone back into what we call chambers, which is sort of like self-employed offices for barristers.

And it means I can do the thing that I love most, which is criminal and public law, back in the courtroom rather than behind a desk.

And then in my spare time, I'm really passionate about sharing with people the darker side of legal history, really, especially if it involves the supernatural.

6:00

So criminal and public law deal with, you know, the sharpest edges of society.

Do you think it was inevitable then, that you'd become interested in how the law has historically handled ideas of evil?

I think anyone that goes into criminal justice, that especially if you go into the bar and work in criminal law, will always have to admit they have an interest in what drives people.

6:28

And I think that means two things.

First, you become very interested in how we treat others that we consider evil.

It's classically described as the mad versus bad debate that we sort of, I think we're going to talk about in this.

And you also get really interested in what it is that makes society improve.

6:51

Why do we get better?

Why is it or what is it that triggers an improvement in how we do criminal justice?

And again, I think this talk or our chat is going to look at that as well.

It's not just about how we view the defendant, but it's how do we as a system and a society improve over the centuries.

7:14

And we're going to be looking at and exploring the legal systems approach to the devil.

When we talk about the devil in a legal context, are we really talking about theology or something much more human?

So I.

7:31

Think we're talking about the devil in different ways depending on the period of history that you look at.

I think that the concept of the devil is a long standing one in the legal system.

And as we're going to see, it goes all the way back to the 1400s.

And in those circumstances, he is seen as quite a a real character.

7:51

But then as you look at how history and especially legal history shifts, he begins to become something else.

And I think it's fair to say that this, you know, my position is it breaks down into four different categories.

If you go right back into early legal history, the devil is very real, as we're going to find out.

8:09

He's basically a lecherous and sex mad old perv.

And he is real that it's not that we're looking at defendants through the lens of evil.

We are dealing with a legal system that very much thinks he exists.

But then after that, as we move into the Victorian era, he becomes something more complicated.

8:29

He becomes something arguably more romantic and then I think as you move into the 21st century, he becomes either in the early 20th, 21st century, a sort of twisted manifestation of how we see society's greatest mistakes in its dark past and then an excuse that we use to blame our own bad behaviour on.

8:51

So you really do see a shift over the over the centuries.

So if we start with the most infamous image, the sexually obsessed devil, where does that version come from?

Almost, almost entirely, he is a product of the witchcraft hysteria that broke out on the continent in between.

9:16

It depends on which country you look at, but it's but somewhere between the late 1400s or the mid 1400's, the late 1700s.

And he really can be traced back to the sort of popularity of one book.

Your listeners are going to be shouting at it at the screen as we talk about him.

9:32

It's the Maleus Maleficaron by Heinrich Kramer that is the book where we first start seeing this sex mad crackpot devil.

And it's mainly because Kramer himself was a complete misogynist.

He was a monk.

He was convinced that witches were real, and it should be made clear that the time Catholicism didn't really agree with him on that.

9:55

He was convinced that the devil and demons made women sex crazed.

It gave them powers over a man's sexual performance.

It gave them powers even to make penises disappear.

And he put this all down in the book.

10:10

He put it down in the Maleus Maleficara.

My.

I genuinely do recommend people read it if they want to, if they want to have a tickle and they want to have a laugh.

It was published in 1486 and probably would have gone into the sort of dustbin of history had it not been for the printing press.

10:28

And the printing press was able to send it round Europe.

And whilst the Catholic bigwigs didn't actually like it and were unimpressed by it, local people became absolutely convinced that it was a really good book that would allow you to identify, prosecute and punish witches.

10:47

And from there we get, we get this explosion of witchcraft trials.

And I do have, I do have some quotes if you want them from the malaise Malafcharum.

So anyone wants to go out and check if they know any witches they can use this.

There's there is no doubt that certain witches can do marvellous things when it comes to with regards to the male organ.

11:09

And later in the book it says when the male member is no way stirred and can never perform the act of coercion.

So sex, this is just a sign of frigidity of nature, but where it becomes stirred and erect but cannot perform, that is witchcraft.

11:26

Then he goes on to say the devil can directly prevent the erection of its member when it is adapted to fruitification, just as he can prevent local motion.

And then just to round it off, it's not just about penises.

He also ends up saying it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, the rib of the breast which is bent as if it were contrary direction to a man.

11:51

And since she is a defect, she is imperfect and she will always deceive.

That's where we trace all this back to.

And I think, you know, just kind of following on from what you were just helping to introduce there.

You know, when we step back from the trial records and the confessions, what's striking is how visual this fear of the the sexually obsessed devil actually becomes.

12:14

I mean, the law isn't operating in a vacuum.

It was surrounded by propaganda, you know, woodcut woodcuts, sermons, folklore that reinforced a very, very specific image of evil.

Well, quiet and and this is your territory over mine, actually, you're the you're the historian here.

12:36

I know what these descriptions look like in the legal textbooks at the time, but what do they look like outside of that?

So it, I mean, it's fascinating to me because what you see is across early modern Europe, you know, witches repeatedly shown in art not just as criminals but as corrupted bodies.

12:55

So in woodcuts and pamphlets, women are depicted feasting on the flesh of infants.

You see them boiling babies in cauldrons or sucking nourishment from them in grotesque parodies of motherhood.

13:10

And these images appear again and again and again, from German broadsheets to Swiss and French trial illustrations.

And they sit alongside these stories of sexual excess, you know, orgies with demons and have seen acts with holy objects.

13:30

And there's an obvious symbolic connection there, you know, sex, flesh and consumption, you know, collapse into one another.

So the witch doesn't really sin.

She devours.

You know, her sexuality is portrayed as this insatiable element.

13:48

You know, her body is out of control.

Her desires are quite literally cannibalistic.

So you know the devil in this worldview doesn't just tempt, He's unlocking a woman's supposedly inherent appetite for lust, for blood, and for destruction.

14:08

I mean, it seems so alien, that idea of womanhood as being so malicious.

I I just wonder where you think it comes from.

I mean, this imagery is something that draws so heavily on older Christian ideas about the body is dangerous, you know, particularly the female body, Eve's defective creation that you mentioned becomes a legal and theological justification for portraying women as closer to animals, you know, closer to appetite, closer to sin.

14:39

You know, in art, which is a are often shown naked or partially naked, twisted, aged or hyper sexualized, you know, a visual shorthand for this moral decay in their character.

And even, you know, maternal acts as are inverted.

14:57

Breastfeeding becomes feeding demons, nurturing becomes consuming.

Fertility becomes corruption.

So I think what's important is that these images don't simply reflect belief.

They produced it.

15:13

You know, judges, jurors and inquisitors grew up with this visual culture.

They were immersed in it.

So when a tortured woman confessed to baby killing or obscene sexual acts, you know, those confessions matched what people already knew witches looked like and did.

15:33

So, you know, the law then validated the image.

And the image then of course justified the law.

Yeah, it really is that sort of the snake eating its own tail.

Because in both Europe, and I know we're going to talk about it later, but in the UK as well, the legal system until very late completely accepted that witches were a real thing that had real powers given to them by the devil.

16:01

And, and it's really is for me, very difficult to get my head round this.

And we're going to come to actually some of the judges who recognised as rationalist how mad this was.

But I do wonder, and this might be for you, the historian rather than me, why you think so many people were willing to accept something they could not possibly have seen.

16:21

That's the huge bit about here.

They're all willing to say things they could not possibly have seen or witnessed.

I mean, it's a, it's a good question.

