Original subtitles

Something unusual happened to my daughter

when she was probably about 8-years old.

Wow. It's hard to talk about.

Okay. Hold on.

So my daughter said that there had been an apparition.

Christina.

An apparition of a boy that came in her room.

She said he was wearing these overalls.

He had kind of an impish smile.

And what occurred was that this little boy

would be transformed into this character

that was horribly evil.

He started to laugh.

Go to the window.

I thought maybe I heard something,

something moving in her room.

It's okay.

And I got up out of my bed to look.

Now fly.

She was gonna kill herself.

Christina!

I grabbed her and had to, like, restrain her.

Are you okay?

She said, "The little boy says I have to kill myself."

I felt so powerless.

In my faith,

in Christ, and in my prayers,

I knew I was dealing with hell itself.

This was over 30 years ago.

And my daughter grew up, of course.

Whether a Satan exists is a matter of belief,

but we are certain that Satanism exists.

Recently she called me up and said, "Dad,

I watched this thing on YouTube...

'Geraldo Rivera.'"

And our own Detective Hart was on that program.

We came down here.

We found Mrs. Sullivan laying on the floor.

And there was this kid, Tom Sullivan.

Tommy Sullivan had written this contract with the devil.

She sees the face.

And she recognizes him as the boy that showed up in her room.

The same kind of smirk and everything.

She said, "That's him."

My daughter would have not recognized Tom

at the age of 8, because Tom had been dead for years already.

She didn't know anything about Tom,

and to this day, she will tell you...

..."The little boy that appeared in my room,

that was Tommy Sullivan."

When something traumatic happens,

something you can't wrap your head around,

it's natural to reach for the oldest story in the book...

...good vs. evil...

God vs. the devil.

It gives the horror a shape, a villain, something to blame.

But that doesn't consider the real-world demons

that live within us all.

It's a shield against an even more violent foe.

It's realizing that the monster was never hiding under the bed.

It was always much closer than that.

Everybody that I've ever talked to about Tommy

and about the whole situation definitely has questions.

The part that stood out to me the most

was that he killed himself that way.

Both of his wrists were slit.

And then the way it was described to me

is that from ear to ear he was slit, like,

almost, like, basically through his throat.

Like, it was deep.

I had the exact same pocketknife.

It's not a big knife.

If you were gonna hold it,

the handle is about the size of your hand,

and then the blade would be sticking out

maybe an inch to an inch and a half.

So he wouldn't have been able to hold the knife

to cut the next wrist.

And if you slash... slash your throat,

well, you're not gonna be able to do either.

So, I mean, not to make it a math problem,

but the order of operations just doesn't make any sense.

The devil possessing you, giving you superhuman strength

was the explanation that put that to bed to everybody.

I understand there may have been some Satanic,

uh, indications in that letter, as well.

That's true. That's correct.

Even as a 13-year-old trying to process it,

like, the devil doing it just didn't...

It's not really a satisfying explanation,

and it just leaves you really, like, unsettled

and really uneasy.

It's 30-something years ago.

It didn't make any sense at the time.

And, like, looking back,

I don't know anybody that thinks that Tommy killed himself.

It's just...

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.

A neighbor down the street told me Tommy Sullivan

used to cut his grass.

He said he was an all-American boy.

He said nobody... and I mean nobody...

can figure out what went wrong.

Satanism made little Tommy kill his mother so brutally.

Yeah, I don't buy that.

I just don't.

I was there just to learn.

I was just there to find out why.

Why? What happened here?

I did not talk to Tom Sr.

Trust me, I tried really, really hard to talk to him.

I tried and tried and tried.

He did not want to talk to me.

So here I was going to look into, like,

why and what happened and really,

you know, dig as deeply as I could.

But it wasn't an easy dig.

I got a lot of, "I can't talk to you,"

"I don't want to talk to you."

"Why?" "I'm sorry. I just can't talk to you"...

as if there was this big secret, which made me even,

you know, more curious.

Like, what's being hidden here?

