Gaming, Goth and Satanism - Crossing over to the Dark Side: The Murder of Pamela Vitale

Daniel Horowitz, defense attorney and television commentator, came home after work to find his wife, Pamela Vitale, brutally murdered inside the entrance to their temporary trailer on the property of the dream home they were building. She had been blodgeoned some thirty-nine times and the killer had carved a Goth signature into her back. A neighbor, sixteen-year-old Scott Dyleski was arrested just days later. Should this have been a huge surprise? Dyleski had been coming to school dressed in black, wearing the trademark long black trench coat of angry and antisocial teens, reading The Satanic Bible, and claiming other people's judgments would not affect him. I guess he was right about that.

Why do parents and school personnel not take seriously these children who are becoming disaffected human beings? Why do they wait until the kids are seriously bent before attempting any intervention and, worse, why do they simply shrug and consider it a stage the preteen or teen is going through until reality hits them in the face? The kids who shot up Columbine and alleged killers like Scott Dyleski didn't turn vicious overnight. They started sliding downhill a long time before they became totally contemptuous of the world and hateful of its inhabitants. By the time they start misbehaving seriously, doing drugs, running away from home, ending up in psych wards, and planning attacks on their fellow man, it is far too late to really fix them. You can only hold your breath and hope they find nonlethal avenues to express their contempt for society.

Are there early warning signs? Sure there are, but we often minimize these signs as youthful explorations and such. Forays into the worlds of gaming, Goth, and Satanism are three warning bells parents and teachers ought to take very seriously. Gaming, while it can be an enjoyable mix of strategy and fantasy, can also be a signal of a child wanting to go to a place where he can shape rules to his own liking and experience a sense of the power and control he has failed to garner in the real world. Some will say (read: gamers), isn't it a little paranoid and ridiculous to disparage gaming in this way? Haven't we forever enjoyed a good scare or a little titillation by confronting creepy things? For many gamers, playing such games may indeed be no more than a diversion and a challenge to enjoy with like-minded friends. While this may be true for a good portion of those involved, this doesn't mean there are not those who use the game to nurture their increasingly violent thinking pattern. There is a major difference between chess, stragegy games like Diplomacy, and role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachi. Chess and Diplomacy do not venture to the dark side (although some might claim Diplomacy is about politics and war and this might train youths for violence.) Role playing games, however, tend to take the players into a very dark and grotesque imaginary horror world - one of vampires and ghouls and other evil demonic creatures. When the images for the game include blood dripping off of skulls, one can hardly claim that the game is a totally healthy and uplifting experience.

I remember growing up with the vanpire soap opera, "Dark Shadows." I loved it and looked forward to being creeped out every aftrnoon by Barnabas Collins and other scary monsters that lurked about at a safe television distance. However, I did not identify with the monsters. I did not wish to be like them. Today, we have a new breed of teenager who wishes to revel in the dark, demented regions of the psyche. Their way of expressing discontent lies in groveling in hideously ugly landscapes. The world of Goth, the type of world expressed in the writings of Ann Rice novels, is not a hell but a heaven to these disaffected young people. Many teens would argue I am being harsh (as my hate mail can attest to.) They do not see anything wrong with lyrics in music that call women bitches and suggest one kill their parents. They do not see anything wrong with visuals ov hacked bodies and blood drenched skeletons. This is exactly the problem. Healthy, happy teenagers do not find these images and fantasies pleasing. I don't give a crap what line vampire-obsessed kids give me. Vampires are nothing but serial killers and represent a sad, evil being that destroys others because he has a pathological desire to hold onto life in any form and at any cost to innocent beings. This is evil. Kids who think this is a cool lifestyle and look up to vampires as mentors have problems, serious problems.

So, does this kind of attitude and its attendant bizarre behaviors show up a day before the kid murders his neighbor or guns down his schoolmates? Obviously not. Signs of serious discontent and anger would have spanned back as much as a decade. Kids who are healthy psychologically might dabble a wee bit with gaming and Goth and even the concepts of Satanism, but these inquiries will be more of the curious nature rather than the obsessive. Kids suffering from a pathological decline are going to search out and embrace evil in one of its many forms. Parents will see this increasing focus on the dark side and obverse an increasing gulf between the child and healthy pastimes. Gaming that changes from a way to kill a Saturday afternoon to a way to kill will be noted in the inability to leave the game fantasy behind when one leaves the table. Goth that becomes an everyday lifestyle of dark clothes, dark thoughts, and an extremely dark outlook on life (including a very abnormally intense interest in death and destruction) is no longer just a way to express minor angst. When Satanism becomes a way of looking at the world, a world without right and wrong, a world where good is really evil and evil is really good, this immersion in evil is more than just an attempt to shock one's parents.

Kids heading down these routes usually believe the world is full of hypocrites and life as they know it is a sick joke; therefore, doing the exact opposite of what is considered decent and right is to laugh in the face of those hypocrites and show them how little these kids believe in adult mores. These kids are not simply explorers of interesting ideas and devil's advocates (no pun intended). They are telling you they hate you, your life, and your world. This message is a sign of severe depression, possible suicidal tendencies, and, worse yet, homicidal tendencies. Leaving that kind of teenager alone in his room with his heavy metal music, allowing him to dress in Goth and hang out with likeminded kids at school, and chalking his underlining of Anton LaVey's principles in his bedside copy of The Satanic Bible up to teenage hormones is tantamount to child neglect. If you are a parent with a junior or senior high school kid behaving like this, do us a favor, and pull your head out of the sand. If you don't, we will all live to regret it.

Likewise, the rest of society needs to pull their heads ouf of the sand pit as well. Schools need to stop catering to the poor behaviors of children and parents need to stop penalizing school administrators and teachers for expecting their children to show respect. All parents need to stop their children from viewing violent pornography on the Internet (yeah, your parental controls are not worth squat), and stop leaving their kids alone with television sets as babysitters. Parents and all adults need to help children build lives of worth and beauty. If kids turn into killers, we may not be all that innocent ourselves of aiding and abetting these crimes.

As for the victims of these killer kids, it is too late for them to do much about the situation. We can Monday night quarterback and say that Horowitz shouldn't have become involved in legal counsel with these neighbors, or that Dan and Pamela should have put armed guards at their residence considering the isolation and opulence of the grand mansion they were building, or that Pamela shouldn't have opened the door to a relative stranger. But, the fact is, I have had neighbors who are pretty questionable and I can't hide from them every day of my life, and I open my door daily because it is the only way to get in and out of the house. We can do our best to protect ourselves from ticking time bombs, but after we take reasonable precautions like not hitchhiking or jogging after dark, we can do little about the fact that we are going to be in the proximity of possible dangerous offenders.

We can, however, work in our society to stop the increasing number of psychopaths and disturbed individuals we are creating through the neglect and abuse of our country's children, and by working to reduce disturbing behaviors and activities of adults (like pedophilia, pornography, drug, and alcohol abuse) that negatively affect our children's lives and psyches. If we fail to do this, how can we tell our children we love them and be angry if they call us hypocrites?

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