Original subtitles

Jefferson is my hometown. I love it.

You know, we're not the crime capital of the world.

We don't have many murders.

It's a place where people still leave their cars open

and their front doors open.

This violent act was so out of character,

unbelievable to happen in our nice, small community

where nothing really happens.

The murder scene is like a jigsaw puzzle.

You're trying to put all the pieces together.

You have a woman who's been murdered in the basement.

The victim was stabbed multiple times

about the upper torso and the face.

Her head was bashed in,

which caused her eyeball to explode out of the socket.

And just the saturation of the blood was evidence

that it was violent, very violent murder.

And Tom, he's the only one not in the home.

It was imperative to try to find him.

It was all hands on deck.

K-9 units, crime scene units, full detective bureaus.

We got patrol cars running around

through the neighborhoods. Nothing.

It was just go where the dog's trying to lead you

and see if you can find anything.

And of course we didn't.

We went on down to the condominiums

that were being built and cleared those.

And by then, it was getting close to daylight

and we realized that we

were probably not going to find him at this point.

The decision was made to hold off on the search

and wait till the day shift comes in.

Wake up in the morning, and that's the first time

where the adults start being dodgy with what's going on.

"What happened in White Rock?" "Well, we're not really sure."

"Is everyone okay?" "Well, we don't know."

Then the phone starts ringing with my friends,

and they're like, "Mrs. Sullivan was murdered."

I'm like, "What?

There was a murder?

Like an actual murder in Jefferson?"

Like, "Who did it?"

And at this point, we still don't know, but Tommy's missing.

So the first bit of rumor mill that was going on

was that there's a murderer loose in town,

and he kidnapped Tommy.

So we're all like, "Holy shit."

There was a murderer that kidnapped a kid,

and what the hell is he doing to him?

I'd seen movies where kids were abducted.

In "America's Most Wanted," that was very recent still.

Host John Walsh,

whose six-year-old son Adam was brutally murdered,

leads this crusade against crime.

I was... I was terrified.

It was snowing like hell the night before.

We all wanted to go out on a sleigh riding, we couldn't.

We wanted snowball fights, we couldn't.

No one could leave the house.

Panic. It's not just a reaction.

It's a state of mind, an instinct.

When something horrific happens, we scramble for answers.

We start looking for someone or something to blame.

Panic can distort everything.

It spreads faster than facts.

And soon, it's not about truth anymore.

It's about the fear that consumes us all.

Tommy was known as a Reverend Brown kid.

Everyone knew him from church.

He was an altar boy, which was also an elevated position there.

And he was an all-area, 106-pound wrestler.

New Jersey is a wrestling state.

It's like a more popular sport than football.

So the wrestlers were, in a way, kind of,

the good ones were kind of revered

because everyone knew the discipline

that it took to really excel at that sport.

I was principal of

Reverend George A. Brown Memorial School.

Tom Jr. was in the school from first grade on.

He was very handsome.

I remember him as being blond, but I saw a picture of him

and he had darker hair than I remembered,

but he had the most beautiful blue eyes.

He was a good student.

He basically made no ripples.

It was Sunday morning,

I received a call from the convent that said

that they could not find Tom.

I felt shock,

basically...

unbelief.

And then, when they didn't know where Tom was,

I had so many concerns about that.

Like, where would he be?

Hello?

The following morning,

I had received a call from the dispatcher saying that

one of our police officers who lives in White Rock

was speaking on the phone to a woman.

She just happened to be talking to her

and asked about what was going on.

And as she was talking to her,

she looked out her back window and saw a body.

Oh, my God.

Blood on the ground.

At first, they weren't too sure if he was still alive.

Then the woman clarified, "He's dead, he's dead."

It was Tommy Sullivan.

It was a couple houses across the street

and over from the Sullivan house.

The backyard was fenced in.

There was a shed to the left of the body.

The snow was so deep at the time

that the body kind of sat below the snow.

I got a call, and said they had found Tommy,

and to come back down.

His wrists were cut all the way down to...

pretty much through to the bones.

His throat had been cut from one side all the way to the other.

You could actually look down into his windpipe,

cut it all the way across.

The medical examiner was pointing out the blood splatter

or spurting blood on a wooden fence.

