Possessed by the Devil
Two mysterious deaths and rumors of satanism have created widespread hysteria in Childress, a town that fears it is …
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If Tate was upset on July 26, 1988, he didn’t show it. More than an hour before his death, around five in the afternoon, he had been seen at the United Supermarket parking lot. He made plans with some girls to drop by the city park that evening to act as their coach for a women’s league softball game. He told Bobby Reynolds that he would meet him later to split a twelve-pack of beer. Then he and a younger friend, Chad Johnston, got in a car and drove away.
It was Chad who, at six o’clock, came through the front door of Jimmie and Brenda’s home to tell them that Tate had hanged himself. Brenda later recalled that Chad “was as calm as he could be, no tear in his eye, no nothing.” The three of them rushed to the site. There, according to a chillingly concise account of the events in the Index, “Tate’s father, Jimmie Rowland, cut his son from the tree.”
Chad, then fifteen, was a quiet, unpopular kid. He was new to town; those acquainted with him said he liked hanging around the more popular Tate because Tate could always provide some excitement. Chad initially told the sheriff that he and Tate had driven to a small grove of trees where they liked to listen to music. According to his first version of the events, Tate drank a few beers, strung a rope over the limb of the horse apple tree, and announced that he was going to hang himself. He told Chad where he wanted to have his funeral. Chad thought he was kidding. Chad told the sheriff that he walked behind the car to throw a beer can into the bushes and to see if anyone was watching. When he came back three minutes later, Tate was dead.
That story presented a problem. Two rope burns were visible on Tate Rowland’s neck—one above the Adam’s apple, one below. When someone is hanged, the body weight invariably pulls the chin toward the rope so that the rope mark is always above the Adam’s apple. Could Tate have been strangled first with the rope, then hung up in the tree to make it look like suicide? Two days later, Chad was interviewed again. This time, he said Tate had tried to hang himself twice. The first time, the rope broke. According to Chad’s statement, Tate said, “I can’t even kill myself.” They went back to Tate’s house (a five-minute drive away) to get another rope, then came back to the tree. Tate, standing on the hood of the car, tied one end around the limb, the other end around his neck, and stepped off of the car.
Chad would later say that he had told different stories because he was afraid he would get in trouble for not trying to stop Tate. He insisted that Tate had talked about suicide, that Tate had been upset over Karen. At the time, the sheriff’s department decided there was nothing else it could do. The death was ruled a suicide. The county judge, standing in for the justice of the peace, saw no reason to order an autopsy, and Tate’s body was prepared for burial.
A Whisper Campaign
The rumors began at the funeral. A woman dressed in black, a veil covering her face, mysteriously slipped into the back row of the packed Calvary Baptist Church. Tate’s aunt, who had driven down from Amarillo, asked if anyone knew who the woman was. Apparently, no one did. The woman left before anyone could talk to her. Then, in the middle of the service, a young man sitting in one of the front rows chanted over and over a single word: “Suicide.”
A few days later, the Childress Police Department, acting on a tip from a high school student, drove to a spot only a quarter of a mile from the hanging tree and found a cow skull lodged in a small tree; beneath the tree were logs surrounding a pile of rocks. The policemen decided that they were staring at an altar. On another night, an officer, driving past the cemetery, saw a figure standing by Tate Rowland’s grave. When the officer came by later to check again, he found spittle all over Tate’s tombstone. Other unsubstantiated reports came in: A cross had been seen burning over Tate’s grave; a schoolteacher’s dog had been stolen and sacrificed.
Was all this the work of pranksters? Kids in Childress, no doubt like kids everywhere, cherished bogeyman tales. Because of one line of dialogue in the 1974 horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—in which a man, pretending to help a frightened girl, says, “There’s no local phone here. We have to drive over to Childress”—the town had gained notoriety as the home of the actual chain saw killer. That the entire movie was filmed near Austin and was loosely based on an event that took place in Wisconsin didn’t matter. At slumber parties, stories were still told about a killer on the loose. One night, for kicks, Tate had put on a mask and overalls, borrowed a chain saw, removed the chain, and chased some giggling girls into the cemetery.
The stories emerging about Tate’s death, however, were far from funny. When school started that next fall, every high school student seemed to have heard that Tate was a member of a cult and had been killed by fellow cult members because he would not bring them a blond-haired, blue-eyed child to be sacrificed. According to the story, the child was supposed to be either one of his stepmother’s daughters or one of the four blond daughters of his sister, Terrie Trosper. “To make this even thicker,” says district attorney McCoy, “about the same time as these rumors started, we had strangers in cars showing up at the grade school parking lot, trying to pick up little kids. That’s a dad-gum fact!”
