Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Satanic Panic was at the forefront of the average American family’s fears. Movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and The Exorcist had already made their mark decades before in cinematic history, and with bands like Iron Maiden and King Diamond—Mercyful Fate rattling home stereos, parents were convinced that their children were vulnerable to the dark lord.
As we enter the spooky season, I thought I’d deviate from the traditional campfire ghost story and take us on a journey into the not-so-distant supernatural past. This is a Texas Tale of Tragedy under the guise of Satanic Panic.
The Goth Girl Knows…
In August 1988, 17-year-old Mary Rayna arrived in Lockhart, TX, and threw the locals for a loop with her goth look and morose attitude. Mary had transferred from Childress, TX (just south of Amarillo) to live with her aunt and cousin, Eddie, who lived in Lockhart. It seems Mary “needed to leave Childress” after a series of questionable and unfortunate events.
Michelle Gomez was also 17 and good friends with Mary’s cousin, Eddie. Michelle didn’t initially take to Mary, finding her exclusively black wardrobe and melancholy demeanor odd, but because Mary and Eddie were cousins and lived in the same house, there was no avoiding Mary. Once Mary started buying their group of friends pizza and paying for visits at the arcade, everyone looked past Mary’s Addams Family vibe, except for Michelle’s mother.
As weeks passed and the teenagers spent more time together, Michelle became intrigued by the mysterious Mary. On Halloween 1988, Mary did not disappoint. This was her time to let her goth flag fly. Michelle asked her mother if Mary could stay the night, and her mother insisted that Mary wear something other than black. So, Michelle loaned some clothes to Mary, and the sleepover took a dark turn.
Mary opened up to Michelle about her hometown of Childress and talked about the strange “dreams” she was having about the people she had left behind – the people she called The Merchants of Death (not to be confused with the War Crimes Tribunal). Michelle listened to the macabre stories of Mary’s detailed dreams and began to question if they were really dreams or if the events had actually happened.
Mary admitted to being part of The Merchants of Death. They would meet at an old house with a red porch light on the outskirts of Childress on the 24th of each month and perform ritualistic animal sacrifices. As Mary shared more with Michelle, she divulged that the group was why she was in Lockhart. The Merchants of Death had killed two boys and two girls, and she was scared that she would be next.
Were these dreams? Or were they memories?
On July 26, 1988, less than a month before Mary Rayna arrived in Lockhart, 17-year-old Tate Rowland was found hanging from a horse apple tree off a dirt road just outside of his hometown, Childress. Authorities ruled it a suicide. Tate was a handsome high school senior with a wild streak and an older on-again/off-again girlfriend, Karen, but folks who knew him never would have suspected he would take his own life.
Tate and Karen had a volatile relationship when they were together, and the year before, one of their fights turned physical. Tate was arrested, and charges were dropped, but Tate’s family sent him away to live with a family member in Louisiana, thinking he needed to be away from Karen for a while and to stay out of trouble. After a few months in Louisiana, Tate returned to Childress only to find out that Karen had gotten married.
Tate had a hard time at first, but his friends said that he was getting over this broken heart and moving on. He started coaching a women’s softball team and was seen in a grocery store parking lot having a few beers with his friend Chad before their game – and an hour before his body was found swinging from the tree.
Chad was just 15 years old and was described by other schoolmates as a “loner”—nothing like Tate. He was new to town; those who knew who he was thought that he liked hanging around Tate because Tate always had some excitement brewing. It was Chad who was there when the tragedy occurred, and it was Chad who went to Tate’s family home to announce to Jimmie and Brenda Rowland that their son had hanged himself. The three rushed to the scene to see Tate hanging from the horse apple tree. Jimmie cut his son down.
He was as calm as he could be, no tear in his eye no nothing. ~ Brenda Rowland recalled of Chad’s delivery
Chad showed up at the Rowland’s home a few days later and told Tate’s parents that Tate had left specific orders to be carried out after he died. He told them that Tate said Chad “should have his car” after he dies. That didn’t go over well. The Rowlands kicked him out of the house.
