On November 30, 1990, Tammy Whittington, fourteen years old at the time, was raped and strangled by two teens, who then burned her body. A big part of the problem with this case is the nature of the people involved. Tammy’s sister’s name was Angie.

Tammy and Angie ran away many times during the past three years, Whittington said. The mother, who divorced her husband in 1979 and moved her family to Port Orange from New Hampshire, said she fought constantly with her daughters. She said they were uncontrollable. Complaints from Tammy led her mother to face child abuse charges in criminal court last October.

Ok, this is not a good start.

Ok, I was wrong. This is a terrible start. It gets worse…

At least five police officers had told Tammy Whittington that she would end up dead on the streets if she didn’t stop running away from home, her mother said. She started running away from home when she was eleven.

 So what responsibility did Tammy’s mother have in this, when not being accused of child abuse?

When the body was discovered, I knew deep down it was her, said Whittington, who blamed state social workers and police for not doing enough to prevent her daughters from repeatedly running away.

The only way cops and shrinks could stop them from running away would be to send them to a locked facility. The problem lay with the mother, something she wasn’t prepared to accept. Tammy was last seen on December 1, 1990. She had run away and was seen making a phone call at a gas station. Hunters found her skeletonized remains on January 13, 1991.

Yes, the crime was horrific. This is highlighted all the more when it is realized that one of her killers had sex with her corpse. Set the scene…

Four bottles of wine! Early in the morning! And she’s fourteen. Three glasses of wine and I will hopefully make it to my bed without falling and breaking my neck.

Who committed the murders? There was really little doubt…

…John Linssens and Judson Ronald Vedder, both seventeen years old. This immediately leads to the question…why?

So, as we’ve seen so many times, we play the satanism card. The idea? Something came to exercise a terrible influence over them…so in a certain way, the two killers were being controlled, offering the possibility that they would not be held totally to blame. There’s a built-in sort-of-salvation in committing horrible crimes.

In his affidavit, Linssens told police of playing Dungeons and Dragons with Vedder and other friends. Players of the fantasy game make decisions concerning the death and resurrection of their assumed characters.

The murder was related to Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy game set in medieval times in which players pretend to be wizards and other characters in search of treasure, Linssens told authorities. Setting Tammy’s body on fire was part of Satanic ritual, he said.

Authorities in Florida linked D&D to the death of a 14-year-old girl who police say was lured into the woods by two teen-age boys, strangled, then set on fire. Last week, two 17-year-old avid players of D&D were indicted on first-degree murder charges for the death of Tammy Whittington.

"They went over the line with this thing," said Port Orange, Fla., Sheriff's Department detective Robert Vail. "They were so deeply involved that when the opportunity presented itself, they planned this stalking-type thing, like they did in the game."

So yet again, satanism, by which I assume devil worship, as opposed to the satanism of the Church of Satan, has no connection with Dungeons & Dragons. In the case of Linssens, he was piling up excuses for what he did…satanism…D&D…I’m not really a bad person. If the satanism card doesn’t work, I’ll try the D&D card…after all, Pat Pulling continually reinforces the connection between terrible actions and a role-playing game. So, it’s worth a shot. Who was Vedder?

…drop-out housebreakers…in other words…losers with no future.

The youths had become chronic truants and runaways. They were living in tents and played with others as commandos in the boggy forest, carrying weapons, mounting training missions and setting traps.

They had graduated into home and car burglaries and modeled themselves after the Latin Kings street gang. Teens were spending so much time playing D & D and in the woods that parents became concerned.

Again…losers.

…not just losers…psychopaths as well. What about the burnt sacrifice?

Officials believe Vedder and Linssens burned Whittington’s body in an attempt to destroy evidence.

And that makes a lot more sense…doesn’t it? Committing rape and murdering a child, not to mention an act of necrophilia, has nothing to do with D&D.

