99% Invisible - 554- Devil in the Details

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

This week we have two stories featuring the devil.An infamous "training video" teaching cops how to spot and stop "satanic crimes." And a stretch of highway with the misfortune of being officially named US Route 666.Devil in the Details

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Due to the graphic nature of this program, the viewer discretion is advised. In 1994, an independent producer made a short-earness video featuring an eccentric cast of characters who are focused on a very specific paranoia. In Satanic occultism, that which is good is bad, and that which is bad is good. And as you view this learning and educational tape, pay attention to notice the reverse of everything that is normal becoming abnormal. The video is released as a one hour and 15 minute VHS tape. Best producer, Harmon Leon. The tape was made to look like a TV news special. It opens with a cheap, Jerry Springer era computer graphic of a gold pentagram set against

a red brick wall. There are many crimes that are unsolved in our cities, and many of those crimes have ritualistic overtones. And so today we hope to be able to shed some light on a dark, dark area. There's an impassioned host sporting a nappy sweater the color of wet cement. His title on screen reads, Cop slash Pasteur.

Behind me is the city of San Francisco, a city known for the first Satanic church in America. Anton LeBae established this church under the freedoms of our country in 1966 and wrote the Satanic Bible. The video was called Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Colts. It was used by police departments as official training the satanic Bible. understand and recognize which are regular offenses, those that belong to cult behaviors. This is a law enforcement problem.

Therefore, all law enforcement officers should be familiar with the difference. I first saw this video years ago on YouTube. What got me laughing was how ridiculous it all seems today. The bikini model with a huge pentagram drawn on her stomach, the mullet sporting so-called Satanic expert who walks us through a crime scene filled with made up Satanic symbols. I've watched the video no less than a dozen times and only gets more and more absurd

with each viewing. But then I started looking a little closer and realized this video is once taken very seriously. a little closer and realize this video is once taken very seriously, especially by police, who used it to convince their fellow officers that they were America's first lines of defense what we now call the Satanic Panic. The Satanic Panic was based on conspiracy theories, misinformation, and straight-up lies. But back in the 1980s and early 90s, that wave of paranoia and anxiety that swept across the US felt very real.

The fear was that well-organized, secret satanic cults were lurking everywhere, corrupting America's youth. Even worse, parents lived in terror that Satanists were kidnapping children and murdering them and gruesome occult sacrifices. Everyone seemed to buy it. Parents, teachers, church leaders, and the media. The local media was inclined to believe even the most ridiculous of allotations. You know, and then you look on the national stage and have people giving space for this idea. Jordan Smith is an investigative journalist who's covered the Satanic panic and how the

press made things so much worse. I think it's, I mean, it's disappointing. It's, you know, nicest way to say it. I mean, these are people that are theoretically supposed to be calling out bullshit when they see it, but are not. Definitely not. The media mostly just fan the flames. There were dozens of documentaries and TV news specials produced on Satanism.

Talk show celebrities made exposés stoking unfounded fears about demonic cults. To describe this story as horrifying would be an undistitement. It deals with satanic cults, human sacrifices, of death. Devil worship, exposing sittings underground. There are thousands of men and women who are secretly worshipping the devil. A devil on Thursday, we discuss satanism

to summit the religion, to others that's the practice of evil in the devil's name. It exists and it's flourishing. These supposed deep dives into the dangers of devil worshiping cults were wildly successful in terms of ratings. Americans couldn't get enough of the wall-to-wall satanic panic coverage. The thing that I will never understand is why somebody would believe this because it's so clearly unhinged and irrational and illogical?

Once the narrative got kicked off, it was just sort of an unstoppable juggernaut. But the satanic panic would have never become as big and ugly as it did without the misguided and ignorant actions of law enforcement. Gullible cops believed they were on the front lines of an all-out war against a plague of demonic crime. Law enforcement did not shy away from this role. Since the early 1980s, when the panic began, police departments had been grooming cops, whose job was to learn everything about demonic crimes.