Law enforcement arrived and began questioning Chad. Chad told the sheriff that he and Tate had driven to a small grove of trees where they liked to listen to music, and Tate drank a few beers. Chad went on to say that Tate then strung a rope over the limb of the horse apple tree and said he was going to hang himself. Chad thought he was kidding and walked to the back of the truck to throw a beer can into the bushes. When he came back, Tate was hanging.
But Chad’s story didn’t add up. Tate’s neck had two visible rope burns – one above the Adam’s apple, one below. In hangings, the body pulls the chin forward, and the rope mark is always above the Adam’s apple. This led folks to ponder if Tate had been strangled with the rope before the hanging.
Two days later, Chad was brought back in for a second interview. His story changed. Chad claimed Tate tried to hang himself twice. The rope broke on the first attempt, and Tate said, “I can’t even kill myself.” They then went back to Tate’s house to get another rope, returned to the spot, and Tate stood on the hood of his car, tied the rope to the tree and his neck, then stepped off the hood. Chad’s story changes because he is afraid he will get into trouble for not trying to stop Tate.
The sheriff’s department decided there was nothing they could do…. (insert WTF). The judge didn’t think there was any reason for an autopsy (do it again), and Tate’s body was prepared for burial.
The weirdness didn’t stop. At Tate’s funeral, a guy sitting in a front-row pew chanted “suicide” over and over again. Then, the Childress Police Department got a local student’s report that something odd was not too far from the “hanging tree.” When patrol cars arrived, they found a cow skull lodged in a small tree and logs surrounding a pile of rocks under the skull. A few nights after that, an officer on patrol saw a figure standing by Tate’s grave. When he went in to investigate, the figure was gone, but there was “spittle all over Tate’s headstone.” 
Rumors were flying. By the time school started back in the fall, the story was that Tate was a member of a satanic cult, and because he refused to bring them a blond-haired, blue-eyed child for a sacrifice, he was sacrificed instead. And to add fuel to the fire ritual, reports began to come in that strangers were parking in the grade school parking lot, trying to pick up young children. Reports by townspeople of kids blasting heavy metal music and writing 666 around town and rumors that cult members were going to dig up Tate’s body circulated the town like a tornado warning.
Then something even stranger happened. Childress law enforcement received a phone call from the Lockhart Police Department. They were calling about Mary Rayna’s “dreams.” Lockhart authorities were made aware of the details Mary had shared with Michelle: that there was a cult in Childress that met in an abandoned house with a red porch light outside of town. She told Michelle that they were local parents who were members of the cult and that they had run over a boy with their car a few years ago. Childress deputies fact-checked these concerns and discovered that there was a “haunted” house with a red porch light in Kirkland (just outside of Childress city limits) that had just burned down. They also found an incident two years prior when a fifteen-year-old boy had been struck and killed by a hit-and-run while walking home.
On Halloween night, 1988, while Mary was sharing her dreams with Michelle, something nefarious was happening at Tate’s grave in Childress. A group of high school kids had heard or perhaps speculated (tis the spooky season), that the cult was going to dig up Tate’s body and steal his collarbone and pinkie knuckle for a ritual. So, the kids thought it would be a fun Halloween night field trip to go to the cemetery and see if they could catch the cult in the act.
They all piled into one truck and drove slowly to the back of the cemetery towards Tate’s grave. As they got closer, they heard music. Then, all of a sudden, “some headlights turned on right where Tate’s grave was supposed to be. We all started going crazy, and I whipped the truck around as fast as I could,” one of the teens told a grand jury. As they sped back through the gates, they saw pentagrams drawn on the cemetery shed. The headlights were gaining on them, and some of the kids jumped out of the truck and ran for their cars to escape. The headlights continued to follow the truck, turning off when they reached the Childress courthouse.