And there was some discussion about

how this could have happened.

As brutal as his mother had been murdered,

this was equally as brutal.

His throat was cut ear to ear

and his head was hanging back, um, you know.

Esophagus, everything was visible.

So this was shocking.

The thought was that this was a suicide.

Just the nature of the violence, the nature of the wounds,

people have a hard time relating that to a 14-year-old boy.

White Rock is a pretty tight-knit community.

You have people who have been there for a long time,

born there.

Everybody kind of knew each other.

The police, if we had found Tommy,

you can kind of keep that under wraps to some degree

to finish out your investigation.

But the fact that Tommy was found by a neighbor,

that's not gonna stay too secret too long.

Hello?

My brother got the first call.

"They found Tommy, he's dead."

My mom screams, starts crying.

I went, "Where did they find him?"

Like, the neighbor's backyard.

Like, across the street? What are you talking about?

We've got to find out more.

So then I start trying to call. And I think I actually broke

the news to a couple of my friends, okay?

And then they didn't believe me. And then they tell their mom.

So everybody's trying to get confirmation of the story.

We started finding everything out.

That Betty Ann was dead and that Tommy was dead.

You're trying to process that as like a 13-year-old boy.

You know, oh, my God, how could this happen type thing.

So, it was scary.

And it just leaves you really, like, unsettled

and really uneasy.

I was there at Tommy's scene

when they located a Boy Scout knife

that they found with his body.

It was a typical camping knife,

maybe four or five inches long.

It can be super sharp.

If you spend enough time sharpening it, I guess.

It would have to be pretty sharp to do the damage that it did.

I don't know how you could do that

after you've already sliced your wrists,

how you could stick the knife in your throat

and slice all the way across.

It certainly didn't make sense.

They still had to do the medical examiner's report

on Mrs. Sullivan's body, because at this point,

they didn't know if that was the same knife

that killed the mother.

When his body was found, the ID unit, everybody was still there.

So it was easy for them to photograph everything

and collect the remaining evidence.

There was only one set of footprints,

and they were Tommy's that led to where he was...

where he was found.

It isolated him as the only person.

It wasn't like there was a struggle.

It was more a validation of, this is Tommy.

This is what Tommy did to Tommy.

There were just his prints

that went from the road up to that yard.

So it appears as if, after he crashed the car,

got the car stuck,

that he immediately went to that backyard.

The family car was across the street from the house.

It had a sloped driveway,

so it appeared that it had rolled down across the street

into a snowbank, and it was stuck there.

And that's when they found

some of Tommy's belongings in the car.

And that's where they found the contract...

...the contract that Tommy had written

to the greatest demons of hell.

"To the greatest demons of hell, I, Tom Sullivan",

"would like to make a solemn exchange with you.

"If you give me the most extreme of all magical powers,

"I will use them wisely to tempt as many people as possible

"to do evil and follow you.

"I will kill many Christian followers

"who are serious in their beliefs.

"Although I will not kill my family

"until I live for 10 years from this very day,

"this will be done to avoid any neighbors

from becoming suspicious, not out of love for them."

"Throughout my new life,

"I promise to perform any Satanistic ritual

"except homosexual acts."

"I will do these to prove my loyalty to the demons of hell."

"Exactly 20 years from this day,

"I promise to commit suicide.

"At this time, I will go directly to hell

"to work with you as a demon.

"I will tempt all teenagers on Earth to have sex,

have incest, do drugs, and worship you."

"I believe that evil will once again rise

"and conquer the love of God.

If this pact is to your approval, sign below."

The part in the contract about killing his family

has an X through it, and then, in parentheses,

he has next to that, "I have already killed my family."

Now, the contract, well, I was obviously taken aback by it,

especially when he, you know,

that he'd already killed his family, because he thought,

once he torched the place, once he lit those papers,

that the house was going to burn down,

he was going to kill his father and brother.

The contract.

For a lot of people,

that was a pretty telling piece of evidence

that kind of linked this behavior,

this murder-suicide, into the realm of the occult.

Once the word got out

that this could have had its roots in some type

of Satanic belief system, there was media on scene.

A mother and son from New Jersey

are dead tonight following a devastating murder and suicide

with shades of the occult.

