Original subtitles

So, this rosary ring was found,

I believe, in Tom's room.

It's not meant to be worn around the neck.

It's an actual ring.

You wear it with the cross up

while you're saying the rosary.

But he takes it...

and is wearing it with the cross down.

Do you understand? It's an inversion of the rosary.

The fact that Tom wears it with the cross going down...

That's not a rosary ring.

That's a mocking

of the Blessed Mother and the Lord Jesus.

This is a mockery of all that is sacred.

This is spitting in the face of God.

14-year-old boy said to be obsessed by Satan

stabbed his mother to death over the weekend

and then committed suicide.

Over the past month, Tom had developed

an unhealthy interest in Satan.

I remember walking into his bedroom,

and on the bed is where I saw some of the books.

And opening the books,

he had some pretty strange writings

of following Satan and giving his life to Satan.

He was the neighborhood paperboy, a model student,

and now, by his own admission, a satanic murderer.

I believe that Tom Jr. had a relationship with Satan.

Once a person is possessed, they have no control.

In that basement...

...Tom was possessed

by demonic forces

to kill his mother.

The killing of a mother by her son

is beyond comprehension.

It is not natural. It is not normal.

It is anti-everything that's holy and good.

Evil conjures a thousand images in our minds

of twisted people, unspeakable acts,

and dark ideas.

It's the darkness we see in others

and the darkness we fear lurks within ourselves.

But what happens when that evil

stops becoming a concept and takes shape?

When Tommy Jr. killed his mother

and turned a blade on himself,

it pointed to something that defied logic.

Something truly evil.

Thomas Sullivan was 14 years old.

And as Dave Roddy reports,

his father is trying to find a way to forgive him.

I loved him dearly.

But he also took my wife, who I loved.

If you're saying to yourself something like this

could never happen in your community, think again.

Morris County police are broadening their investigation

of a bizarre murder-suicide to determine

if it was linked to a local satanic cult.

According to police, Tom stabbed his mother

more than a dozen times with a small penknife.

The body of Betty Ann Sullivan was found in the basement.

And the next day, the body of Tom Sullivan Jr.

was found in the snow.

He had slashed his wrist and throat.

This was a brutal murder.

This was a suicide that was, you know, very, very violent.

The crime-scene photos and autopsy photos

showed that he cut his wrist and then took the knife,

put it from one ear to the other ear,

and pulled it across his throat.

Right across.

Um, I mean, graphic.

To see the picture of his head being back

and to see this gaping hole...

You know, to kill himself in the manner that he did...

...it promotes a lot of questions.

For the average person, it's like, well,

if he was under some influence of drugs,

I mean, that can make people do all kinds of things.

But from the reports and, you know,

speaking with the detectives at the time,

there was no drugs, no alcohol.

Um, you know, just, um...

how did that happen?

Tom Sullivan Jr. is described by neighbors

as the all-American kid,

an eighth-grader who loved baseball...

How does a kid going to the school there

and having all those advantages...

You know, why did this 13-, 14-year-old,

eighth-grade Catholic school kid do this?

He told some kids that he had a vision,

that Satan came to him.

Satan had his face on it.

And Satan told him to kill his family

and then go out and preach Satanism.

My understanding was

that Tommy had written a paper

on Satanism in class.

I believe the school paper started around October,

when it had to be done around the Thanksgiving holidays.

Something within his research triggered his attachment to it,

and then he just stayed involved in it.

But it went downhill very quick with him.

In just a couple of weeks, Tommy's behavior changed.

It's just mind-blowing. It really is.

It's really hard to, you know, wrap your head around it.

It really is.

Family did say he was getting involved in Satanism,

and that's what people were worried about,

is him being possessed.

Sister Philomena told us

that they had been having some concerns about Tommy's behavior.

I was like, "Well, let's go up to the school

and find out what they can tell us."

The police were in my office the following morning,

on Monday morning.

They said, "We want to go

and get all his books out of his desk."

My first statement-- I felt I had to say it--

was, "I have never dealt with anything like this before."

And I believe it was Paul Hart who said...

"Neither have we."

It was very tense, to put it mildly.

There was a lot of concern about what had gone on

and how did this happen.

The English teacher had them doing journals.

She was just trying to get the students

to put their thoughts down.

The journal was personal,

and I would never have looked at a child's journal,

but the police could.

They started each day by writing kind of a private journal.

The initial sketches were of cartoon characters.

Mickey Mouse and all the things you would imagine

that a teenager, you know, might be drawing.

And then it progressively got darker.

