Episode 6: I’m Just a Teenage Cultist, Baby

Summary

The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall

Episode 6: I’m Just a Teenage Cultist, Baby
CBC | November 24, 2025

Overview

This episode of The Devil You Know explores how the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s evolved into moral hysteria targeting teenagers—culminating in the real-life fallout for youth wrongly accused of diabolical conspiracies. Through the story of Dr. Justin Sledge, who as a Mississippi high schooler in 1997 was swept up in a tragic school shooting and subsequently accused of being part of a satanic cult, host Sarah Marshall interrogates how cultural fears and scapegoating can destroy innocent lives. The episode dissects the underlying dynamics of these panics, their lasting impact on communities, and the enduring urge to blame “outsiders” in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Childhood Nostalgia and Changing Freedoms (00:48–02:20)

• Justin Sledge shares memories of growing up in 1980s–90s Mississippi, enjoying the freedom to roam, play, and explore without constant adult oversight.
• Sarah Marshall reflects on generational nostalgia for a freer childhood but points out how the same era bred anxieties that eventually curtailed those freedoms.
  • “To feel nostalgic for that while forgetting that the reason we stopped allowing kids to do that was because we created the panic that took that childhood away.” (06:12)

2. The Burgeoning Satanic Panic and its Teenaged Focus (03:16–05:56)

• As horrific crimes draw national attention, communities seek explanations—often turning suspicion toward "outsiders," especially teenagers involved in alternative cultures or activities.
• Anti-drug PSAs, cartoons, and school warnings set the stage for paranoia about corruptive outside forces, with Satan positioned as the ultimate villain.

3. Teens as Both Victims and Suspects (06:12–11:12)

• Marshall explores how teens were cast as both vulnerable and menacing—a shift from protecting children to suspecting their inherent deviance.
• School psychologists and media warn of faddish rebellion morphing into potential occult threats, amplifying the climate of suspicion.

4. Profiling the “Teen Satanist” (11:12–16:10)

• Justin was a “dorky, edgy” kid: interested in philosophy, Judaism, Dungeons & Dragons, and alternative music—strikes one, two, and three for the era’s Satanic stereotype.
  • “I suppose the way I chose to do it was becoming Jewish, which is a strange form of rebellion.” (11:37, Sledge)
  • His association with Dungeons & Dragons and grunge music (“Nine Inch Nails or whatever”) further marked him in the eyes of authorities.

5. The Pearl, Mississippi School Shooting (16:10–17:21)

• In 1997, Justin finds himself at ground zero for a tragedy: classmate Luke Woodham murders his mother before shooting nine people at Pearl High School.
  • “He had killed his mother that morning…He wounded seven people and killed two students, Lydia Du and Christina Menefee.” (16:58, Marshall)

6. Hysteria, Grief, and the Search for Scapegoats (18:54–23:16)

• In the immediate aftermath, rumors swirl about mafia or satanic cult involvement. Grieving communities and fearful authorities cast a wide net—quickly landing on teens already marked as outsiders.
• Justin’s actions—passing on Woodham’s writings to media and making a controversial speech at a vigil—further alienate him and make him a suspect.
  • “He gave these documents to me and told me to pass them on to Grant. I passed them on to the media, which was also, I think, unwise.” (18:54, Sledge)
  • Reflecting on his vigil speech: “I regret a lot of that. I regret a great deal of that, honestly.” (20:46, Sledge)

7. Young Lives Upended by Moral Panic (24:05–27:48)

• Justin and five others are arrested and charged (conspiracy to commit murder—potentially 20 years in prison). Suspicion, bullying, and surreal accusations about “the Kroth”—a supposed Satanic group—take hold.
• His difference (intellectual curiosity, alternative interests, speaking out) becomes damning in an environment primed to fear what it doesn’t understand.
  • “My lawyers were like, what the fuck is the Kroth?” (27:17, Sledge)

8. Confirmation Bias, the “Kroth,” and the Collapse of Evidence (29:55–36:53)

• Community and police pursue ever more spurious “evidence”: animal bones, clouds shaped like skulls, internet rumors.
• Investigation focuses on circumstantial evidence, groupthink, and imaginative leaps rather than facts.
  • “There were certainly people…combing the forests looking for evidence of Satanists…confirmation bias is a hell of a thing.” (34:38, Sledge)
  • The “Kroth” is ultimately revealed to be nothing more than the setting of a Star Wars-themed role-playing game, dreamed up in Colorado (45:47–46:04).

9. Coping with Long-Term Fallout (39:35–41:23)

• Even after charges are dropped, Justin and his family suffer ostracism and trauma: “No school would take me. So I had to ultimately go through a kind of correspondence program. Then I kind of drifted for a while…Real despair set in in the years that followed. Real despair, suicidal despair.” (39:35)

10. From Scapegoat to Scholar: Reclaiming the Narrative (41:23–43:35)

• Justin (now Dr. Justin Sledge) channels his experience into scholarship, becoming an expert in Western esotericism. He assists concerned parents and law enforcement with questions about occult symbols—arguing for reason, not panic, when interpreting youth culture.
  • “I would far rather a detective working on a strange case with a bunch of weird symbols shoot me an email…than it to be a bunch of pseudo experts running around.” (42:29, Sledge)