He reportedly went into a rage,

stabbed his mother to death, then ran into the living room,

where he set a pile of papers on fire.

Then ran to a neighbor's yard

where he slit his own throat.

Books on Satanism were found in the fire

that was burning in the living room of the Sullivan home.

A major crime happens in your community

and of course the media comes out and they go around

and start speaking to all the neighbors.

All we've heard is that Tommy killed his mother

and then tried to kill himself and died in the woods.

You don't think that something like that

can happen right next door or across the street.

In the late '80s, I was a freelance journalist,

and I wrote primarily for the women's magazines.

I was assigned the article

because I lived in New Jersey at the time.

I was told there's a story out of this suburban town

in New Jersey of this young teenage boy

who brutally killed his mom.

And we want you to find out

what happened here.

How did this typical American boy

take a dumbbell and smash his mom in the head

and literally try to cut her face off?

It's horrifying. It's scary. It's fascinating.

It's mysterious.

It's... insane.

So I was going to dig as deeply as I could.

If you asked me anything about this yesterday morning,

I would have said, great kid, wrestler,

baseball player, good student.

He wasn't some horrible kid

who had tons of trouble,

that the schools kept coming to the parents

and saying, "You have to do something with this child,"

or the parents kept punishing him.

That wasn't what this kid was about.

And that's why it was so fascinating,

because there was no easy answer here.

And we want answers.

14-year-old Tommy was an eighth grader

at Reverend George A. Brown Memorial School in Sparta.

There's deep concern for the Sullivan family,

but there's also concern for the children in the school

and how they will deal with the tragedy.

The media was everywhere in the town,

and we wanted to protect our children, number one.

We had psychologists, psychiatrists, um...

counselors.

The children were doing a lot of processing,

and they did not need to be assaulted by the media.

So we said to them, "There will be people around.

Get on your bus and do not speak to the media."

The students at Thomas Sullivan's parochial school

in Morris County, New Jersey, got some counseling today.

And then, when I was looking at the news...

No cult group here at the school.

...and I saw this eighth grader...

He changed.

He was more quiet and he kept things to himself.

...I was like, "No!"

Did you know anything about his Satanic obsessions?

Um...

It was quiet. He kept it basically to himself.

The past week, maybe the last couple of days,

he said something about it, but no one would believe him.

Some people suspected that,

because he was toying with Satanism,

this is what led him to do this.

I understand there may have been

some Satanic indications in that letter, as well.

That's correct.

Murder stories are fascinating in and of themselves, right?

And now it's this young boy murdering his mother,

supposedly in the name of Satan.

Well, now you've got yourself a home run.

There are unanswered questions about Satanism in America.

Unsolved incidents of torture and murder.

In every state in the nation,

authorities are investigating some form

of what they call Satanic activity.

The Tommy Sullivan story played perfectly into a cultural phobia

that was running rampant in suburban America at the time.

Fears that young adults were being seduced by darker,

more violent things.

We know it as Satanic panic.

Fantastical games like Dungeons & Dragons

with their demonic covers and blood magic conjuring.

Dr. Thomas Radecki says there are 28 deaths related

to Dungeons & Dragons in the last five years.

Hyper-violent movies dripping with gore and death.

And angry, thrashing heavy metal music.

Heavy metal.

Some would say it's the selling of Satanism.

Parents feared

that their innocent children were running away

from their idyllic lives towards a darkness

that they couldn't understand.

You can see the pentagram on the walls,

the inverted cross, the 666.

Representing Satan with the horns.

We don't want people to think that we're being overreactive,

but truly, is Satanic involvement,

is Satanic criminal behavior,

is it happening, and to what degree?

Tommy Sullivan Jr,

he was the perfect example of it all.

In a statement to police,

Tommy's younger brother, Brian, stated,

"Tom had been acting strange for the last two to three weeks,

"had been interested in witchcraft,

"and had several books about it in his room,

"listened to heavy metal music,

believed there was messages from the devil."

Officer Hart believes heavy metal encouraged

Tommy Sullivan to butcher himself and his mother.

Within literally weeks of his death and his mother's death,

Tommy had been listening to music

by some heavy metal artists.