And I think, you know, that idea of the sexually obsessed devil really does function as a kind of narrative engine, you know, he explained.

16:40

Famine, impotence, infant mortality, social disorder, and, you know, while allowing deeply misogynist, you know, misogynistic fears to be expressed in legal form.

So what we're seeing is, you know, the witch's body becomes the the battlefield on which these anxieties about sex, about reproduction and authority were really being fought.

17:05

So, you know, when we talk about the devil kissing bottoms or presiding over orgies, you know, it's easy for us to laugh.

But behind it is sitting something much, much darker.

You know, these stories weren't just absurd fantasies.

17:22

They were a way of making certain women as abominations of the flesh outside the protection of law and humanity itself.

And once the law accepts that framing, the outcome becomes almost inevitable.

17:40

Yeah, and I think it's it's it reminds me a little bit of when you hear old fashioned swear words and you think, how could they possibly land?

They seem so, they seem so quaint.

But you're right.

We laugh at images of the devil kissing bottoms, but then the end of the story is these women tend to be set on fire or hanged.

17:59

And it sort of takes the edge off the ability to laugh, I find.

So when which trials reach Europe and England in earnest, what immediately looks different?

So I think the starting point is that the trials in Europe are happening significantly before they are happening in England in earnest.

18:22

Our laws don't really come into effect until under Elizabeth the 1st and then James the 1st, and then even later during the Civil War.

So ours are happening a lot later, but also we have a very, very different legal system.

Europe.

18:37

Most of the countries that all of the countries in Europe that where they had significant outbreaks of witchcraft trials had what we call an inquisitorial system, whereas we had an adversarial 1.

And in an inquisitorial system, it's the judge who investigates the case.

18:53

They control the evidence, they control and question witnesses.

There's no prosecutor to speak of and there's certainly no independent decision maker in the form of a jury.

And as a result, European witchcraft trials tend to follow quite predictable process.

19:11

What would happen is a local bigwig so that it can be the Pope or it can even be an Archbishop of a certain area becomes concerned about something in his in his diocese.

So it might be suffering, it might be crop failure, it might just be that there are too many of a certain minority in his area.

19:30

And the Jewish population could also could often be on the receiving end of this.

And what would happen is that the the local bigwig would attribute that to witches.

So a really good example of this is the Archbishop of Tria, Johan von Schonenberg in 1581.

In Tria, he makes it clear he's concerned that there have been problems with witches.

19:49

And what they then do is the judge in points.

I beg your pardon.

The bigwig who is the Archbishop off will become the judge, but they will appoint an inquisitor.

And in Tria it's a guy called Peter Binfield, and he works with the judge to identify people and interrogate them, and they work very closely together.

20:12

And they also can do something that English judges can't do, and that's employee torture.

Now we can talk a little bit about English use of torture, but in Europe they really can torture.

You they will pull fingers out, they will break fingers, they will break toes.

20:29

They will use what is widely recognised as torture to get confessions.

And in Tria for example, you see some really disturbing confessions.

You see people saying that they admitted meeting the devil and that the devil gave them the power to kill.

They admit that they meet in orgies where they have sex and molest holy objects, or they kiss the devil's anus, or they they it's all focused on sexual violence.

20:55

There's even 1 case in trio where a 7 year old boy claimed that he'd eaten the cat's brain because the devil's told him to.

And not only are they made to confess, they are made to confess.

They then have to repeat their confessions during the trial.

The judge and the inquisitor who have arranged all of this are in charge of finding him guilty or then guilty.

21:16

There's no defence.

Barrister of of no, you don't really get a defence.

And then worst of all you are forced to name others who are then tortured and then they are put on trial.

And it creates this cycle of accusation, trial and execution.

21:32

And in tria it's astonishing because 1.

Judge Dietrich flayed.

He wanted, he spoke out and he says this cycle of violence needs to end.

Well, obviously he's been accused of being in league with the devil.

He is tortured.

He is forced to identify others.

21:47

And then he is executed.

And over the course of just under 10 years, because that's how long this cycle of violence goes on and on, 368 people are killed, 12 villages are described as being left with not a single more than one woman.

22:04

And it's that sort of mass trial that crops up all over Europe because of this very unusual structure that they have.

Or at least it's it's unusual to English lawyers of an inquisitorial system that basically makes the judge, the judge, the jury and the executioner.

22:21

And just before I kind of follow on and ask you a question about how that looks in comparison when we think about English witch trials, I just wanted to bring out something that I think you mentioned prejudices and you mentioned Jewish people, for example, only in the last couple of weeks, I was teaching a student something to help them with their GCSE coursework.

22:41

And we were talking about the the plague and how, you know, what you saw across Europe, for example, where unfortunately, Jews moved from places out of fear that they were bringing the plague.

And, you know, it's, it's a part of history that I think isn't necessarily understood that actually there was this deep mistrust for certain populations, certain groups of people within a population of people in a town or a village.

23:11

And unfortunately, Jews were often targeted with various different accusations, whether it was connections with the devil or that they were the the source of the plague as a means of moving them, displacing them, or sadly, in some really horrific cases, you know, leading to their death.

23:33

You know, as I was teaching my student, as I mentioned, you know, there was a horrific case of hundreds of Jews who were who were executed in order to try and prevent the plague from arriving.

And so that kind of old prejudice, those personal feelings around certain groups was sadly a, you know, something that was used as part of the witchcraft craze.

23:56

And I don't think that's necessarily quite always understood.

No, I think that I think mass killings of, of people that are othered is a, is a tragic but constant issue in our history.

24:14

I think that you can look at them side by side.

Actually, you have, I'm going to Bury St.

Edmunds next week and I've been there before and they have a memorial to I think it's the eleven, it's either the 1200s or it's 1190 or something like that massacre of the entire Jewish community because the he was the 11 member of the community was wrongly connected to the death of the local child.

24:40

So the entire community was was killed.

And there is a there's a memorial there now that was installed very late.

25:09

So what do the the English witch trials look like then?

Are they the same to the ones that you were just mentioning and describing?

No, and that's because, and I must admit, I know there is some incredible work out there.

I'm thinking, for example, people like Miriam Gibson, whose new book is on my bookshelf about witch land.

25:29

This is not a defence of witchcraft trials.

What I'm about to say, what I would say is that our legal model prevented them from manifesting in such enormous numbers as you saw on the continent.

25:45

And the reason is there was, I would say there are three big differences.

So I've already said that these trials start a lot later.

They start under Elizabeth the 1st and James the first.

Most significantly, before we get to the witch Finder.

They are not necessarily as Catholic as we would think because this is post reformation.

26:06

But the big defence that our trials had is they had juries and actually they had two sets of juries.

You didn't have one judge who had started the trial in the 1st place come along and preside.

What you had was a local community would get nervous that something was happening.

26:23

They would have to persuade a grand jury that there were, that the person they had accused was a witch.

That was 23 men.

Then you would have to persuade the trial jury.

So again, that's an additional 12 men and they are all men.

26:39

I have to concede that.

And they were often your neighbors, and you would have to convince them of the allegations you've made.

And actually having that number of people that you'd have to convince meant that we actually saw a lot of acquittals in witchcraft trials.

26:55

It's, you know, throughout the records, throughout history, people were acquitted.

The second thing that we had was we didn't focus on confessions as much.

Confession evidence wasn't as necessary.

We tended to use witness evidence.

And as we'll get to the witnesses, they did see some weird things.

