Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,72
he had found in Anton LaVey all the answers he had been seeking for much of his adolescent life. He was not an outcast, a deviant, a sexual predator—or if he was, there was nothing wrong with any of that. Life was not about self-denial and the hereafter; it was about pleasure and the here-and-now.
Over the course of the next six months Spencer attended all of LaVey’s soirees, mingling with artists, attorneys, doctors, writers, and even a baroness who’d grown up in the Royal Palace of Denmark. LaVey continued his rants against Christianity, though he was not a soapbox preacher. He wanted to start a real revolution, one that would free people from the blind faith and worship that life-denying Christian churches demanded.
To accomplish his goals he knew he could not simply present his ideas to the world as a philosophy, which could be too easily overlooked. He needed to do something shocking, and so he ritualistically shaved his head in the tradition of medieval executioners and black magicians before him, formed a new religion he called the Church of Satan, nominated himself as the high priest, and declared 1966 Year One, Anno Satanas—the first year of the reign of Satan.
For a while LaVey’s Friday night lectures and rituals continued as cathartic blasphemies against Christianity. But then LaVey, drawing upon Spencer’s expertise in psychiatry, began to focus more on self-transformational techniques such as psychodrama, encouraging his followers to enforce their own meaning on life. This proved hugely popular with the masses, and within two years LeVay was getting coverage in major magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Time, and Newsweek. By the time he published The Satanic Bible in 1968, the Church of Satan had ten thousand members and he had become an internationally-recognized Satanist labeled the Black Pope by the media.
Over the next couple years, however, LaVey allowed himself to become charmed by his own hype and grandiosity, causing Spencer to lash out at him one evening in September of 1971, accusing him of turning the church into a cult of personality. The following day Spencer discovered just how much he had overestimated his position and influence within the Magic Circle—or underestimated how crypto-fascist LaVey had become—because LaVey kicked him out of the church, what had become his family.
Disillusioned, lost, Spencer returned to Cleveland and did his best to get on with his life. He often consoled himself with the knowledge that LeVay was a lie and a phony. The man wrote and preached that Satanism was about becoming one’s own god and living as one’s carnal nature dictated, but he never had the balls to move beyond the conformities of the masses and follow this teaching through fully. He never raped or killed or indulged in any other of the most basic of human desires—desires repressed inside everyone—which made him as hypocritical as the hypocrites he professed to hate.
Spencer, on the other hand, indulged more than anybody ever knew. During his time in LA he killed seven women, while over the next sixteen years he killed dozens more, experimenting with everything from necrophilia to cannibalism to human sacrifice. What kept him from getting caught, he believed, were two simple rules: he never killed anyone he knew, and he never killed anyone in or around Summit County.
He broke both those rules in the winter of 1985.
Her name was Mary Atwater. She was committed to Boston Mills Psychiatric Hospital during a blizzard three days before Christmas day. As Psychiatrist-in-Chief it was one of Spencer’s responsibilities to interview each incoming patient. Based on the photo in her files he knew Mary was attractive, but he wasn’t prepared for her extravagant beauty. Armenian-American, she had glossy jet-black hair and piercing chestnut-brown eyes and a wide, handsome mouth. She wore a blue silk kaftan with a silver-and-turquoise necklace and an armload of silver bracelets. She had been born in Chicago where she enjoyed a normal, stable childhood. She became a cello prodigy in her teenage years and married her former college professor. They relocated to Cleveland when she was twenty-five, where, quite out of the blue, a combination of heritability and her daughter’s birth precipitated a catastrophic mental breakdown from which she never recovered. It’s what landed her in Ward 16 of Boston Mills Psychiatric Hospital, an “acute admissions” ward meant for patients in highly disturbed states who needed around-the-clock care and medication. They were all sectioned, a euphemism for legally detained (hence the hospital’s barred windows and locked doors), and most were never discharged,