I remember my mother not being a fan of Tom Sr.

My folks remember Tom Sr. was heavy-handed.

I used to occasionally catch a beating

from my father, obviously.

I mean, it was the 1980s

and I was a pain in the ass,

but Tommy was in trouble a lot,

either grounded or afraid

that his father was gonna give him a few cracks

when he got home.

I was able to rationalize it at the time, like,

you know, that's just what happens, you know?

But looking back, it definitely was a different level.

Tom Sr., he had a temper.

I guess that was pretty well known.

Detective Pell related to me, and one of the people

that he had spoken with from the neighborhood

described Tom Sr. as having some type of argument

or something with Tom Jr.

Kind of got loud and stuff.

Kind of an aggressive type of situation.

Went unreported to law enforcement,

but nothing was ever done.

There were people around the neighborhood

that voiced concerns about Tommy and his father getting into it,

but certainly nobody's picking up the phone,

calling 911,

um, and didn't.

When I first started looking at what was going on

with this family,

one of the things that I recall

didn't involve Tommy or Tommy's room,

but it was Brian and Brian's room.

Most of us, if you had brothers and sisters growing up,

remember putting a sign on your door

that said, "Do not enter," or whatever or something like that.

"Keep out."

That's until your mother and father said, "Nah",

we don't do that here," and take it down.

The thing that struck me was that on the door

to Brian's bedroom,

it said, "Stay out or I will kill you."

And I think it speaks to a level of violence

that I hate to say was acceptable.

It certainly wouldn't have flown in our home.

Um, and I think most parents would say the same thing.

That... In my opinion,

this was an indicator of the family situation,

the dynamics.

I always had this feeling that Tom was mad at his mom

for not protecting them from the dad.

And I remember having the sense

that his mother didn't step in to protect him and Brian

as much as he would have liked that she would have.

Like, she should have been there to cushion that blow.

I hesitate to judge a person's home,

and there are factors in every home that have issues,

and parents have issues.

But I don't think there was good communication.

In an article that was written subsequent to this,

the father had been quoted as saying,

"My wife was overbearing

and she's too strict."

And maybe she was too strict.

Betty Anne is the one who believed

that parochial education was good.

I don't think that the dad had signed up for that,

but he just went along with it.

What little I gathered from talking to neighbors

is that this boy,

I think he just felt as if he couldn't breathe...

...as if he had no say in that family,

because Mom knows better and Dad knows better than you do.

And if you are miserable, well, you'll get over it.

And he wasn't getting over it.

He was miserable. It wasn't a fad.

It wasn't just a little period of time.

He was miserable.

There's piety that's good,

and there's piety that is self-serving.

I'm very influenced by my tradition

for daily Mass and prayers four times a day.

That's part of who I am.

But it does not absolve me

from the realities I see around me.

I can't just pray them up to God.

I believe that she was praying for her family

and for herself and not seeing.

And we all have blind spots and we all have things

we don't want to see.

So obviously she was struggling

and saw things perhaps that she didn't know how to deal with.

I remember when she came to talk to me

and I told her, "The children are worried about your son."

I said, "Some of what he's talking about"...

I think it's something you might be interested in.

"...is about Satan and his power."

I said, "I don't know everything,

but I really encourage you to talk to your son

with your husband over the next few days."

And she said to me, "Where's the rule book?"

And I said, "Rule book?" She said, "Yes.

How do I raise children? I don't know how to do it."

I said, "There's no rule book."

I had never been asked about a rule book.

And I'd been doing the work for a long time.

No parent ever said, "Give me the blueprint.

Give me the..."

So that spoke volumes to me.

If you are asking for a rule book,

you're in a lot of conflict.

That was Thursday.

He had killed his mother on Saturday night.

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

Truth be told, I thought it was my fault

because I asked her to talk to him.

So my first thought was, "This is on you."

Something horrible happened in that house.

I had a lot of questions and a lot of... a lot of confusion.

I just know my gut feeling that something didn't add up.

It wasn't right.

