The Satanic ritual stabbing retrospective

Author Rick Duncan reacts to his book turning up at a crime scene.

ISLAMABAD: Just when we thought 2011 couldn’t get weirder; just last week, reports of one Zainab Bibi murdering and ‘cooking’ her husband went viral. Apparently ‘khawand salan’ (this roughly translates to ‘husband curry’ for our non-native population) is the latest culinary rage these days. The Examiner reports: “Zainab Bibi is accused to killing and cooking her husband Ahmed Abbas for wanting to bed their daughter in a physical relationship.” Now that’s what you call justice, served with a side of roti.

Of course, it’s not just Pakistan that’s reeling from psycho-crime related infamy. Across the pond in the United States, new developments emerged in the recent Milwaukee ‘satanic sex stabbing’ scandal. A gruesome summary of November 10^th’s coverage for those still unfamiliar with the incident: according to Global Post, an American teenager, Ruben Vati (18), was allegedly stabbed 300 times by Rebecca Chandler (22) and Raven Larrabee (20) while being held hostage by the two women in what is described as “a satanic sex ritual”. Remarkably, Vati made it to the police (mostly in one piece) and told officials he’d been bound and stabbed for a whopping two days. This is the last time Vati will ever troll the internet for hook ups.

Investigators also found a variety of grisly literature at the crime scene: a plethora of occult materials including The Necromantic Ritual Book (available on Amazon) and a black folder titled ‘Introduction to Sigilborne Spirits’. This is precisely what happens when one watches too many episodes of “Charmed” on repeat.

In a recent development, as of Sunday, author Ritch Duncan reacts to the incident, whose slapstick publication The Werewolf’s Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten (a humorous ‘self-help’ book for self-proclaimed lycanthropes) also turned up at the crime scene. We ask: is this an author’s worst nightmare or a timely, sales-boosting godsend?

For Duncan, unfortunately, it’s the former. In a salon.com exclusive (“How my book became part of the Satanic sex stabbing”), the writer indicates his shock and horror in a feverish rant: “That was my book. At a crime scene. Seized by police and entered into evidence at a bloody, murderous crime scene. A bloody, murderous satanic crime scene. A bloody, murderous satanic sexual crime scene.”

But what appals Duncan even more is the media fury that ensued — misrepresenting his book within the context of satanism: “There may be no such thing as bad publicity, but the book these articles described certainly wasn’t ours. If you did happen to be looking for a step-by-step guide on how to murder people for Satan as part of a two-day sex binge, one look on Amazon would tell you our book wasn’t that.”

Duncan takes up the issue with media rhetoric; he feels that it bungles the facts and makes life difficult for everyone including the two suspects, who didn’t actually kill Vati. In fact, majority reporting fails to emphasise the fact that Vati voluntarily and consensually got involved with Satan’s handmaidens. It’s like agreeing to sleep in a nest of wolverines. Obviously,the culprit is going to wake up the next morning with half of his body missing.

The writer sums it up nicely: “It’s safe to say that something strange and horrible happened that night in Wisconsin, but something strange and horrible is also going on when the images of two young girls who haven’t been convicted of any crime can be rocketed around the globe, and the facts of their lives ignored or twisted. What happened for sure was [that] those of us clucking our tongues, gasping and laughing as we read this story weren’t getting the truth about those girls, not by any stretch. And that certainly isn’t a new phenomenon.”

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2011.

Correction: Due to a typographical error, the word 'grisly' was mistakenly written as 'grizzly' in an earlier version of the story. The error has been rectified.