The Devil You Know

Are you concerned about the alien reptiles who can take on human form and have infiltrated the highest levels of world government on the orders of Satan? What about that family member who is almost certainly a clone? Surely you're worried about your colleague, the one who is, without doubt, not just a witch, but a witch with a vampire demon inside her. What about the giants? Or the zombies in Miami? And let's not forget the fact that the CIA is a cover for a global paedophile ring, the children of which are sacrificed to Satan after they're raped, and then eaten (usually during lunch break). If you worry about any of these issues, care about your fellow man, or love the lord, then Sherry Shriner is the person you need. The earthly manifestation of God's actual literal daughter (yep, Jesus had a sibling. In fact, he had thirteen of them. Apparently), Shriner wants you to join her movement today and help fight the war for the very fate of humanity (first though, make sure you subscribe to her Patreon. And contribute to her GoFundMe. And buy some merchandise. And sign up for a recurring donation on her website).

Okay, as flippant an introduction as this is, it does serve to make a point regarding the utter absurdity, unworkability, mercenary, and thoroughly incoherent nature of Shriner's core beliefs, which posits that mankind is engaged in a millennia-old war with Satan and an army of aliens, reptiles, clones, vampires, witches, vampire witches, demons, giants, zombies, genetically engineered super soldiers, paedophiles, Meg Ryan, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift (don't ask). As cults go, her unnamed movement (they were informally known as the Orgone Warriors) certainly isn't one of the better-known ones, but as the excellent second season of The Devil You Know illustrates, you don't need thousands of followers living together on a compound to make an impact, to create pain and suffering, or to ruin lives. In fact, you don't even need to leave your house.

July 15, 2017; Tobyhanna Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania. A woman makes a frantic 911 call to report her boyfriend has been shot. Police arrive on the scene and find that the man, Steve Mineo, is dead, a single gunshot wound to his forehead. Confused and distraught, his girlfriend, Barbara Rogers, isn't making much sense, so police bring her in for a formal interview, during which she tells them that although she was holding the gun, Steve knowingly pulled her trigger finger to fire it. Finding this explanation hard to believe, over the next seven hours, police press her, and eventually she says she killed Steve by accident. And ignoring her obvious mental health issues and her state of shock, this admission is all the DA needs to charge her with murder.

As directed by Lana Gorlitz and Zebediah Smith, the second season of The Devil You Know initially seems to be setting up for an investigation into a case of someone wrongly accused, but it instead uses Steve's death to probe the Orgone Warriors, of which both Steve and Barbara were members, before running afoul of Shriner. Active on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, GoFundMe, Blog Radio (her twice-a-week show ran for 14 years, totalling over 500 hours of content), her own websites (all 19 of them), and with three self-published books (one of which is an actual literal interview with Satan and Lilith), Shriner output a massive amount of material in which she outlined and re-outlined her wild theories. And because of the vast reach of social media, those theories were disseminated to a fair larger audience than they ever would have been pre-internet.

And, aside from Steve's death, that's the real theme of the show - much as the first season used the Pazuzu Algarad case to probe disaffected youth, drug addiction, and a broken mental health system, here, Steve's death is used as a springboard to examine the power of social media and how easily it can be used to manipulate and indoctrinate. Ultimately, the show asks the question of how could a lone middle-aged woman who barely left her house and who met almost none of her followers in person amass thousands of blind adherents all over the globe and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

And boy did she say a lot. Indeed, her claims about herself are almost as fantastical as her claims about the New World Order, the aliens who signed a treaty with the US government in the 1930s, and the war between God and Satan. So, for example, she suffered from night terrors from a young age and later claimed these night terrors were caused by one of Satan's top generals, who had been sent to kill her; she said that God began to give her visions in 1994, and in 2001, he told her she needed to use a bible code program to decode the bible, whereupon she discovered it was the end times; in 2012, she claimed she saved New York from Hurricane Sandy (which was actually a secret alien invasion intending to sink Manhattan); in 2015, she revealed that she was an angel whose heavenly name was Shazuraze, in 2018, despite originally saying Trump was an agent of Satan, she claimed that he was a literal angel and that they often worked together. Oh, and she also predicted the end of the world...every year from 2007 to 2014.

Despite rarely leaving her house, and despite meeting only a handful of her followers in person, by 2010, Shriner had gained followers in 116 countries. By 2016, her YouTube channel had 6,000 subscribers and her videos totalled over a million views. As of October 2021, there are 29,000 subscribers and close to two million total views. Her GoFundMe generated over $700,000 over ten years. The almost exclusively virtual existence of the cult is also touched on in the excellent podcast The Opportunist (2021), which aired around the same time as the show (and is well worth a listen to if you want to know more about Shriner). In the fourth episode, the podcast interviews Reza Aslan a professor of the sociology of religion, who points out how much social media has changed the nature of cults in the modern era; "a few years ago you would have to literally upend yourself from your community and your family and go and join a group. Now, you can just be the same person that you are, that you've always been, but you're a cultist. The Internet has changed drastically the efficacy of the cult. I firmly believe that if Heaven's Gate existed today, it would be a global movement of individuals, all of them linked together through social media."

