Court Urged to Make Band Pay $5 Million

A British rock band and its record company should pay up to $5 million in damages to a young fan who allegedly was spurred to enter a suicide pact by subliminal words hidden in the group’s music, an attorney argued today.

Vivian Lynch, representing the family of James Vance, also charged in her closing arguments that a multitrack original of the song “Better by You, Better Than Me,” by the heavy metal band Judas Priest was altered before it was presented to the court as evidence.

“If this trial does nothing else than prevent the use of subliminals in mass communications, then this trial will be a success,” Lynch said.

She urged Washoe District Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead, who is hearing the case without a jury, to award damages of $4 million to $5 million to Vance’s family to repay nearly $500,000 in medical bills and to compensate for pain and suffering.

Closing arguments in the four-week-old trial were to continue into the afternoon.

Whitehead will then decide whether the alleged subliminal messages exist and, if so, whether they promoted the youths to shoot themselves.

Members of the heavy metal group contend that no covert words exist in the 1978 “Stained Class” album.

The families of Vance and Raymond Belknap that backward and subliminal messages on the album contain blasphemy and promote suicide.

Belknap, 18, died of a single blast from a shotgun held in his mouth two days before Christmas, 1985. Vance, then 20, blew away the lower portion of his face. He fathered a child and lived three years before his death on Thanksgiving Day, 1988.