Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (77 page)

“Wait a sec… I think I’ve heard of the Four Pi Movement before,” says Gordon.

“Your grandmother told us about it, remember?” Twinker reminds him.

“Oh yeah!” Gordon says, turning around in his seat. “I forgot to tell you this, Jimmy… your mom and my mom were going to secret meetings in Doctor Smiley’s back yard and skinning dogs alive. They called it the Four-P Club–or the Four Pi Movement.”

“What the fuck?” says Jimmy. He looks startled, but recovers quickly. “Those
bitches!
And they didn’t invite me?”

“That sounds like the Four Pi Movement, all right…” Lloyd confirms. “They’re notorious for sacrificing dogs to Satan–German shepherds and Doberman pinschers, almost exclusively. They seem to believe the soul energy–or
orgone
, to use Wilhelm Reich’s term again–is extremely strong in those two breeds, for whatever reason. To acquire that orgone for their own uses, they drink the dogs’ blood.”

Jimmy blanches under his freckles. “Oh, sick! I can’t believe my mom did that!”

Gordon, on the other hand, is having no trouble accepting his mother as a dog-blood-chugging Satanist. He’s suspected something like that all along.

While everyone else is conjuring mental images of Gordon and Jimmy’s mothers swilling dog blood martinis and participating in the satanic equivalent of a suburban swingers’ party, Lloyd fills them in on the rest of the Four Pi Movement’s story:

“David Berkowitz followed up on his tip to the North Dakota police by alleging that Arlis Perry had been killed by his associate Manson II in California as a favor to the Four Pi cult in Bismarck, North Dakota. The Bismarck Four Pi members had suffered the indignity of being evangelized by Miss Perry–who probably told them to renounce their evil ways and devote their lives to Jesus–and for that offense, the devout Christian girl had been executed. As proof of his rather bizarre and astonishing claims, Berkowitz told the North Dakota police they’d find that a cult had been killing dogs in the woods behind Mary College–a tiny school in Bismarck. Not only did at least ten people later confirm that cult activities had been taking place in the woods behind the school at night–along with pet dogs disappearing–but several people claimed that Arlis Perry had discussed the cult at church meetings. She definitely knew about it, according to her friends. So the question then becomes: how did David Berkowitz know about the cult in Bismarck? The logical answer is that Berkowitz must have once belonged to the Four Pi cult, too–just as he claimed–and his neighbor, John Carr, must have had a direct connection to the cult in North Dakota, possibly at the Air Force base where he was murdered.”

“Maybe Berkowitz just read about it in a Satanist newsletter,” Gordon suggests facetiously. “They give those out free to all the psychokillers in jail these days, don’t they? Along with a complimentary CIA brainwashing.”

“Sometimes I forget just how insufferable a smartass you can be,” Lloyd says, grinning at him.

“Yeah, Gordon, no wonder your mom drank dog blood,” Jimmy jokes.

“What’s your mom’s excuse?” Gordon asks him.

“Peer pressure,” Jimmy shoots back.

“Don’t judge your mothers too harshly, boys…” says Lloyd. “Remember, it was the seventies. Satanism was quite in vogue a mere dozen years ago. Even Sammy Davis Jr. was a member of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan.”

“You’re using Sammy Davis Jr. as an example?” D.H. asks, incredulous. “A one-eyed, black, Jewish member of the Rat Pack? The guy was obviously confused….”

“Well, just remember how popular Scientology was–and still
is
, by the way,” Lloyd says defensively. “The Four Pi cult was just Scientology with all the extraneous details stripped away, revealing the black magic at its inner core. It was a splinter group from the Process Church of the Final Judgement, which itself had broken away from the Hubbard Institute of Scientology in London. The Process Church’s co-founders, Robert Moore and Mary Anne MacLean, had been high-ranking London Scientologists who decided, sometime in 1963, to follow Hubbard’s lead and start a religion of their own. The got married and took the occult surname ‘DeGrimston,’ then began preaching a rather odd take on Christ’s instructions to ‘Love your enemies.’ They suggested that their followers should dedicate their lives to the love and emulation of Jehovah, Lucifer, or Satan–whichever figure appealed to them most.”

“That’s pretty twisted,” Skip comments.