27:13

That's not perfect, but there wasn't this need to get an admission out of the defendant.

And then finally, we did not use torture in the same way as the Europeans did.

So torture could be used by license from the king or that I should say, the monarch in the Star Chamber.

27:31

It was often reserved for treason.

Your normal run-of-the-mill which couldn't be subjected to the sort of violent beating and bone breaking it was against the law.

Our country is always proudly boasted that it did not, that torture has never been permitted in our legal system.

27:47

Now what you could do was behaviour that we would now recognise as torture.

That wasn't seen as torture then.

So we could deprive of sleep, we could put in stress positions.

A lot of people say to me, well, what about pricking where you would prod them with a sharp needle to see if they bled?

28:04

That wasn't classed as torture.

That was classed strangely as a science experiment.

And you were testing the person.

And I accept it.

It manifests and it pretty much has the effect of being torture.

But it wouldn't have been considered torture in our legal system.

And as a result of these differences, the the juries, the lack of need for confessions, the lack of torture, we do see fewer cases across the country, far fewer mass trials.

28:32

I know we can all name them, but there there are far fewer of them.

And I think that is that is something that the legal system should maybe not celebrate, but it could be worse.

But I'm not going to say as we're going to discuss, there were horrible injustices, there was cruelty.

28:53

But I would also say the devil, when he does appear, he's a lot less sexually motivated.

He's a lot less sexually obsessed.

I always find he's actually quite a provincial character.

So do you have any examples then of how the devil appears in cases in English trials then?

29:12

Yeah, so the devil in English trials, especially the the later ones, doesn't appear in as as a big horned creature.

He just doesn't seem to be associated with that.

We have quite a provincial devil who likes to appear mainly as animals.

29:30

So in 1579 in Colchester you have the trial of Agnes Waterhouse.

She's put on trial because depending on the witness she has a magical toad or a magical.

Cat.

The problem that she will have and she is executed is that that magical toad slash cat could kill people and that's what she's accused of.

29:49

And then later in 1582, you've got the trial of Ursula Kemp in Saint Office, and she's given the power by the devil to stop beer from brewing.

So people, they're not seeing the devil.

What they're seeing is their beer isn't brewing and they think it's her fault.

Unfortunately, she's also accused of killing four people with magical powers.

30:08

So again, there's no manifestation of the devil himself.

It's the people see things happen like their friends die, and they blame the local unpopular person.

I mean, in 1682, you've got the Biddeford Witches, Temperance Lloyd, Mary Tremble, Susanna Edwards.

They're accused of breastfeeding Magpies alongside causing people to die.

30:29

So what you don't see is, you know, you just don't see him appearing as much as he does in the European cases.

I mean, I don't think we're going to talk massively about everyone's favorite witch Finder.

But when he writes his 1647 book The Discovery of Witches, even his description of the the the witches is quite parochial.

30:53

So you know that very famous wood carving on the front of the cutting on his book?

You've got Holt, who is the little white cat who is the familiar to one of the witches.

You've got Jamara, who's described as a fat spaniel without legs, Vinegar Tom, who's just described as looking like a greyhound, except he has the head of an ox sack.

31:13

And Sugar, who are just two black rabbits.

And then a couple of others that he never really gives details of, except he says that they were Imps.

So they're just, they're just not as sexually motivated or is grotesquely violent.

31:31

It doesn't really help the women.

The women are still executed for being blamed for murder, but there's just not that obscenity associated with them.

So what role then, did sceptical judges like Sir John Holt and John Powell play in bringing the trials to an end?

31:49

So we spoke about this a little earlier, you know, you, we, we were both talking about why is it that people believed this?

Well, thankfully, especially towards the end of the 1600s and into the 1700s, the spread of enlightenment, Enlightenment values amongst the educated senior judiciary meant that these trials were brought to an end far sooner than you'd have expected.

32:14

And that's mainly thanks to judges like, and I'm there's two particularly famous ones, Sir John Holt, who was Lord Chief Justice and John Powell or John Pole, who was a very senior judge, not a Lord Chief Justice.

And they essentially were deeply suspicious that these allegations were true and they would tell juries, which is quite shocking to A, to a modern barrister here.

32:39

These women are not guilty, do not convict them.

And the trials start to dry up actually.

So, you know, there's quite a late witchcraft trial in 1712 where a woman called Jane Wenham was accused of flying.

And that was the allegation made against her.

And we have records that the judge, John Paul, told the jury it's not a criminal offence to fly, which is right, even on the reading of the law at the time, it wasn't a criminal offence to fly.

33:02

And when she is convicted, he petitioned successfully from Queen Anne for Jane Wenham to benefit from a pardon.

And that's what you saw.

Especially at the more senior end of the judiciary, you have very experienced judges searching out opportunities to sit as judges on witchcraft trials and then finding a way, often by just telling juries these women are not guilty, do not convict to not convict.

33:28

And as a result, you really do see fewer and fewer cases, thankfully, as a result of them, as a result of their hard work, our our law changes 1735.

Our law ceases to recognise the existence of demons or witches.

The law is the law of witchcraft is repealed and you can no longer be prosecuted for being a witch.

33:50

So as enlightenment, you know these ideas take hold.

How does the devil's image then begin to change do you think?

Well, I think certainly in trials but also in wider society he becomes a different character.

34:08

He is no longer this kind of sex obsessed perv from want of a Better word.

Instead I think what you see is he becomes the urbane, educated fallen Angel and deal maker.

And you know, you only have to look.

34:24

And I think it's really important actually to look at the literature before we look at the case.

If you think about in 1667, you have John Milton writing Paradise Lost, the idea of the devil, of the fallen, poetic, intelligent Angel.

Then you have Goethe's Faust in 1808, again, a really clever romantic character.

34:46

And then you have the rise of the Romantic poets, who themselves were seen as sort of manifestations of these romantic, passionate, very sort of unchristian, but in a very urbane way, Blake and Byron and Shelly.

And then also at the same time, especially in the Victorian period, the devil's appearing all over London in the form of Spring Hill Jack.

35:07

But he's not some, you know, horned monster who's getting his arse out.

He's a, he's dressed in a suit and in his black tie, admittedly blowing fire with strange fairy hands.

But you he just becomes a more suave character.

35:26

So is anything else happening in the legal system then that changed how people view demons?

Yeah, I think alongside, you know, I've spoken about enlightenment values alongside the very idea of the devil being romanticized.

35:43

What you start to see for the first time is this new science of psychiatry, and not just psychiatry, but forensic psychiatry.

So psychiatry that is used, when we say forensic we just mean used in the court.

And so forensic psychiatry is beginning to emerge.

35:59

And this is particularly true in the late 1700s, early 1800s when you start seeing state funded lunatic asylums.

Psychiatrists, who then would have been called alienists, might have been the more accurate term of becoming interested in what makes, what makes someone a criminal and what makes someone mentally ill.

36:19

Now there is no denying a lot of their conclusions, almost all of them are completely wrong.

But it's that first move from bad to mad.

So you've actually started to having people starting to look at mental illness and they're no longer saying, Oh well, these people are possessed by devils.

36:40

They're saying there's there's something wrong with them.

And the legal system starts to pick up on this very early.

So prior to 1800, the defence of insanity is almost impossible to rely on.

You have to show yourself as what what is basically STEMI legal term, stark raving mad.

36:59

You have to show that you're completely out of touch with reality.

But then in 1800, a guy called James Hadfield tries to kill kill King George the Third at the Drury Lane Theatre.