11. The Broader Lesson (43:35–44:41)

• Marshall stresses that monsters loom when we refuse to examine root causes—becoming scapegoats for collective anxieties. True understanding and empathy pierce the darkness, exposing hysteria for what it is: a way to avoid harder truths about society and ourselves.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “The Satanic panic very nearly destroyed my life.” (16:10, Justin Sledge)
• “Every teen is a deviant teen when you get right down to it. Because what is being a teenager but experimenting and pushing boundaries, figuring out who you are by figuring out what you’re not?” (11:12, Sarah Marshall)
• On confirmation bias:
  “We’re all guilty of confirmation bias. And it’s very difficult in a small town. Once there’s social momentum and there’s a trusted institution like the police saying to the entire community that a conspiracy of satanists has done this crime…The mind runs wild.” (34:38, Justin Sledge)
• On lingering trauma and recovery:
  “People shot at her house when I was in jail. They called them all kinds of names you can imagine in a small town…Real despair, suicidal despair.” (39:35, Justin Sledge)
• On the origins of “The Kroth”:
  “The Kroth Internet website is the gateway to the imaginary planet Kroth which hosts the game Dungeons and Dragons, the role playing game.” (45:47, Justin Sledge, quoting a news report)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:48–2:20: Childhood freedom and nostalgia
• 06:12: How 1980s panic erased childhood freedoms
• 16:10–17:21: The Pearl High School shooting and Justin’s involvement
• 18:54–22:45: Justin’s media involvement and aftermath
• 24:43–25:56: Justin’s suspension and subsequent arrest
• 27:17–28:52: Discovery of the "Kroth" and moral panic escalation
• 34:38: Confirmation bias and the search for Satanic evidence
• 39:35: Personal and familial consequences for Justin
• 41:23–42:29: Justin’s transformation into a scholar of esotericism
• 43:35: Marshall’s reflections on monsters in the darkness and the real lessons of the Satanic Panic
• 45:19–46:04: The true origin of the “Kroth”—a harmless internet RPG setting

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Tone

Sarah Marshall narrates with a blend of dark humor, empathy, and historical insight. Guest voices—particularly Justin Sledge—add raw candor and intellectual reflection, vividly illustrating the personal devastation caused by communal fear and scapegoating.

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Conclusion

This episode captures the social mechanics of the Satanic Panic as it morphed into suspicion of teenagers—how moral outrage, fear of the other, and confirmation bias led authorities and communities to ruin innocent lives. Through the lens of Justin Sledge’s ordeal, Sarah Marshall issues a call to confront our monsters not with panic, but with understanding, honesty, and compassion.

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For listeners interested in the intersections of crime, mass hysteria, youth culture, and lived experience, this episode provides a compelling and cautionary case study of the costs—personal and societal—of uncritical belief in moral panics.

Transcript

[Sarah Marshall]

You may have heard of the sex cult nxivm and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mack, but she's never told her side of the story until now. People assume that I'm like this pervert. My name is Natalie Robomed, and in my new podcast I talked to Allison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member and what she thinks of it all. Now, how do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma to other people?

[Justin Sledge]

I mean, I don't even know how to answer that question.

[Sarah Marshall]

Allison oftronxium from CBC's Uncover is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

[Justin Sledge]

This is a CBC podcast.

[Sarah Marshall]

Just a heads up that this episode contains discussions about gun violence and death. Please take care while listening.

[Justin Sledge]

I remember we moved to Pearl. We had a shower, like two showers. And I thought we had become, like, rich because we had a shower.

[Sarah Marshall]

This is Justin Slege, a child of the 80s. He lived in Jackson, Mississippi until the early 90s when his family moved to a small town called Pearl.

[Justin Sledge]

Yeah, my parents would let us just roam around. We would cut grass to make money and we would have $20 in our pocket, which was an enormous amount of money, I think. And, you know, we walk down to the Taco Bell and buy our own food and then walk to the video store and then rent, I don't know, Evil Dead and some Super Nintendo game. And yeah, we had an enormous amount of freedom and, I don't know, independence.

[Sarah Marshall]

Every generation runs the risk of becoming really annoying by acting like they were better at being kids. But it is striking how someone born in the 80s, the early 80s like Justin, or the late 80s like me, remembers the world being completely different than it is today. We remember what it was like to not have a cell phone, to not have a way to contact your parents as a child to wonder about something and then just kind of have no way of finding out. I feel nostalgia for a time I didn't even experience when I listened to Justin. And this is a nostalgia so many people, especially millennials, feel these days.

[Justin Sledge]

In many ways, it was a pretty good upbringing. I look back on my childhood with a lot of joy either the more working class time we lived in South Jackson and also the time that we lived in Pearl.

[Sarah Marshall]

When Justin was 16, something happened in the town of Pearl, Mississippi, that made all that joy and all that safety disappear.

[Justin Sledge]

I was working at, like an amusement park that had go karts and laser tag and ice skating, which is a strange thing to talk about. Ice skating in mississippi, but there was an ice rink there. You wouldn't know it from the beard I have now, But I have a huge scar on my chin from just a few weeks before that Where I got cut off and fell on the I. It landed chin first on the ice and busted my chin open rather badly. And I think you can even see the scar in some of the mug shots that they took during that whole time period. There's sort of pieces of things that I remember. It all seemed like a. It's like standing in front of a freight train or something.

[Sarah Marshall]

In 1997, Pearl, Mississippi, was the site of a horrific crime, and justin found himself in the middle of it.

[Justin Sledge]

You could start hearing the first rumors of conspiracy. There were several different iterations of what this conspiracy was. The first version of it was that this was somehow wrapped up in the mafia. And then the next iteration I heard Was that there was some group of people at the school Called the group maybe tied to devil worship.

