Christian Police Sergeant Sees Satan as an Adversary in Crime

First came the 18-year-old La Puente machinist who shot himself with a .22-caliber rifle in 1984 while a tape of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Diary of a Madman” blasted heavy metal anthems from his stereo.

The next year, a partially burned voodoo doll with pins in its groin and heart was found nailed to the back door of a Baldwin Park dressmaking shop.

Then, in 1987, seven people were arrested for ransacking an El Monte warehouse, where they painted “Suicidal Death Tribe” in giant letters on the wall and jammed a dead rat through the plaster.

Just last month, a Covina teen-ager pleaded guilty to charges of animal cruelty after he and a friend were accused of mutilating several cats and using the blood to scrawl “666” on an elementary school wall.

Troubled Youths

Perhaps, they were all just troubled youths hoping to shock the rest of the world into paying them attention. But Randy Emon did not think so.

Emon, a Baldwin Park police sergeant with 18 years on the force, saw a darker side to those incidents, a suspicion that has launched him on a bizarre and spiritually turbulent journey into the world of occult-related crime.

In the process, Emon has become a leading authority among a small but growing number of occult specialists whose expertise in such practices as satanism, witchcraft and Santeria is increasingly in high demand.

Through his course at Rio Hondo College and consulting jobs, he estimates he has trained more than 600 California police officers in recognizing ritualistic crimes. Adding church and civic groups, he figures that at least 20,000 people have heard him lecture about animal mutilation, necrophilia and human sacrifice.

Yet Emon, a “born-again” Christian and father of three, has also been beset by personal conflict as he has immersed himself in a subject that is the antithesis of all he believes.

Unusual Events

Emon, 36, says his children have been possessed by demons just before he conducted seminars on the occult. He says his wife has broken out in rashes as she approached the boxes of demonic memorabilia that he stores in his garage.

And he says a pentagram, the five-pointed star often used as a symbol by satanists, once mysteriously appeared etched in his carpet, disappearing only after he dropped to his knees in prayer.

“You feel this stuff getting to you sometimes,” Emon said. “I have seen firsthand the power that’s there. I suppose, if I didn’t feel a real calling to learn more about this, there would be a lot less pressure in my life.”

These are statements that are sure to raise the eyebrows of skeptics. Warnings about supernatural forces and gruesome rituals often seem overly alarmist, if not flat-out fantasy.

But with the grisly drug-cult murders in Matamoros, Mexico, earlier this year and the self-styled satanism allegedly practiced by Night Stalker suspect Richard Ramirez, such notions have slowly begun to creep into the public consciousness.

Occult-Related Crimes

Some experts now say they hear of so many cases involving blood-drained animals, abused children and dismembered corpses that they believe occult rituals will be the crime of the ‘90s.

“When you measure it against the tremendous gang and narcotic problems we have, it’s still not a major issue,” said Detective Patrick Metoyer, a 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and a widely recognized expert in the field. “But it’s something we had better be concerned with. Occult activity is definitely on the rise.”

In the San Gabriel Valley, as elsewhere in the state, documentation is still usually piecemeal and anecdotal. No police department has an officer assigned exclusively to such crimes. And authorities readily concede that they are not always equipped to decipher the clues left behind from ritualistic acts.

That is where Emon steps in.

When two decapitated chickens were discovered last month next to several small wax figurines, coconut pieces and shreds of colored cloth near a dry riverbed in South El Monte, it was Emon who determined that they were the remnants of a ritual from the Afro-Cuban religion, Santeria.

Legal Sacrifice

No crime was committed because the animals appeared to have been slaughtered humanely, with a quick and clean cut, said Dan Sturkie, district supervisor for county Animal Care and Control.

“But prior to this, it would have looked to us just like someone’s leftover dinner,” Sturkie said. “Now we’re recognizing things more often for what they are.”

The same was true for Covina police who last April arrested two youths, ages 16 and 17, for allegedly mutilating at least seven cats, scrawling satanic symbols with the blood and leaving the tails in a box at the Covina Post Office.

“I guess the kids were able to convince the D.A. that it was all a joke,” said Glenn Myers, the Covina crime prevention officer. “But it was still pretty scary behavior. Randy was able to look at some of the stuff and let us know that we had a real problem.”