“I tend to agree,” says Lloyd. “There were some neo-Nazi implications to the DeGrimston’s new religion as well. The Process Church logo was a stylized swastika–four P’s in a circle–not dissimilar to the swastikas that Charles Manson and his followers had carved into their own foreheads during their trail for the Tate-LaBianca murders. Mary Anne DeGrimston also made claims that she was the reincarnation of the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels. And thirty German shepherds were kept on the Church’s premises as guard dogs –

“– or as stand-by satanic sacrifice material,” D.H. interjects.

“I’m fairly certain that came later… but as you can see, there were already enough clues to the DeGrimston’s true agenda that followers should have been scarce. However, the religion was thriving by the time they set up shop in San Francisco in 1967, just two blocks away from where Charles Manson was then living on Cole Street.”

“Did Manson hang out with them?” Gordon asks.

“Let me put it to you this way…” Lloyd says, “when Charles Manson’s prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, asked him if he knew Robert Moore, Manson answered, ‘I
am
Robert Moore. You’re looking at him.’ Bugliosi took that to mean that the two men shared a similar philosophy, but
I
think it means something beyond that. Any Satanist will tell you that the hierarchies in satanic cults are determined by the power of the demonic entities that possess their individual members. The term, ‘Selling your soul to the Devil’ is true in the sense that Satanists allow their bodies to be possessed in return for illusory gains in our material world. The way I see it, both Charles Manson and Robert Moore had been possessed by the very same powerful demonic entity.”

“They should’ve been called the Regan Twins,” Jimmy says. “Wasn’t Ronald Reagan Governor of California back then?”

“Yes–from 1967 to 1975. We get the joke,” Lloyd says. “Those were tumultuous years for the entire nation, but especially for California. During that time, fully twenty-five percent of the world’s serial killers were plying their trade along the California coastline: Manson, Edmund Kemper, Herb Mullin, John Lindley Frazier, the Zodiac–the list goes on…. Right here in Big Sur in 1970, just up the road, the California Highway Patrol picked up two young ‘longhairs’ named Stanley Dean Baker and Harry Allen Stroup on suspicion of a hit-and-run. Baker not only admitted to fleeing the scene of an accident, but he confessed another crime to the arresting officers as well: ‘I have a problem…” he said. ‘I’m a cannibal.’ As proof, he and Stroup emptied out their pockets, producing several well-gnawed human finger bones. The fingers had once belonged to a murder victim in Montana named James Schlosser, whose mutilated corpse was also missing a heart. Baker candidly admitted that he’d eaten it.”

“I wonder if he used any A.1. Sauce…” says Jimmy.

“Oh,
Jimmy!”
Twinker scolds him. “That’s just
sick!
And
you
, Lloyd, I don’t know how you can even keep stuff like that inside your head.”

“I’m just reciting the facts, dear…” Lloyd says to her. “The only way to diminish evil is to confront it. Ignoring it, or pretending it doesn’t exist, only allows evil to grow stronger. Letting the mainstream media tell you what to think about it won’t help matters much, either. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird has been subverting the free press and infiltrating key positions in foreign and domestic media since the late-forties, when it was established by Frank Wisner and overseen by Allen Dulles. Wisner has even gone so far as to brag that the CIA plays the most important media outlets ‘like a mighty Wurlitzer.’ Satanic serial killers and hippie cannibals were just what the CIA wanted Americans to expect from the counterculture movement. It was all part of the Phoenix Program coming home to roost.”

“I know I’m probably just being dumb,” Twinker says, “but what’s the Phoenix Program?”

“You’re not being dumb,” Skip says to Twinker, still trying to cheer her up. “
Phoenix… Mockingbird
… that’s a lot of bird names to keep track of.”

“Operation Phoenix was a covert CIA program of kidnapping, torture, and assassination directed against Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War,” Lloyd explains. “Its aim was to take out the Viet Cong’s infrastructure, but a huge number of innocent people got caught in its crossfire. Six million Jews were killed by Hitler–we’ve all heard about that–but we don’t hear quite so much about the three million Vietnamese killed, and the four million wounded, during the Vietnam War–largely by our own doing. And all in the service of… what? Some vague notion about halting the spread of communism? The U.S. dropped nearly 8 million tons of bombs on the Vietnamese population during what’s called ‘The American War’ over there. For comparison’s sake, we only dropped about two million tons of bombs across Europe during World War Two. The Phoenix Program’s ‘Snatch and Snuff’ teams committed some of the Vietnam War’s most egregious atrocities–and now, in occult guise, they’re doing the same things here.”