[Sarah Marshall]

This story is almost unbearably familiar. Now. We, as a culture, A small town, or a country, Are confronted with a crime that reveals something terrifying about the people we spend our lives with. And so we search for an outsider to blame it on. And there's no better outsider than satan. But the prince of darkness never works alone. Apparently, he hires a lot of teenagers to help him take over the world.

[Justin Sledge]

Yeah, it was sometime in the evening time When I was ultimately. The police came. Yeah, I remember coming out of my room, and they turned me around and handcuffed me and told me I was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

[Sarah Marshall]

The panic began in the 1980s with fears about terrible things happening to very young children as the 80s became the 90s, and as these children grew up, so did the panic. And in many places, the focus shifted from saving the children to blaming the teenagers. What is it like to grow up in a world where you are seen as both potential victim and potential suspect? What does a satanic panic allow those in power to ignore? And why does taking on satan himself so often lead the powerful to blame the powerless? I'm Sarah marshall. This is the devil. You know, Everywhere they turned, kids in the 1980s were told to just say no.

[Justin Sledge]

This is your brain on drugs. This is is crack rock cocaine. It isn't glamorous or cool or kid stuff. Mcgruff here. I want you to learn a song that tells people to say no to drugs. Users are losers and losers are users.

[Sarah Marshall]

And don't use drugs. There is something very 80s in the best and the worst. Way about using the powers of he man and she ra to teach children how to protect themselves and stay safe.

[Justin Sledge]

Don't use trash. Shera and I want to talk to you about something that's very personal. Your body. Remember, it's your body and no one.

[Sarah Marshall]

Should touch you in a way that.

[Justin Sledge]

You feel is wrong. Right, Orko? Right on.

[Sarah Marshall]

This was the era of the lackey kid. More than ever before, both fathers and mothers were working long hours to support children they didn't see that often. It's 10pm do you know where your children are? There's something especially ironic about the fact that we feel so much nostalgia today, both in Facebook memes and conversations, and the way pop culture has turned in huge mass media franchises like Stranger Things for this vanished era of a child who could roam free, ride their bike around the streets, adopt an alien, whatever they needed to do as long as they were home by seven. And to feel nostalgic for that while forgetting that the reason we stopped allowing kids to do that was because we created the panic that took that childhood away. And then adolescence comes. Suddenly everyone is both terrified for you and terrified of you. If there's anything I remember about being a youth, it's that telling us not to do something only makes that forbidden fruit look ten times more tempting. And besides, there's nothing more fun than scaring gullible adults. The evangelical Christian show the 700 Club blamed MTV for a lot of teenage rebellion.

[Justin Sledge]

Occultic symbols abound in mtv. In King Diamond's Welcome Home, the singer floats in the air more demon than man. Madonna sings in front of burning crosses. Nuclear assaults. Demonic faces are violent, frightening.

[Sarah Marshall]

It wasn't just TV preachers that were worried about Satan. The secular crowd had plenty of concerns too. School officials, psychologists and others at the time said that so called satanic cults could offer validation, support and direction to teens experiencing feelings of alienation and antisocial attitudes. In 1989, the Newsletter for the national association of School Psychologists warned often teenagers are influenced by heavy metal groups, ready access to drugs and sexual activities. There's evidence that this is widespread among teenagers in today's culture. Still others said Satanism was a symptom of a larger problem in a teen's life or merely faddish symbols of teenage rebellion. Intermittent symptoms of learning disabilities, evidencing reversal of letters and numbers, I.e. backwards writing themes of death and killing in artwork, excessive use of black, red and purple in art illustrations, destructive behavior with children, toys, cruelty to animals, sleep problems, I.e. night terrors preoccupation with monsters, scary books and movies. But even with these slightly kinder and more level headed interpretations from adults, there seemed to be no escaping the association of deviant teens with Satanism. Remember our friend Dr. Lawrence Pazder from episode two? Here's what he had to say about teen Satan worship in 1989.

[Justin Sledge]

Adolescents try everything out. Want to try it out and see what it does to you to get a high from it or not. Start putting a few candles up and start putting some posters up and start invoking the devil to see what's going to happen and you get caught up in it.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's not to say there was no such thing as a self identified teen Satanist. The CBC managed to find some in 1989.

[Justin Sledge]

Raymond is 18, lives in the Okanagan Valley town of Vernon and worships Satan. It's kids like Raymond that doctors and counselors fear for most kids who get entranced with the idea of celebrating evil and who turn away from the regular world. To Raymond, Christianity is evil and corrupt. Well, Satanism is down to earth. It's what you are. I mean, there's none of the spiritual jargon mixed in. There's none of this saying, if you do this, you're gonna burn in a lake of fire.

[Sarah Marshall]

So how do you identify a teenage satanist?

[Justin Sledge]

We moved to Pearl at the very beginning of sixth grade.

[Sarah Marshall]

Here's Justin Sleich again from earlier.

[Justin Sledge]

Middle school's a difficult time. It's like when people are coming to understand who they are. It's when class differences and cliques begin to emerge. It's when the kind of backpack you wear and what kind of clothes you wear begin to matter. That was a little bit of a learning curve, I would say. You know, there were definitely bullies and there was definitely the in and out crowd and that kind of thing. You know, there are certain styles that you either are an alternative kid or you're a jock kid, or you're a preppy kid, or you're a goth kid. And you need to pick an appropriate uniform. If you don't pick an appropriate uniform, you're just sort of out on the edge of things.

