FBI file: Animal Mutilation, Animal Mutilation Part 02

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

THE MUTILATION MYSTE Texas had its own prime satanic spects: a group called the Sons of Satan. In 1974, a Kilgore College student had written that this group performed dawn rituals.

(Continued from page 92) Investigation is unclear. I have read one report, prepared by Flickinger and dated April 10, 1975, in which many other reports and investigations are mentioned. For a few months in 1975, the Federal Government apparently investigated satanic organizations and activities all over the country.

The motives of the informants also remain a bit unclear. Bankston, for instance, appears to have wanted to make a deal so that he could be transferred to a state jail in his home state of Mississippi; he also seems from his letters to have wanted to make some money from the publication of his story. Dan Dugan, the other principal informant, wanted to exchange his testimony for a reduction of his seven-year sentence.

For reasons unknown, Federal officials decided in the late spring of 1975 not to pursue the investigation further. One apparent problem with the informants' story was their allegations regarding the national leader of the mute mob. According to Bankston and Dugan, this man had served a sentence in Leavenborn on a bank-robbery conviction (which was accurate) and had recently moved to Austin, Texas (also accurate); however, when Texas reporter John Maksig obtained the alleged leader's arrest and jail history, it indicated that he had been in jail during most of the time that the informants claimed he was roaming from state to state performing hemaplugus ceremonies.

Some authorities believe the Bankston. Dugan affair was part of a master escape plot predicated on the assumption that a small county jail is easier to flee than

a big Federal prison. On May 31, Bankston did, in fact, escape from the jail in Chaska, Minnesota (to which he had been moved from Hastings), along with another prisoner; when they were apprehended six hours later, Bankston insisted that the other prisoner, a murderer, had forced him to go along with the caper. Dugan, meanwhile, had been remanded to Texas, and the day after Bankston's escape, Dugan escaped, too; he was captured on June 19th, during a holdup attempt in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Bankston later asserted that Dugan had escaped in fear for his life.

Despite the doubt cast on the satanic-situal theory, the mutilations continued to spread and to increase in frequency in 1975. They were especially common in Texas, where Bankston was to have his fear-filled innings as well.

One stare at a map of Texas, with its 254 counties containing some 17,000,000

## LONE-STAR MUTES

head of cattle—In fact, there are more cattle than people in Texas—and it is obvious that a group of moneyed mutilators could chop away pretty much to the tune of their own solly. More than 500,000 cattle reportedly die each year in Texas from natural causes, so a few hundred moos mutilated by night stealth would not be significant.

The Texas mutes reached public attention in November 1974 and then appeared to stop. More cases occurred in early 1975, with parallel to cases in other states. On January 20th, for instance, Hopkins County sheriff Paul R. Jones announced that a blood-slurping group calling itself the Devil's Disciples

was believed responsible for the mutes. In Kaufman County, east of Dallas, mysterious helicopters were reported and police officers started directing their spotlights into the night sky. And Texas authorities tended to ascribe the mutes to those coyotes with table manners and stomachs big enough to hold eight gallons of moo blood—even though, as in other states, there were instances in Texas where predators had uncharacteristically avoided cattle that had been mutilated. (Usually, when a cow lies dead for a few days, the ripening fumes spread widely and predators quickly arrive by land, air and burrow for the least.)

Aho, in January, the Fort Worth Star Telegram paid for toxicology tests on a heifer found near Brownwood, and the test showed a significant amount of nicotine in the liver and the blood; nicotine is the material most commonly used in tranquilizer guns. In March, a cow was chopped up north of Big Spring: its udder had been removed—but carefully, so that the stomach lining had not been punctured—and its heart had been repaired: through a small hole in its chest.

There were UFOs reported also. In Cochran County, following numerous flying-object reports in early March, two mutes were found in a large wheat field, each lying in a circle of burned, stubbled wheat about 30 feet in diameter. Sheriff C. G. Richards checked the circles and reported finding some radiation residue.

By late March 1975, Texas investigators had gotten word of the Federal investigation of the mute mob in Minnesota. As several of the suspected mob members—including the leader—were supposedly residing in Texas, the state department of public safety, as well as local police departments, conducted surveillance operations in Austin and in Hurst, Texas, near Fort Worth.

Texas, however, had its own prime

satanic suspects In the mutilations case: a group called the Sons of Satan. In 1974, a Kilgore College student had written a paper in which he said that this group performed dawn rituals in which cattle were chopped up. The student's theme was destroyed by one or more of his teachers, who felt that the material was disgusting. But word of the paper reached T. O. Tinsley, an employee of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, who was investigating the mutilations; Tinsley located the student and traveled around Texas, talking with several of the student's sources.

I knew of a motorcycle gang in California that also called itself the Sons of Satan; in 1970, a pack of its members murdered an Orange County woman and, according to a young man who later confessed, offered her heart to Satan by placing it in the woman's station wagon and setting the vehicle afire. The leader of the California Sons of Satan claimed to belong to a larger satanic organization that regularly sacrificed human victims in ceremonies in Northern and Southern California. One Colorado investigator believes that the Sons of Satan are involved in the mutilations and that the purpose of the mutilations is clandestine bacteriological-warfare research. I found no indication, however, that the California and Texas Sons of Satan were connected.

Between January and September 1975, John Makeig of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote a series of articles on the mutilations. The articles eventually attracted the attention of mute-mos informant Bankston, who began a correspondence with Makeig, in which he repeated some of his old charges and also came up with some new ones tailor-made for Texas. There is no measuring the terror that Bankston caused in Texas that spring and summer of 1975.

In a small city south of Houston, for example, Texas Department of Public Safety agents called together the mayor, the chief of police and the city manager and announced that the town water supply was going to be poisoned by occuit terrorists. In Mayflower, a small town near the Louisiana border, a sheriff's deputy called together the town's HI) citizens and announced that two of them were going to be mutilated. The scurk in both places was total scar-fire.

Meanwhile, learning that the Federal investigation had been called off, Makeig began to treat Bankston with more caution. When Bankston announced in a letter that the mutilators were going to