“That’s a pretty wild allegation,” Gordon says. “Can you prove it?”

“Even if I could, do you think I’d live long enough to see public opinion change?”

“Meaning what? They’d kill you?”

“If I were to be assassinated, the CIA–or their minions–would try to make it look like an accident, or a suicide. But first, they’d try to assassinate my character by making me seem paranoid, debauched, and deranged.”

“You don’t need any help there…” Twinker says. “You’re doing a great job of seeming paranoid and deranged on your own–and probably debauched, too… whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

“Why would we even
need
a version of the Phoenix Program in America?” Gordon asks. “I mean, what would be the point?”

“Why do the American people need to be terrorized?” Lloyd asks rhetorically. “Haven’t I already explained that to you? There are interdimensional entities that feed off our fear and suffering: the Lam, fallen angels, demons–call them what you will…. More specifically, why did California become such a nexus for serial killers in the late-sixties and early-seventies, during Ronald Reagan’s years as Governor? It had a lot to do with the tenor of the times.”

“Those dirty hippies…” Jimmy extrapolates.

“Yes,” Lloyd says. “People were dropping out of conventional society, forming radical street groups like the Diggers that gave away food in Haight-Ashbury. They were starting communal farms in the redwood forests along Lompico Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains. They were cultivating marijuana crops in Humboldt County. The overriding impulse was to find a way to live an authentic life–without every personal choice being dictated by economic necessity–to ‘survive outside history,’ as Joan Didion put it–ideally in ‘some little town with a decent beach.’”

“Sounds great,” says Gordon, thinking of the shingled geodesic dome cabin that he saw on the hill overlooking Moonstone Beach in Cambria. He imagines himself there, sitting out on the deck rereading Joan Didion’s books–specifically, the essays in
The White Album
and
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
.

“
Good Lord
, you don’t think Ronald Reagan would have approved, do you?” Lloyd asks him.

“Of what? Dropping out? Why would he even care?”

“It was a social experiment that threatened the status-quo,” Lloyd answers. “The hippies and the New Left were generating a political consciousness that would eventually spread out over the country and spur the civil rights movement, end the war in Vietnam, and de-louse the White House of the Nixon Administration. In the eyes of Reagan and the dowdy crowd of Rotarians, Jaycees, Christian evangelists, and white-collar profit-takers that supported him, it had to be stopped.”

“So they sent in the hippie cannibals?”

“What better way to discredit an entire group of long-haired advocates for social change? But they had to have plausible deniability, so the CIA arranged for it to be done under cover of the Four Pi cult.”

“Dude, you’re blowin’ my motherfuckin’ mind!” D.H. says with stoned hippie wonderment. “
Far out!
”

“Think about it…” Lloyd says. “Why was Stanley Baker so eager to confess to killing a man and wolfing down his heart when he hadn’t even been accused of such a crime?
Was it all part of the program?
Baker also confessed to several other brutal slayings, including one in San Francisco where his fingerprints had been left all over the crime scene, along with the words ‘ZODIAC’ and ‘SATAN SAVES’ written on the walls in the victim’s blood–but California, rather astonishingly, declined to prosecute him. He was sent up to Montana, instead, where he and Harry Allen Stroup were tried and convicted for the murder of James Schlosser. However, Stroup is already out of jail and Baker is up for parole in 1986. I’ll bet serious money that he gets it, too.”

“The guy kills a bunch of people and eats somebody’s heart and he’s up for parole in fifteen years?” D.H. decries, doing the math. “Where the hell’s the justice in that?”

“If Baker happened to be a secret servant of America’s shadow government, then there would be no justice, of course,” Lloyd says matter-of-factly. “Within that context, I find it interesting to note that Stanley Baker claimed he’d been recruited into the Four Pi cult while he was on a college campus in Wyoming. He also claimed that the murders he’d committed had been done at the behest of the cult’s ‘Grand Chignon’ or ‘Head Devil’–whom he described as a wealthy, middle-aged California businessman.”

“One of Reagan’s friends?” Gordon has to ask.

“
Perhaps
,” Lloyd answers. “No one can be sure. But one thing is certain: over the last few decades the number of serial killers in this country has skyrocketed.”