Most of those cops would proclaim themselves satanic experts. They would teach classes on cold crimes to their fellow officers. There were several police departments who would have an officer who would be the designated satanic crime expert and so on. They had studied the phenomenon, had declared themselves to be experts, and they were on the lecture circuit. Ken Laning is a former FBI agent who has once the nation's leading law enforcement authority on satanic crimes. I became an informal clearinghouse for these cases.

Satanic ritual abuse called Ken Laning at the FBI, And so I just started to deal with hundreds of these cases. Today, Ken is very critical of the so-called experts. Those cops who relied on a jumble of newspaper clippings, police reports, and sensational documentaries to teach their fellow officers. Police were particularly fond of heraldra Rivera's NBC special on Satanism, which earned huge ratings when it ran on TV in 1988.

It's teenagers who are most likely to fall under the spell of this jumble of dark, violent emotions called Satanism, and in some cases to be driven into committing terrible deeds. When heraldor special came out, because a lot of cops are looking for audiovisual material and shortcuts, make a copy of it over the VCR, pop it in the tape, and now you're playing Araldo's two hour special that we've shown on television as if it's a documented training film for law enforcement.

And then in 1994, that law enforcement audience got exactly the kind of video it was looking for, a training tape about satanic cults that was tailor-made for cops. The idea for the video came from a small-time filmmaker named Devon Dahavan. Back in the early 1990s, Dahavan was a young producer based in San Diego, just trying to break into the film industry. Yeah, incredible energy. He's really ambitious. He could get so much done in 24 hours. This is Carrie Burton's scene. He worked closely with Dahavan back in the 90s.

Although Dahavan went and talked to me for this story, Carrie shared pretty freely his memories of how driven Dahavan was. He was constantly juggling numerous projects from directing small music videos to shooting boring corporate films. His dream was always to become a big producer. He had some real goals inside. I mean, one of the things that he was really good at recognizing was that if you could get somebody to pay you to have a camera in your hands, that time becomes really valuable. For one of his projects, Dahavan made a half-hour documentary aimed at teaching parents about

the dangers of Satanism. Then he started developing another video on the same subject, but instead of a demonic occultism warning that felt like a PSA, this new project would focus specifically on cops. There was already a built in market for something like this. As the go-to experts on Satanic crimes, cops were the stars of the moment. They were the ones educating the public about the alleged ritual abuse crisis

in which they also got to play the heroes. But there weren't any videos made specifically to teach police how to spot satanic crimes. Dahavan's video would satisfy that need. To get the tape made and in the hands of law enforcement, Dahavan called up the guy he often rented his video equipment from. Hello, I'm Lenny McGill. And as I stand before you, I have honor about my person concealed 11 different handguns. I would describe Lenny McGill as the Joe exotic of guns.

Back in the early 90s, instead of selling firearms, Lenny made his money producing his own brand of very niche VHS tapes. I formed a business called Got Video. And it was actually a good business. You know, we basically did a whole series of videotapes on fire arms. Lenny made instructional videotapes on all aspects of gun use. And he sold those tapes through his mail order catalog. That catalog in Lenny's gun videos were very popular among law enforcement.

That's the exact audience, Devon D. Havan, hope to reach. He needed Lenny's help to shoot and market his new video project. So they struck a deal. Lenny would be the executive producer of Devon's new satanic video, and he'd get a cut of the sales.

In exchange, Devon got to use Lenny's cameras for free and he got Lenny to agree to sell the tape in his catalog. Devon and his small crew wrote and shot the video over several months, mostly in San Francisco and San Diego. They pulled together several supposed experts, including that mullet sporting ex-high priests. One hardened detective shows just how supposedly elaborate and pervasive these demonic cults were, pointing to a calendar of sacrificial holidays and a glossary of satanic terms.