You know, it went from Mickey Mouse to pictures of,

like, a horned person resembling maybe the devil.

There were some pentagrams.

And as it got kind of darker and darker,

nothing came to light because it wasn't anything they shared.

The sketchbook started taking on

a more ominous, angry feeling about it.

Tommy was not happy. He was not a happy kid.

Right away, you could see he was influenced,

obsessed by the satanic world.

The evidence of what he was thinking of

on a daily basis was in that book.

Along with Tommy's sketchbook,

the Jefferson PD uncovered several journal entries,

such as this one.

"Today is really cool.

I really do hate God and love.

The devil is my idol.

I will rise and conquer the good of mankind for eternity.

And when the apocalypse comes around,

I will descend to hell to fulfill Lucifer's will.

Well, I really do have to go now.

So, bye."

I mean, this is his journal.

This isn't for public consumption.

This is what he was really feeling.

Yeah.

I've studied that kind of imagery.

I think it reflects Tommy's

deep understanding of Satan or the occult.

And I see telltale signs there

of somebody who's in the know.

As a historian, I study Satanism.

I'm an occultist. I'm a seeker. I'm on the path.

And I document what I find on the path,

both in terms of history and practice.

To me, understanding the occult,

participating in occult movements,

requires skin in the game.

It requires a lot of hands-on research and practice.

So here we see he's holding the reverse crucifix

in his left hand.

And the left-hand path

is said to be the path of the satanic,

where the individual seeker is attempting

to develop certain superhuman powers--

levitation or bilocation or super strength.

So the belief that the left-hand forces hold that power

that maybe he was unable to find

in the other, more conventional doorways

that were open to him,

he's calling on Satan to seek power.

This is fascinating to me

because what we're seeing in this image most obviously

is a horned figure with someone's severed head.

This time, Tommy creates a language, a kind of script.

The words at the top of the image seem to me

to be "evil world" written backwards.

One piece of satanic lore that runs through the ages

is that demons,

as the term is conventionally used,

they like things backwards.

They like things upside down.

He clearly brought details

a little more sophisticated than you might find

in books from the local public library.

In this drawing, you're clearly seeing somebody

who is more fully grokking

to the brutalization of what he's depicting.

That drawing, during the investigation,

well, it's one of those pieces of information

that's stuck up here.

The victim has an expression of despair.

With the hand cut off,

damage to the body, to the head and the face.

There's a...

a reveling in cruelty in the image.

You would look at it and you could say...

that was a depiction, drawing

of ultimately what happened to his mother.

Tommy wasn't alone in his interest

or in how he expressed himself.

I myself have stacks of notebooks

with similar drawings I made when I was his age.

And the thing is, I turned out fine.

In fact, those inspirations served me very well

throughout my career and continue to do so.

But sometimes the signs can't be ignored.

As a parent now,

I understand that fear of not knowing

what's going through my kid's head.

How can I? And how could anyone know

what was going through Tommy's mind

and that he would cross that line

from fantasy into something physical?

That day when I talked to Tom in my office...

Tom, can you tell me...

...the steel look in his eyes.

I've never had anyone look at me like that, ever.

He said, "It's too late."

And I felt...

it was too late.

The whole room got cold.

I was feeling... just so chilled.

So...

It's too late.

I cannot describe it in words.

I can only say...

that, for me...

that scared me the most.

Satan is real.

Satan is the opposite...

and the antagonist of God.

It is very hard for me...

to really...

understand...

evil.

But I know it exists.

And I know it takes people away.

And I know that people choose evil.

I walked back to my office.

My vice principal said,

"Did you want to speak to Mrs. Sullivan?"

And I said, "Oh, yes."

Betty Ann, it's good to see you.

Mrs. Sullivan was a faithful volunteer in the school.

At lunchtime, she would go into a classroom

and be there for the kids as they were eating

and then take them out on the playground.

It was a heroic job, and she did it faithfully.

She was a stay-at-home mom.

She did not have any other job.

So she made her children a priority.

I wanted to check in with you...

I said the children had come to me.

They were concerned. The teachers are concerned.

We're all concerned about what he's talking about,

which includes Satan.

She says, "I know all about it.

He took every single book out of the library,

and he read every single one cover to cover."

And she said, "I was so glad he was reading.

I didn't care what he read."

And I said, "But there are other things to read."

I said, "Please.

I encourage you and your husband to talk to him."

That was Thursday.

Friday, we had a snow day.

A 14-year old boy said to be obsessed by Satan

stabbed his mother to death over the weekend

and then committed suicide.