I felt that the father was suspicious

and maybe that knew more than he had told us.

I mean, I wasn't saying for sure that he did anything.

I don't know that for a fact, but I felt

that he seriously needed to be looked at as a suspect.

For a father to draw a conclusion that quickly,

to go from knowing nothing to saying, "Get my son,"

it just didn't make sense.

That's what really threw me off.

How do you know that? You were sleeping.

And now you know your son murdered

your wife and his mother?

It just didn't seem right to me.

And how did this kid come back to the scene

and cut his own throat

with all the officers there and everything?

And he wasn't there when we started the search.

Something isn't right.

Like, how did he reappear right there?

The thing about the Tommy situation is that...

I don't know that anyone's ever gonna know

what actually happened,

but I just don't see it as possible that Tommy did it.

It feels to me that what makes much more sense

is that Tom Sr. is the one that killed Tommy.

I remember, like, early in the morning

writing my report.

My report originally expressed

that I felt the father was a suspect, strongly felt that.

And then if not, he knew a lot more than he told us.

The chief told me I was wrong,

that it was a homicide-suicide.

I couldn't comprehend how we'd determined that that quick.

Murder, suicide.

It was almost like the police couldn't comprehend it either,

but this seemed like it made sense,

so "let's just do this and get it done with" type thing.

And it just never felt right.

I think that's part of the reason

why it's just never really gone away.

I've certainly heard that Tom Jr. couldn't have done this,

that it was Tom Sr.

I again look at it from an investigator's standpoint.

I've never seen any evidence that would make that connection.

The police didn't think it was the father.

When something is incomprehensible,

theories are always around.

They're always around.

When you don't understand something,

you got to come up with something

that to you makes sense.

'Cause a 14-year-old boy brutally killing his mom?

Unh-unh. It's got to be the husband, right?

That's usually the suspect,

so it must have been the father, even though it makes no sense.

Tom.

On the night of the murder,

Thomas Sullivan Sr. provided a detailed account

of his whereabouts to police.

He stated that, "He had not been feeling well during the day."

He was awakened by the sound of a smoke alarm,

and upon getting up to investigate,

he hears the front door slam closed.

As he exits the bedroom,

he observes a small fire on the living room floor

and begins to stomp it out

and uses a couch pillow to beat at the flames.

He is confused.

He went across the street to the Eastman home,

banged on the door, and requested help from Mr. Eastman.

He went into the house.

He's screaming for his family.

At that time, the younger son

comes out of his bedroom,

and Tom asked him if he saw his brother and his mother.

And he said, "Yeah, I saw Tommy

and he was covered in blood."

Brian's interaction with Tom Sr. Is just one more piece

of the puzzle that made Tommy a kind of

a prime suspect or person of interest.

The night that this happened,

there was certainly enough bloodshed in the house.

If Tom Sr. was responsible for that,

we would have had blood on his clothes,

blood on his hands, blood on his face.

And when the call went into the arrival,

couldn't have been more than a few minutes.

The idea that he, what...

He would have killed these two people,

been covered in blood,

and then run into the house and took a shower.

And certainly,

if Tom Sr. had been responsible for killing Tommy Jr.,

there would have been two sets of footprints

going out to the body, not just one.

And it would have been the same thing.

There would have been a lot of blood.

I think people just have a hard time accepting

that that level of violence could be perpetrated

by a 14-year-old.

And people like to jump to a conclusion.

"Tommy couldn't have done that.

It had to be somebody else," you know.

"It had to be somebody else."

Well, the evidence in this case

didn't support anybody else but Tommy.

Within a few months,

final autopsy reports came back to say

that Tommy Sullivan Jr. was not under the influence of drugs,

and that the same knife was used to kill

both himself and his mother.

So the case was officially closed.

Murder-suicide.

But the questions have always lingered.

I can't explain everything that happened.

I can explain some of it. I can accept some of it.

But I don't have any better an idea of what happened.

There are things that can't be explained

and died with people that are no longer with us.