All this is backed by a homemade synth soundtrack. The numbers 666. According to the Bible, these numbers 666 are the mark of the beast. The pedagram. This inverted star points downward towards hell and Satan. It is a popular simple but has no meaning other than a satanic one, and there may be many different versions. The video speaks straight to the police with the message that satanic ritual abuse is real, it is pervasive and horrific, and it's hurting the most vulnerable people. According to the tape, cops are the ones to save us,

and the tape promises to show them how. Devon finished editing the video in 1994, and then he made a very smart marketing move. Just to make sure he got the attention of police, he slapped a sticker on each VHS case that read, Officer Training Purposes Only. Unauthorized viewers may be subject to prosecution under penalty of law. It was a completely unenforceable and bogus warning, but it was meant to sell the idea that this was not just your average documentary. Even though anyone could purchase the tape through Lenny McGill's gun video catalog,

that sticker gave the tape the air of official police business. As agreed, Lenny McGill listed the tape in his gun video catalog. It wasn't as big a hit as Lenny's other titles like Rock and Roll 3, Sexy Girls, Sexy Guns, but for police who are running sessions about Satanism at conferences around the US, the 75 minute BHS tape was a godsend. A lot of times the instructor would be given discretion as to what he might use or show during the training, and a lot of times videos are good. And a lot of times if it was something that you could use to give you a break in your presentation, it was something that kept the class interesting you might use it. Weaving all the weird and dangerous myths of the Satanic panic into a single video,

law enforcement guide to Satanic cults was widely circulated. Maybe you think your community is immune to these satanic crimes. Well, it's not. I challenge you to investigate each crime just a little bit deeper. Let's stop this heinous crime that's going on in the name of the devil. Let's stop it before it takes another victim. But this tape had a lot of the same problems as all the other fear-mongering media of that era.

First of all, it trains police to be on the lookout for so-called Davelers. These were people who did things that were supposedly satanic-ish, like listening to heavy metal music, playing Dungeons and Dragons, or just being queer. Another problem with the video was that it featured someone claiming that they were abused by Satanists as a kid. These kinds of repressed memory testimonies were widely discredited by the mid-1990s. Psychotherapists were criticized for coursing children into saying whatever they thought the adults wanted to hear.

But the biggest issue with law enforcement guide to Satanic cults is how much it was probably just made up. You know, for me, I was a little bit uncomfortable with the level of dramatic presentation. This is Carrie Burton's senior again, Devon to Havan hired Carrie to be his production manager on the project. Carrie admits that the tape was shot less like a fact-based training video and more like a film where Devon took a lot of creative license. Carrie believes some of the so-called proof of demonic rituals in the video, like the Satanic

graffiti spray-painted everywhere, was staged by one of the experts in the video. We looked like it was done on purpose for us, because there was pretty consistent in its presentation. But now, right over here, I can see on a tree here, there's a inverted cross. Now this is satanic. This is a very generic symbol. Let me see. Well, it's actually fairly fresh, too.

Obviously, they probably had a party or a ritual here within the past and the night or two. Usually what they'll do is... Looking back, Carrie says a lot of Devon's production choices seem to follow this pattern of make believe. I think he may have embellished some of it. You know, a lot of what gets labeled as a dynamic activity is really just

some kids goofing around, but you know, that's not a very interesting video to say that. But the thing is back in the 1990s, goofing around, but you know that's not a very interesting video to say that. But the thing is back in the 1990s cops didn't see any of this as just goofing around. The satanic panic stirred up a zealotry among police officers who became radicalized against Satanism, particularly some Christian cops who literally believed they were doing God's work by hunting demons. Some of the cops were true believers. They believe in all of this and they think they did doing a good thing to make society aware of it and to save abuse children and expose what's going on. Since his days as the FBI's number one Satanism expert. Ken Lening has become super critical

of how police bought into the myths and conspiracies of the Satanic panic. I would like to tell you that law enforcement officers are always neutral and objective. Fact finders have got their minds on straight. But I found that police officers are just as likely or can be just as easily influenced by the emotion of something like satanic crime.

