The ‘80s were known for many things. Loud clothes, indulgence of every kind, spandex, big hair and loud, heavy music. It was also the decade that so-called darkness came from the music via misinformation, paranoia, media hype and adult/journalistic finger pointing. This era was called the Satanic Panic. The decade was also known for its legendary and sometimes fatal intake of drugs. The ingredients of drugs, parental neglect and heavy metal are the three main factors in the story of Northport, NY’s Ricky Kasso.
A teen kicked out by parents forced to live on the streets and woods as a derelict, turning to crime, selling drugs and doing unthinkable things just to survive on a steady diet of bologna, bread, weed, pills and eventually angel dust.
Kasso’s story is a tragic tale that could’ve been avoided if not for the hardcore tough love shown by his father. A drug addled teen sleeping in the woods or wherever he could, going to the worst parts of the Bronx to buy drugs, so he could eat and buy clothes. A desperate situation leading to lots of bad decision’s and ultimately murder and suicide.
Jesse P. Pollack is co-director of The Acid King, the first feature length documentary about the life and death of Ricky Kasso and the events leading to the murder of Gary Lauwers and eventual death of Kasso. The film is told in a series of interviews by people who knew both kids, giving their memories and testimony to the time, lifestyle and kids they were. It debunks much of the original reporting on the news and in print which fueled paranoia and satanic angles. Pollack also wrote a book with the same title which dives deeper into case details and specifics with the documentary serving as a visual companion piece.
Pollack says it covers the same ground but isn’t a beat by beat adaptation of the books structure. “A lot of stuff in the documentary came to light after the book was published.” The book goes into more detail about the case. This is the story of The Acid King and the beginning of the ‘80s satanic panic.
The book and movie dive deep into the worldwide coverage ambushing the town when it happened, “One guy we interviewed talked about how there were reporters hiding in trees from London and Japan trying to get scoops. One of the things we try and get across in the film is the case doesn’t have a household name anymore in the true crime world but one of the first that blew up in the early ‘80s. It led to this rapid succession of things like Ramirez, the Judas Priest suicides and all that. Once it exploded, it ironically got lost of the shuffle.”
The satanic panic media blitz and BS that followed was at the time a modern version of the Salem Witch Trials in a sense. It was a media painted idea of a shadow organization behind these events whether a gang or cult. Reporters got their scoops, books were written and nobody cared anymore. “That’s what we saw in this case with Kasso. This notion that, not only was he a member of a satanic cult called The Knights of the Black Circle he was supposedly the leader. It turns out the Knights weren’t even a cult, just a collection of friends that liked to sell pot in the park downtown and draw pentagrams on their denim jackets to scare away revival dealers from stealing their weed.”
The Knights were an in-joke among the kids then Peter Jennings tells the world on the news and they become public enemy #1 igniting national fear, wetting a global coverage appetite.
The Amityville Horror saga had died down at that point though the close proximity added some supernatural aura to the Kasso case. ‘It had died down from the original legit scare, if you call it that. I don’t think anyone was taking it seriously by ’84. People had accepted it was a Hollywood franchise (by then) on the third or fourth sequel. As far as that little nook in Long Island was concerned, it was almost a badge of honor. It was the local spooky thing in Suffolk County before Kasso. At the time that was it. There was no murder of Gary yet, just Amityville.”
Though Amityville has arguably had one of the longest life-spans in media fascination and public interest, movies are still being made today from major studios to YouTube. “At some point it was decided in court that you can’t trademark the name Amityville. It’s a preexisting town but you can trademark The Amityville Horror. That’s why you see The Amityville Terror, The Amityville Haunting, etc. People in the last five-ten years really caught onto that.”
The media painted Kasso as a stoned-out leader of a satanic cult though Pollack says he was more a curios dabbler, later enhanced by drug use. “This kid was into some spooky shit, so it made perfect sense. He got too high on angel dust one night and decided to dig up a grave and take it to the Amityville Horror house. He didn’t succeed. The idea that bored drug addled kids in that part of Suffolk County would do something like that wasn’t too far off script, this weird pop culture thing that happened in our own backyard.”