[Sarah Marshall]

Every teen is a deviant teen when you get right down to it. Because what is being a teenager but experimenting and pushing boundaries, figuring out who you are by figuring out what you're not? That was what Justin was doing. He had interests that some might consider niche, like learning Latin and reading philosophy. And his family was Jewish in a state where that was increasingly uncommon.

[Justin Sledge]

I only discovered I was of Jewish origin when I was like 12. My mom sat me down and said, so you're Jewish and I'm taking you to the synagogue and you're going to meet with the rabbi and he's going to sort you out. And so she took me to the synagogue and the rabbi sorted me out. And so I did get interested in Judaism and reading Hebrew. And there was something fascinating about the idea of learning the Bible in the original language and stuff like that. And I think it was also part of my disaffectedness with, you know, like the same thing that made me, like, listen to Rage against the Machine was also, like, part of why I was interested in, like, being Jewish. You know, like kind of a rebellion against Christian hegemony or something. I don't know. You know, when you're a teenager, you want to rebel. And rebelling against Christianity was one way to do it. And I suppose the way I chose to do it was becoming Jewish, which is a strange form of rebellion.

[Sarah Marshall]

Another thing Justin was into was Dungeons and Dragons.

[Justin Sledge]

I definitely found friends. I had lots of friends. You know, we had our own hobbies that we did. We did martial arts or played Dungeons and Dragons and stuff like that.

[Sarah Marshall]

Unfortunately for Justin, if you're trying to build a profile of a teen Satanist in the 80s, this is strike one.

[Justin Sledge]

Millions of children and teenagers now play Dungeons and Dragons. They are drawn to the adventure, fantasy and suspense the game creates through mythical characters and complex situations.

[Sarah Marshall]

In the early 80s, there were two highly publicized cases of two different teenagers who both loved D and D and who both died by suicide. Their parents and the PIs they hired blamed Dungeons and Dragons for their deaths. Hat pulling formed a group called Bad Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, along with the National Coalition of Television Violence in the states. Bad documents 28 cases of juvenile murder and suicide they claim are linked to DD. Adults in the 80s, so confident in their own grasp of reality, didn't trust teenagers to be able to tell the difference between fantasy and real life. Which brings us back to Justin Slege. After all, D and D is only one part of what sounds like a pretty rich teenage social life.

[Justin Sledge]

I got pretty interested in like, alternative music. And there was one radio channel in our town that at like 8 o' clock at night or 9 o' clock at night, they would play alternative music. And so I got pretty into alternative music, you know, the sort of standard grungy music of the men to late 90s. So I started dressing in that style and that put me into the sort of skateboarder kids and the sort of long hair and the ironic shirt and the jinko pants and all that stuff.

[Sarah Marshall]

Strike two. That kind of music was a major red flag at the time, according to the experts. Grunge, alt punk, heavy metal, whatever. If the music had loud guitars, aggressive voices and anti authority lyrics, if it slapped, in other words, that meant Satan was as good as in the recording studio. Twisted Sister, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest were some of the most high profile targets of this branch of the Satanic panic. For some, Satan's influence in the entertainment world seemed even more insidious.

[Justin Sledge]

Now that sounds pretty blatant in one way or another, Greenwald argues. Most of the popular rock groups are consciously or not working for Satan. Groups like Kiss, the Electric Light Orchestra, even Olivia Newton John.

[Sarah Marshall]

So here we have Justin growing up in the 80s and 90s, exercising his right to be a teenager, staying out past dark, wandering in the woods, playing Duncans and Dragons, learning about his Jewish roots, reading old books and dead languages and listening to hard rock music.

[Justin Sledge]

I wasn't a goth. I didn't wear trench coats. I didn't listen to Marilyn Manson. I was ice skating and playing Dungeons and Dragons and yeah, listening to Nine Schnails or whatever.

[Sarah Marshall]

At this point he was an edgy teenager, or a dorky one, depending on your perspective. Maybe he was ticking some aesthetic boxes for being a teen Satanist, but none of the really concerning ones that school psychologists were being told to look out for. Either way, Justin was about to find himself with three strikes.

[Justin Sledge]

The Satanic panic very nearly destroyed my life.

[Sarah Marshall]

On a fall day in 1997, Justin was at school. It was still morning and a kid he knew named Luke walked over to him.

[Justin Sledge]

The weather was beautiful that day. In fact, that was one of the things that sort of keyed me off that day that something had gone very much awry with. He showed up to school in a big blue. It was a heavy coat. He was wearing a coat. It's a winter coat, big blue coat.

[Sarah Marshall]

His classmate handed him a stack of.

[Justin Sledge]

Papers and one of them really clearly was a will. And I could see clearly the word murder and kill on it. He had killed his mother that morning and he basically told me to run and he opened fire.

[Sarah Marshall]

A 16 year old student named Luke Woodham entered the school around 8am on October 1. He had killed his mother Mary that morning, stabbing her to death at home. Before coming to school. He wounded seven people and killed two students, Lydia Du and Christina Menefee. My friend got shot.

[Justin Sledge]

Mr. Pan.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, there's my friend over There. Talk to her this morning. Talk to her this morning. The sound of sirens and sobs of distress filled the air in Pearl Wednesday morning. Moments after the shooting, law enforcement officers converged on the campus to find frightened, weeping students. That was coverage from the local news station WLBT the day of the shooting. This was one of America's first modern day school shootings. 18 months before Columbine in 1999. Looking at this footage from the day of, it's hard to fully realize the kind of shock that everyone must have been in. It's like looking into a completely different world where this kind of violence actually was unfathomable. Dozens of school shootings have happened every year in the United States since the year 2000. And each one is in a way more devastating than the last, because we know at this point that it won't be the last. But that's a different kind of shock than being one of the first. There's just no way to make sense of something like this, especially in the immediate aftermath. But that didn't stop Justin from trying. He was one of the last people Luke Woodham spoke to before opening fire. And in the days following the shooting, Justin made some questionable choices.