As Ken Laning looked closer at all the cases of supposed demonic abuse that had piled up on his desk during the 1980s and 90s, things just weren't adding up. There was often nothing to corroborate and investigators claim that a crime was, quote, unquote, satanic. And when Laning would ask for proof,

he'd get all kinds of ridiculous excuses. I'd say, okay, what's the evidence? And then they would explain to you why there wasn't any evidence. That was the evidence that there was no evidence. Lanny says detectives would often tell him that the evidence of ritual abuse had just vanished. They'd say it was because they were dealing with the dark forces of Satan who had the power to conceal it. So their proof of it was that the fact that there was no proof. All the lies, conspiracies, and satanic profiling, it all had real and tragic consequences. During the 1980s and 90s, nearly 200 people were charged with satanic ritual abuse crimes.

Dozens were convicted and served long prison sentences. Some are still behind bars. In just one case that helped define the era, four openly gay women in San Antonio, Texas were convicted of sexually assaulting two children in 1994. The crime was alleged to be, quote unquote, satanic-related. The women received sentences ranging from 15 to more than 37 years. The case was clearly part of a homophobic witch hunt, and the accusations were completely baseless. All four women were eventually exonerated, but only after spending a decade and a half in prison. By the second half of the 1990s, a million holes had been poked in the satanic panic conspiracy in a half in prison.

By the second half of the 1990s, a million holes had been poked in the Satanic Panic conspiracy theories. People stopped believing that daycare centers were fronts for child-sacrified ceremonies, at least for the time being, and no one cared anymore if Satanic messages were hidden in rock music. And so about a year or two after a law enforcement to say Tannik Colts was released, Ken landing says the national panic over demonic abuse really began

to fade. A lot of people just wanted it to go away. They were embarrassed that they had once believed that was going on and they just quietly just walked away from it. Then the media turned on it as well, and the media started to do a lot of negative stories about it and point out the absurdity.

Heraldo came out and publicly apologized for all his devil-worship exposés. As for the police, landing says most of them just moved on. Police departments around the country quietly stopped using the Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic cult video. The tape disappeared from police training sessions, along with the phrase, Satanic, ritual abuse. Producer Devon DeHavn never made anything quite like this tape ever again. His co-creator, Carrie Burton-Ceney, says, Devon got exactly what he wanted out of that

production. It got his name out there. It's got him working in different locations with equipment and a team. So at his age and at the time, it was a pretty good feather in his cap. And it was mostly about making a video that that's going to help move him forward. The Havan did law enforcement guide to Satanic cults nearly 30 years ago in hopes of making a name for himself. With this tape as one of his first IMDB credits, he's gone on to produce and direct nearly

300 different projects from deaf comedy jam to the very not not Satanic Kiss Monster World Tour. world to her. Even though I couldn't get DeHaven to talk to me for this story, he did send me an email in which he said, Going back to Law Enforcement thing, that's so far in the past, I don't even remember those docks. Law Enforcement guide to Satanic cults lives on with a newfound audience. The artist's collective, Everything is Terrible, has screened excerpts at their found footage festival where viewers would point and laugh at the idea that anyone in their right mind

ever took any of this stuff seriously. Nick Mara is the co-founder of Everything is Terrible, and he's a big fan of the police training tape. I just watched it today, and it was... I saw all kinds of things that I had missed the first seven times I watched it. Just stuffed full of goodies. They were using this tape that is so clearly full of just bullshit, and they're training police officers with this. After the satanic panic, you'd think that we'd be wiser as a culture, but then there's PTAK and QAnon.

It's just a constant rebranding of the same bullshit to keep people scared and in prison. And I think until the major structures of our civilization and the priorities of the civilization change, it's going to be the same shit. It's impossible to trace exactly how much law enforcement guide to satanic cults was responsible for all the myths that ruin people's lives during the satanic panic. But as an artifact of that era, it shows how conspiracies

can easily balloon into the official story. And it's not just a story, it's not just a story. It's not just a story, it's not just a story. during the satanic panic. But as an artifact of that era, it shows how conspiracies can easily balloon into the official story, and how easy it is to slap on a sticker with an official sounding warning that seems to give these conspiracies the power and authority of law.