Kasso was arrested only two months before he murdered Gary Lauwers for attempted grave-robbing. “He told the cops, I was trying to go to the Amityville house to hold a ritual to summon Satan on Walpurgisnacht. It was common knowledge, not made up. When I found out that so much (of the story) has been made up, I assumed all that grave robbing shit about Amityville, was gonna be the next thing that’s not true but it turned out one of the few things that was.”
When interviewed, the arresting officer told Pollack when searched he found a photo copied list of all the dignitaries in hell. He was trying to find a skull for a ritual. So, there is occult flavor to the story. Kasso was interested in Satan, but nothing close to a cult leader. The media saw dollar signs and didn’t take long for the myth to grow legs, once it became public knowledge.
Ricky’s dad, Dick Kasso shares a large portion of the blame for Kasso’s actions due to his tough love approach, bordering on sadistic abuse and beatings. “I think the saddest part of the whole case was, it was all preventable, until he pulled a knife on Gary. He could’ve walked away, and let it go, even if he decided to give Gary another beating that night.”
Kasso had beaten Gary several times prior, “Leading to the murder he’d beaten Gary several times over money and drugs he’d stolen from him. There was never a real point of no return, until he pulled the knife that night. “If he wasn’t in the woods, I doubt he’d of been consuming the amount of hard core drugs he was. A perfect storm that led to the murder but the catalyst was his father throwing him out.”
Kasso and Lauwers had known each other since the 2nd grade, “Knowing your close friend had betrayed you, stealing from you when you were sleeping. Knowing you rely on those drugs for income. It wasn’t his personal stash; it was his stock for making money. I think all that led to him flipping out. If you look at the part of the story where the kid is leading tours to the body for two weeks straight, he’s practically begging to be caught. I think murdering Gary was an act of suicide. His final push to kill himself knowing he’d crossed a line that couldn’t be taken back.”
Pollack says it was a rage killing motivated by stolen drugs. “A lot of Kasso’s rage stemmed from (knowing) he wasn’t wanted and loved at home. He was very aware he’d been cast out by his family, forced to live in the woods like a feral child. He had to steal and sell drugs to survive.”
Children services wasn’t the same organization it is today and never intervened “I don’t think they would’ve gotten involved at that point. That’s another big myth in this story. The media at the time interviewed the dad and mother. They tried to make out like, we did so much for him. He always had a home he was welcome too. The neighbors knew that was BS and other community social workers knew that was not true but no one wanted to speak up that the Kasso’s were lying. They threw him out all the time and burned his clothing. We tell the story of his father throwing two dollars at him wiping his hands of him. Don’t ever call again, you’re dead to us.”
Pollack notes in the book that all Kasso had to sleep on in the woods, was an old ratty couch he dragged out from the trash. One night all his firewood got soaked by snow so he had to sleep on the snow covered ground and burn the couch for warmth. “That was this kid’s existence, dealing with the trauma of coming from an abused home, physical and mental.”
Another myth was Kasso didn’t do anything to help himself, he did. “In the book it details there was a teenage drop out center on Main Street in Northport. Any teen could walk in and speak to a counselor for free.” Whether it was help with their mental health, falling behind in school or being thrown out and needed a place to live.
Kasso went on his own, several times trying to get his life together. “Every time he seemed close something would fall apart. He went in one time and said I’m tired of living in the woods, (I’m freezing) I wanna patch things up with my family and go back to high school. The center mediated and the parents said we’ll take him back as long as he cuts his hair and stops cursing around the house. He agreed, got a haircut and went back.”
He said shit one day and was thrown back out. “Another time he went back and got thrown out for leaving school a few minutes early to go hang out with friends one day. They looked for any reason to throw this kid out on the street knowing he had nowhere to turn. The woods at worst and at best, sometimes a friend’s parent would let him crash on their couch for a couple nights. He had no long term backup plan.”