[Justin Sledge]

Luke gave me his documents. He gave these documents to me and told me to pass them on to Grant. Well, yep, and I didn't. I passed them on to the. To the media, which was also, I think, unwise.

[Sarah Marshall]

Justin took a copy of these papers to the local TV station WLBT and gave an interview. Justin Sledge was a classmate of Luke Woodham. He has known him since sixth grade. He says the picture the media and police have painted of Woodham is untrue. Woodham gave Sledge his credo, or a statement of belief that that Sledge believes he wrote after he killed his mother. In an exclusive interview, he read some of it to us Wednesday night.

[Justin Sledge]

He begins, I am not insane. I would like to repeat that again. I am not insane. I am angry.

[Sarah Marshall]

When the police chief did address Woodham's manifesto publicly, he dismissed it as, quote, a disgruntled boyfriend, girlfriend thing. His manifesto was that he was wronged.

[Justin Sledge]

I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I do this to show society, push us and we will push back.

[Sarah Marshall]

Whether or not to release a mass shooter's so called manifesto is unfortunately an ongoing public debate to this day, though. Typically it's police departments and media outlets who make that decision, not a traumatized teenager. But in the wake of tragedy, people searched for meaning. Justin was doing that too. Justin Sledge tells us no one can justify or condone what Luke Woodham has done. But he says everyone needs to know the truth, that Luke Woodham felt he would never make national news for being smart, but he did for being a killer.

[Justin Sledge]

I don't think I should have done that. I regret a lot of that. I regret a great deal of that, honestly. I totally projected my own philosophical ideas into what had motivated him. I could have portrayed Woodham as sort of a jilted intellectual, and maybe it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Would have been fine if he had projected his ideas quietly. But at a candlelight vigil for victims of the shooting that week, Justin made a speech where he called Luke Woodham his friend and said he, quote, went mad because of society. We as a society must change.

[Justin Sledge]

This was a, you know, a time period where I remember watching the Hollywood shootout and when there was the bank robbery and how those guys were portrayed as sort of folk heroes in a certain kind of way. The Oklahoma City bombing had happened, and I had this sense that society itself was producing these monsters and that if society didn't change, we would continue to produce monsters like Woodham or McVeigh or David Koresh or what have you. And I diagnosed that as a kind of not taking intellect seriously, that we took all kinds of other things seriously in our society, but we didn't take intellect seriously or something. And, of course, this is obviously not what a town in profound grief needed to hear. And again, I look back on this with a great deal of regret and shame.

[Sarah Marshall]

Justin remembers being invited to speak, but news reports at the time described him as disrupting the victual. Today, it's hard to hear Justin's argument at the time without thinking of all the mass murderers and all the manifestos that have come since. It's hard to hear about Luke Woodham without thinking about Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in 2014. He left communiques framing himself as the victim of a world that denied him what he deserved. And certain corners of the Internet painted him as a hero. Some people still do.

[Justin Sledge]

I was a traumatized young person trying to cope with what I was dealing with as well. So it might explain to some degree what I said and did, but it certainly doesn't justify it.

[Sarah Marshall]

In the days after the shooting, the entire town was reeling and scared. People thought it might happen again, and they began to want a better answer than it was a disgruntled boyfriend, girlfriend thing or we live in a society. There had to be something more behind this.

[Justin Sledge]

In the days after the shooting, you could start Hearing the first rumors of conspiracy, that there was some kind of conspiracy. The first version of it was this was somehow like Dixie Mafia related. And then the next iteration I heard was that there was some group of people at the school called the group, I don't know, capital T, capital G, the group. And that this, the group was somehow maybe tied to devil worship, that there was a devil worshiping entity called the group. And again, this is happening over the course of just a few days. It was right after that that I could begin to see friends of mine being interrogated by the police. They're sort of being picked off and then one by one, interrogating by the police. And at that moment, I began to realize, hold on, something's happening.

[Sarah Marshall]

Justin had made two crucial errors. He had spoken on behalf of Luke Woodham at the vigil, and he was just a little bit different. Put those two things together in a town dealing with a crime of a type it has never experienced before, and you might have yourselves a suspect.

[Justin Sledge]

So that shooting happened on a Wednesday. We all went back to school on a Monday, if you could believe that. As soon as I arrived back on campus, I was escorted to the office, held there. I wasn't allowed to leave the office. They had an armed guard in there with me the whole time. I was escorted off campus by an armed guard.

[Sarah Marshall]

According to news reports at the time, Justin was suspended for what he did at the vigil.

[Justin Sledge]

I was at home. It was sometime in the evening time when I was ultimately. The police came. I remember my mom getting pretty hysterical and my dad sort of just trying to talk to the police, being like, what's going on? Can you tell me? You know, just trying to get information about what's happening. Yeah, I remember coming out of my room. I don't know what I was doing at the time, but coming out of my room and really turned me around and handcuffed me and told me I was charged with a conspiracy to commit murder. They put handcuffs on me and took me out to the car. I got booked in. And I remember coming in and there were other. The other guys that were. That had been arrested were all in the same room. And I remember thinking, what's going on? And we all ask ourselves the same question. What's happening? What's going on? What is this all about? You know, what did you get charged with? Where are your papers? So it was just a, you know, a bunch of. At least I was 16 at the time, just to, you know, teenagers trying to sort out what in the world was happening.