The other major theme, of course, is Steve's death and the subsequent investigation, with the show very much taking the stance that Barbara's conviction for murder in the third was the wrong decision. For example, it reveals that during their seven-hour interrogation of a woman clearly suffering from shock and trauma, the police heard her say it was an accident 27 times, saying that Steve put the gun in her hand and moved it up to his head and that both of them were holding it went it went off. The police point blank refused to accept this. Eventually, exhausted and deeply confused, she started to change her story to suit their narrative (although she never wavered from her contention that the death was an accident). The show also interviews a ballistic expert, who says the evidence suggests that both Steve and Barbara's hands were on the gun, as she said, but this evidence was ignored by the police, who argued that only Barbara's hands were on it.

Another example is the prosecution arguing that Barbara would have known how to shoot because she had been in the army, whereas she was actually a supply clerk and was never trained on firearms. There's also an unfortunate interview with the prosecuting DA saying you can't make out what Barbara is mumbling to herself when she was left alone during the interrogation - cut to footage of her mumbling accompanied by a full transcript of what she's saying. And the show takes the judge to task for removing involuntary manslaughter as an option for the jury. Instead, they could only pick from not guilty, murder in the first, or murder in the third.

Things are also pretty impressive from an aesthetic perspective. This is best seen during scenes set in Shriner's home. Only two known pictures exist of Shriner, and no video, but the show features her a lot in voice over. To get around this, during the lengthy extracts from her radio show, the camera moves around her empty house as various images related to what she's talking about are rear-projected onto the walls, giving the whole thing an almost haunted house vibe. It's a really nice touch and really well done.

All in all, the second season of The Devil You Know isn't as good as the first, however, it's still an impressive documentary. The third episode in particular is brilliantly done, really making you feel just how badly manipulated Kelly Pingilley (a young believer who killed herself because she believed it was what God wanted) was and how much her friends miss her. Tightly paced, very well edited, with an excellent selection of Shriner's voice-overs and Steve's video clips, the season is definitely worth your time.

In William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist, and William Friedkin's 1973 filmic adaptation, a young girl is possessed by a demon named Pazuzu, a figure from the mythologies of Ancient Mesopotamia. Fast-forward a few thousand years, and travel a few thousand miles to Clemmons, North Carolina where Pazuzu Illah Algarad (born John Alexander Lawson) is a mentally-ill young man who worships Satan, sacrifices animals, and claims he can control the weather. And he murdered at least three people.

Although The Devil You Know, directed for Vice by Patricia E. Gillespie, is an excellent overview of the Pazuzu Algarad case, its real focus is the efforts of local journalist Chad Nance to get beyond the sensationalist media headlines of cannibalism and witchcraft, and get to the issues which gave rise to someone like Pazuzu. Through Nance, the show branches off to examine issues such as addiction, law enforcement, societal apathy, and the ease with which directionless and marginalised young people can drift into potentially dangerous situations in the hope of finding somewhere they can belong. Devil You Know paints a vivid, compelling, and often heartbreaking picture of a community and way-of-life that appears idyllic, but which is rotten at the core and fundamentally broken in so many ways.

For Nance, Pazuzu's story isn't about Satanism or animal sacrifices - it's about a broken mental healthcare system that allowed an ill young man to fall through the cracks, it's about an indifferent law enforcement agency that allowed him to act without repercussions for years, it's about a man (Matt Flowers) so disgusted by the actions of his best friend that he's driven to act against him, and it's about the tragedy of one of his victims, Josh Wetzler, and the concomitant pain of Wetzler's wife, Stacey Carter. In this sense, the first episode, "There's a Satanist in the Suburbs (2019)", goes into Wetzler's background to a far greater degree than Pazuzu's, which is unexpected - how many documentaries dealing with murder spend more time telling us about a victim than about the killer?

When Wetzler and Carter lost their life-savings trying to open a horse rehabilitation centre, Wetzler turned to selling weed and mushrooms to try to make ends meet. However, after having some mushrooms sent to his house in the mail (a federal crime), he was arrested and convicted on a felony drug charge. Nance uses this as a launching pad to examine some of the incongruities found under the surface of the Pazuzu case. Speaking of how Pazuzu got merely a few months' probation after participating in a murder, Nance opines, "the system is really just broken. You have Pazuzu and his posse committing crimes that seriously affect everyone around them, but they get just right back out on the streets. But non-violent crimes like having a bag of pot or mushrooms in your pocket? Those lead to felony convictions that fills up prison and totally ruin lives."