Pollack researched The Acid King for three years, “I started in December 2015 and handed it in, April 2018. It was a really interesting process. When I started, I wasn’t aware the story had been manipulated by media as much as it had. I had this feeling that this kid was probably not in a serious satanic cult with over a hundred members, maybe a teenage gang with a loose tier system of who’s in charge. The more I interviewed people that knew these kids and were affected by this story it became clear that none of this was true. All the original coverage was botched.” He had to start fresh, from the beginning.
He went through all the microfilm at the Northport Public Library and every article printed including international coverage. “I was the first journalist to get the entire police record of the case. The whole file from the Suffolk Country Police Department.” Pollack gathered every name in the case files, news articles and later Rolling Stone article, tracked them down, interviewing them from scratch, talking to over 50 people including Kasso’s sister and Gary’s sister, and the arresting officers.
Initially he thought it would be an easy story to tell with all the details in the press already with lots of material to work with. “That turned into, no, you’re gonna have to throw all that aside because it’s tainted and start from scratch. That’s why it took three years.”
Feedback has been positive so far, with the book being a cathartic experience, “The people who participated and the people I didn’t track down in time eventually got a copy. All by large have been supportive. They’re appreciative that the record’s been set straight. Of course there are people not aware of the book, seeing the film advertised on social media and hits them as a shock.”
Pollack hopes everyone will see it for what it is, “It’s not another exploitation film. It seeks to bring significant understanding to a very controversial story and shed light on a moral panic we’re still seeing the echoes of today.”
The Acid King is the first feature length documentary on the story. “It’s inspired this really interesting counter culture movement. A lot of artists took on the story as a source of inspiration, especially the horror movie and heavy metal community. We’re talking over three dozen professionally released metal songs. At least five movies have been inspired by it and fictional books like Dark Places by Gillian Flynn. It took on this second life.”
Rikki Sixx, My Sweet Satan and surviving Where Evil Dwells footage can be found on YouTube, “Where Evil Dwells, they started working on I think only a couple months of the story breaking. The production is almost its own urban legend. It was never finished. The co-director David Wojnarowicz died of aids before it was done. Several reels of footage were accidentally destroyed in an apartment fire in the 80s. All the public has seen is 30 minutes, almost like a teaser created for the New York downtown film festival in ’86. It’s become this almost Blair Witch thing, this super 8 film, the first Kasso movie ever made. It wasn’t finished and never will be. There might be undiscovered footage out there but who knows if we’ll ever see it.”
Director Jim Van Bebber talked on camera about his film My Sweet Satan. “He’s this constant voice in the film, talking about his views on the case and pretty much fuels the movie. That’s the one big reaction we’re getting from people. Saying, man, Van Bebber really runs the gamut with real insight especially from a person who didn’t know the kids personally. He was an outsider, adding this grim, gallows humor. Jim’s almost like the crypt keeper of the film in a sense.”
A housing development was built over large parts of the woods where Kasso stayed and Lauwers was murdered. “The spot where Gary’s body was found is now someone’s backyard swimming pool. We found that out from the Northport cops. There are still some small patches of it. We show one in the film. The path they walked into the woods. That still exists and shot some B-roll there.”
The park in downtown Northport at the time was featured on the news with ‘Satanic Graffiti’ spray painted. “It was Hail Satan and maybe a pentagram or two but largely it was people spray painting bands. We show archival footage, people just writing Black Sabbath on stuff.” One of the running jokes was, several spots had Hail Satin sprayed on it, they couldn’t even spell the lord of darkness’s name right.
Due to unwanted exposure, the town quickly built a new park over the offending graffiti. “Anyone going there looking for a spooky reminder will be disappointed. It looks like any other park with a swing set in any town USA. The gazebo where Kasso hung out; sold drugs and occasionally carved pentagrams is still there.” There’s virtually nothing left for dark tourism.