He pulls out a gun, shoots at him, and then sits down very calmly waiting to be assassinated.

37:18

And he's represented by an incredible lawyer of the time called Thomas Erskine, a very famous lawyer.

And Erskine realized, well, this man isn't stark raving mad.

He sat down very calmly.

He waited to be killed by George's guards.

And when asked why, he said, well, I need to be killed by the King's guards so that I can bring about the next Messiah, and I can bring him about by my death, and the Messiah will return.

37:48

And he's completely deluded.

But because he's not stark raving mad, he initially doesn't appear to have a defence, but after his trial the essentially the courts agree he is insane and they allow him to or the jury finds him not guilty by reason of insanity.

38:04

They're so unprepared for this that they have to rush through a law that makes sure that he goes to the mental asylum rather than is just freed.

Because the law is so rarely used that no one had even bothered to introduce legislation to make sure that if you were convicted under the on the base of insanity, acquitted, found not guilty by reason, insanity, you would go to an asylum.

38:26

That's how rarely it's used.

And from that moment on, we start seeing insanity being associated with these beliefs.

So how does this shape the legal system's reaction to the devil then?

Well, instead of seeing the devil as being a completely legitimate real concept that motivates people's behaviour, you start seeing it as a manifestation of a mental illness.

38:54

What's seen then in in trials like the 1856 trial of William Dove, you know, is that, is that a case where it's kind of exemplified, do you think?

Sort of, I think it's a really good example of how the lawyers and the judges want to approach people that believe in the devil.

39:13

So by this point, 1856, we've just had, so you've had the the attempted killing of the king, which has led to a change in the law.

You then have a case called the McNaughton case, which led to the McNaughton Rules, which basically sets down the law for insanity and says that you need to have an illness of the mind.

39:31

That means that you don't know how, you don't have any control over your actions or you don't know right from wrong.

That's the sort of the shortest hand.

They are the same insanity laws we still have, by the way.

So 1856, enter William Dove, deeply disturbed young man.

39:47

It appears from very young age his family will give evidence at his trial that he was violent, he was prone to arson, he would threaten to harm and shoot family members.

He was also described as highly volatile.

But that doesn't stop him being able to get married.

40:04

Gets married to his part his wife Harriet that in 1854.

So 2 years before the crime that would see him charged with murder.

He is approached by a man called Henry Harrison, and Henry Harrison has a strange job description.

He is a self-described astrological Dr. and Mystic, but also a dentist.

40:28

And over the course of two years Dove and Harrison regularly meet.

Dove gives him money and Harrison essentially predicts his fortune.

He says I can, I can predict your fortune.

And I think you're going to have a second wife.

He's going to be far more beautiful than Harriet and you're going to be far happier with her.

40:46

So Dove takes that as an excuse to go out by strychnine and murder his wife.

He poisons her by killing her because he is convinced that he can bring about the premonition that Henry Harrison has promised him.

And so he is then arrested.

41:02

He's held in York jail.

And whilst in York jail he writes a letter in his own blood that says, Dear devil, if you get me clear of their sizes.

So the Criminal Court and let me have the enjoyment of life, health, wealth, tobacco, beer, food and you better my wishes granted and I live till I'm 60.

41:24

Come to me and tell me.

And what you have there is a man trying to sell his soul to be spared the noose for murder.

And he's gets a very good lawyer, William Bruce.

And William Bruce thinks I'm really, I'm going to go with the insanity defence.

41:42

You've been labouring under delusions.

They've been brought about by this Henry Harrison.

You clearly think you can commit, you can do things because the devil will help you or support you.

You must be insane.

And Bruce goes to trial and in his closing speech to the jury, he says, if you think that it will tend to the repression of crime, if you think that the law requires that this man who believes he has sold his soul to the devil who is under this dreadful insane delusion should be hanged at your castle.

42:19

For an example to set an example, I ask you why an example to him, the insane.

So you have a a lawyer making a really powerful argument to a jury that what does killing a madman do for society?

42:36

What murder does it prevent?

Who does it save?

Who does it help anyway?

It goes to the jury.

Any guesses?

Well, I would imagine it is found that he's insane that it's it's, you know, it ends in some kind of acquittal or something that aids the his defendant.

42:57

I mean, it's quite a powerful speech.

You could be really moved by those words, I think.

You could be.

Unfortunately, perhaps we'll never really know why jurors make the decisions they do.

But they find Mr. Dove guilty of murder and he is immediately hanged, so they're not persuaded he's mad.

43:14

And to be fair, you might argue the other side of the toss that it's not like he was under any delusion that killing his wife was wrong.

He just thought he had the protection of the devil if he did it.

Now, that's not quite the same as saying, well, the devil made me do this.

43:31

That's someone saying, well, if I do this, the devil will protect me.

And sadly for him, yeah, sadly for him, the devil doesn't protect him.

He he is, he is hanged.

But yeah, as I say, the emergency insanity defence does mean that you start to see him.

43:48

We're going to see the insanity cut defence, I think come back at a late stage of this talk.

It does mean that the shift of what the devil is and what his role is in the legal system is, is beginning to move.

But what if the devil then does he stop appearing?

Well, it takes a little while.

44:04

Actually it takes it takes a long time.

He we have to look at some different jurisdictions for the next couple of cases.

What I think is really interesting is that he can crop up in cases where countries are struggling to deal with a very, very dark past.

44:22

That's, I think after Dove, that's the next change we see in who the devil is and where he turns up.

So are you thinking about the case here of Annalise Michelle?

I am, yes.

So we're going to move forward in time.

We're going to go to the late 1960s in Bavaria in West Germany.

44:42

And as you say, we've got a, we've got a young girl, 16 years old, Annalise Michelle begins to suffer severe convulsions and it is quite clear early on that what she has is epilepsy.

But unfortunately it is very resistant to medication.

44:58

She is seen by doctors.

She's prescribed a series of anticonvulsives and they don't work.

And Annalise and her family are very religious, very, very religious.

And she's still allowed to go to university.

But by 1970, when she's at university, her religion and her, her illness are beginning to combine.

45:22

And when at university, she starts describing that she's now hallucinating the face of the devil.

When she looks at people, it's, I mean, it sounds an utterly nightmarish.

And she starts hearing the voice that she describes is the devil telling her that she is damned and that she is one of his.

45:38

And she becomes really unwell.

She goes into a psychiatric hospital.

And it the, the, the real tragedy of this is that despite all medical intervention, they are unable to really break this this decline.

And her religious views begin to shape, continue really to shape how this manifests.

45:57

She rejects religious objects.

She clearly becomes utterly convinced that she is damned.

She says she can't be in the presence for crucifix.

She even starts eating insects because she believes that she is damned and she has to eat the food of the devil.

And you said her her family was religious.

46:15

How did they respond to all of that?

Well, they didn't go straight to religion, as I've said, they got, they tried to get her the medical help.

They tried to get so that she took psychiatric drugs.

But at the same time they become steadily convinced that she is possessed by the devil.

46:36

So they join in what I would say is her delusion, and they go and speak to their local priest, Father Ernst, Father Ernst Alt.

And he also becomes convinced that she is possessed by the devil.

And he goes to the local Bishop, and he asked the Bishop for permission to perform an exorcism.

46:56

And again, the local Bishop, Arnold Rens, agrees that she may be possessed by the devil.

And what you see is everyone becomes convinced that the way to solve her illness is through exorcism.

And what that means is, over the course of ten months in 1975, she is subjected to 67 exorcisms, some of them lasting 4 hours.

