CRIME HUNTER: What sparked sickening Satanic ritual slayings of duo?
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There was something about the house on Knob Hill Drive.
The windows were blacked out and the yard was tucked behind a fence. Outside, a sign warned off cops, and there was an upside-down cross.
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A sticker promised: “Evil will triumph.”
This was the Clemmons, NC home of Satan-worshipping Pazuzu Algarad and Amber Burch, his self-identified wife. The sign was a sickening precursor.
“It reeked of feces and urine,” a friend of Algarad later said. “You didn’t get a good feeling walking into that house at all. It was dark. It was like a lifeless house. It was creepy.”
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Before morphing into Pazuzu Algarad, he was John Alexander Lawson. Born in San Francisco, California, in December 1978, he was raised by his mother, Cynthia James. Mom and son moved home to North Carolina in 1980.
When his mother remarried, she noticed a change in her son, with the boy quarrelling often with his stepfather. John was rarely seen at school and flunked Grade 2 and Grade 9 before dropping out.
As a teenager, he shaved off his long hair and dressed in a style that was either Demon 101 or heavy metal hellraiser 2.0. At 13, he started boozing and experimenting with drugs.
“There’s this one guy that was doing meth and got John into doing that, and I don’t know if I just turned a blind eye,” James told Fox News.
And he changed his name to Pazuzu , the name of an ancient Mesopotamian demon known for its depiction in The Exorcist. The new surname, Ilah Algarad’s translation from Arabic, means “God of locusts.”
He whittled his teeth to sharp points and got tattoos on his face. Doctors at a local mental health facility diagnosed him as suffering from schizophrenia, agoraphobia and alcoholism.
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Every pot needs a lid, and Pazuzu found his in a young woman from Rock Hill, South Carolina, named Amber Burch. She was six years younger than her bizarrely tattooed paramour.
On a visit home, she boasted to a pal she had gotten high from the “still-beating heart” of a sacrificial animal. Burch also bragged that the couple had murdered two prostitutes.
One friend who visited the couple in their dingy home with a backyard overflowing with trash said Pazuzu was naked, and the couple tried to entice the female pal into a threesome
Burch’s appearance was also changing. Like her Beelzebub-loving beau, she sharpened her teeth and shaved off her eyebrows.
“As she got more and more involved with Pazuzu, she became almost just a female extension of Pazuzu,” friend Nate Anderson said on Snapped. “They drank one another’s blood. Everything Paz did, Amber did. She was his queen, he was her king, kind of thing.”
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On Feb. 15, 2010, a woman, Stacey Carter, reported her ex-fiancé and the father of her child, Joshua Wetzler, had been missing for six months. Carter became alarmed when a friend told her: “Josh is buried in Pazuzu’s backyard.”
“When I saw Pazuzu’s Myspace account, the first thing I thought in my mind was the Manson family,” retired detective Lee Whitesides told Snapped. “In the photos, this guy was trying to live that lifestyle. You could tell by the graffiti on the walls, the feel, claiming to do animal sacrifices and the dark moon.”
Friends told detectives they were afraid of Pazuzu, who had proclaimed he worshipped the devil.
Whitesides added: “In the photos, Pazuzu was doing Satanic worshiping … he made general statements he wanted to be a demon, so therefore everybody should bow down to him and respect him and be fearful of him.
“I’ve never seen anything exactly like this. Pazuzu sorta reminded me of something you’d watch on TV. A horror flick. But here it was in North Carolina.”
***
When cops arrived at the demented demon’s home, armed with a search warrant, they were staggered by the conditions and the stench.
“Filthy. Nasty. Unkept,” Whitesides recalled. “Spiderwebs everywhere. Dirt all over the floors. Supposedly animal carcasses lying around. Unless you’ve been in a death house, there’s no way to mentally prepare yourself for something like this. It was like an air of evil resonating from the basement area where all this was supposedly taking place.”
Investigators did not find any bodies.
It was Pazuzu’s mom who put cops back on track in November 2011. Cynthia James said in October 2009, a man named Tommy Welch was at the home she shared with her son and his girlfriend when she heard a gunshot.
Welch had been reported missing several weeks before. But cops still did not have the evidence needed to arrest the couple.
Three more years passed.
Then, in September 2014, a former friend of Pazuzu told detectives he had been away on a military deployment. His girlfriend, Dixie Ross, told him she saw Welch dead on the ground in Pazuzu’s lair.
Ross also had photos of the dead body and the grave. Cops had enough evidence to go forward.
The bodies of two men were found in the backyard: Tommy Welch and Joshua Wetzler. The couple was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and faced a ride in the electric chair.
Pazuzu would never make it to trial: He hanged himself in his cell on Oct. 28, 2015.
Burch pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including second-degree murder, in Welch’s death. She is not scheduled for release from prison until 2045.
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