The Suffolk Country correctional facility is still in operation. “We never figured out which cell it happened in. If we did, we’d of tried to get some B-roll there. We used stock footage of a generic cell in the film.”
The term dusthead was definitely used at the time to describe Kasso and other high kids. “David’s Rolling Stone piece makes big use of that phrase. There’s whole interview spots where kids ask to remain anonymous referred to as teen dusthead one and two. Almost like counter culture that always amused me.”
Journalist David Breskin’s in the film talking about his 1984 Kids in the Dark Rolling Stone piece dissatisfied with how major news outlets were doing a terrible hatchet job. “He decided I’m gonna go live amongst these kids for five or six weeks, hold up in this motel, spending every waking hour interviewing these kids on tape. When writing the book he sent me 44 hours of original interview tapes. It was a real godsend, the closest thing I had to a time machine.”
The recordings were kids talking about the case, some deceased at the time of Pollack’s research. I’m hearing kids talk about the story 48 hours after it happened. If you were looking for fresh memories opposed to 42 years later, they were an indispensable resource. We asked if he’d be willing to be interviewed on camera, and said yes. I was proud we got him on film talking for the first time. He did a great job.”
The piece made such an impression that a few years later when Rolling Stone put out their 20th Anniversary issue of greatest stories, Kids in the Dark was selected. “In 20 years of iconic reporting, having your story selected as one of 20 best. That really shows how hard he worked on it. Having him involved was a real honor.”
If the internet had existed then it would’ve been on Blabbermouth, other metal sites, Yahoo, AOL, etc. “You still see it pop up sometimes. Anytime Acid King, the stoner metal band from San Francisco releases an album, it pops up.” Sometimes the myths are regurgitated and misinformation repeated for juicy copy keeping it alive in certain circles.
On the surface it’s the story of a good kid that went wrong, “He was a middle-school football star that smoked a joint, listened to Black Sabbath records backward then became a teenage cult leader, sacrificed his friend to the devil and hanged himself in jail before he could face consequences. That’s really appealing to someone who wants a spooky story to tell, write a metal song, or make a horror movie. It’s not the whole story.”
A book about the case called Say You Love Satan came out in 1987. “I read that book before I decided to write my own on the case. I was working on my first book, Death on the Devil’s Teeth another true crime book about a sort of proto satanic panic story. About a girl who disappeared hitchhiking in New Jersey in 1972 and six weeks later, her remains were found in the woods.” Rumors spread witches did it or a Satan cult. The killer was never found becoming an urban legend in town.
While researching and writing Pollack became well-versed in the Satanic Panic seeing Kasso’s name often pop up. “The only book written at the time was Say You Love Satan. I picked up a copy on Ebay. I thought it was the true story. When I was asked to write a book for Simon and Schuster’s new true crime line they asked me, do you know a case that’s very teenager-centric? We want to gear this toward teenagers and people going to college to be social workers or criminologists.”
He thought it’d be an interesting modern retelling of the Kasso case, “I figured I could find more people that the author couldn’t, with the internet. When I started interviewing people, I was made aware that David St. Claire, who wrote it, had made 90% of it up and the remaining 10% he’d plagiarized from Breskin’s article. It’s the only true crime book he ever wrote.” His other books were about psychic powers and the metaphysical. “He’d go on TV and say he was a psychic healer.”
Another editor contacted Breskin making him aware. “He saw the bulk of his article in it and threatened the publisher with legal action. They very quietly withdrew it from print.” Though, with Pollack’s book, it’s become something of an odd collector’s item. “Discovering how much of that book was bullshit became this interesting side-quest with this story already filled with lore and media myth.”