After the break, a different story about finding the devil in a remote stretch of highway. Sometimes associations with the devil appear in the smallest details. Once you have to look carefully in old road atlases to find, reporter Austin Cope has the story. There's a highway near where I grew up about half an hour's drive from the New Mexico border. It runs through some of the more remote parts half an hour's drive from the New Mexico border. It runs through some of the more remote parts of the U.S., Northern New Mexico, Southern Utah, and my own hometown of Cortez, in southwestern Colorado. Along the route, smooth tan sandstone cliffs and jagged brown rock formations rise up over

the high desert. Hot sun and giant thunder clouds fill the sky in summer. Cold winds and dust storms blow over it in the winter and spring. The highway was called US Route 666. Some locals called it Triple Six, or the highway to hell. Most people I knew talked about it like a novelty. We had the devil's highway running through our town. The link between 666 and the devil comes from the Bible.

A passage in chapter 13 of the book of Revelation reads, Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666. This association has led some people to feel really nervous about the number. Enough people that they invented a needlessly complicated name for a fear of 6666. It's called the Hexicosioihexiconta Hexophobia. But the origin of how the highway became known as 6666 is slightly less eventful than the book of Revelation. It got its number through an aberration of the early days of the US numbered highway

system. That's the set of guidelines that dictated how highways were arranged over the country as they were being built. Route 666 was connected to the more famous East West Highway Route 66. That's Strait Trim Chicago to Los Angeles. Its number was finalized in the 1920s, and engineers planned to have several smaller routes branching off of it, known as Spurs. They assigned a three-digit number to each Spur, all of them ending in 66. So Highway 1-66 would start in Kansas, 2-66 in Oklahoma, 3-66 in Texas, and so on from East to West. Highway 6-66 was a 6 designated Spur along the way. For the isolated parts of the country these highways went through, like Rigerup, these routes ended up becoming

major thoroughfares. I also grew up next to the highway, um, went to school in Gallup, and it had been until hatching New Mexico. And along that, for about 30 miles along, highway 666, and it did have a lot of stigma to it as far as when we talk about the religious numbers. New Mexico State Senator Shannon Pinto represents one of the districts the highway runs through. She also represents some of the overlapping boundaries

of the Navajo nation. She's Navajo, and most of her family lives in the area. There was no way you couldn't get to where you needed to without driving the highway, you know. You couldn't try to hold to your beliefs if you were religious About the six six number and well, I'm not gonna drive that highway As Pinto was growing up in the 1980s and 90s

It was hard to ignore the connection between the highway cutting through that area and the number of the beast Lots of hard rock music had started to become popular among people on the reservation There was deaf leopard monthly multi-crucans and roses, iron maiden, pantera, mega death, skid row came out. There was a lot of metal bands during that time.

Six, six, six, six, and no more of a beast. How? In 1994, the bad vibes kept coming when Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers came out. It had an ultra-violent plot that followed a couple of serial killers. Part of the film was shot in Gallup and directly references the local highway. Tonight, I'm standing on Highway 666, running through Tans like Cortez, Shiprock, Sheep Springs,

and ending in Gallup, New Mexico. To some, a beautiful stretch of the American landscape. But to Mickey and Mallory not, we're still at large. It is literally a candy lane of murder and may." Pinto says that it wasn't just Uber violent movies and death metal that freaked locals out. The highway had a reputation for being dangerous in real life, too. Collisions were common. She remembers someone from the tribal office

of Environmental Health coming into her middle school to talk about DWIs. And she showed us these maps of all these fatal collisions along Highway 666. It was a pretty high number, just even for the population per capita within the area. Between 1979 and 2000, New Mexico's transportation department counted over 6,500 crashes between Gallup and the Colorado border.

The Albuquerque Journal tellied 22 pedestrians killed between 1985 and 1992 within a mile stretch. One state trooper even recalled a drunk driving suspect telling him, triple six is evil. Everyone dies on that highway. And Pinto says there was violence in the region. She told me about a young Navajo girl who disappeared near the highway in the mid 80s.

