Episode 27: "They were in the occult"

"THEY WERE IN THE OCCULT" On June 16, 1993, Ricky Don Climer, 16, described life in a gang of Satanists in lurid and unlikely detail. Climer’s statement was full of wild accusations about Baldwin, Misskelley, Echols and others involved in the Crittenden County witch cult. As with stories from Aaron and Vicki Hutcheson, Garrett Schwarting or the Echols family, the truth was difficult to determine. Climer had spent time in the Arkansas State Hospital. He was in state custody at the DeDe Wallace Wilderness Program in Shelbyville, Tenn., after he was taken from his parents due to behavioral problems. He had confessed his involvement in the occult to program counselors. Climer also had been friends with a group of West Memphis youths who had come under scrutiny.He described one exceedingly unlikely incident in which he and a group of boys had jumped a police officer or security guard and beaten him up, with Climer claiming he used a baseball bat while Misskelley used his fists. They supposedly left the officer unconscious.Concerning Misskelley, Echols and Baldwin, Climer told Ridge that “they were in the occult ... I knew that they rape some people ... they always made barn fires uh in the woods. Uh, I know that they jumped a cop, they cut, you know, a pig’s head off, you know put it on a porch ... Occult, a satanic type, it’s pretty much the same thing.”He explained occult symbols, such as a pentagram: “With the symbol being all black, you know it suppose to be an updown cross look like somebody’s hanging from it.” The pig’s head was placed on the porch “to scare and show people that death is on its way ... to show people that we have power.”He said parts of cats and dogs were cooked and eaten at ceremonies and a variety of intoxicants used: marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, gasoline sniffing and acid. Climer said drug use sometimes would lead to fights or “you’re be sitting there, you know, the next thing you’ll start thinking of some cartoon character. Let’s say, the little guys in blue ... Smurfs, things like that.”In contrast to others, Climer didn’t seem to have any idea of special days or times for the Satanic meetings held around Lakeshore and the Marion area. Climer, with some prodding and leading questions from Ridge, said they discussed plans on how to get away with murder. He said if they killed someone, they would use “torture, you get a thrill out of torture.”He claimed that they had killed someone “in the projects” over “Bloods, you know that’s a gang.” He claimed “cult are Crips, you know, some cult people are Crips.”On June 18, Climer told police in a phone conversation that he had witnessed Baldwin and Echols torture a girl with a rope, hanging her from a tree with a slip knot around her neck. Climer said he didn’t know the girl, who was from Marion and wasn’t a girlfriend. He said he left the scene, which happened in woods toward Marion, after she dropped. Climer said of the rapes: “I don’t know if you want to call it talking her into it, by getting her doped up and everything, that she would say, yes. ... I don’t know if you would call that talking.” Climer repeated his claim that Baldwin and Misskelley had “jumped” a police officer and “did it because you just hated cops, you know.”Climer said he had been involved in the occult group since he was 8 or 9, which would have been around 1985, and had left it two years before. According to Misskelley’s confessions, Misskelley was a relatively recent recruit to the occult scene and only participated in a few ceremonies. There was little evidence to suggest that Baldwin was involved in the occult earlier than 1991. Even Echols may have gotten involved in witchcraft mostly as the result of his relationship with Deanna. Echols claims he first became interested in “magick” around age 12, which would have been around 1987. Despite the many problems with Climer’s story, his description of certain cult practices —- cooking and eating animal parts, drug abuse, the pen