Sullivan's father says

heavy metal music was to blame.

There was one by Ozzy Osbourne.

It was "Suicide" or something to do with suicide.

♪ Suicide is the only way out ♪

Another one he was actually singing to one time

about killing his mother.

It's no big secret that our interests label us.

I mean, look at me.

When I was a kid, I loved horror movies and the macabre.

I was into Iron Maiden and weird shit

that you could buy from Spencer Gifts.

My bar mitzvah had a bloody cake and a magician

that sawed me in half.

It was over-the-top and innocent fun,

a rebellious escape from the humdrum of school and life.

But back then, it wasn't so cute to everyone else.

Once Satanic panic washed over my town,

my parents got calls from the school saying

that no one would let their kids sleep over in my house.

Perhaps the most dangerous kind of devil worship.

They were afraid I was going to infect them

with darker interests.

I turned out fine, but for kids like Tommy, it didn't end well.

There may have been something about all that dark imagery

that awakened something that festered inside him,

and it became a real nightmare that needed to come out.

The Sullivan case not just got national attention,

it got international attention.

We had them all here.

I mean, this was...

this went on for a good couple of weeks.

And Geraldo at the time came to White Rock.

Whether a Satan exists is a matter of belief,

but we are certain that Satanism exists.

I remember Detective Hart doing interviews.

Detective Paul Hart thought he had seen everything.

He wanted to go to the house.

I was like, "Well, I don't know."

He just bounded up onto the porch, knocked on the door,

and said, "Hi, I'm Geraldo. Can we come in?"

And the doors opened up,

and we went down and filmed in the basement.

As we came down here,

We found Mrs. Sullivan laying on the floor

just about in this area here.

I mean, he was doing the show,

and it was to identify the problem.

It was actually one of, I think,

the first case that he profiled in any depth.

Do you think... you're not a theologian,

a theologian, you're a cop.

Do you think that Tommy was possessed?

I think that possession is a state of mind.

As far as the media,

I understand their position is to... to report the news.

And I think it was more for the sensationalism.

I mean, the case itself was sensational enough.

I remember some of the media reports.

Everybody's trying to figure out, like, what happened?

How did this go so bad?

The town was pretty freaked out.

Obviously, it's a small town.

You want to know, A, what happened, and B,

is it going to happen to me?

There might've been a little intentional mythologizing,

a little bit, to be honest,

especially when the Satanic stuff broke.

Then it's like, all right, if we're talking about that,

we can say basically whatever the hell we want, you know?

And so people were adding their own opinions to it.

One of the rumors was that he attended a Satanic black mass,

and then everybody panicked.

First of all, does this Satanic cult in the woods exist?

Is that real?

If it does, how does that happen

under our noses, right?

How does... How... Who's involved in it?

People thought he was drinking people's blood.

He would go sneak out of the house at night.

This little boy apparently goes into the woods and sets fires.

Someone said that he took a hatchet,

put it under his chin, jammed it up,

and then ripped it out to the side.

That's how everybody said he did it.

We didn't know about the Boy Scout knife.

That became fact.

The rumors were pretty strong.

It's kind of like in school where you'd play the game,

whisper something in one person's ear.

By the time it gets all the way around the room,

it's completely different. It was snowballing,

but we couldn't comment on it at the time.

It was still considered an active investigation.

1988, I was pastor of Grace Church

in Jefferson, New Jersey.

The Sullivan family went

to St. Thomas Roman Catholic Church,

which was across from my church.

It was the beginning of winter.

It was January, right after the holidays.

And you could feel not just the coldness of the snow,

so to speak, but that this town will be changed forever.

Betty Sullivan had been killed,

and all of a sudden, we lost our innocence.

We prayed for the family.

We prayed for Tom.

We prayed for Betty Ann.

We prayed for the family that was left.

We prayed for ourselves.

I remember we went to church

and it was just all everybody wanted to talk about.

Such a small town with such a tragic event.

I realized I was...

the last person to see him alive.

It was just a little overwhelming

because I knew it was much bigger,

much bigger than me at that moment, that's for sure.

And the family was going through trauma and devastation.

And for some reason,

I was in there with them at that time.