[Sarah Marshall]

Along with Justin, four other high schoolers and one college student named Grant Boyet were arrested. Justin was charged with conspiracy to commit murder. It's a charge that can come with a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

[Justin Sledge]

But I think the feelings were just confusion and shock and fear and I don't know, it's like the emotional equivalent of when you're walking down the stairs and you miss a stair and you start falling. It's like that. Yeah, it was a real nightmare.

[Sarah Marshall]

Justin's parents got him a lawyer and he pled not guilty. And it's at this point, as the teenagers are being held and questioned pre trial, that the story about a shadowy group at school begins to take shape. Two of the accused conspirators told police about a cult like group and that Grant Boyet, the college student, was in charge.

[Justin Sledge]

I can say that I knew Grant, but you know, if you were to look at him, he would look sort of like a, I don't know, Mormon missionary a little bit.

[Sarah Marshall]

I looked at a couple of photos from the newspapers at the time that tracks the idea of a sinister cabal of young men who hated the world was, was basically catnip to the public. And the investigators and the media ran with it.

[Justin Sledge]

There was a moment in the juvenile proceedings where I came in and my lawyers were like visibly angry at me. And I was like, oh God, what have I done? And they're like, what the fuck is the croth? And I was like, the the what? And they're like, the croth. And it was a moment where one of the paralegals or one of the other lawyers, he looked at my lawyer and he let out like a sigh of relief. And I was like, what's going on, guys? They say you're part of a satanic group called the Kroth.

[Sarah Marshall]

The shooting had been a national story from day one. But the story of the alleged teenage cult that led to it meant that it stayed in the news. Clearly, the seven students were friends. Perhaps they even qualified as a clique, with at least some of them sharing an unusual interest in Nietzsche and Latin. Now, the police in the suburb east of Jackson have said that the students were also co conspirators in a plot to kill fellow students. At Pearl High School.

[Justin Sledge]

Jackson adolescent counselor Paul Davy said teens who became involved in satanic and cult like activity often think and act differently from others their age.

[Sarah Marshall]

Woodom and the six alleged co conspirators have been discussed. Described as weird and highly intelligent, school.

[Justin Sledge]

Officials and students said the accused students like to eat lunch together and spend free time with one another. Some of them apparently had a penchant for wearing black clothing.

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm Sarah James McLachlan, host of the Opportunist. Join me every other Monday for news stories about ordinary people who turn sinister by twisting opportunity and transform into thieves, scammers and murderers. We're pulling back the curtain on a fresh lineup of opportunists who stop at nothing to get ahead. These are the stories of criminals who saw a loophole, a chance to cash in, to warp opportunity into a weapon. Subscribe now to the Opportunist, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Justin Sledge]

I do remember Luke being interested in Nietzsche. The only thing worse than Nietzsche is a 16 year old boy reading Nietzsche. But the common idea was you all knew this guy. You know, you must have had something to do with it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Given all the so called evidence the papers were uncovering, it was not hard to fit Justin and the others into the typical profile of the teen Satanist that had been drilled into everybody's brains over the past two decades.

[Justin Sledge]

I think two counties over they found some animal bones in a off of a hiking trail. And I think one of the. I remember when I was listening to some of the transcripts, one young girl had come to the detectives because she had seen clouds form the shape of a skull.

[Sarah Marshall]

But there's a world where this whole debacle over a supposed satanic group could have never really blown up. Really where people just paid a little bit more attention to what Luke Woodham actually said in his initial confession. He was pretty clear about his motivations and mindset. He resented his mother Mary, and he resented his ex girlfriend Christina. And you can hear all this in the tape of that confession courtesy of wlbt.

[Justin Sledge]

Then she dealt with me again. And ever since then I've never been the same. That was last year, like a week before Thanksgiving. And I just, I mean you can ask anybody at school, they'll tell you. I just, I really hated the world Hourly. Just walked around like I was gonna do what happened in school. That's what it looked like throughout this.

[Sarah Marshall]

Nearly 18 minute long video. The most Satan adjacent things Luke would have mentioned are a role playing game and wanting to see an Ozzy Osbourne concert. Why was misogyny not enough of a motive to accept? Why did Satan need to be part of the story? In just a handful of years, school shootings have gone from being an outlier to an existential threat. Especially after Columbine, which at the time was the deadliest school shooting in American history with 13 victims, although that superlative has since been passed. Many times in the aftermath of Columbine, frightened parents and fear mongering media blamed culprits ranging from Marilyn Manson to the Gothic movement. But what people were a little slower to point out was that the Columbine massacre was facilitated largely by Colorado gun laws that made it extremely easy for a teenager to buy an assault weapon at a gun show, or more broadly, by the laxity of American gun laws in general. In this case in Pearl, Mississippi, there was a similar kind of impulse, and blaming some kind of outside influence is easier than looking at ourselves. On a small scale, this kind of magical thinking can be what we need to get through the days and weeks after a tragedy. But on a larger scale, and certainly on a national scale, it's also a way for us to refuse to learn whatever lessons these horrific experiences can possibly teach us. We just kind of throw up our hands and say that maybe some people are just born evil and there's nothing we can do except wait for the next one. And yet there's always been a pattern. Young white males living in a culture of emotional repression and weaponized misogyny without easy access to mental health resources, but with very easy access to guns. In the case of Pearl, Mississippi, those motives were visible from day one, just as they were in so many of the cases that followed it. But we can't learn from the things we're not looking for.