In a basic police report,

there should be the primary questions... Who, what,

where, when, and why?

But we've never had the why,

and we never got to ask those questions

or come up with answers.

What cases like this bring up

is, we often don't know

what's going on inside of somebody's head.

My area of expertise is kids who kill and parricide,

which is kids who kill parents.

The killing of a parent is very, very personal.

Killing the people that gave you life...

That's why it horrifies people.

What we know about Tommy is, he was a healthy kid.

Good family, good community, athlete, Catholic school.

He was kind of privileged in a lot of ways,

but he's willing to trade all of that to be with Satan.

So what was going on with that individual or in that home

that things could have ended so badly?

Could there be, for example, abuse?

Maybe.

Could he have been angry? Yes.

But if it were simply a matter of responding to violence

that he had experienced,

I don't think we'd have this Satanic element involved.

Once you mix in the Satanic involvement,

you can't say, "Well, it was only the abuse that drove this."

When you start making pacts with Satan,

it's a whole different ball game.

Tommy was involved in reading, drawings,

learning about Satanism

to the extent of making what he believed

to be a pact with Satan.

I mean, that's extreme.

Tommy's drawings bespeak anger,

but there's a lot of adolescent boys filled with anger.

You could probably find drawings like that

in the notebooks of a vast number of adolescent boys

from that era

who never acted out on any of this stuff and never would.

But he did act.

I drew in my notebooks the same way he did,

and I have to confess,

I feel a certain affection and sympathy for Tommy Jr.

He went down one path.

I went down another.

What was it in his life

that went in such a violent direction

that my life did not go in?

With Tommy, we have to ask,

why did it take a violent turn?

When I look at those drawings

and I read those letters to Satan,

and I look at the background...

...the strongest evidence from a clinical perspective

is that Tommy, at 14,

was severely mentally ill...

You do not have a life outside of this house!

...and experiencing likely some type of psychosis.

Why can't you just be a good boy?

Like I said...

Psychosis means being out of touch with reality,

having delusions and bizarre beliefs

with no basis in reality.

Whether it was a psychotic episode

or childhood schizophrenia...

...without treatment, it's a ticking time bomb.

In the '80s, mental health was a taboo subject.

Therapy was something that the rich did,

or if you had suffered a traumatic event,

it wasn't something that was openly discussed.

If something was off,

if you were struggling,

if you were feeling dark or angry or just lost,

who did you turn to?

Your friends? They'd make jokes about it.

Adults? They'd tell you to toughen up.

There were no resources or guidance

for dealing with those feelings.

So you kept them to yourself...

buried deep down.

But here's the thing.

When you keep stuff like that bottled up,

it doesn't stay quiet.

It festers.

And when it's left to rot in the dark,

it poisons everything it touches.

It's my belief

that psychosis could lead an individual to do such an extreme

and unthinkable act.

I told you to go to bed hours ago.

Tommy was so immersed...

I'm going down here, Tommy.

...in Satanism and destructive themes.

Leave me alone!

If we take, you know, the fact that his thinking is disordered,

which is part of psychosis...

He has delusions.

I don't know what to do anymore.

You do not have a life outside of this house!

In this case, the delusions

are that he's in a pact with Satan...

How are we supposed to help him?

He won't talk to me.

...and that Satan is gonna reward him,

and, in turn, for power,

he's gonna do the killing of the family.

Tommy killed his mother with a Boy Scout knife.

Boy Scout knives are pretty small,

so that suggests to me

a lot of effort to get those kinds of wounds

with a little knife...

which suggests a lot of anger.

He may have been dissociated,

which means that when somebody is so overwhelmed with feeling

that they just keep going,

it's almost like automatic pilot.

The aggression fuels the release of stress hormones.

The cycle then propels more aggression,

and people don't stop until typically, they're exhausted.

The brother said Tommy was very fidgety.

He's hyped-up. Well, I mean, I'd expect that.

I'm thinking he's just, like, on automatic pilot,

and that would fit in with the dissociation.