47:19

They obviously have no success.

If anything, they appear to motivate her entrenched belief that she is possessed.

And by the end of 1976, she stopped eating at all.

And she is wasting away under the pressure of these exorcisms.

47:35

I mean, it's just horrific to think about.

It's truly, truly awful.

And and I think just kind of linking what you were describing there.

I mean, obviously you mentioned at the start how these could be linked to parts of dark history.

47:52

So how does this case, you know, what does the presence of demons here have to do with Germany's dark history?

Well, it's who the demons are in her mind.

So Annalise is 16 in 1960.

48:09

So she is born just 99 to 45, nine to 46, that sort of time.

And when she is going through her exorcisms, she starts listing the devils that are allegedly inside her.

And what's interesting is she doesn't list canonical biblical demons instead, and this should have been a sign, one would think, to the people involved.

48:32

But instead, who does she list?

She says Nero.

So the emperor Hain, she does say Lucifer, Judas.

It's in Judas Iscariot.

And then the next two names, Hitler and Priest Fleischmann.

Now Priest Fleischmann goes back to 1572.

48:48

He was a priest who was defrocked for murder.

And it's really interesting, I think, that she says so soon after the end of World War 2, bearing in mind what those years look like for Germany, that she doesn't name demons in any traditional sense.

49:04

But she lists, well, most startlingly, she lists Hitler.

So this story takes a very, very dark turn on the 1st of July 1976.

What happened next?

Well, she dies.

She dies weighing 35 kilos times her death.

49:23

I always find that weight almost impossible to get my head around.

This is a fully grown woman and she is an autopsy has performed and she has died because she was malnourished and dehydrated.

She has been, she has been starved to death and what is the most shocking, I think element of this is that following the performance of the autopsy, the conclusion is that she could have been saved if someone had intervened to provide her with basic medical care.

49:53

So how does this then all end up and result in a trial then?

Well, when the government and when the state find out about this, what it appears to the stake I think quite fairly is you have four people.

You've got the Bishop, the local priest and her parents who have committed negligent homicide, which is our equivalent really of gross negligence manslaughter.

50:17

And they all owed Annalise a duty of care.

They all, for one reason or another, parents always assume to owe their child a duty of care if they're looking after them.

But also the priests had had adopted a role to look after her, so they all owed her a duty of care and they breached it grossly by allowing her to starve to death.

50:39

And so they're charged with pardon, notion of homicide.

They all go on trial, they all plead not guilty.

And at trial they run a really fascinating defence.

They try and argue that Annalise really was possessed, that they were acting in her best interest.

50:56

They didn't breach any duty.

They actually complied with their duty that she was possessed by demons and they had to get them out of her.

Now alongside that they also make a legal they run to two horses as it were.

They say that Annalise was a fully grown woman and she was capable of making informed decisions about her care.

51:17

So they also try and argue, well we didn't actually owe her a duty of care in the 1st place, she was a full grown adult.

But that doesn't stop them from playing hours of the exorcism tapes to the judges, because they don't have juries, but hours of exorcism tapes in an attempt to prove that she was possessed.

51:36

The following segment contains brief archival audio from the exorcism tapes of Annalise Michelle.

This audio is played strictly to provide essential context regarding the evidence presented to the judges during the subsequent trial, illustrating the immense weight of the psychological and physical evidence that they were forced to evaluate.

52:01

It is vital to remember that behind this case is a young woman who experienced profound documented suffering.

I'm not playing this for sensationalism, but rather to help understand the staggering gravity of what the court and the judges had to weigh when deciding the legal responsibilities in her tragic death.

52:22

The audio depicts real and severe human suffering and listener discretion is advised, so please prepare yourself or skip ahead.

52:56

So after hearing hours of recordings like we just heard, did the judges accept that she was possessed as a defence?

No, no they didn't.

They were all convicted of negligent homicide.

What is interesting, in this case, the prosecution actually tried to seek quite light sentences.

53:19

They thought that they thought that because of the strange circumstances of this case, they should be punished with basically the fine.

The priests should be fined and the parents should be punished at all because, you know, they'd lost their daughter.

And it's the judges who who took quite firm positions.

53:36

So, for example, the priests themselves received suspended sentences, which is it's still aren't very light in terms of in terms of a sentence for manslaughter.

But it's interesting to see that the prosecution thought that this was a case that deserved very little punishment, even though they were guilty of the offences.

53:56

So by the late 20th century, what form does the the devil start to take in criminal cases then?

Well, it's a little bit like going back to William Dove, actually.

We do start seeing we, well, we, I should say we continue to see allegations of the devil manifesting all the way up to the 80s.

54:19

And it's probably worth mentioning.

And I, I always think, just as I did with the literature that was coming out at the time, to think back to what the 1970s and the 1980s looked like and why that might have been a period where people were thinking about the devil.

And the one film I know everyone will get tired of hearing it and tired of it being blamed for this sort of thing. 1973, we see The Exorcist come out, and the following year we see probably one of the most bloody and famous murders in American history, and that's the Defeo murders.

54:51

So 1974 Ronald Defeo murders his entire family and his parents, his brothers, his sisters in 100 Motion, 112 Ocean Ave., Amityville, NY.

A very, very famous case.

What exactly happened though?

55:07

There is no denying it's a weird case.

It appeared like Ronald.

You can talk about this, this could be an entire separate podcast, but essentially Ronald Defeo has clearly had an unhappy relationship with his father.

And he goes round the rooms 1 by 1 in their very large house and shoots them in their beds.

55:31

And one of the points that is always made that is slightly strange is no one ever moves in this bed.

Everyone's found murdered in their beds.

And there's always been a question of how he managed to do that.

And we'll never know.

But there is clear evidence he did it.

And at his first trial he was represented by a lawyer called William Webber.

55:49

And he tried to plead the insanity defence.

He said he had been hearing voices, that he had been a very heavy user of heroin and LSD, and that he may have been schizophrenic, and that he was hearing voices telling him to kill, kill, kill.

And as that often happens in cases where the insanity is brought on by drugs, it is not.

56:10

It's not rare.

Rarely does that succeed as the insanity defence because you're not allowed to become insane through voluntary intoxication.

He's convicted and he is sentenced in November 1975 for second degree murder.

And that, arguably, should have been the end of the story.

56:27

Well, yeah, I think probably it would have been.

And whether or not it would be such a famous case, it's difficult to know.

I mean, it's incredibly, grotesquely the case.

But perhaps the reason it's so well known now is because of who moves into the house afterwards, and that's George and Kathy Lutz.

56:44

They move into the murder house the following months, and they very famously claim that they have to flee the house after 28 days because there was such a powerful demon in the presence.

And I mean, we've all seen, I suspect we've all seen the movies, we've all watched the documentaries.

57:02

It is quite a, a over the top description of a devil.

Perhaps we'll put it that way.

This isn't just, you know, spooky sounds around the house.

This is slime from the walls.

This is rooms that are allegedly full of millions of flies.

This is a pig faced demon tormenting a child.

57:20

George says he wakes up at the time of the murders every night feeling homicidal.

It's quite an extreme manifestation of a a demon's presence.

So how then does this relate to the trial?

I mean, De Feo had already been convicted by this point.

57:38

He had.

And what ends up happening is quite it's a confusing series of sort of meetings and, and discussions.

But essentially, George and Kathy go to William Webber, de Feo's lawyer with their ghost story, and they say we want to write a book.