[Justin Sledge]

There was an idea that they hadn't caught everybody or that the parents of the. There were some adults who were the real pullers of the strings and the real Satanists, and they were going to train another group of kids to do something. Or again, you hear these rumors sort of being. And they get back to you and you're like, are my parents going to be arrested? And if they get arrested, what am I going to do? What am I brother and I are going to do? Yeah, you have these sort of constant lingering fears.

[Sarah Marshall]

The thing is, even if Luke Woodham wasn't a teen Satanist, he was still a teenager who needed help from adults. Woodham wrote in his diary, which later became court evidence, about gleefully torturing and killing a dog. And in a ninth grade writing assignment, he wrote about wanting to kill all of his teachers and to torture the principal to death. But no one had intervened then. So what good was the teen Satanist profile anyway?

[Justin Sledge]

There were certainly people. I heard people saying they were like, combing the forests looking for evidence of Satanists, and, you know, they would find a heap of bones in the woods. And they were like, oh, look, the Satanists have been here. But it was just like a city dump and there was like chicken bones. But I mean, confirmation bias is a hell of a thing. We're all guilty of it. We all guilty of confirmation bias. And it's very difficult in a small town. Once there's social momentum and there's a trusted institution like the police saying to the entire community that a conspiracy of satanists has done this crime. Well, there's every reason to turn your confirmation bias on and go looking for things, especially if you think your kids aren't safe. The mind runs wild. This was a pearl was a deeply religious community. There was tons and tons of churches, you know, so called buckle of the Bible belt. And for deeply religious people, you know, the devil is just as real as God. The devil, hell is just as real. Demons are just as real. And if you are told by law enforcement that spiritual warfare is playing itself out in your community and you're hearing it from the pulpit and hearing it from the police department, hearing it from teachers, who are they to stand up and say, no, it's not.

[Sarah Marshall]

The case? Building against Justin and his alleged co conspirators in the court of public opinion was like a bingo sheet of every fear mongering conservative trope you can think of. They were accused of anti Christianity, communism, summoning demons, and investigators even said the group planned to take over the high school and then escape to Cuba.

[Justin Sledge]

Judge Goza was a judge very much driven by evidence. What is the actual tangible evidence that there was a satanic conspiracy or any kind of conspiracy. And I remember being in the courtroom when he would, you know, really just, I don't know, pound the gavels. It's a metaphor, but in some sense true. Just demanding evidence and you know, the evidence would always be highly circumstantial. Or we have testimony from these kids or we have this, we have that. And then when it came down to asking for it, it never appeared.

[Sarah Marshall]

As the investigations progressed, Luke Woodham began accusing his older friend Grant Boyet of indeed being a Satanist and of trying to get Luke to be one too. Luke testified about drawing pentagrams and casting satanic spells with Grant. And he also testified that Grant said Satan was his father and wanted Luke to do great things and that Grant was sending demons and apparitions that were encouraging Luke to kill. In fact, when Luke Woodham stood trial for the shooting, his defense team built their argument on his toxic relationship with Grant Boyet. The defense framed Woodham as an unpopular, depressed kid who fell under the thrall of a charismatic older guy who preached the power of Satan. His lawyers argued that Woodham could not be responsible and asked the jury to name Woodham not guilty by reason of insanity. But even this defense didn't go so far as invoking the croth or any kind of conspiracy larger than these two young men.

[Justin Sledge]

Any last words? God bless you all. That's all Luke Woodham had to say as he left the courthouse as a convicted murderer. Twelve jurors found him guilty in the stabbing death of his 50 year old mother Mary. He still faces trial for the shooting deaths of Christina Menefee and Lydia Du at Pearl High School that same day, Friday morning. Attorneys.

[Sarah Marshall]

In June 1998, Luke Woodham was found guilty. He received three life sentences, one for each of the women he murdered and 20 years each for seven charges of aggravated assault. Grant Boyette was convicted of conspiracy in 2000 for his clear role in encouraging Woodham to violence. As for Justin and the four others, the conspiracy charges against them were dropped a month after Woodham's conviction in July 1998, nearly a year and a half after the shooting. Another charge against Justin was dropped later that year.

[Justin Sledge]

The actual satanic conspiracy element, I think, had been abandoned by the prosecution. Now, Luke still maintained that Grant had control of him through demonic influence and something like that. There was some talk of demons in the trial and things like that, but the actual occult conspiracy theory basically evaporated. Ultimately, when it came down to me, I saw the prosecution for the last time in my lawyer's office. And they were like, good luck. And I remember thinking that evening, I'm like, good luck. What do I do now? Everyone thinks I'm a devil worshiping murderer.

[Sarah Marshall]

The charges had been dropped, but the court of public opinion wasn't so sure.

[Justin Sledge]

It was just like, you gotta figure out what to do with your life. I wasn't allowed to go back to school. No school would take me. So I had to ultimately go through a kind of correspondence program. Then I kind of drifted for a while. People shot at her house when I was in jail. They called them all kinds of names you can imagine in a small town. You know, people go grocery shopping and my mom goes grocery shopping and, you know, people are leering at her and calling her names and stuff. My dad eventually had to leave, and for a while it was just my brother and I kind of holding the family together. My brother and I were like, how do we keep this house? How do we not be homeless? And eventually I ended up homeless. I just slipped into despair. And. Which I think was very reasonable at the time. I had no prospects. I had hard to get a job. And yeah, real despair set in in the years that followed. Real despair, suicidal despair.