And hearing how brutal Mrs. Sullivan passed

made me think something evil was involved.

At that point,

the goal was to work on just continuing the ministry,

bringing healing and bringing understanding.

It's Thursday night, people are tired,

but questions about what happened to Tommy Sullivan,

fears that it could happen to somebody else's child,

brought parents out of their houses this evening.

This freaked out the community.

We had an assembly at our high school,

and it was standing room only.

We had to have a second assembly

because people couldn't get in.

500 people packed this auditorium

to learn about Satanism.

I'm really scared about the future for the kids.

It makes you wonder, you know,

if it can't happen to your child.

The town's reaction to it,

they were treating him like he was infected with something.

You know, did he infect my children?

What are they going to do?

We parents worry, you know, it's in our DNA.

I mean, what's more important than your child?

Is this something that my kid is going to get into trouble?

Is this something that I have to worry about?

Something had to have caused this.

Because to say, "Oh, we don't know," that's too hard.

So we've got to come up with a reason.

And the reason here was Satan.

But Satanism, that's outside of the home,

and that's some other thing that sort of penetrated here.

And if I don't let it in, I'm safe.

People wanted to understand,

like parents would come and talk to me,

how do we protect our kids from different groups?

And being someone who studies theology and knowing history,

also having a very good understanding

of what we would refer to as spiritual warfare,

I understood how high the stakes would be.

The ramifications were going to be great in the community

and in the church and in my life.

There is a Satan, there is evil.

There are negative forces.

We must be aware that it is real.

It is absolutely real.

Yes, there's evil.

But your religion helps you to deal with that.

And it was a challenge for every single person in that school.

We definitely had to face

the reality

that evil can seem to many to just be,

eh, you know, it's nothing really big.

We could no longer say that

because we were confronted with evil.

We were confronted with the Satanic world.

I've never really been touched with evil except for this.

It was a very pious, very religious town,

where a majority of the households

were regular churchgoers.

Right? Sunday mass, like clockwork.

So it was like the devout Catholics in town

had their answer,

that he was possessed, it was demonic possession.

They're looking for a boogeyman.

The boogeyman's always the devil.

It was scary.

And then the parents were terrified

that it could... their kids could be next

or that they could be next.

So that's where the real fear was.

And as a trickle down kind of circumstance,

it's never comfortable for kids to see their parents scared.

So there was this kind of low level feeling of discomfort

among the kids

because we're seeing

that our parents don't have all the answers.

I bought into the story,

like I felt that this was a Satanic thing

and the devil was there and helped create,

you know, this mess.

That was me as a 19-year-old

because of all the drama surrounding it

and everybody was just consumed, you know.

So, you know, you start to believe things.

I just remember being super-affected

and not really knowing, like, kind of lost.

The only way that people seemed to be able to make sense of it

was with this Satanism angle.

And I remember the one detail that they were pressing was,

"Well, when you're possessed by the devil, you can do anything."

In my 13-year-old head,

I didn't know what was possible,

what wasn't possible.

But God and the devil and...

I mean, all of my fears were about the fact

that it was possible.

And while I'm doubting that, at the same time,

I'm like, "Okay, well, what the hell happened next door?

Because maybe it did happen."

You're trying to process that

and you don't really want to sleep.

It just felt evil.

I started having nightmares...

...that the devil would go underneath Tommy's house,

come underground, and come up into my room...

...and then go in my mouth and take over my body.

The source of all this

is the apparent practice of Satanism.

It's easy to look back at this time

and laugh at the hysteria.

Sensationalistic news feeding parental fears.

We have young people captivated in something

that can make killers out of them.

Religious communities turning to the only explanation

they can think of... Satan.

A small New Jersey community stunned...

But the truth is,

something made this seemingly normal child

murder his mother in cold blood.

And there had to be an answer hidden somewhere

in his final days.

About three weeks ago, the father says,

"In addition to an increased interest in heavy metal music,

the young Sullivan had started a research project into Satanism

at the Catholic school he attended.

Tom Jr. was a regular student,

never in my office except the last three weeks

when we had an incident

that was unlike anything

I had ever experienced before.

There was a teacher who came to me,

and she said,

"The students would like

to have a comparative religion opportunity."

