The Dark Truth Behind Wheatus' Teenage Dirtbag

May 2024 · 2 minute read

In 1984, a troubled 17-year-old from Newport New York was arrested for a harrowing drug-induced murder. Wheatus frontman Brandon Brown was just 10 years old at the time — and the murder occurred in the woods directly behind his house.

The killer was a young man named Ricky Kasso, a disturbed teenager who was heavily into LSD. According to the book "The Acid King" (via Rolling Stone), On the night of the murder Kasso had been tripping with his friends in the woods, and while high, got into a fight with one of the other boys present, Gary Lauwers. During the scuffle, Kasso killed Lauwers by stabbing him multiple times in the back and face. Aside from its sheer brutality, the murder case was particularly memorable because Kasso had screamed "Say you love Satan!" at the boy as he was killing him. The murder was discovered some weeks later but Kasso hanged himself in jail before ever standing trial.

Although in reality, the murder was simply the act of one disturbed individual under the influence of powerful drugs, at the time there was a lot of misreporting on the case. While it was true that Kasso had a strange obsession with Satan and liked to get high in cemeteries, the media reported he was part of a full-blown Satanic cult. The Washington Post for example described Kasso as belonging to a devil-worshipping society "The Knights of the Black Circle," a group the paper claimed had more than 20 members. Such a cult never existed — but it made a good story and seemed to fit with contemporary anxieties about Satanism.

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