57:58

Now, eventually, they would famously go to Jay Anson.

He is the man who creates the I Must feel horror.

But what is really interesting is something that Webber says later.

Webber is angry that they didn't write the book with him.

He sued them for very boring breach of copyright, which has nothing really interesting to talk about.

58:16

But during all that legal chaos, he makes a really interesting claim.

He says that he, George and Kathy created the ghost stories and that he did it because he wanted to secure a ground of appeal for Ronald Defeo.

And essentially, he wanted to be able to argue that the house was clearly haunted and that the ghosts had driven Defeo to murder.

58:38

And he said they came up with all of this over a couple of bottles of wine.

But it doesn't go anywhere because, well, Defeo dies in prison a couple of years back, 2021.

So would the defence have ever worked then?

You know, can you really say the devil made me do it?

Well, we do have an answer to that in in Connecticut.

58:58

So it's a couple of years later.

Again, this will be 1 if anyone's a fan of the horror films because it was recently turned into a really awful Conjuring World movie.

But in 1981, a kid called Arnie Johnson stabs his friend to death in what appears to be an open and shut case.

59:16

Ever fight over a girl?

So he'd been out with his friends.

They'd been drinking.

He he stabbed his friend to death.

It's it's shocking and it does seem to come out of the blue.

But what's interesting is what had happened in his life a couple of years previously, because he had been involved in a really strange series of events.

59:35

His then his girlfriend, who was the same girl that he'd been dating when he commits the murder was called Debbie Glatzel.

And her little brother was allegedly possessed by the devil.

And so Arnie Johnson, the Glaxos.

59:51

And so it said, the little boy's family contact Ed and Lorraine Warren, the Warrens.

And they have literally just finished investigating Amateurville, weirdly, and they go and meet this little boy and they agree that this little boy is clearly possessed.

1:00:08

They say his eyes turn black periodically and he had superhuman strength.

And so Arnie Johnson assists the Warrens in conducting an exorcism.

And during this, he tells the little boy, or I should say what he thinks is the devil in the little boy, you should leave the kid alone.

1:00:25

Take me.

I'm here.

And this has all happened 18 months before the stabbing.

And so he says the demon must have come in to me when I committed this stabbing.

That's must have been what's happened.

And his lawyer, Martin Manella, I would argue, adopt quite a brave approach and instead of arguing a psychiatric illness defence, which is how this sort of thing would normally be dealt with, actually argues, Oh no, my client really was possessed.

1:00:57

Ed and Lorraine Warren were there.

Everyone saw the devil did enter him a year prior and that's why he committed the murder, because the devil made him do it.

So how did the the judge respond to a defence based on literal demonic possession then?

1:01:12

To be a family on the wall of that particular hearing would have been a joy.

The the judge threw it out immediately and he made a wonderful judicial ruling, in essence, where he said how are you possibly going to call evidence to prove that plain?

1:01:30

Now funnily enough, the Warrens had said they would give evidence but the judge said there is absolutely no one with sufficient evidence who could prove that that was even possible.

So he said you're not proceeding with it.

It's not a defence recognised in law.

And so Arnie Johnson instead argued he was acting in self defence.

1:01:50

The jury rejects that.

He is convicted of manslaughter and he received some.

He sees quite a long sentence.

He's ordered to serve between 10 and 20 years in prison.

He's released on after 5 on good behaviour and to this day he continues to maintain he was possessed by the devil.

1:02:05

I think Netflix had a documentary they interviewed him recently.

Still maintains it was a devil.

So does this does this case then mark the end of the devil made me do it as a serious legal argument?

I think probably, I think your listeners would be outraged and I would be copping out of something copping out of the the podcast.

1:02:28

We didn't mention the Satanic Panic, which is that period in legal and social history starting in the around 79.

There's different, there's disagreement about when it starts, but certainly going through the 1980s where society became convinced of the existence of satanic cults and often satanic cults committing terrible murders.

1:02:50

And the reason I don't really sort of focus on this particularly is because I think it's now completely well established and I certainly accept it, that none of this happened.

It's all a sort of mass hallucination, the satanic pad.

1:03:05

It was a period when the legal system was obsessed over the behaviour as sort of suspected cult members and there was no basis to it.

And it's, it's a really tragic period actually in my modern history.

So a bit like the the witchcraft period, you know, people were accused of doing really terrible things to please the devil.

1:03:24

Yeah, yeah, basically.

I mean, unlike sort of old witchcraft trials, it's not that people were arguing the devil was real.

So unlike in the witchcraft trials, people genuinely everyone accepted the devil was real.

But in these cases, what you had, no one had to prove if the devil was real or not.

1:03:41

What they had to prove was that these people believed in the devil and that they were committing atrocities in an attempt to sort of satisfy the devil.

So that's sort of how it made it manifest in the court cases.

So before we look at the the cases, why do you think people in the 1980s were so obsessed with Satanism then?

1:04:03

Well, I mean, again, that's sort of the subject of an entire podcast.

How long have you got there?

There was, there's a lot of reasons.

I mean, first the 60s and 70s and the 80s, you know, saw a horrendous string of murders.

You've got the Manson murders in 69, the Night Stalker, who we can talk about a little bit in 84.

1:04:25

So you've got a background of a real sort of period of violence and monstrous behaviour.

And then you have a culture shift.

The sort of free love hippie movement was definitely giving way to punk, a sort of rock music movement, which there was kind of a hysterical reaction to.

1:04:46

And you saw groups like the Moral Majority who were convinced that punk and rock music was clearly an enemy of Christ.

And then you saw a rise of this sort of Christian evangelical movement in response.

And then, I mean, you know, I don't want to sound too sort of political here, but he's sprinkling a few financial crises, a growing gulf between the rich and poor, political polarisation.

1:05:10

It's sort of the, it's a handbook for creating a society, right, with moral panic.

And so the society is already febrile.

Traditional structures are beginning to collapse.

It's actually, when you come to think about it, it's fairly comparable to the sort of period of the English Civil War where you have that similar collapse of familiar beliefs and a reassertion of what we would traditional moral values, leading to real instability.

1:05:35

So you have a an unstable environment.

But why Satan then?

So.

I'm not a fan of this sort of music, and I always think it, they look a bit silly.

But if you look at the music of the time, you've got the imagery of bands like Metallica and Judas Priest who were playing up to sort of cult counterculture, Satanic energy in the way that, you know, beforehand you had had sort of the work of Aleister Crowley.

1:05:59

It was just a way of showing counterculture, revolutionary values.

So you've got that on the one hand and then you have the moral majority seeing that and thinking, well, when they talk about the devil, they really are talking about the devil.

And then you also have an event in 1980, which is probably one of the most famous events of 1980 before forgotten about.

1:06:20

And that's the publication of a book called Michelle Remembers.

And it claimed to be comes out literally at the start of the Satanic panic, I would say bang on 1980.

And it claims to be a true account of a girl who underwent psychological treatment for recovered memories and recalled being involved in a satanic cult that was involved in sexual orgies, torture and the killing of babies.

1:06:47

And that was enough really to provide the flame to ignite that febrile atmosphere.

And it really does create an explosion of really strange demonic cases.

So what did those cases look like then and did the legal system deal with them well, do you think?

1:07:04

Well, I think, I think they've fall into four sort of categories and the legal system varies in how they dealt with them.

The 1st, and I think, you know, you've got to look at it head on, but perhaps if your listeners want to learn about it more, there are other, there are other podcasts.

It's it's really, really a joyless subject.

