How do we make sense of the Lillelid murders?
By Jesse Fox Mayshark
APRIL 20, 1998:
Natasha Wallen Cornett has her thumbs hooked through holes in the sleeves of her white thermal shirt, which she wears beneath the navy blue jumpsuit that marks her as a resident of the Greene County Jail. It may be to keep her hands warm. It may be just an affectation, a small act of rebellion, the only kind left to her anymore. It may be so the sleeves don't roll back to expose the scars on her arms. I don't think to ask.
It's hard, in fact, to know what to ask her. She's flanked by Crystal Sturgill and Karen Howell, in identical uniforms, all of them pallid under the fluorescent hallway lights. Sturgill's somewhat frizzy hair and Howell's puffy eyes suggest they haven't been up long this morning, an observation Howell confirms. "They got us out of bed," she says, her small voice registering not so much resentment as resignation.
So here they are. Three convicted murderers. Three demonic killers, vampires, would-be anti-Christs, if you believe everything said about them in court and in news reports over the past 12 months.
What they mostly seem like up close is three teenage girls. Cornett and Sturgill are 19, Howell is 18, but they could all be several years younger. They're guarded at first, but they soon relax. This is their seventh or eighth interview since they were sentenced to life in prison four days ago—on Friday the 13th—and they seem glad to talk.
The crime is familiar by now. East Tennessee media covered it obsessively, and the state Associated Press named it the number one story of 1997. On April 6 of last year, Cornett, Howell, and Sturgill left their homes in Eastern Kentucky with three friends—Joe Risner and Dean Mullins (Howell and Cornett's boyfriends) and 14-year-old Jason Bryant. That evening, at an I-81 rest stop north of Greeneville, they kidnapped a family of Knox County Jehovah's Witnesses who were on their way home from a religious conference, drove them to a dead-end gravel road, shot all four of them—mother, father, grade-school daughter, toddler son—and took their van, leaving the adults dead and the little girl to die the next day in a hospital. Only the 2-year-old boy survived, his right eye destroyed. Two days later, the six were arrested in Arizona after trying to cross into Mexico.
In the flood of news stories that followed, the case took on near-mythic dimensions of good and evil. The victims—Vidar and Delfina Lillelid and their children, Peter and Tabitha—became an embodiment of innocence and hope, immigrants from different continents who had started a life together dedicated to their family and their faith. Their attackers assumed an aura of darkness that went beyond the horror of their crime. The first lurid physical descriptions of them, their "wild haircuts" and face piercings, were quickly joined by tales of occultism, witchcraft, and satanic rites. Most of the stories revolved around Cornett—how she was married wearing a black dress and red cape, how she cut herself and drank blood, how she signed her name backwards, "Ah-Satan".
The obvious questions about the case have been answered. Although the six have offered different versions of who did the actual shooting, all of them pleaded guilty in February to first-degree felony murder. Last month, Judge James E. Beckner sentenced each of them to three consecutive terms of life without parole, plus 25 years.
Before they left home, they stopped at McDonald's for lunch. Karen paid, with some of the $500 she had taken from her father's house. They were talking about going somewhere far away—New Orleans, maybe, because Natasha had been there before—and they knew Joe's Chevy Citation was too small and too old to get all six of them there. They already had the guns—one from Karen's father's cabinet and one from a friend. "Joe said we could stick somebody up for their car in a mall parking lot," Natasha said in court. "I said, what do you mean a mall? Like a K-Mart? He said, no, a big mall like they have in Lexington." They decided to look for a mall in Tennessee, since it was on the way to New Orleans.
Greeneville, March 10-13
Bryant, the youngest and least articulate of the group, says he never knew what was going on during the trip and was stunned by the carjacking and the killings. He names Risner and Mullins as the shooters but can't offer many details of the crime (he says he went into shock). Cornett, Howell, and Risner all say the opposite—that Bryant was the sole shooter, emptying two handguns into the family while the others watched in varying degrees of horror. They have divergences, though; Natasha and Karen say Natasha tried to stop Jason, or at least tried to save the children; Risner says nothing about that; Risner admits he ran over the bodies as the six were fleeing in the Lillelids' van, but insists it was an accident; Karen and Natasha (and, in the jail interview, Crystal) say it was intentional and Risner was laughing as he did it.
Scene Two
Vidar Lillelid approached the group outside the bathroom at the rest stop, carrying his young son in his arms. The blond, smiling father asked the teens if they believed in God. Natasha said no; He had never answered her prayers when she was little. While they spoke, Delfina and Tabitha Lillelid came up. Tabitha reached out her hand and offered Karen and Natasha a Hershey's kiss.
Shoney's—There's an air of defiance about Tiffany Caudill as she walks into the restaurant, just off the highway between Pikeville and Betsy Layne. She's wearing jeans, workboots, and a black White Zombie T-shirt with "Say You Love Satan" emblazoned on the back.
Greeneville, March 10-13:
"They certainly didn't indicate to me at any level that they were remorseful about what they had done," he says, sitting in his fifth-floor office in the NationsBank building adjacent to the Greene County Courthouse. "They were remorseful that they were convicted of first-degree murder and that they are going to die in the penitentiary. But that's about the only level of remorse I have seen from these people."
