By Mark Ellis
Pazuzu Algarad, an avowed Satanist on trial for killing a man found buried in his backyard in North Carolina, apparently killed himself the day before he was due in court.
Algarad, 36, was found in the early hours of October 28th, unresponsive, with a wound to his arm at Central Prison in Raleigh. Prison officials tried to revive him, but he was declared dead at 4:20 a.m., according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
Originally born John Lawson, Algarad said his mother changed his name to Pazuzu – the name of the demon that possessed the girl in the film The Exorcist. Algarad altered his appearance with tattoos; his tongue was split down the middle like a snake, and he filed his teeth into sharply pointed, canine-like incisors.
The skeletal remains of Joshua Wetzler and Tommy Dean Welch were found in the backyard of Algarad’s house, where he lived with his girlfriend, Amber Burch, and his mother. Algarad and Burch were both charged with first-degree murder.
Algarad told a prison psychiatrist he practiced a Sumerian religion that involved the monthly sacrifice of a small animal. He said he would have to perform the ritual during what he called the “black moon” and asked if he could get out of the hospital to perform it.
Law-enforcement officials said Algarad performed “satanic rituals and animal sacrifices” at his house. Pentagrams and other Satanic messages were scrawled onto the walls of the house, and there were what appeared to be animal carcasses, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
Bianca Heath said she lived with Algarad for a month in 2005, and that he had spoken of bones in his back yard. “Paz told everyone,” she recounted to the Huffington Post. “But I never believed him. I’m sure no one else believed him either. He laughed about the skeletal remains when telling the story on why he did what he did.’
Heath said Algarad told her he picked up two prostitutes at two separate locations before he killed and ate them, burning the remains in a fire pit before burying the rest.
When police searched the home they found a virtual sea of trash, animal or human feces and moldy walls
covered in spray-painted pentagrams and depictions of the Devil.
On the front door was scrawled “evil will triumph,” along with skulls and other obscure satanic symbols.
The house was deemed unfit for human habitation by Forsyth County inspectors and later demolished.
A friend of Algarad’s wife, Amber, said the young woman had gone from being a cheerful person nicknamed Bubbles to someone who never bathed and who had also filed her teeth to give them sharp points, according to The Mirror.
She said Algarad claimed to get a high from eating the “still-beating heart” of a sacrificial animal and bragged openly about having killed two prostitutes. Burch’s friend spoke about conditions inside the house that were so bad she thought she might vomit.
When the friend first arrived to visit Burch in 2009, Algarad was completely naked and never put on any clothes during the visit. The excrement on the floor might have been both animal and human, the friend told The Mirror.
“He was on all kinds of drugs and would drink when I got there,” she said. The friend said Algarad’s behavior was “very sexual, very provocative.”