The Northport Midway head shop plays a dark, supporting but historical part in the Kasso saga. “They’d been picketing it for years by the time the murder happened.” The town really liked being considered Mayberry and any town USA and The Midway was a longtime eyesore. “Right in the middle is this head shop that sells rebellious jewelry, ninja stars and bongs made from plastic skulls and you have a teenager dealing acid at the front door. That’s where Ricky got his nickname, The Acid King. By the time he was 16 he was the chief supplier of hallucinogens, in Suffolk County.”
The town tried getting rid of it several times, finally closing in the 2000’s. “The big scary Midway where Ricky Kasso dealt drugs in the front and slept in the trash in the back is now an interior decoration store. We interviewed the nice lady who owns it in the film. It’s like this hilarious post script. Let’s tidy everything up and forget about the Satan murder.”
Pollack said to his knowledge and from those interviewed, Ricky’s dad never had guilt or remorse for his actions. “Ricky’s younger sister said after he killed himself, his name was only mentioned in the house two or three times. It was like, he never existed.” After the funeral and cremation, his remains sat at the funeral home for almost a year. “When they finally got them, they just put it on a shelf in the basement. The parents really wanted to sweep this under the rug. You can’t blame them but were also not eager to admit their responsibility either. It made for a real lack of healing for people close to that family.”
On his own Kasso found refuge is an unusual, sometimes dangerous and unstable cast of characters including Pagan Pat who allegedly had the idea of finding the skull to go to the Amityville house. “You’ve got this kid thrown out during his formative years, and found Pagan Pat a 40-year- old veteran with PTSD, an alcoholic and drug addict.” He frequented the Northport veteran’s hospital picking up prescriptions for Librium for his shakes and DT’s, selling them to teens in the park.”
His dad’s tough love approach to the straight and narrow, thinking he’d come back begging, didn’t work. The parents can’t be blamed for everything but every misstep from drugs to the occult, were from their extreme treatment and neglect. “They could have taken him back, worked it out and stopped the eventual chain of events but chose not to.” Pollack says people through interviews painted a picture of Mrs. Kasso being intimidated by her husband, dealing with a mentally unbalanced kid with manic depression and was stuck in the middle.
People saw Mr. Kasso abusing Ricky outside. “There was an incident where, he refused to cut his hair and his father chased him with a pair of scissors. When he couldn’t catch him, he took all his concert shirts and any clothing he deemed inappropriate and cut them up on the front lawn.”
Pollack says Kasso’s father also roughed him up in the woods behind the house at least once and neighbors did nothing. “The prevailing attitude was, mind your own business. It’s not your kid. You really had to come close to killing your kid to be arrested for child abuse back then.”
Spot where body was found
Kasso wasn’t born a monster. “A lot of people we interviewed for the book and film had known him since he was a toddler. They all said he was a great kid until puberty then became unstable. If you look at the bulk of bad decisions he made, 9 out of 10 were because he was backed into a corner (being) thrown out. If he had the support needed at home I think things would have been a lot different. Would he have been perfect? Of course not, he had bipolar disorder in an era when it was poorly understood.”
Pollack says he had moments of sobriety but by the final year he was constantly high. “It was a scary progression. People interviewed said dust came in at the end. A lot of people, look at the heavy metal connection through the arc it inspired years later. He was this thrash metal kid so of course he was smoking angel dust. Honestly, Kasso was more of a hippy. That AC/DC shirt, the biggest irony was it wasn’t his. He borrowed it after falling in the water goofing around on the dock. When I interviewed his sister and his friends I was very surprised to learn, his favorite bands were The Grateful Dead, The Who and Frank Zappa. I didn’t see that coming.”
His favorite album was Joe’s Garage by Frank Zappa and The Kids Are Alright soundtrack. “I was like no way, to hear he was very normal and doing normal hippie kid drugs. He was smoking pot at 14, so was I. He was dropping acid at 15, so were a lot of my other friends. I was to chicken to try acid.”