The young man who spoke to the grand jury did a brief interview with Skip Hollandsworth for Texas Monthly in 1992. When Mr. Hollandsworth informed him that his story would be “put in print,” the young man’s voice dropped to a terrified whisper. “Oh, Lord, the cult’s going to get me for sure now,” he muttered in fear.
Just days after Halloween, fifteen-year-old Ray Wilks was arrested for stealing a car and driving drunk into a utility pole. When officers booked Ray, he confessed in a “very spooky voice” to being in a satanic cult and at the tree when Tate was hanged. Years later, Ray claims to not remember anything he said when he was arrested because he was “so drunk.” But the Wilks family were no strangers to bad deeds and felonies, and their connection to Tate’s family would continue into darkness after Tate’s death.
The Devil House
The Wilks’s reputation had gone from the standard up-to-no-good to full-on Satan worshippers. Not long after Tate’s death, folks around town said that painted in red on the side of their house was “I love the Devil.” Mr. Wilks swears it was one of his sons professing his love for a girl named Lettie, and when they painted over it, it looked like it said “Devil.” Childress residents weren’t buying it and were convinced that nothing good was coming out of that house. And on one fateful night, Tate’s sister, Terrie, would add to the rumors and fears of the Wilks’s Devil House.
Terrie Trosper was a few years older than her brother, and since Tate’s death, her life was spiraling into darkness. She had separated from her husband and gave up custody of her four young girls. She started running around with some risky individuals and began dating a 28-year-old ex-convict named Ricky Bradford. Ricky was good friends with Darwin Wilks, one of the infamous Wilks boys. Ricky and Darwin had both done time in prison and didn’t learn their lesson.
One night in May 1991, Terrie and Ricky are at the Wilks’ house drinking with Darwin and a few others while Darwin’s father, Frank, was in jail for assaulting a police officer. The next day, Terrie was found dead, face down, in one of the Wilks’ beds. “I just touched her, and she was cold and stiff. I didn’t even look at her. I just got up. And I informed everybody I thought she was dead,” Ricky told officers without emotion.
At the autopsy, Terrie’s blood alcohol level was .23, more than twice the legal limit. The medical examiner determined that Terrie had died by choking on her own vomit. The Childress Police Department closed the case. How does one choke face down?
Not everyone was buying what the authorities were selling—allegations of Terrie’s death being connected to Tate’s almost immediately. One of Terrie’s friends, a courthouse secretary, said Terrie “never believed Tate took his own life. Right up to her death, she never accepted it. She was hell-bent on finding out who killed him.”
Ricky said that Terrie told him her brother had warned her about the cult planning on taking one of her daughters for a sacrifice. “But I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never seen any kind of cult,” Ricky said. He also claimed that Terrie had tried to commit suicide by overdosing on pills, and she probably tried again that night and was successful. And then the finger-pointing began.
Frank Wilks told police that he heard Ricky boast that he was “the devil.” Ricky’s sister and former girlfriend of Ray Wilks said, “I’ve listened to Darwin say that he works for the devil and knows the devil personally. Ricky’s little brother offered his two cents, “Them Wilks brothers have been seen wearing black capes and doing Ouija boards and loading goats into a car. I ain’t lying.” He also claimed that he was invited to join them in the graveyard to conjure spirits.
Jimmie and Brenda Rowland demanded an investigation. The former Childress County sheriff, Claude Lane, refused to investigate Tate’s death, insisting it was suicide. This led many to wonder if Sheriff Lane was also involved in the cult. But Lane got caught dealing marijuana and was sent to jail, so the new sheriff, Reece Bowen, reopened the case. That’s when Deputy Kevin Overstreet made his way down to Lockhart to hear Mary Rayna’s claims.