On October 14, 1982, a sixteen-year-old named Steven Loyacano committed suicide…

Steven Loyacano Steven was the son of Rosemary Loyacano, the Western Regional Director for BADD. According to his mother, on KFYI radio (14 July 87), an occult recruiter carbon used D&D to lure her son into the world of Satanism. After his death on 14 October 82 of monoxide poisoning, Rosemary said she found occult books, occult pornography, symbols from black masses, including altar cloths and candles hidden in her son's room. She said that friends of his said he had engaged in "rituals and animal sacrifices." As she searched his room and looked in drawers, she found his writings which she describes as "horrible.”

Can anyone tell me what occult pornography is?

…Oh, I see. Pornography in a boy’s bedroom? That’s a new one. What Rosemary described is definitely linked to devil worship, rather than satanism. It’s actually fairly hardcore.

Rosemary Loyacano’s son, Steve, committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1982. She describes searching his room and finding angst-ridden references to Satan along with D&D materials. Like Pulling, she assembled a similar narrative of her son’s death. As she explains it, “We found out another young boy in the same class had introduced him to satanism. I believe he used Dungeons and Dragons as a tool to interest my son in this.” Significantly, she explains how she arrived at this conclusion over a period of months: “Little by little we pieced it together with the aid of friends.” These “friends” were likely cult cops and moral entrepreneurs like Pulling. Eventually Loyacano became a moral entrepreneur herself, traveling the country and giving slide shows of BADD claims about D&D.

So she…thinks Dungeons and Dragons was the tool used by a cult recruiter to entice her son into devil worship. And if all of this true, are we supposed to believe that all this stuff was in her son’s room, but she didn’t find out about it until after his suicide? Of course, this claim allows the parents to say they didn’t know how screwed up the kid was, and therefore didn’t get the psychiatric help he needed. In a certain sense, she resorted to the same ploy as Put Pulling Herself, whose son committed suicide, and then mysteriously found D&D things is his room…and she never knew a thing about it. And, strangely enough, Rosemary became a friend of Pulling, joined BADD, and toured the country speaking out against D&D. Honestly, I don’t believe this all-too-convenient storyline to explain why nothing was done to help the two youths.

On December 2, 1986, the elderly couple…

…Paul and Janie Kutz…of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were murdered. They were found stabbed with their throats cut. It was believed that Paul was watching TV, and Janie was asleep in the bedroom. So it would seem that they were taken completely by surprise. So how did police become aware of their murder?

Two Not-So-Bright soldiers by the names of Mark Thompson and Jeffrey Meyer…

So, we can already see where this is going.

It does seem strange that they would keep the book on the dashboard.

When deputies examined the truck, they found a black robe and long black hood, the kind movie Ninjas wear, with what appeared to be bloodstains on them. They found a butterfly knife, a double-bladed martial arts weapon, a blowgun and three darts and a book called…Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Oriental Adventures book.

The costumes were purchased the day of the murder, and the police found the receipt in the truck.

Now as far as this goes, the Kutz couple had made a serious mistake…

And…

This window had been broken since the couple moved into the house and was covered with tape, and it is puzzling why Paul Kutz seemed adamant that he wouldn’t fix it. A spare key? Just get a…regular spare key. So, from the criminals’ perspective, they were extraordinarily lucky. However, I think it’s far more reasonable to believe that they were casing homes in the neighborhood and noticed the broken window.

The book found on the dashboard of the truck was most likely something like…

It doesn’t exactly tax the mind to believe that one of the characters one can choose is a ninja.

The D&D book wasn’t the only one in the truck…

…published in 1986, the year in which the murder of the Kutz couple took place. And it’s worth noting that the physical evidence points to an obsession with ninjas, which is fairly common with young boys, showing how immature the two killers were.

A Charlotte martial arts instructor said he regularly sees fanciful Ninjas. I get calls three times a week from people who want to be Ninja warriors, said Paul Cash, a Mecklenburg County police captain who runs American Kempo Karate Academy. Half of them already have their uniforms…you can get them through karate magazines…and they’re practicing moves they’ve seen in the movies. We don’t take them.