“You have no idea what you are getting yourself into. Even if you are armed, these people can do things that you can’t deal with.” - New York criminologist
(LINCOLN CITY) - When I began my first reporting job I was busy learning everything I possibly could about reporting, anchoring, and the thousands of things that go along with conveying information for a living. That first job was at a cable TV station in Lincoln City, Oregon called TV10. The station is long gone but the spirit of it lives on in the hearts of those of us who were a part of it.
One of the first things that I had to do after becoming the station’s evening anchor was to branch out and get to know people. My General Manager, station owner Roger Robertson of Lincoln City, asked me to join the local Noon Kiwanis Club. At the age of 24, I was the youngest person in the group by twenty full years.
I became friends with a local police officer in the group named Dale who was a former Marine. I also served in the Marine Corps, but a few years after Dale whose service included a combat tour in Vietnam. One of Dale’s specialties was crime dealing with the occult. The department had designated him as the officer who traveled to law enforcement seminars and informational events to learn about this specialized and often bizarre side of life because evidence of satanic worship was frequently located at that time in some of the back areas around Devil’s Lake, so aptly named.
These signs were not just the designs on the ground and signs of fire and other rituals, they sometimes included the remains of animals that had been sacrificed. Needless to say, the biggest concern of local law enforcement was coming upon remains that were not just animals.
Dale thought that he knew where the big satanic ceremony was going to be held that Halloween night in 1988, the evening is a big event for devil worshippers, and we created a plan to approach the satanic ritual by boat and videotape it, along with the participants, many of whom were rumored to be high level local business people.
The day passed and it was a typical, uneventful prelude to trick or treat night. I was excited and a little nervous. In the process of preparation for this bold plan I did as much of my own occult crime research as I could. I ended up on the phone with a criminologist in New York who works closely with the subject.
His advice was for both Dale and I to avoid the area entirely. His quote was, “You have no idea what you are getting yourself into. Even if you are armed, these people can do things that you can’t deal with.” That kind of left us feeling defenseless, so we decided to ignore the advice and move forward with our plans. This meant having a boat and all of the equipment ready for a prompt launch at a specific hour, which I believe was 8:00 PM.
The uneventful side of the day changed dramatically when a report came across the scanners about a fatal crash on East Devils Lake Road. The factory outlet center in Lincoln City was then a natural wetland, and construction on the project had been underway a short time. Two young men from McMinnville who were from the job site had just left eastbound on the lake road when they lost control in a turn and crashed. The driver was nearly decapitated.
So I shot video of the crash and ran back to the station to put it on and remind everyone to drive safely with the little children present, and then I went through the post scene emotions that we all experience when working around fatal incidents. I was pretty new at it back then.
Soon the hour was nearing for Dale and I to rendezvous and at roughly 20-minutes before the hour, I met him at Devils Lake. Now you are going to believe this or not but it is true; just as we were preparing for our evening a breeze off the lake quickly became a strong wind and an until-then calm night was now starting to sweep the lake in torrents. “We’ll just wait it out for a little while” Dale said, but it didn’t look good and the wind only increased.
We both knew that launching the small craft was worse than taking our lives in our hands. It simply wasn’t big enough, and then the lake started showing whitecaps and we were out of business. It was like a force of nature didn’t want us to witness the event.
I looked back at the advice of the criminologist in New York and then it dawned on me that maybe something big and dark did keep us away that night. I guess the only solace would be that the downpour soon followed and the devil worshippers without a doubt were rained out.
One Halloween Night on the Oregon CoastSalem-News.com