Meanwhile, Darwin Wilks swallowed 25 Elavil, an anti-depressant, in an attempt to kill himself. He left a suicide note: “I know something that the cops don’t know. I know who killed Terrie. I can’t live anymore.” When Darwin woke up, he conveniently didn’t remember writing the note and didn’t know who killed Terrie. And then he left for Dallas. 
During the Darwin drama, a forensic pathologist in Amarillo reviewed the photos taken of Tate’s body. He stated that an autopsy should have been performed to determine if Tate was strangled first and then hanged. So, on July 27, 1991, three years after Tate’s death, his body was exhumed. Then, a third story from Chad, the boy with Tate when he died, emerged. Chad told the sheriff that Tate “started jacking around with the rope by swinging around the tree with it.” Chad went behind the car to relieve himself, and when he came back, he saw that Tate had hanged himself.
Tate’s autopsy found traces of Elavil in his system.
The grand jury asked for Terrie Trosper’s body to be exhumed. Halloween week 1991, Terrie’s new autopsy results were announced: Terrie had died of asphyxiation, most likely smothering. She had contusions on her body, especially on her inner thigh, and bruises in her mouth that indicated “blunt trauma, likely incurred during an assault.” They speculated that there were two people involved in Terrie’s murder: one held her down while another smothered her.
Terrie’s autopsy also found traces of Elavil in her system. Terrie’s case was to now be pursued as a homicide.
Locals were convinced Satan was in Childress
The First Baptist Church in Childress held a satanism seminar, and more than 450 people showed up to hear occult experts explain how their souls were in danger. They preached about cults luring teens with heavy metal music. They explained how their children were being groomed to become a part of the Dark Lord’s Army and would be digging up coffins and having sex with corpses and bones in no time.
And the circus continued during the grand jury testimony. Karen, Tate’s ex-girlfriend, said she knew nothing about a cult. Chad Johnston stuck to his third story, claiming Tate committed suicide. District Attorney McCoy said, “Chad’s testimony was that Tate thought Karen was messing with his mind and that Tate got sick of it. And Tate thought he could make her feel sorry.”
But what about the second rope burn on Tate’s neck? Chad had nothing to say about that. What about Tate’s sister Terrie’s death? And traces of the same drug in both of them? All questions the grand jury was still asking.
Four months later, Frank and Darwin Wilks walked into the sheriff’s department and began to rattle the case again. They told law enforcement that Ricky Bradford, Terrie’s boyfriend, admitted to them that he had “killed the bitch.” Followed by threatening to burn down their house and the promise to cut out Darwin’s eyes if they snitched on him. An arrest warrant was served, and Ricky was in custody for first-degree- murder by the end of the day.
Ricky denied it all. He said Darwin set him up so he could claim the $1,000 reward money. (The Sheriff’s department confirmed Darwin did receive the $1,000 reward.) Darwin knew he was under the microscope. Just a few weeks before he turned in Ricky, he failed a polygraph when the examiner asked him if he smothered Terrie. Darwin took another polygraph after Ricky was arrested and passed.
A few days after Ricky’s arrest, a white cat was found with its heart cut out. A few days before Ricky’s murder charge went to the grand jury, DA McCoy’s house burned to the ground. A few weeks later, a middle-aged couple was found in possession of satanic and pornographic works of art. In one, a goat’s head was drawn on top of a human body. In another, an outline of Texas was drawn inside a pentagram. In the couple’s house, authorities found a large metal staff. (Sounds like typical menopause responses to a partner’s midlife temporary insanity.)
During Ricky’s trial, a woman named Betty Lewis was called to the stand. Betty was at the house the night Terrie died. She testified that she saw Ricky smother Terrie. One of Ricky’s cousins presented a tape recording of Betty denying that she had seen Ricky doing anything to Terrie that night, but the recording was bad quality and too difficult to make out what exactly Betty was saying. So, the jury sided with Betty.
Ricky Bradford was convicted of capital murder on November 3rd, 1992.
The horse apple tree was anonymously cut down.
Mary Rayna is still a mystery.