He had killed his mother on Saturday night.

And somewhere before they found him, he had killed himself.

So now we had a homicide and a suicide in our school.

Truth be told... I thought it was my fault.

Because I asked her to talk to him.

It's a horrible thing to think that in two weeks

a young man could change

and become this monster, you know...

and this interest in Satan.

No, there's not enough time for that to happen.

It's obvious to me,

based on what I've experienced in my own life

and in ministry working with folks,

that we're dealing with something here

that is deeply dark, paranormal,

nefarious, and dangerous...

and real.

Is it possible that Tommy was in touch

with some kind of unseen entity,

some sort of metaphysical presence,

what a person might call possession?

Of course it's possible. Of course it's possible.

I do feel certain that there are some cases of possession

that elude all explanation.

I will never take the supernatural

or the extraphysical off the table.

Possession and exorcism are widely referenced topics

that most everyone has heard of,

due chiefly to entertainment.

Take a look at the number of movies that involve Satanism.

In "The Exorcist," it is the tremendous power

of the devil himself controlling a little girl's body

against the will of a priest.

I love films about possession and evil.

Movies like "Rosemary's Baby"...

This is no dream! This is really happening!

The power of Christ compels you!

- ..."The Exorcist"... - It's all for you!

...and a personal favorite of mine, "The Omen,"

sparked a cultural wildfire.

But they weren't just about the supernatural horror.

They were stories about regular, everyday people

thrust into something they couldn't explain.

And that's terrifying. It hits you on a primal level.

"The Exorcist" was based on the true case of Roland Doe,

a boy in the 1940s who allegedly became possessed

after using a Ouija board.

His story spread, sparking a debate.

Was it possession or something else?

By fictionalizing Doe's story into "The Exorcist,"

filmmakers took that fear and amplified it,

shaping a generation into thinking

that anything strange could be a sign of the devil.

Oh, God, son of God. Unconquered might!

How many exorcisms have you performed yourself?

I've been doing it for about five years now

and about 20 a year, so it's about 100.

There's been an uptick of supposed possession cases

over the past 20 years or so here in the United States,

so much so that the Vatican

has just about quintupled

the number of church-sanctioned exorcists here in the U.S.

It is deeply controversial, and yet word

from a conference in Italy is that more priests

are to be trained in exorcism.

I have the feeling in my hands.

I didn't move them myself.

They were moved for me.

Rest in peace...

I have performed what we refer to in the church as exorcism.

I've seen a woman where there was spirit

that were literally fighting her from her body...

...like fists coming out of her, so to speak,

punching me while I was praying for her.

I've spoken to people that have been controlled by evil.

Their eyes change. Their voices change.

You feel a presence.

You sense beyond the shadow of a doubt

you are not with the regular person that you know.

Tom Sullivan's found.

Wrist cut.

And then neck cut all the way to the bone.

And the head just hanging on by the neck bone.

Now, what, did the person cut his neck and then do his--

These? His hands? No.

Or do the hands first and then do-- No.

It's not possible.

There was something otherworldly about it...

as if he was controlled or possessed by a spirit.

Usually an individual gets possessed

by something that he or she has not gone looking for.

But Tommy willfully sought this experience.

So I wouldn't specifically describe it as possession.

Something takes possession of you.

It's not an invited guest.

If Tommy got in touch with something,

it was an invited guest.

When Tom wrote a pact with Satan,

it was like a legal contract, if you will.

The whole story is in the pact that he wrote.

Alright. So...

"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

and to do evil and follow you."

This is so disconcerting. To actually see it written.

When you play with evil at this level...

...and you call upon the deceiver directly

and the hounds of hell...

...they will respond.

They will respond.

Tommy, what are you doing down here?

You should be in bed.

"I will kill many Christian followers

who are serious in their religious beliefs."

Hm.

It just, uh...

It's so deliberate.

I don't know what's gotten into you.

I really don't.

It was spiritual forces...

You won't even talk to me anymore.

...that can manifest...

I'm really worried about you.

...in the physical realm.

How am I supposed to help you if you won't talk to me?

And when you make a pact with a deity...

...there has to be a sacrifice.

Die, Mother! Die!

Mother, die! Die! Die!

"Throughout my new life...

I promise to perform any satanic rituals.

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

He's giving himself, bargaining.

I mean, it's determined, even-keeled, well thought-out.

Wow.

"Exactly 20 years from this day...

...I promise to commit suicide.

At this time, I will go directly to hell

and to work with you as a demon.