[Sarah Marshall]

For a while, this was a story Justin didn't want to return to, but he also couldn't escape it.

[Justin Sledge]

Yeah. And then I began to see other cases where it would happen, and it was like, hold on, this is bigger. And I think at that time I read. It was around the same time I read the Crucible. Okay, the witch trials. This is sounding similar. And then I just kept digging. And I'm probably one of the few people outside of hardcore medievalists who actively read inquisitorial manuals. And that kind of at some level, helped to kickstart an interest in the world of the esoteric or the world of the occult. And ultimately I decided to become an academic because I wanted to really systematically understand this.

[Sarah Marshall]

Justin's experience exploded his entire life. Nothing could ever be the same again. On the other hand, the effect it had for him was to make him curious about the thing he had been accused of being. A cultist. Someone who was interested in secret religious rituals and in holding the power that ancient knowledge entitled him to. And the kid from Pearl is now Dr. Justin Sledge.

[Justin Sledge]

I'm an expert in Western esotericism, and I am the host of the popular YouTube channel Esoterica. So Western esotericism is a interdisciplinary academic field that studies sort of a grab bag of what the most important scholar in the field is called rejected knowledge. So this would be things like alchemy, astrology, mysticism, magic, the occult, Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.

[Sarah Marshall]

For Justin, being accused of something that he had nothing to do with, based on the prejudices of adults seems to have inspired him to become a better kind of adult.

[Justin Sledge]

I get emails from concerned parents saying, hey, I found my kid's diary, and it has all these kind of weird symbols in it. Is my kid a Satanist? And I. I was like, hey, look, give me a call. I'm happy to talk to you. I would far rather a detective working on a strange case with a bunch of weird symbols shoot me an email and say, hey, what the hell is this? Than it to be a bunch of pseudo experts running around. There's something gruesome, not just about the crime that occurred that day, which took the lives of several people, but also the families of those people being told that some satanic cult was responsible for what had happened to their children. And then ultimately that Just evaporated. And I don't know that they were ever told the truth or apologized to or whatever. So it's very important to say, yeah, the satanic panic did have a pretty horrifying negative influence on my life. But that's a pale shadow to be cast compared to the heinous crime that was committed by Luke Woodham that day.

[Sarah Marshall]

What Justin's experience taught him and what it can teach us is that everything changes when the brilliant light of knowledge fills a darkened room. Because legends look scary when they lurk in the shadows. And if we're not careful, those legends can be used to incite moral panics and to drive those panics toward members of a community who are primed to be scapegoated by moral entrepreneurs and by those who are genuinely afraid. But when you choose to see history as something that can be scary but is also complicated and full of humanity and full of people similar to ourselves and who can in fact teach us more about ourselves, then what seems like a monster in the darkness is revealed in the light of day to be just another teenager. Before we go, there is one more question I wanted to try to answer. What was the deal with the Kroth, the supposed name of the satanic cult? Where did that even come from?

[Justin Sledge]

My lawyers were like, visibly angry at me, and I was like, oh, God, what have I done? And they're like, you know what? What the fuck is the Kroth? And I was like, the the what?

[Sarah Marshall]

This is one of those funny little details embedded in these larger and tragic satanic panic stories that always sticks out to me. Students, investigators, media outlets, all of them dedicated time to trying to figure out what the Kroth was, where it came from, and what it meant. Because remember, for a while, the Kroth was supposed to be the prosecutor's smoking gun. And ultimately all it turned out to be was a whole lot of smoke.

[Justin Sledge]

I remember knowing there was a Star wars role playing game being played by some people at the high school. And it's hilarious to say it now, but I remember thinking, like, how dorky is that? You know? Again, this is coming from the kid playing Dungeons and Dragons, like, oh, it's one thing to be in the Dungeons and Dragons, another thing to be in the Dungeons and Dragons and sci fi. God forbid.

[Sarah Marshall]

As it turned out, Grant Boyette did play a Star wars themed role playing game. I know. Pretty satanic.

[Justin Sledge]

The Kroth Internet website is the gateway to the imaginary planet Kroth which hosts the game Dungeons and Dragons, the role playing game. Dragons Spawn uses Kroth as a place reference Butch John the Jackson Clarion Ledger.

[Sarah Marshall]

Clarion Ledger reporters tracked down the creator of that site. It turned out to be some guy named Jeff who lived in Colorado Springs. He was a computer analyst and an ordained minister. Kroth, he said, sounds like Earth. It's a totally made up name, jeff told the paper. If you're looking for a scapegoat, I'm not it. Thank you for listening to the W Know. Our producer is Mary stephenhagen. Fact checking by Katherine Barner Production assistants by Nicole Ortiz. Thanks to Jay Cowett for voice coaching. Your voice performers and this episode were Alex Steed and Chelsea Webersmith. In previous episodes you've heard the voice talents of River Butcher, Aubrey Gordon, Michael Hobbs, Jamie Loftus and Janet Varney. I've been your host. Sarah Marshall, our sound designer is Evan Kelly. Rooshni Nair is our coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is manager of Growth for CBC Podcasts. Arif Nurani is director of CBC Podcasts. Listen to every episode early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel. For early and ad free listening, subscribe to the CBC True Crime Premium channel on Apple Podcasts.

[Justin Sledge]

For more cbc podcasts go to cbc ca podcasts.