Charles Manson dead

If you haven't heard already, infamous cult leader Charles Manson died today of natural causes at 83 years old.

I was going to write a post but there are so many reports out there already and I'm sure most you know who he is. 

THE LAST VICTIM : JASON MOSS

I recently remembered a book that I read in high school, titled “The last victim”.

On the front cover there was a black and white photo of John Wayne Gacy with the tagline “a true life journey into the mind of a serial killer” by Jason Moss.
Although I'm not sure that I agree this was a journey into the mind of John Wayne gacy per se, it was an interesting read as a teenager.

Jason Moss was an 18 year old man who was studying at UNLV, and had decided to correspond with incarcerated serial killers as part of his thesis.
He researched the inmates that he found most intriguing and began to shape personalities based on the types of person each killer would find appealing.

Moss was quoted as saying he was a cocky 18 year old, who thought that he could outsmart, or get the killers to confess and tell him secrets. He definitely bit off more than he could chew during this adventure and I'm not sure exactly what Moss thought he could get out of Gacy, posing as a victim. 

He also wrote to Charles Manson, attempting to appeal to him as a potential follower, and received some correspondence including a poem from Manson and a response letter.

He made the acquaintance of Ramirez, Lucas and Dhamer and also received responses and crudely drawn cartoons.

But the killer he would eventually establish a relationship with was Gacy, with whom Moss would share letters, seasonal greetings cards, photos, collect phone calls and two in person visits.

The pair exchanged letters, which started out relatively normal, but soon turned dark. They would talk in detail about dark and taboo sexual fantasies, with Jason Moss playing along.

Moss was eventually flown out for two, two hour sessions of unsupervised face time with the killer clown himself, where he claims he was psychologically broken down, reduced to tears and almost sexually assaulted by Gacy.

The book is a very unsettling memoir; the letters exchanged between the pair are nothing short of disturbing.
How he could role play and confidently attempt to manipulate a man who was responsible for raping and murdering 33 boys and burying them in the crawlspace of his house, is perplexing.

So, as you can guess by the title, the book is an account of how a morbidly curious, overly confident young man with teenage feelings of invincibility set himself up to be, in his words, "Gacy's last victim."

I went to search for Jason Moss online to see what he was doing these days and unfortunately discovered that he has passed away.

Apparently he had committed suicide, shot himself with a shotgun.

His date of death was 6.6.06

He didn’t leave a letter.

You can find videos of Jason giving interviews about his experience online.

See also:  "Dear Mr. Gacy" (2010)

What are your opinions on this book? 

Do you believe the account of Jason Moss?

I wouldn't recommend it as the best true crime read out there, but it's moderately entertaining (for lack of a better word) 

Backwards masking

“Oh, here's to my sweet Satan.
The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan.
He'll give those with him 666.
There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.”

Last night I found myself in an old rock bar, and as I was looking around at all of the rock paraphernalia on the walls I noticed a picture of Robert Plant, you know, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, with his shirt open, holding a dove.

It made me remember back when I was younger, how much it used to creep me out whenever I heard that audio file of “Stairway to heaven” in reverse.

So here we go, this one’s an oldie but a goodie:

The case of my sweet Satan:

At the time, the record label (Swan Song Records) dismissed the claims, with audio engineer, Eddie Kramer, calling the allegations "totally and utterly ridiculous.” Adding “why would they want to spend so much studio time doing something so dumb?"

Plant himself denied any deliberate intention of backward masking the track, saying "To me it's very sad, because 'Stairway to Heaven' was written with every best intention, and as far as reversing tapes and putting messages on the end, that's not my idea of making music."

He was quoted in a rolling stone interview as commenting "Who on Earth would have ever thought of doing that?”

For a band that was rumored to have made a deal with the devil, lived in British philosopher and occultist Aleister Crowley’s Loch Ness mansion, and allegedly inserted a mud shark into a fans, ehem, nether regions, it doesn’t seem completely ridiculous that they’d attempt to cleverly insert something spooky into a song.

Team that with the fact that Plant, apparently, wrote the lyrics faster than any other song he’s written, almost with an automatic writing process.

Page claimed that "a huge percentage of the lyrics were written there and then"

Plant was also quoted as saying: “My hand was writing out the words, 'There's a lady is sure, all that glitters is gold, and she's buying a stairway to heaven'. I just sat there and looked at them and almost leapt out of my seat."

Zeppelin weren’t the only bands and artists to be accused of, or deliberately sneaking reversed messages into their tracks.

For your convenience, HERE is a link to a Wikipedia list of many known examples.

So what do you think about hidden messages in music?

Is Rock and Roll really the Devils work? Is Plant a puppet for the dude down stairs? Or do we all have too much time on our idle hands?

Regardless of our conclusions on this one, maybe it isn’t such a good idea to go searching for hidden messages in records, after all, it never did Charles Manson any favors.

But that’s a bed time story for another day kids.

Goodnight!