I believe that evil will once again rise

and conquer the love of God."

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

He was not conscious of what he was doing

when he slit his throat.

He could be there himself,

but the entities that were there worked through him.

In fact, I wouldn't say it was a suicide.

I'd say it was a double murder.

Tom killed his mother.

But Tom was killed

by the entity that killed his mother through Tom.

Committing that you're gonna murder your family.

That's the part that gets people all freaked out.

And that's where he writes on the side,

"I've already killed my family."

I mean, it gives me chills right now,

even just reading it again.

Whew. Wow.

I haven't seen this in quite some time.

Interesting.

Hm.

You have to surmise he was definitely taken over by,

you know, an outside force, you know, the devil.

I remember, you know, being at the funeral.

You could barely even get in the church.

Everybody showed up.

I mean, the whole school was there.

Like, the whole town was there.

People that didn't even really know him, you know,

like, just in tears.

It was a combination of people just being terrified

and trying to understand stuff,

and everybody was so affected by it.

I remember when it was coming time

for him to be buried.

It's still on the increase, so keep an eye in the open...

We actually got briefed.

They wanted to let us know that these satanic cults,

if they believed that Tommy was actually possessed,

they would come to try to dig the grave up,

to take the long bones of the body

as something sacred.

I'm Gordon Coulter.

Today it's my privilege to host this program

on a little-known area in law enforcement.

It's the area of satanic cults.

There are many different satanic symbols.

And, you know, you're told when

you go to the police academy you're going to deal with

- all kinds of stuff. - ...the anarchy...

But certainly not satanic, demonic possessions.

That was not in the training.

Slayings that go unexplained.

Symbols next to victims.

Well, there's reports all the time of occult activity.

We've had reports of the youth

becoming more and more aware of this

and more and more involved.

Perhaps the most dangerous kind of devil worship

comes in the form of underground cults.

Most of them are very secretive,

usually organizing clandestine rituals in the dark of night.

Here in Northern New Jersey,

there have been cultic groups that have been active.

There was recruiting.

I believe that Tom was connected to a group

that had been involved with grooming him.

...as we welcome our dark prince.

And he was used as a tip of the sword that night by evil.

Hail Satan. Hail Satan.

This is part of a continuum...

and that Tom was only one of the players.

There's a lot more.

We're looking at a small snippet of what was taking place.

Police take away boxes

full of bones and satanic paraphernalia.

We were standing across the street,

and they brought a mannequin with blood.

Officials now think mutilated dog carcasses

found along a Millville Road may have been the work

of devil worshipers.

Connecting cults and the supernatural

in New Jersey isn't really a stretch.

The line between what's real and otherworldly

has always felt a little blurry here.

...the outline of something moving along

in the woods, kept right along the side of it.

Take the Jersey Devil, for example.

They found tracks. I found tracks.

It's one of my favorite campfire stories.

This deformed, winged child demon

with cloven hooves and a tail,

born one stormy night in Colonial America...

The footprint was where that green car is now.

...and today said to haunt the Pine Barrens.

And then there's Weird New Jersey,

a magazine which dives into the strange

and paranormal happenings around here,

feeding the public's fascination with the bizarre.

Mutilated animals showing up

by the dozens in North Bergen.

A grisly discovery in Newark.

Police found only the victim's lower torso.

When you add in the media frenzy of the time...

They use a cauldron. They use human bones.

...pouncing on stories of satanic rituals, mind control,

and dark pacts with the devil...

Well, there are a great number of people

who believe in that sort of thing.

...well, every crime, every unexplainable tragedy

seemed to be part of a much bigger, darker conspiracy.

The perfect storm of local folklore and real-life horror.

The general feeling at the time

was that there were underground satanic cults

that were looking for isolated places in the woods.

We heard there was this cult in the woods

just a couple miles out of town.

Animal sacrifices, pentagrams carved in trees and stuff.

The latest incident, the bodies of six dead animals

arranged on a pentagram.

It's an area infested with phenomenon.

It's like a crescent, from this part of Jersey

all the way to Manhattan.

It's a hotbed, if you will, for occultic activity.

Different stories and different types

of abuse and tragedies

and desecrations of sacred places...

The broken statue of the Virgin Mary

and a note that read,

"It's Satan's power which gives us strength."

...and cults.

Then he walked over to me

and dripped the blood onto me

and made the sign of a pentagram.

During the Gilded Age,

which was around the turn of the century,

this area was a playground for people from New York.

It's putting aside all worldly things

in a purely spiritual act of worship.