No arrest was ever made in the attempted kidnapping case; nevertheless, the information triggered waves of alarm. Tate’s stepmother said she began to receive at least ten phone calls a day from people spreading stories about the cult. “I don’t know if I believe it,” someone would say, “but here’s what I heard …”—and another version of Tate’s death would be born. What seemed initially to be the embellished speculation of high school friends suddenly had turned into a full-fledged community menace. Even though a cotton farmer who had been plowing a nearby field that July day when Tate was hanged told investigators he saw only two boys come out to the hanging tree, then leave and return, the rumors did not stop—and they were coming from citizens the sheriff called “good, ordinary people.” A Childress mother says that just a few days before Tate’s death she saw a group of teenagers in the city park gathering some gravel while a heavy metal song that mentions Satan played from the stereo system of one of the boys’ cars. After they left, she looked to see what they had done. The gravel had been shaped into a perfect circle, and outside the circle was written 666, the sign of the devil. “A shiver went plumb down my spine and then back up again,” the woman recalls.
Childress authorities also received a bizarre phone call from the police department in the Central Texas town of Lockhart. A Childress girl visiting Lockhart apparently told a Lockhart girl that she had dreamed of a boy being hanged by a satanic cult. The Childress girl told the Lockhart girl that she had dreamed that the cult met at an abandoned house with a red porch light in the tiny town of Kirkland, east of Childress. She said that parents were involved in the cult and that they had used a car to run down a boy a few years earlier. The sheriff’s deputies did some checking. Yes, there was a “haunted” house with a red porch light in Kirkland that had just recently burned to the ground. And a couple of years earlier, a fifteen-year-old boy who worked as a dishwasher in a local restaurant had been hit by a car and killed while walking home one night.
On Halloween night 1988, after hearing that the cult, as part of a ritual, was going to dig up Tate’s body to extract his collarbone and pinkie knuckle, a group of eight teenagers met at the gates of the cemetery to visit Tate’s grave. “We thought it would be, well, fun—get some dates, go out there, and see what was happening,” says one of the teens, who was seventeen at the time. According to this young man, who told this very story to a spellbound grand jury, everyone piled into one pickup. He drove slowly toward the back of the cemetery, where Tate’s grave was. As they got closer, someone said, “Is that music?” The teenager stopped the truck so he could hear.
“And then all of a sudden,” he recalls, “some headlights turned on right where Tate’s grave was supposed to be. We all started going crazy, and I whipped the truck around as fast as I could.” As he roared back through the gates, someone noticed pentagrams drawn on the cemetery shed, which started everyone screaming again. The headlights kept coming closer. People jumped out of the pickup and into their cars and took off in separate directions. The young man headed for town in the pickup. He says the lights followed him all the way to the courthouse before finally turning off.
(When I talked to this young man, who was a starting lineman for Childress’ high school football team and is now a burly 240 pounds, he gladly related that story to me—until he realized it would be published in this magazine. “Is this going to be put in print?” he asked. “It is?” His voice dropped to a terrified whisper. “Oh, Lord, the cult’s going to get me for sure now.”)
If that wasn’t enough, soon after the Halloween episode came a “confession” made to the police by Ray Wilks. One of the town’s more renegade teenagers, Ray, then fifteen, was arrested for stealing a car and drunkenly driving it into a utility pole. According to officers, when Ray was booked, he said he was a member of a satanic cult that had been at the tree when Tate was hanged. Those who were at the jail that night would later say that Ray’s voice sounded, in the words of one officer, “very spooky.”
Ray, who today sports a swastika and the words “heavy metal” tattooed on his forearms, denies having been at the tree or having even told the story—“I don’t remember saying anything because I was so drunk,” he told me. Yet the incident got a lot of people thinking about the Wilkses. No strangers to police—David McCoy calls them “a bunch of outlaws”—44-year-old Frank Wilks and two of his four sons had been charged at one time or another with various felonies. Could they possibly be part of a cult? And what were those words that had been painted, then sloppily covered up, on the back of the Wilks home? Curious citizens drove past the ramshackle frame house in the poorer southwest part of town. David McCoy concluded the writing said, “the Devil’s Den” or “the Devil’s Bin.” A courthouse secretary swore it read, “We Worship the Devil.”
My Library