1:07:21

There were myriad accusations of child abuse.

They were monstrous.

And essentially children and other vulnerable people were tricked and persuaded into falsely accusing their caregivers of terrible, often ludicrous acts of sexual violence committed against the backdrop of, of satanic abuse.

1:07:42

And the Moral Majority groups encouraged it.

Some of them actively coached this evidence.

And it it's essentially prosecutions, successful prosecutions, which is the most awful part of this, that that were based on these allegations, people went to prison.

1:08:00

And it is a legal shame.

So that's your first category.

And it was dealt with very, very poorly.

And as I say, we're probably probably not the the podcast if you want to learn more about that.

So what about the other categories of cases then?

Well, then you have the murder cases and they break down into two different categories.

1:08:19

I would say.

There's the one that were actually committed by people who believed in Satan.

And then you have these gross miscarriages of justice.

And it must be said, during this period there were awful crimes committed by people who genuinely believed that they could appease Satan.

1:08:36

And those crimes were actually prosecuted really well.

And this is, I think, what you were leading to earlier when you mentioned we might be able to talk about the Night Stalker.

Is that the one that you're thinking about here?

Absolutely.

He's a really good example of it.

So Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker was operating between 1984 and 1985?

1:08:56

He was a brutally terrifying murderer.

He broke into properties.

He murdered at least 15 people.

The the facts of those murders are grotesque.

And you know, there's there were allegations of cannibalism, that sort of thing.

1:09:14

There's a really famous picture of him during his trial where he had held his hand up and he had an upside down pentagram drawn on it.

And you know, it suggests he shouted hail Satan.

And during his trial, he said he was interested in Satanism.

And during when he committed certain crimes, he made his victim, some of them survived promise, make promises to Satan and he draw drew pentagrams over their bodies.

1:09:39

There is no denying he was motivated by a belief in Satanism.

So how was his Satanic beliefs then dealt with at trial?

Well, I think what's really good about this case and what is good about a lot of these cases is they never really enter into it.

1:09:55

The prosecution don't need to tell the jury why they think he did this.

They went and convicted him using good old fashioned actual evidence.

They had witness evidence of him being seen near the sites of murders.

1:10:10

They had footprint evidence, fingerprint evidence, putting him in the room.

It was it was good old fashioned police work.

And that's how you tackle cases like this.

You know, you go out, you never need to ever say they're Satanists.

You never need to say, well, the reason they did this, you, you go and get the evidence and you prove your defendant did it using admissible evidence.

1:10:34

And they did.

And they, they, they got convictions.

It was really, really good police work.

And that wasn't the the only example, the only case where it was dealt with well, correct?

No, no, I mean, there's, it's quite a late one, but and there's reasons we can talk about her in a in a moment.

1:10:52

But in 1995 there was a girl called Elise Carla who again brutally, brutally merged in Arroyo, California by three teenage boys who called themselves a cult.

And they, you know, they said their motive to do this was to deal with, they wanted to make a deal with the devil to improve their music.

1:11:12

They wanted to improve their death metal.

But you know, once again, Satanism.

It's not like the the defend, the prosecution stood up and said, Oh well, members of the jury, these are a bunch of weird boys.

They believe in the devil.

Therefore they must have done that.

They used actual evidence again, fingerprint evidence, what I would call good old fashioned police work.

1:11:31

One of the boys, you know, confessed and he didn't confess saying I am possessed by the devil.

He said I was there.

This is what happened.

It was an effectively prosecuted case.

Are there other examples, you know, converse to that where you see murder cases that weren't handled quite so well?

1:11:49

Well, yeah, I think, I think when when you look at the LC parlour case, the obvious case to contrast it with are cases in which the police decide that a case is satanically motivated.

So they just go and pick up the the sort of local, the local oddballs basically.

1:12:08

They don't actually do any investigating.

They don't find any fingerprints or foot track marks or anything like that.

They just think this is satanic.

Let's go pick up the people we think are Satanists.

And perhaps the most damning example of that is May 1993, the very famous case, the West Memphis 3.

1:12:27

So there's an area the West Memphis AR Three children, three young boys, Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Hires were murdered.

They were found they'd been strangled and hog tied, essentially tied up their wrists, their ankle and thrown into a Creek.

1:12:44

So what did the police then make of their of their murder?

Well, this is one of the problems with with murders that are are sort of hard to solve.

They didn't really have very much evidence that they could see.

Now query whether or not that's because they didn't bother looking.

1:13:01

But what they did do is they thought that this might be satanic murders.

And what's bashling to me is they spoke to what they considered to be the local expert in Satanism and then from that concluded that the murder was satanic.

1:13:17

And they've become so narrow minded and myopic that based on this, what would transpire to be completely spurious evidence.

They all all the police do is focus on who they think might be the local Satanists, which is obviously their route to just picking up the people they think are the local outsiders or widows.

1:13:36

So no actual evidence, just prejudice then?

Absolutely.

And having decided the crime is satanic, they target the local sort of self declared spooky kid Damien Echols.

He's just a he's a kid, he's a goth.

They then through him, they link him to his two friends, Jason Baldwin, Jesse Muskelly, no evidence to link these boys to the murders in any way, but the police are indeed one of them.

1:14:04

I think it's James Baldwin was definitely a wrestling competition 45 miles away, but that doesn't matter.

But that they're all charged with murder.

And at their trial, which was televised and they get a fake expert who sort of says things like, well, the three young boys had clearly been tortured in a way that showed satanic abuse.

1:14:25

Now the defence try and challenge that and it's, it's pushed, but they're convicted.

They they are convicted and they spend collectively, I think it's nearly 20 years in prison.

And, you know, when I, you know, talk about the the satanic abuse that they said the children had cut marks all over their bodies.

1:14:46

And years later it would be shown that the lake into which they were thrown was full of snapping turtles.

And no one put that together.

And it wasn't that they had cuts to them that was satanic.

It was it was animal predation.

We see it all the time.

But the they would be freed only after there's two.

1:15:05

I think it's three actually now incredible documentaries on the on the on the murders.

And it's through the involvement of people like Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson, who made one that was supported on the one of the films really do push.

And finally, their convictions, interesting really were not overturned.

1:15:24

They accepted what are called Alford pleas, which is the convictions.

They were found, the trials were found to be flawed.

They were listed for further trial.

So they were the appeals were successful and they were set down for another trial, a fair trial.

But they accepted what are called Alford pleas, which are, we don't have them in this country, which are you accept there's enough evidence to prove you did it and you can just be treated with time served.

1:15:48

So they, they quite, I completely accept what they did it.

They just said we'll just plead to that and it'll be free.

But no, it's monstrous.

It's awful.

It's truly, truly awful.

So is that the the the kind of the last category of satanic cases then?

I think the last one spend on the 4th category I spoke of is actually doesn't involve anything to a crime, which is quite nice.

1:16:10

It's and it's ones that I think a lot of your audience will remember and and remember slightly chuckling at.

And it is the rock'n'roll cases of the 1980s in which allegations were made that these songs were written by the devil and that they had subliminal, powerful messaging that could lead people to do things.

1:16:31

And as a result, what you saw was people suing musicians for the writing satanic music that had messages in it.

Doesn't this have something to do with Ozzy Osbourne?

Yeah.

And you know what, when you drill into these cases that there is a real tragedy and sadness at the heart of them.

1:16:50

So in 1985, Ozzy Osbourne had a record called Suicide Solution, and it was released and a young man called John Daniel McCullum took his own life.