Emon, an athletic, neatly groomed man who belongs to Cops for Christ, traces his connection with the occult back to 1985, shortly after Ramirez was captured and his obsession with satanic imagery revealed.

Incident in Church

That same week, Emon said he saw a demon possess a woman during a Sunday church service, watching as her face grew contorted and she repeated in a deep masculine voice, “No, I don’t want to leave.”

From that moment on, he said, he felt “a nudge from up there” to learn everything there was to know about the occult. He soon realized it would be a road paved with tension.

One night, just before he was going to conduct a seminar, his eldest son developed a high fever as he lay on his bed, arms extended to the ceiling, crying, “Get away, get away.”

Emon said he placed the boy in cool water and prayed for him until the fever subsided.

Five minutes later, his younger son screamed from his bedroom that he could not see. Emon said he wrapped his arms around him and prayed until his son’s vision returned.

‘Not Mere Chance’

“I realized many of the events which had occurred . . . were not mere chance, but the work of Satan and his demons striving to discourage my research,” he later wrote in a Christian magazine.

Emon’s experiences, however, are not shared by all in his field.

“My personal feeling is that’s pretty far out,” said Investigator Sandi Gallant, the San Francisco Police Department’s occult expert. “I’ve certainly never been haunted.”

Metoyer, the LAPD’s expert, said he has been invited to attend satanic rituals but was not impressed.

“I didn’t see a darn thing,” he said. “I didn’t hear diddly-squat. I didn’t see any devil come down.”

A professor emeritus of religion at USC even compared Satan sleuths such as Emon to those who conducted the communist witch-hunts during the red-baiting days of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

“You interpret what you find in the light of the glasses you look through,” said Gerald Larue, who was named “Humanist of the Year” for 1989 by the American Humanist Assn. “You become obsessed with the enemy. And for a Christian, the enemy is Satan.”

Spiritual Encounters

But an occult expert at the Christian Research Institute in Irvine said experiences such as Emon’s were genuine spiritual encounters that were typical of devout Christians who trespass in the demonic realm.

“Sure, these things are nothing short of the bizarre,” said Craig Hawkins, a research consultant at the institute. “But for a person who believes that there really is a spiritual realm, that kind of thing is not impossible at all. That’s what happens when you enter the domain of the demonic.”

Some say Emon’s deep faith even enhances his expertise. George Belanger, a former drummer for the occult-rock band Christian Death, said Emon was instrumental in helping him leave satanism behind.

“A lot of Christians, when they find out you’re from an occult background, they freak out,” said Belanger, now a “born-again” Christian who lives in Glendora. “But Randy was very sympathetic, caring and loving. I had a lot of painful memories and he had a real soft ear.”

Emon, who is also director of the Christian Occult Investigators Network, a nonprofit research group in West Covina, says he works hard to keep his religious views from interfering with his police work.

Freedom of Worship

He stresses First Amendment rights in all of his seminars, cautioning other officers that satanists--unless their rituals break the law--have the same freedom to worship as anyone else.

His supervisor, Baldwin Park Police Chief Richard A. Hoskin, said that there have been no conflicts, but he acknowledged that the subject can get touchy.

“It’s a sensitive issue,” Hoskin said. “As far as being an embarrassment, it hasn’t really come to that. But we have tried to suggest to him that he not become actively involved in that while he’s on duty.”

On- or off-duty, however, it’s hard for Emon to escape the occult. The 30 to 40 boxes of artifacts from his investigations piled in the garage of his suburban home serve as constant reminders of his encounters with the demonic.

He has photos of decapitated pigs, record albums from heavy metal bands, such as Venom and Slayer, literary staples such as Anton LaVey’s “Satanic Bible” and comic books with ads for “100 Ready-to-Use Mystic Chants.”

He has a Ouija Board that he says sent mystical messages to a teen-ager to take his own life. He has a cardboard shrine splattered with blood. And he has a small squirrel tail that he says was cut from the animal in a satanic ritual.

“Randy is a unique individual,” said Tony Palmer, whose Walnut-based firm, International Law Enforcement Training & Consulting, hires Emon to teach occult seminars to police officers. “He lives this stuff. In many different ways.”