She said, "Every group has to tell about the religion

and then how it relates to

or is different from the Catholic tradition."

I thought, "Well, that sounds good."

A couple days later, she came to me

and she said, "There is a group

that would like to do, um,

Satanic... the Satanic Church."

Well, I felt, first of all,

it wasn't a religion

like Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam.

And they're young and impressionable.

She came back to me and said,

"Well, if you don't know it,

how can you confront it?"

Hmm. I thought about that.

I prayed over it and I said, "Yes."

And she... she went with it.

And Tom Jr. was in that group.

If I could do that over again,

I don't know that I would say, "Yes."

Tom took every single Satanic book out of the public library.

We had nothing in school.

So he studied it

and then he shared the information with the other kids.

What did you come up with?

Sacrifices.

Sacrifices. Hmm.

I can't believe they let us pick this.

I don't think the children

had ever faced

something that is so diabolical,

so different from what they believe and hold as true,

and how powerful it seemed to them.

That there was a power in this.

And it wasn't a comfortable power.

The kids themselves said,

"This was the scariest thing we've ever done.

And it bothered us."

When he returned from Christmas...

...the children told their teachers.

They said, "Tom is talking crazy."

They came to me and they didn't give me any specifics.

They just said, "We're worried about Tom.

He's saying crazy things.

It's just not right."

When I heard that he picked Satanism,

I was like, "That's weird, but that's pretty funny,"

because it was also related to, like,

the music he was listening to, so, like,

he was making... It was a bigger joke.

To me, that's what the project was.

It was... it was, "Screw you. I like this music."

And I remember some of the people in our class

that he was hanging out with

were much more into some of that music.

I know he became closer with Chucky.

Chucky was cool.

He would do all the same stuff, play "Manhunt" and whatnot,

but Chuck was super into the music stuff.

And Tommy and he had hit it off on the music.

At the time, they were huge into the Black Sabbath, Ozzy stuff.

So they would hang out and talk about that stuff.

On Wednesday of that week,

there was an incident in gym class

where Tom and Chucky...

were cutting class

and they talked the whole period.

The teacher got back and found them there.

She reported them to me.

So after school, I put the two boys into two different classes,

and I went into the class with Chucky.

And I said, "What were you talking about?"

And he said, "I'm not telling you."

I said, "You don't have to tell me what you said.

But just give me, you know... What took 40 minutes?"

And what I got back was the most surprising answer

I've ever received in my life.

"He was trying to convince me to join him"

"in doing Satanic things."

And I said, "Run that by me again."

Chuck, remember our history class, doing that religion unit?

Yeah.

I think you might be a good fit for it.

It has a lot to offer you.

What does it offer you?

Power, freedom.

What is it?

Satanism.

Chucky said that Tom Jr. was told by Satan

that he needed to have disciples, to proselytize...

and he used that word...

proselytize people to join him in his efforts

to help Satan.

I said, "What did you say?"

And he was shaking, and he said...

I didn't do anything. I said, "No."

"I said, 'No.'"

I said, "I'm happy for you."

He said, "But he tried so hard.

He had all these reasons.

He said he really, really wanted me to join."

Chucky's confrontation with Tommy

may have started with this letter.

It was uncovered by Jefferson police

during their investigation.

It's written backwards

and seems to be addressing Chuck in the name

of the demon of teenage lust and damnation.

When you hold it up to a mirror, it reads like this...

"Chuck, the power of all deadly sins dwells within my soul.

Do you want in? This is your last chance.

Write back now."

So I left there thinking,

"Oh, I have to go talk to Tom."

And as I walked down the hall, I thought to myself,

"You know little or nothing about this."

I went into the room,

and I just said,

"Tom, I was talking to the boy you were with,

and he said that you were trying

to get him to join you

in helping Satan."

And he looked back in the most steeled way

with these beautiful blue eyes and said...

It's too late.

..."It's too late."

It's too late.

The room got cold for me.

I was freezing cold in there.

And I thought, "It was so iced.

It was so convinced.

It was so adult."

And the way he said it was just done.

This is not negotiable. It's not happening.

It was almost as if I was talking to someone else.

And I felt it was too late.

The question for me was,

"Was I talking to Satan

or Tom?"