Sort of like, you know, just moving,

just going through motions.

When I heard Tommy committed suicide...

And it's actually not uncommon in cases of parricide

that the assailant will kill himself afterwards.

When I was informed about how he killed himself,

I'm thinking of the intensity and the pain,

which would be extreme.

When somebody is really dissociated,

the stress level is so acute.

He's not gonna be in good contact

with feelings and thoughts.

He's just not in good reality contact.

He's just not there.

They say he fought with his mother, then stabbed her.

I think he was a very, very sick boy.

Wo He went into a rage, stabbed his mother to death.

I know that

This boy committed murder.

That's horrible.

But I feel for him.

I feel for this little boy.

He needed help.

He needed help.

And obviously, he didn't get it.

It just makes me so sad to think

that a 14-year-old could have been so...

...haunted.

Not realizing he had any lifelines.

That makes me very sad.

Nobody realized that he was in crisis.

And as a parent now, for me,

that's far more terrifying than any alleged demonic possession

or Satanic influence.

Washington Township residents packed an auditorium tonight

to hear more about Satanism.

Did the Satanic Panic or some of the other cases

that were floating around at the time kind of feed into this?

I would say probably yes.

The Satanic message is clear,

both in the album covers and in the lyrics.

People in the community

were looking for something to blame.

I think it's a problem.

You can call it the boogeyman.

You can call it the devil or you can call...

something to hang a label on,

to blame for what happened.

You can't prevent mental illness.

You can hope to treat it, you know,

but you can't prevent it.

But Satanism?

The question in everyone's mind seems to be,

how widespread is this Satan business?

It makes you wonder, you know,

if it can't happen to your child.

Humanity enjoys looking for an enemy,

but whole books have been written

discrediting the Satanic Panic.

Most infamously, Geraldo Rivera spoke about it.

It's teenagers who are most likely to fall

under the spell of this jumble of dark,

violent emotions called Satanism...

...and has recently apologized

for having participated in the Satanic Panic,

blaming Satan or the devil.

Satanism gives people a false sense of calm

that they have an enemy that is easy to identify.

Blame it on horror movies, Ozzy, and Judas Priest.

It's much easier.

But a broken home with an alleged abused kid,

a lonely child...

That's a story that we should be looking to learn from.

Whether you believe in occultism,

whether you believe that Satan has power,

whether you believe that Satan can give you the things

that he's promising these kids,

that's immaterial, my friend,

because they believe it.

Is Satanism inherently dangerous?

Probably not.

But if that becomes one's solution to problems,

that's... that's dangerous.

You can't take Tommy out of the times.

This was part of the culture.

And it wasn't just the pop culture.

The fact that Tommy was raised in a Catholic family,

I think, is important

because Satan was something that existed.

So it was easy to understand

how a mentally ill juvenile with a lot of anger

believed he was writing to Satan.

I think Tom Jr. tried God

and didn't get the answers he wanted,

and so he turned to another source of power.

Later that week...

I'm so sorry.

...Tom Sr. and Brian came to talk to me

about what had happened.

No one should ever have to go through this.

I was afraid to see the father

because of my feeling

that perhaps I had caused this.

I had asked Betty Anne to talk to Tom Jr. about Satan.

Did she talk to him and those were the consequences?

We didn't listen to you.

Tom said to me right away...

I wish I had listened.

..."You told us and we didn't listen."

And then I knew my first thought was wrong,

that it was my fault.

That was, for me, a graced moment

because he was able to free me

from what I thought perhaps had happened.

He gave me that gift, and I was so grateful.

I just feared for Brian.

Brian was barely able to function.

I found out that he saw his brother

after he killed his mother

with his mother's blood on his hands.

Tommy?

He did say this to me...

"My brother told me to go back to bed."

"And the look on his face, I went back to bed."

I can only imagine his horror.

The demons that must have haunted him about all of it.

I couldn't even imagine living Brian's life.

Brian had to live with the fact that the only details

that are known up until the last minute of Tommy's life

before he dies are in Brian's head.