He was going to the South Bronx for angel dust to sell. “The other horrifying thing was this was a guy, a child, he’d just turned 17 and was doing this for awhile. Starting at 15 or 16 he was taking trains from suburban Long Island to the South Bronx of the early ‘80s, which was a rundown shithole at the time. Ronald Reagan visited and said it reminded him of Warsaw during the war. It was dangerous to go there but this kid was so detached from any normal family life or community he was risking his ass almost every week to pick up drugs, so he could buy clothes and a pack of bologna and bread to eat while he slept on a grungy couch in the woods.”
He was a kid forced to major extremes to survive, “A kid forced to make a bunch of shitty choices which lead to ruining his brain on drugs and the trauma of being homeless and abused. He eventually lashed out, stoned out of his mind and did something terrible.”
When making the documentary, Pollack never considered narration over using words and pictures for transition and story progression. “We deliberately went with the title cards. I think nothing ages a documentary quicker than narration. People narrate films according to what’s in vogue at the time. In the ‘90s and early 2000’s everybody was trying to be Robert Stack, Cold Case Files and Forensic Files.”
He’d seen a documentary series called Lost Tapes showing footage you really don’t see of popular events and was impressed how footage was presented with no narration or talking heads. “For transition, they cut to a black title card, screen or static image (showing) this is what happened next. I really enjoyed that because it made it timeless.”
They used some footage from Where Evil Dwells, My Sweet Satan and Lucifer’s Satanic Daughter only because they didn’t want to show many gory crime scene photos. “We didn’t want an exploitation piece.”
With the book and movie out, coupled with all previous media the public now knows as much as there will ever be known. “The guy who committed the murder committed suicide within 36 hours of being arrested. His confession wasn’t audio or videotaped. The guy who arrested him took some notes on a yellow legal pad and had Ricky sign it. That’s the closest we’ll ever have to a version of events that happened that night.”
Witnesses Jimmy Troiano and Albert Quinones who went with them into the woods that night stories changed so many times it resulted in Troiano being found not guilty in court. His story changed four times and was caught changing it again on the stand mid-trial. “The jury said we have no clue what really happened that night.” The kids were all on PCP. The jury watched them change their story on the stand in real time. As much as can be factually known about this is in the book and film. “Anything else is up to interpretation and imagination. We’ll never know.”
In a real-time reality check on Quinones the lawyer convinced him that a tiger had escaped from a circus. “He was seeing how high he was that night.” Quinones said a swarm of bees chased him and at one point thought a tiger was chasing him. “To see how susceptible he was to outside influence, he said, but Albert, didn’t you hear, there was a circus the week before and a tiger escaped. In front of the whole court room Albert said, you mean the tiger was real. It showed how completely he’d lost touch with reality. I don’t think anyone will ever know what really happened that night aside that four kids walked in (the woods) and three walked out.”
Pollack says Kasso could’ve lived a normal life post-prison had he survived. Quinones is living a normal life along with people that knew Kasso and Lauwers. “Being a kid into Ozzy Osbourne and smoking angel dust on its own wasn’t a death sentence in Northport, NY in the mid-’80s. Until he pulled the knife on Gary, Kasso could have gotten his life together. We probably would’ve interviewed him for the movie. That would’ve been weird.”
Going in they knew it was going to be an uphill battle with certain reviews. “The documentary’s pretty low budget, we crowd funded it and not counting out of pocket, it was shot for under $7,000 which is next to nothing in filmmaking. We knew our intentions were right and wanted to tell the whole story, not relying on gimmicks to do it.”
The stories been manipulated so many times through so many lenses, whether the satanic panic, evil kid, or heavy metal lens. “This story needs to speak for itself for the first time. The only things used are interviews with people who lived it. I’m going to let them tell the story. That’s why I’m not in it. People have asked, you wrote the book, why aren’t you interviewed in the film? I’m not important to it. I didn’t live it. I’m the messenger of the facts. I wrote the book to get it out there. I co-directed the film but wanted to give it back to the people who lived it. Let them tell it themselves.”