Bell didn't set out looking for witches. But he says the evidence quickly accumulated to such an extent that it was impossible to ignore: from the upside-down cross spray-painted in Natasha's bedroom to the one she carved into Jason Bryant's left arm two nights before the killings, from her books on witchcraft to the testimony of friends about Natasha and Karen's blood rituals, everywhere Bell's investigators looked, they found occultism.
He doesn't pretend to understand the teens' exact beliefs, which he characterizes as a mish-mash of ideas cribbed from a wealth of sources. But he's sure they were the reason for the killings. And in his 16 years as D.A., he's never had a case convince him so thoroughly that there is evil—"spiritual evil"—in the world.
At the foot of the bank are openings to two parallel tunnels, wide cement box culverts as long as a football field and eight or nine feet high. When it's not raining, they stay fairly dry. They're covered, end to end, floor to ceiling, with spray-painted slogans and symbols.
When Natasha Cornett was 13 or 14 years old, she came down here with a can of black spray paint and in letters two feet high scrawled the name of a popular Pat Benatar song: "Hell is for Children." It's signed, "by Natasha Ah-Satan."
Scene Three
In the Lillelids' van, Joe Risner sat in the front seat holding the 9 mm gun. Jason Bryant, Natasha Cornett, and Karen Howell were in the middle, next to Peter Lillelid in his car seat. Jason was holding the .25 caliber. Delfina and Tabitha were in back. Tabitha was crying. Delfina started singing to her. Natasha says Jason told Delfina, "You'd better shut her up!" The Lillelids tried to assure their kidnappers they could let them go without fear of repercussions. "[Delfina] said she wouldn't be able to identify any of our faces because all teenagers dress alike these days," Karen says.
"Tara" dresses a lot like Natasha Cornett and her friends. Today, she's wearing a black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, with an upright pentagram dangling from her thin necklace. She doesn't want her real name used. Although she is "out of the broom closet" to her friends and co-workers, the 20-year-old college student is wary of letting too many people in Pike County know she's a Wiccan, a witch.
Tara's been a Wiccan for three years. She knows most people around here won't see much difference between her religion and satanism. But she says she adheres to pre-Christian pagan beliefs that don't even acknowledge Satan, much less worship him.
Tara estimates there are 200 or so Wiccans in the immediate vicinity, most of them solitary practitioners. Natasha Cornett, she says, wasn't one of them. She was something different, darker.
The god Natasha says she believes in is a yin-yang deity similar to the Wiccan goddess. But Tara thinks Cornett lost sight of the good in pursuit of the evil.
"In the immortal words of Kurt Cobain," Tara says, giving an ironic half-smile at the name of the dead singer, "the darkness catches you. You can run from it, but it catches you. If you completely embrace the dark side without the light, then the dark will claim you."
After Steve Cornett left her, Natasha and a friend took a road trip to try to find him in Lexington. Failing that, they ended up in New Orleans, where they lived for a month, hanging out with "gutter punks" and sleeping in abandoned houses. They did drugs, including heroin. They went to a tarot reader; the cards said Natasha was going to "do something big" with her life.
The word "Gothic" is mostly a fashion statement these days. It means dark clothing, black lipstick, chains on jeans, and the doom-ridden music of bands like Marilyn Manson and Tool. Tara offers a definition: "The whole idea behind Goth, in my opinion, is embracing your darker side and recognizing it."
She's not far off from the more subtle analysis offered in a recent book, Nightmare on Main Street, by University of Virginia literature professor Mark Edmundson. Tracing Gothic thought to its roots in 18th and 19th century literature (Edgar Allan Poe was kind of a high priest of Gothic), Edmundson suggests its core ideas—that we are haunted by pasts we can't escape, that there is no hope for redemption—have come to define our culture. He sees the effects of Gothic thought in everything from Freudian psychobabble to slasher films. (Vampires, who are both haunter and haunted, are very Gothic.) Edmundson isn't an alarmist, exactly; he notes violent crime, for example, is actually down, even as obsession with it is up. But he wonders about the cultural impact of so much determined, or pre-determined, darkness: "In a culture of Gothic...there is no love to mitigate the drive to domination, not even a conception of love that can adequately counter the Gothic myth that all is haunted and that death inevitably wins out."
Scene Four
After the shootings, Natasha says, Jason jumped into passenger seat of the Lillelids' van. He and Risner were laughing. Karen says Jason fiddled with the stereo. "He said, 'I've gotta hear some Marilyn Manson.'" The stereo wouldn't work.
Jason's the one who walked up to Tabitha Lillelid while the 6-year-old was screaming over her mother's fallen body, put a gun to the girl's blond head, and fired. Crystal Sturgill calls him "a monster."
I start to ask what it's like to wake up every morning and realize he's in jail, but Bryant anticipates the question and misunderstands it. "Every morning when I wake up, I grab my right eye," he says, clamping his hand to his face to demonstrate. He said the same thing in court, to illustrate his trauma at seeing Vidar Lillelid shot in the head. The motion looked oddly mechanical on the stand; it seems even moreso close-up.
i am curious .. what you know of about them?? explore their world mmm