Another major theme is addiction, with the show being remarkably open about the heroin usage of Nate and his girlfriend Jenna (two of Pazuzu's followers), showing them openly shooting up on-camera. In the case of Jenna, before she's even said anything, we see her injecting, and whilst she's happy to admit she doesn't want to kick the habit, Nate laments how he's been an addict for more years than he's been clean, pointing out (as he's shooting up) that drug possession is a violation of his parole and would land him in jail if he were caught.

Indeed, directionless youth, in general, is an important theme, as it was this kind of societal alienation that brought so many impressionable young people into Pazuzu's circle. This theme is also touched on in relation to Matt Flowers, an Iraqi War vet and John Lawson's friend before he became Pazuzu. When Flowers learned that Pazuzu had supposedly killed and buried someone in his backyard, he was one of the first to contact the police, even telling them where in the garden the grave was supposed to be. However, when nothing happened, and as years went by, Flowers saw Pazuzu becoming increasingly unhinged and dangerous. In a remarkable admission, he explains that he told police that if they didn't properly investigate, then he was going to kill Pazuzu himself to prevent anyone else dying. But what's really extraordinary about how the show presents this part of the story is how guilt-ridden Flowers is at turning Pazuzu in. That he turned on his best friend haunts him deeply, and the heartbreaking self-destructive behaviour with which we see him engage in the fourth episode, "Another Dead Boy (2019)", is difficult to watch. To see him sitting alone in a bar burning himself with cigarettes and grieving about his involvement in Pazuzu's downfall is almost as dark and upsetting as the show gets. Almost. But not quite.

It's in the fourth and fifth episode that the show really steps outside the mould of multi-episode crime documentaries and becomes something else - an examination of despair, an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of suburbia. The scene where we see Flowers burning himself is intercut with a sequence which sees Jenna nonchalantly turn to prostitution to get money for drugs, and the cumulative effect of such editing is extremely effective, creating a sense of hopelessness that transcends anything individualised. And it's within this general theme where the show features its darkest and most heartbreaking moment. During the fourth episode, Nance reveals that his son has started to mess around with drugs, and there's a scene where he describes working late one night when he looked up and saw his son in the doorway - sweating, pale, shaking, his eyes bloodshot. Nance describes, or tries to describe, the emotion of seeing this person who is his son, but who isn't his son. It's his son's body, but it's not his son's soul. It's deeply upsetting and thought-provoking, and it's not somewhere I was expecting to end up with a documentary about a murderer. So hats off to the filmmakers for having the courage to go that far and yet never for one second have it feel manipulative or irrelevant.

I was impressed with The Devil You Know. The show is not about a Satanist murderer called Pazuzu. It's about the child he once was and how that child was failed. It's about the people who were affected by the murders and how they are trying to get on with their lives. It's about societal indifference. It's about apathy. And as it branches out to take in issues such as addiction, PTSD, guilt, and police incompetence, the wider it casts its net, the better it gets, painting an increasingly complete picture of a community that is either incapable of or uninterested in caring. Genuinely surprising me on multiple occasions, genuinely moving me on others The Devil You Know may disappoint those looking for salaciousness and Satan and gore, but for those more interested in the why than the how, and in the aftermath than the act, this is a richly rewarding viewing experience.

This is a really cool series. I would agree that the story and information is a bit sensationalized but, I lived close to this area at the time of the crimes and the info is spot on. Is it made for tv... Yes it is; however, it's worth a watch. Reminds me of old school Vice programming. Thank God!!

I guess there's a new edit out, and maybe that's the one I saw. I did notice some repeat info, but assumed it was where the commercial breaks would go. I'm not sure why everyone is upset about the "bias" of the docuseries. It's clear that the system and the war on drugs failed these people. I think the the reason people are upset about this "bias" is because it goes against the narrative they've been spoon fed since the Bush era. Systemic problems cause systemic issues, including but not limited to; drug addicts not able to afford rehab; families giving up on them; hopelessness; death and yes, even murder.

I actually thought having the two junkies in the docuseries was an interesting look into how addicts spiral. The hopelessness and the struggles. This docuseries might be a little slow for some people, but it's a good look into how these systemic problems drive people to murder and drug addiction.

Just paid for and watched two-episodes and definitely a waste of time and money. I have long been a documentary freak and this documentary is for those that need to be told the same information over and over and over and over..see how annoying that is? Half way into the second episode they are retelling episode one!

Definitely an intriguing subject and the 'law enforcement officer's' in Winston Salem are a total joke, they truly let down the victims and the community in which they are tasked to protect.

Won't be watching anymore Vice 'documentaries'. Unfortunate waste of of everyone's time too; what an opportunity wasted.