Archive footage wasn’t exactly readily available, “We’re talking about a case that happened before cell phones. There’s only 12 seconds of Ricky Kasso in existence but no recorded audio. There’s no surviving footage of Gary Lauwers at all, to our knowledge. We have a recording of his voice and a few photographs.”
After trying outside artists Pollack did the soundtrack himself. “We were gonna go with a stock music company at first due to budget than I noticed my kid, he’s 8, watches a lot of those videogame YouTube channels. I picked a really somber piece of music for the opening scene, where Ricky’s friend Grant was talking about that one perfect day to make a person fall apart with footage from the old bridge and I thought, OMG, this music’s so perfect for this. Then a week later my kid’s watching YouTube, some comedy meme compilation used the same music and I was like, oh no. The video had 10 million views. I had to rip that out otherwise people would remember it from the dog meme video. Why’s he using it for a Satan murder story? I used a fake band name in the credits because I was self-conscious about it.”
Film Threat gave it 10 out of 10, calling it required viewing. “That was such an honor. I read Film Threat and just to have the kings of underground cinema give it that high a rating. Someone gets it. A lot of people will have their minds blown, like holy shit, I had no idea what went on.”
Pollack says it’s a scary, even horrifying reminder of the satanic panic’s affect on parents including the Geraldo special Exposing Satan’s Underground. “It’s funny now. Seeing Ozzy with his perm, saying no you’re getting my songs wrong. If you take away the humor, you’re watching a witch hunt in real time.” The panic was a very REAL thing at the time.
When you have a kid on the front page, growling at the camera wearing an AC/DC shirt with the press telling you, he was the leader of a satanic cult who murdered this child in front of a roaring bonfire as other cult members chanted to Satan, they now had ammo.” Parents grabbed the paper saying I told you so.
Pollack says the Satanic Panic will always be there, with different faces and phases. Teen rebellion takes different forms every generation. There are probably lots of Ricky Kasso’s out there that never committed murder but dealt with abuse, alienation and bullying.
Talking to younger generations about the book and case has been a fun, interesting experience for Pollack. “I’m an ‘elder millennial’ born in ’88. Explaining to generations past me, a lot of people in America and the world were scared shitless because this teen was on the front of every newspaper wearing an AC/DC shirt. Today you can get an AC/DC Onesie for your baby at Walmart. They did music for Iron Man. In 1984, parents were scared of AC/DC, Ozzy and Judas Priest. They said Ozzy was putting secret messages in his songs encouraging kids to shoot themselves.”
Though he has presented two works that demystify Kasso, even portraying him as a sympathetic character, his compassion ends when Kasso killed Lauwers. In the cell he was aware his face was on every paper in the country. He also saw a news report that night with his name and face on TV so he knew he was persona non-grata.
He wanted to tell an interesting story debunking the teenage grave robber commits Satan murder accepted headlines. “I found out how these kids had been used and abused by a scoop hungry press.” Revealing and telling the factual truth of what happened, wiping away the media hype, legend and lore and giving the survivors some peace and closure is satisfaction for him.
He would like to do his own media events/tour screening the film with a Q&A in Long Island and possibly elsewhere if interest is shown.
Though he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a true crime writer he’s working on his last true crime book, Room 100 chronicling the death of Nancy Spungen the girlfriend of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious. It’s a story that seemed cut and dry but the real story is murkier, misunderstand and misrepresented. “I’m doing a deep dive into that story and it should be coming out sometimes next year.”
Nothing can change the past but the truth can at least partially heal wounds. “The people that knew and loved Gary and Ricky, are gonna have to live with it for life. I hope the pain is softened. Books like Say You Love Satan aren’t the final word anymore. It was for 31 years, from ’87 till 2018. I hope they’re comforted knowing if people want to know the true story they can go read and watch The Acid King book and movie. The truth stands a fighting chance now.”
The Acid King is streaming on Apple TV, VUDU, Direct TV and Roku.
@jplackauthor
@1289films
Crime case images courtesy of Jesse P. Pollack.