He's the last person.

I mean, I don't know how you would live with that.

He lost his mother. He lost his brother.

I can't imagine that he wasn't terribly damaged by this.

Just look at this case

and it's just layers and layers and layers of sadness.

The first thing I thought about when I heard about Brian was...

I'm like, "Does this ever go away?"

A small new Jersey community stunned

by a Satanic murder-suicide.

When a person passes on,

the energy of the individual still remains.

Setting fire to the family house

in an attempt to kill his brother and his father

were all linked to Satanism.

Spirits have to go somewhere.

They just don't disappear.

They wreak havoc in other lives.

What occurred in Morris County

on that night in 1988...

Washington Township residents

packed an auditorium tonight to hear more about Satanism.

...not only affected Tom and his mother

and his brother and his dad...

I can tell you that each person

whose life was touched by that event

carries it to this day.

Probably the hardest thing about this story

is just the effects on everyone.

It's a small town.

I mean, this... this will live on

in the fabric of their community,

I would think, forever.

I am haunted.

Haunted in the sense that it's 35 years

that I haven't been able to shake it.

You know?

What happened to me as a 19-year old boy

being put in that situation,

it really stuck with me.

I had a tough time.

I couldn't sleep.

I wanted things to be good for them.

Yeah, it was tough.

Not many years ago,

I recall a conversation with Chuckie and how it affected him.

He apparently struggled with issues in his adult life.

You would have to think that it would have been difficult.

To be honest with you, I lost touch with Chuck,

but I remember him being hit.

Like, it resonated differently with him,

like it resonated with me.

For me, it was 'cause he was my neighbor next door,

and because we had hung out

and he and Chuckie had had that relationship

where it definitely resonated strongly with him.

I just recently learned that Chuck also committed suicide.

I was surprised and saddened to hear that he'd passed away.

You don't see those things often happen

in small communities like this,

and when they do, they're not easily forgotten.

You wonder how many of the other friends

are sitting around all these years later still, you know,

thinking about, "Well, maybe if I had said something."

Or maybe they just buried it. Who knows?

Everybody knew that I was the one

that found the bodies in town.

So people would ask me and I would just,

"Yeah, yeah, it was terrible," you know.

Like, how do you talk to somebody that didn't see it?

You know what I mean?

As far as what I saw...

...you know, I kind of, like, blocked that out.

I don't know. Just kind of buried it.

Like, I never got no counseling or nothing.

Now that I'm a born-again Christian, it makes more sense.

I truly believe now that Satan played a part in it.

That wasn't God's work.

Everything evil that happens, Satan's involved with.

I mean, you can call him whatever you want.

Um, if you really, truly believe in God,

then you believe in Satan.

You can't believe in one without the other

if you read the Bible.

The community of Jefferson

is still haunted by this mystery.

Why did Tommy kill his mother and himself?

Was it the devil whispering promises of power and violence?

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

would like to make a solemn exchange with you."

Do I believe in the possibility of supernatural forces?

Sign below.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

There are dark forces out there,

and there are people that are gonna succumb to...

you know, to the devil.

Sometimes evil wins.

Or was it a mind pushed to the edge...

Satanism? Really?

...breaking under the weight

of something we can't fully know or understand?

Leave me alone!

The really scary part of it for me

is that a 14-year-old kid could be angry enough to do this.

There's true evil out there.

It doesn't have to be, you know, supernatural or anything.

I think he was a very, very sick boy.

And he needed help.

You don't even talk to me anymore.

This story has captured the imagination of people

trying to understand or explain the unexplainable.

'Cause no one can really explain the nature of rage...

...or what's really going on in the mind of a 14-year old kid.

What keeps us all up at night

is that no matter how safe our world feels around us,

there's always that malevolence creeping in the shadows.

And you never know when it's going to strike.

But why the Sullivans?

The truth is, we'll never know,

because the only person that can give us answers is Tommy.

And he has disappeared

into the silence of his own tragic end.