And his parents sued Ozzy Osbourne because they said that the song contained a line, why try get the gun and shoot.

1:17:12

And that's a very explicit line.

And what at that stage happened is it went, it went to court, and America has a very, very strong free speech laws.

So obviously the First Amendment protects the right to free speech.

And what the court found in that case is that because the line is explicit, because it is literally a deliberate communication to an audience, it's no different from standing up and saying it.

1:17:37

And that is protected free speech and cannot be infringed.

So Ozzy Osbourne, the case failed.

So is that the last musical case to go to court then?

No, there's one final sort of case to focus on, because Ozzy Osbourne's case focused on what happens when there is deliberate messages in music that could be heard clearly by the listener and that was found to be protected free speech.

1:18:05

There isn't a subsequent case in 1985 about what happens if the message is allegedly hidden.

And again, it starts, you know that that these cases, often at the heart of them, are very tragic.

So in 1985, a guy called Raymond, Raymond Bell Cap and his friend James Vance decide to take their own lives in a in a pact.

1:18:26

Belknap is killed immediately.

Vance suffers very, very terrible injuries.

And it transpires that in the hours before the ACT, they had been listening to Judas Priest and his pet.

Their parents, James Vance, would go on to die after a little after.

1:18:43

But their parents decide to sue Judas Priest not because of the explicit language that can be heard in their songs, but because in the song Better by You, Better Than Me.

They maintain there is subliminal messaging if you play the song correctly that tells you to kill yourself.

1:19:02

So this is different from the Ozzy Osbourne case then, because in this case the message was allegedly hidden.

Exactly.

And what the parents argue or they seek to argue, is that hiding satanic messages in music means that you are creating a dangerous product, your music, that causes people to commit suicide.

1:19:25

And they said that because the message is hidden and it's not communicating with someone's conscious mind, it's not covered by the 1st Amendment.

The First Amendment is intended to protect the exchange of ideas and discourse.

But subliminal messaging isn't the intentional exchange of ideas.

1:19:42

It's an attempt to subliminally influence someone against their will.

So it's not protected First Amendment speech.

So was the case thrown out as quickly as the Ozzy Osbourne case?

No, it goes a lot further, actually, and I find it fascinating for a few reasons.

1:19:59

First, Judas Priest didn't write this song.

It's a cover.

So, and they make so Judas Priest are forced to give evidence in this case and they do and they do make that point.

They say, well, we, you know, we, we were doing a cover of this song.

We didn't add anything into the original.

1:20:16

So, and I'm sort of sympathetic to that point.

Second, the judge as a matter of law actually did find that songs can contain subliminal messaging.

The science on that is really junky and it's not really clear even now.

1:20:33

Almost certainly you can't do subliminal like subliminal messages are not as powerful if they exist at all.

But the judge as a matter of law found that it was that it could happen.

The other thing I like about this trial is that Judas Priest came in and performed their music and they demonstrated that the sound of instruments being played over each other could give the illusion if listened to in a certain backwards.

1:20:59

You know, if you if you distort how you play it, it could be said to hear, you could be said to hear stuff that that isn't, isn't manifesting.

It's quite obviously just the the sound of the instruments on top of each other.

And I just think that would have been such a fun thing to have seen in a courtroom.

1:21:16

And then finally, the judge decides that even if the messages can be hidden in music, you have to be sure that listening to it would make people go out and, and hurt themselves.

And he rejected that.

He ruled that even if some of these music, if this music has some of these oblique comments in which as a matter of fact he found they didn't, they can't 'cause people to to to take their own lives.

1:21:44

So that's why it is thrown out.

It just there's a lot more hoops to go through than the Ozzy Osbourne case.

So looking back across all these different cases that we've been thinking about and that you've been sharing, what do you think they tell us about how society constructs the devil?

1:22:02

Well, I think you know this.

I don't.

Maybe not creating a grand thesis, but I would hope what this shows is the the concept of evil and the concept of the devil is always shaped by the wider societal issues of the time.

1:22:18

We have this sort of concept of the devil as this little horned figure, but actually it does shift as a concept.

It is constantly changing and what it looks like now is completely different to what it's looked like over the centuries.

1:22:35

It is a a surprisingly malleable concept.

And in that sense, we have to kind of ask the question, has the devil ever really been on trial?

Or is it, as you know, are we simply judging ourselves really?

Oh.

I completely agree with that.

1:22:52

I think we might not always realise that's what we're doing, especially in the early years.

But even, you know, even with Arnie Johnson, he seems to be completely unwilling to believe that he's judging his own actions there.

But yeah, I, I think really the devil is often just the scapegoat of our worst instincts.

1:23:15

He, she, it's is blamed for acts and behaviours that are terrifyingly human.

You know, with witches.

It was the reason that crops failed.

It was the reason children died.

It's the reason we hate our neighbors.

And then in Victorian period, it's this clever urbane thing that can get us out of scrapes.

1:23:33

He's a deal maker that can help us.

Or I mean, in the case of Annalise Michelle, it's the way that you process or at least comes terms with a far deeper sociological trauma.

Or in 1980s or even now or in the period of the Satanic panic, he's he's a manifestation of our darkest fears.

1:23:51

So, and I didn't think I'd end saying this, but maybe, maybe he's the victim in all of this.

He never really gets a fair shake.

He's blamed for everything that really can be blamed on something else.

Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a fascinating kind of question to pose, though, I think because it then just raised the question, you know, how will this be shaped in the future?

1:24:11

You know, how will we see something similar, you know, coming through in legal courts with, you know, our different fears and the devil or something connected to the devil being linked to that in the future?

You know, what will that look like as we continue to evolve and change and our societies change?

1:24:30

You know, it's, it's just a, a really dark question in the really dark part of our history.

But to still recognize the, the likelihood that this is still going to be something that continues to evolve somewhat going forward is, is an interesting kind of perspective to take, I think, and and a question to have in the back of our minds.

1:24:51

Well, I promise you, I will keep you up to date as the, as the new manifestation, as and when they appear.

And when I work out what they are, I will I will let you know.

Honestly, it's been such a brilliant chat.

So I'm always so privileged to be able to talk to you because I think it is so fascinating to look at history through this lens, but also the supernatural through this lens.

1:25:14

And to really see how different judges, different courts, different time frames have kind of had to grapple and get to, to kind of grips with some of these questions.

It's just so fascinating and to see that evolution.

So thank you so much for giving us this kind of tour, if you like, of of your, you know, sharing your knowledge and some of these cases to help illustrate just the changes that we've seen and the fears that have people have wrestled with and how that's manifested in some of the cases that we've seen.

1:25:44

So thank you so much for your time, Naomi.

Honestly, it's been such a a pleasure to chat with you again.

Thank you ever so much.

No, any opportunity to to share these stories and to give people that insight into the law that perhaps can be a bit impenetrable.

It's always a joy.

So thank you for having me.

1:26:01

And of course, I will make sure to include in the in the podcast description notes and on the website and everything your details so that people can easily find you on your social pages as well as obviously find links to past episodes that you've been on where you've spoken about other legal issues and kind of questions around the supernatural and the law.

1:26:23

So all of that will be then easy for people to find.

So again, thank you so much for your time and I'll say goodbye to everybody listening.

Thank you for joining us on this journey into the unknown.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, Rate, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.

1:26:42

You can follow us on social media for updates and more intriguing stories.

Until next time, keep your eyes open and your mind curious.

Naomi Ryan

Barrister