That case wasn't the first or the last. Gallup still has one of the highest rates of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in the US. There were also issues related to drugs and alcohol that stem from the towns along the reservation's borders and along the highway. For a lot of people in the area, it was hard to tell if the road's pop culture perception influences real life danger or vice versa. I think when there was an accident, you wondered. You wondered if there was something a little more to it. She says that a lot of people in the Navajo Nation took issue with the name of Route 666.

The road went directly through tribal land, and many of its safety issues had gone unaddressed for years. To her, this made the route's numbering seem even more disrespectful. It was a discomfort that went beyond hexagosioe, hexagonta, hexophobia. I think there was something with those numbers that didn't sit well just with the area. There's those that will hang on to it and feel like, you know, that it was going to play into your perception of the rest of the world that they're after you, you know, after the Navajo people.

It's too suppressed to say, okay, you know, who was really in charge of putting that name on there? You know, did they do that to us purposely? Or was it really something that was oversight? And they thought, oh, over time, they'll live with it. In her view, it seemed in line with so many other things that had been imposed on the Navajo people over the years. Not only was a design of the highway bad, but for Pinto, it felt like the federal government's

disregard of the number symbology lined up with its carelessness towards the violence in the region, as well as the crime and economic concerns. Those issues would take years to fix, but the highway's number was something that could be dealt with relatively quickly and easily. Shenipinto's grandfather, John Pinto, was also a state senator. He represented that same district from the 1970s until he died in 2019. The highway's numbering wasn't his main priority during his years in the New Mexico Senate. He spent more of his time advocating for funding for safety improvements on the route. But, in 2003, he co-sponsored a measure to change the name from 666. It stated that nearby residents on the Navajo nation lived under a, quote, cloud of a probrium created by the numbers associations, and that the

highway's reputation was making people avoid the area. The measure recommended state transportation officials changed a number as soon as possible. The measure passed both chambers in mid-2003. Tribal and state transportation departments decided to change the number 666 to the more discreet 491. A few months later, the body governing US highway numbers made it official. I think people were relieved that it finally occurred. The name has changed.

You're done with it. Highway workers were already getting some help with the exorcism. The 666 science had been popular targets for theft over the years, but science stealing increased substantially after the change was announced. Less than two months after the re-numbering, the Associated Press reported that all the 666 science in New Mexico and Colorado had been taken, leaving nothing except sheared metal stubs. Since the name changed, there have been significantly fewer collisions and deaths along the route, but it had less to do with re-numbering and more to do with design.

The biggest improvement was getting almost 100 miles of the route changed from two lanes to four, since it's like a median mediums was considered a major factor for accidents. It was a project John Pinto had pushed for over the course of his time in the state senate. He and other legislators started advocating for funding in the early 80s, but it took over 20 years for the projects to start. Between the 1990s, when it had two lanes, and the 2010s, when its expansion was completed, collisions decreased by almost half. There has been a movement over the years to rename the part of the highway that goes

to New Mexico after John Pinto to honor his work. A proposal went before the Navajo Tribal Council after he died in 2019, but the naming hasn't been made official. Now, 20 years later, there's only one sign and gallop that references the former 666 below the number 491. Otherwise, there's very little trace of the previous designation. A lot of people might drive the highway without knowing it was ever there. You can still find it printed on some old maps. My parents still have a few in their car.

Every so often I'll pull one of them out and look for the old route. The numbers are tiny and hard to find among the hundreds of other roads in the area. If 666 has to be anywhere, maybe it's best trapped in an out-of-date map, tucked into a side door compartment, next to some old pens, and a spare pair of sunglasses. 99% invisible with producer's week by Harmon Leon and Austin Cope edited by Christopher Johnson and Vivian Leigh. Sound mixed by Martin Gonzales, original music by Swan Rial, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Special thanks this week to Jessica Romov.

Kathy too is the executive producer Delaney Horrors, senior editor Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Baroube, Jason D'Alyone, Emmett Fitzgerald, Lash Maudon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of his will logo was created by Staffin Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful.

Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 999PI.org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You find links to others to your shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pI.org. at 99pi.org

And, yes, Lee, well, bye, this is my show. Nice, that's my... tight knock-buff is like you both Nancy and Larry. you