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He threw away Medical School at the University of Alabama for Satanism and burned 9 or 10 churches.
 He went to a summer camp-meeting for Satanism, and came back with a new religion. The first thing he did was to convert his best friend who was two years younger than him. Then he recruited some of the other students at the local college. He would ask them if they wanted to go out for the weekend and find some demons. He told his friends this was a new religion of peace. He said you could be a Christian and into Satanism at the same time. What was his underlying motivation? Matthew Cloyd said, "Let's go out this weekend and defy the very morals of society instilled upon us by our parents, our relatives and of course Jesus Christ." Some of the locals are screaming, "boys will be boys. Well, let's see what this religion of peace led these young men into. As of now, we have 9 churches burned, perhaps as many as 30 deer shot, at least 3 cows killed, and the destruction of the dreams of many families. According to the Christian Science Monitor, over 1,000 churches have been burned in a 4-year period of time.  Does anyone find it strange why they started all the fires inside the church at the altar, if this was only a joke? Why did they find it funny to destroy the lives of the families who attended these churches? Why did they pick on poor churches instead of the ones they grew up in?It all started this way. The newspaper read, "Russ DeBusk and Ben Moseley are on the road to stardom." The local newspaper had no idea how that would come true. Who are these young men? Are they from broken families? Did they grow up rejected and deprived? Are they the outcasts from their school or town?  Benjamin Nathan Moseley is the son of a Jefferson County police officer. He sang in the church choir. Moseley was the high school homecoming king and senior-class president two years ago. He spent a week helping rebuild a church in Louisiana on a missions trip with his church, Huffman United Methodist. "We loved him; he stayed in our home," says church member Beth O'Donnell.The day before the arrests, agents spoke with Cloyd's parents, Kimberly and Dr. Michael Cloyd MD. Cloyd is a med-student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the son of a doctor, and was an honor student in high school. His father, a physician, said his son admitted that, "he knew who did it, and he was there," according to the affidavit. Russ DeBusk's father works as a salesman for Hanna steel.  These boys were being molded by one of Alabama's most prestigious private schools — a Methodist college where 70% of students take part in organized volunteer work. Now, within a few weeks of the article, DeBusk and Moseley — both 19 — are in federal custody, charged in a string of church fires in poorer, rural communities. The third man, Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20, also was arrested and charged in connection with the fires. Federal agents arrested these three college students from the prosperous Birmingham suburbs - sons of a doctor, a police officer and a plant manager. They accused them of setting nine churches ablaze, home to both black and white congregations, in the rural counties around Birmingham in February. "It's hard to believe it was these kinds of kids," says Greene County sheriff Johnny Isaac. Most expected a troubled loner to emerge as the suspect. A volunteer firefighter pleaded guilty to an earlier series of burnings in 1996; a self-professed Satanist is in prison for similar crimes in 1999. But what are these boys really like? This is a quote from Cloyd's blog: "Let us defy the very morals of society instilled upon us by our parents, our relatives and of course Jesus Christ." In another quote from Cloyd to Mosley on Dec 4th: "Do you ******* realize what we did last night. Holy **** we killed 3 deer and 26 beers and killed a baby deers worth of ammo." The Birmingham News reported the students didn't talk directly about the fires, but bragged about excessive drinking and partying in messages rife with obscene language. In one of the few posts not full of obscenity, Cloyd wrote on November 28th: "Moseley/Monday night, we killed a Case of Beer, had a Powerful Rifle and Lots of Ammo a Green 4Runner we were 2 complete idiots 1 pack of camel lights 0 law enforcement officers and 33 dead innocent whitetailed deer and drove insanely at high speeds" "He said he was interested in Satanism," says Jeremy Burgess, 19, DeBusk's dorm roommate. But one "demon hunting" trip amounted to little more than an excuse to drink in the woods. According to court documents, Cloyd, DeBusk and Moseley set the first five fires as a joke after a night of drinking and shooting at deer. Then they torched four more churches 100 miles away to throw police off their trail. A lawyer for Cloyd described him as "remorseful", but would not comment on his guilt or innocence. Ian Cunningham, DeBusk's roommate, said Cloyd could be bothersome. "He mocked everybody; he had no tact. It seemed like he didn't have a lot of self esteem." Something else disturbed Cunningham: DeBusk had come back from summer break talking about Satanism, and he had gotten Moseley interested as well. Cunningham said DeBusk had always kidded his churchgoing friends about their faith in Christianity. He recalled DeBusk and Moseley having some strange weekends. "They'd show up at 7 in the morning covered in pine needles," he recalls. "They'd just have strange little hippie rituals in the woods." He wasn't raised as a Christian, and he had never found any kind of religion to settle down with," Burgess said. "He thought he'd found something that worked for him. ... worshipping the devil. It's nothing ritualistic. He explained to me that there can be Satanic Christians" Burgess said DeBusk invited him on a "demon-hunting" trip last summer. Tommy Spina, one of the boys attorneys said, "The trio may face state charges because they admitted to night-hunting, which included shooting a cow on February 3rd. The three could also face additional federal charges. He said night-hunting near some of the churches started to increase around Christmas. "It seemed like it shifted into high gear. Sometime in late fall, a cow was shot to death. Then, on the night of the first set of fires, a second cow was shot. Shooting livestock was one of the clues that people from outside the area were involved." Officer Lecroy said, "Most of the old-time redneck hunters are just out to get them a deer. They don't usually bother the livestock." He said there may be some outlaws among the locals, "but they were brought up not to mess with churches. Their grandma would whip them."  Cynthia Tucker said: "Who attacks houses of worship but men distorted by hate? Who preys on small backwoods sanctuaries but the cowardly and small-minded, pumped up by their pretensions to power? Who tries to destroy a community's center, its soul? My sense of outrage is no doubt heightened by my own heritage -- the days, and, yes, the nights I spent at little piney woods Alabama churches as a child, churches with names like Bethesda and Bethany and Lighthouse. They were more than places for Sunday morning worship. They were community anchors, keepers of ancient memories and burying grounds for the revered dead. Reverence, however, is something the three suspects apparently never learned.""These kids were not some huckleberries from the South," said Renee Sakaguchi, a parent in Indian Springs Village, a tony suburb of rolling hills and horse farms where Cloyd grew up. "I'm going to have my sons read the [newspaper] articles and say: 'Look at what these boys had in front of them — and now look at what they have to look forward to.' The charges seemed particularly difficult to swallow at Birmingham-Southern. The small campus attracts the children of Alabama's elite. Its students are proud of their commitment to public service. They tutor in inner-city Birmingham, work in San Francisco homeless shelters and volunteer in Mozambique.  (The Birmingham-Southern community is small and close-knit, and the administration is so stunned by the crimes that college president David Pollack announced that the institution would help rebuild the churches. "Students, faculty and staff of our college are at once shocked and outraged," he said at a campus gathering.) |
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