Groups would meet,

and they would be debaucherous, so to speak.

They would also always involve some sort of a sacrifice.

Fidelio.

If you know the film "Eyes Wide Shut"

by Stanley Kubrick,

that might give you a little context.

There was a massive estate

back at the turn of the 20th century

built by an industrialist named Richard Cross.

A bunch of freaky stuff apparently went down there.

Cross was an occultist who had varied interests,

would have these crazy parties with the elite of New York.

And apparently that's where

these satanic rituals were happening.

And then by the time we were kids,

it was just a stone shell of a once-huge mansion.

During high school,

one of those boring nights we have nothing to do...

we got our courage and we're like,

"Let's go walk through the ruins of Cross Castle,"

in the middle of the night.

It's a really cool place to visit during the day.

At night... it's terrifying.

Because, 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?

A pentagram where mutilated ducks were found.

It's very scary to think

that it's right outside your backyard.

It seems like there's a little bit more meat

on the paranormal bone in Jefferson

than other places that I've heard of.

I don't think it was unheard of

that reports of kind of strange gatherings

or gatherings in the woods.

It was a rural, suburban area.

There's thousands and thousands of acres

that most people don't access.

So it provides an area of privacy.

A lot of places where people could get off on their own

if they were doing rituals.

I know of at least one, personally, that I documented.

A kind of occult type of scene.

Candles and...

Laying on the ground,

there was half a coconut.

And I saw that these look like bandanas

that had been around somebody's head and on

and taken off and tossed.

And there were some, uh...

hair remains, like pieces of animals.

We say, oh, this is kind of weird, you know?

Bits and pieces around.

It was a little spooky because it seemed to be so fresh.

Somehow an animal

apparently played into this belief.

I had a really strange experience.

I don't-- It's weird even talking about it.

So, Clinton Road is just outside of town.

No streetlights.

Just inky, terrifying blackness

with woods forever on both sides.

People were scared to go into the area.

It was deemed to be the most haunted road in America...

by people in North Jersey.

And there were a lot of rumors

and a lot of ghost stories associated with Clinton Road.

But I'm not really a believer of that, right?

Me and two buddies of mine...

This is like a year and a half later, you know, after Tom.

And we're walking down this path into the woods.

And...

crossing in front of us was...

...a cloaked figure,

like, wearing a mask.

Like, what the quintessential Satan worshiper would look like.

And we stopped dead in our tracks.

No one was breathing.

I look at him. I'm like, "Dude, did you s--

Like, am I the only one?" And they're like,

"We gotta get the fuck out of here," right?

And we just sprinted back to the car.

And we're like, "Was that real?"

So we-- you had to have this--

an honest moment with ourselves

that, like, all that we'd been hearing

that we'd been dismissing to religious zealots is true.

Then it's like... who's involved in it?

Is it our teachers or the guy at the deli?

Is it our mailman? Like, who is it?

Everybody could be a suspect.

So that was a very sobering moment.

Well, those ceremonies sometimes involve the sharing

of animal blood to gain power, they say.

But cult members believe their strength

really comes from secrecy.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt,

there was stuff going on.

And I believe that Tom was involved

with cultic activities in the wooded areas

months, months before the murder.

Tom was never the puppet master.

He was always a puppet.

One of the bigger fears was that there was

an underground satanistic cult within the community,

and they were afraid that their children

were gonna get involved in it.

To this day, it hasn't been proven.

If there was, it certainly wasn't as serious

as what Tommy Sullivan was involved in

because nobody else killed their mother in that manner

or violent way that he did.

There was nothing that showed that he was involved

in any type of rituals other than what he was

learning about through his own reading.

There were enough skeptics

that it certainly kept the conversation going.

There are things that can't be explained.

I would tell them, "I feel the same way."

We had a 14-year-old boy write, and this is what he did.

And that's not to say that the devil made him do it.

It's just that whatever he bought into

in that belief system somehow validated these...

feelings of anger and hostility.

So what we wanted to know was, how did this come about

and what was going on with this family.

1988, I was 19 years old.

I was neighbors of the Sullivan family.

And the Sullivans were like family to me.

I may have bought the satanic thing

for a very short period of time because that was the narrative,

but there's no way.

I think that the police didn't do

very much investigation at all, and I just don't know

that he would have killed his own mother.

Especially as brutally as that was.

Because I believe Tommy Jr. is innocent

of what he's being accused of...

and what he's been accused of since 1988.

And it has bothered me for years and years and years

that, you know, he was depicted as a murderer.

There's just no way.