Ricky Kasso: The Acid King
In 1984, Northport, New York, was considered an idyllic suburb. The upper-middle-class, overwhelmingly white community on Long Island was regarded as safe — as far back as anyone could remember, there had only been five homicides there. So most parents didn’t think twice about leaving their kids alone while they worked in the city.
But, like teens in suburbs across the country, Northport’s teenagers resented the stifling conformity and utter lack of anything to do. Many of them turned to drugs as an escape.
None so much as Ricky Kasso. Besides being the school drug dealer, he was known for doing unbelievable amounts of LSD and PCP. Friends and acquaintances said they never saw him sober, and his epic appetite for hallucinogens earned him the nickname “the Acid King.”
He hadn’t always been that way. Up until junior high school, he had been a clean-cut kid; his mother was a teacher and his father, a school football coach. But around 7th grade, something began to change in him. That was when he first dropped acid. The next year, he got in trouble for the first time — for stealing some punch from his family’s church.
Kasso’s behavior went downhill from there, and he quickly spiraled into addiction. His family enrolled him in a community drug program, but he would just skip it. Later, they would have him committed to a psychiatric facility, but that didn’t stick either. They ended up kicking him out of the house when he was a young teenager, leaving him to sleep in the nearby Aztakea woods or in other people’s garages.
Kasso soon lost interest in school, and he dropped out when he was 16. But before he left school, one thing did pique his interest: the occult and Satanism. He found some books on the topics in the library, and his interest grew from there. He began carrying around The Satanic Bible (affiliate link) and randomly saying, “Hail Satan!”
Now free to indulge his drug appetites, he began doing even more LSD (which he called “mescaline”) and PCP. Friends and classmates said he would do about 40 tabs of acid a day, along with PCP, Cannabis, and whatever other drugs he could get his hands on.
Kasso, like a lot of his friends, was a big fan of heavy metal bands like AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest. Particularly in the 80s, metal bands’ music and album cover art had a dark, Gothic, Satanic aesthetic. None of them actually worshiped the devil; it was an affectation, an aesthetic, designed more to piss off fundamentalist moralizers than anything else. Most metal fans knew this and were in on the joke.
But Kasso, his brain fried on clinically stunning amounts of hallucinogens, seemed to take the whole thing way too seriously. He liked to trip in the local cemetery, where he told friends he was trying to “commune with Satan.” But other than chanting Satan’s name, no one recalls him participating in any rituals or doing any harm to animals or people.
More troubling than his obsession with Satanism was his apparent mental illness. His parents and friends said he frequently made comments and jokes about killing himself, and said “death is the ultimate trip.” It was for these suicidal tendencies that his parents had him committed to the former Amityville Asylum — but Kasso refused to cooperate in his treatment.
Most of Northport’s teens just saw him as kind of a weird burnout, a dirtbag you only hang out with to buy drugs, who acted crazier than he really was. But he did have a few actual friends, including Jimmie Troiano, Albert Quinones, and Gary Lauwers. They helped Kasso dig when he decided he wanted to get a skull from an old Revolutionary era cemetery — some said he wanted to use it in a “Satanic ritual” being held at the old Amityville Horror house, others said he wanted to sell it for drug money. Either way, he was later caught with a human skull and hand, and he was arrested.
A year after the grave-robbing incident, Kasso — who had been homeless for some time — came down with pneumonia. While he was in the hospital, his mother tried to have him committed to another psychiatric facility.
But Kasso, in his words, “bullshitted” the counselor sent to evaluate him, denying having suicidal thoughts or worshiping Satan. The counselor determined that Kasso was antisocial, but wasn’t a danger to anyone, so therefore couldn’t be involuntarily committed.
Kasso recovered and went right back to his dirtbag lifestyle. One night, he passed out at a party, and while he was out, Lauwers took 10 bags of angel dust from Kasso’s jacket.
When Kasso woke up and realized he’d been robbed, he was furious. Lauwers confessed immediately and returned five of the bags. But since he’d already smoked or given away the rest, he promised Kasso he’d pay for them.
Because he was broke, Lauwers had to make a payment plan for the $50 he owed Kasso. Kasso stayed mad at him, frequently berated him and, on more than one occasion, beat him up.
But by mid-June, Lauwers had finally paid Kasso off. Things seemed to be patched up between them, according to everyone who knew the two boys.
On June 19, 1984, Kasso, Quinones, and Troiano invited Lauwers to go to the woods to get high and hang out. At first Lauwers didn’t really want to go, but Kasso offered to buy jelly donuts for everyone, and that persuaded Lauwers.
The four — along with some other hangers-on — found a spot in the woods to make a bonfire, but they had a hard time getting the wet wood to burn. Lauwers took off his socks to burn, then cut off the sleeves of his jean jacket to burn them too.
The teens did what they normally did: lots of drugs. The four of them had taken a total of 40 tabs of LSD and smoked 17 baggies of PCP. As the night wore on, the rest of the hangers-on drifted away, leaving the four of them alone.
What happened next, we may never know exactly. We do know this: at one point, Kasso and Troiano began beating and kicking Lauwers. Then Kasso took out his knife and began stabbing Lauwers. Quinones would later testify that Troiano held Lauwers down while Kasso stabbed him; Troiano denies it.
Troiano admits to helping Kasso drag Lauwers’ body away, deeper into the woods, and covering it with some brush. But Lauwers suddenly sat up, and Kasso freaked out. Kasso said he stabbed him multiple times in the face until Lauwers was finally, truly dead.
Afterward, Kasso and Troiano threw the knife off a bridge, and the three agreed never to tell anyone.
But Kasso couldn’t keep his end of the bargain. He told several friends what he’d done — not to express remorse, but to brag about it, laughing. Most of them didn’t believe him; it was a story too gruesome to be real.
So Kasso decided to prove it. Over the course of a few days, he took several friends — anywhere from a dozen to 20 — to Lauwers’ decomposing remains in order to brag about what he’d done. Shockingly, not one of the sightseers told the police or even a parent. However, one girl did tell Kasso he should at least cover the remains.
Two weeks went by after Lauwers’ murder, but his parents had done little more than ask a few of his friends — including Kasso — if they had seen him. Lauwers often ran away, so his parents just assumed he had done so again.
Meanwhile, the smell of his decomposing remains was becoming overwhelming, even outside the woods. So Kasso and Troiano decided they needed to bury him. They dug a shallow grave next to where he lay, then pushed him into it. Because they were so decomposed, his skull fell off while they were moving his remains. Kasso found this very amusing.
Kasso and Troiano figured they had gotten away with the murder, and now that Lauwers was buried, they probably wouldn’t ever be caught. They began making plans for the future; they decided to hitchhike to California, where they could support themselves selling drugs and start a new life.
But just after they left, someone heard about how Kasso had confessed to murdering Lauwers and would take people out to the woods to gawk at his remains. This anonymous someone called the police.
At first, the police blew the caller off. There had been no missing person report on Lauwers, so there was no crime to investigate. But — perhaps tipped off by the overwhelming smell emanating from Aztakea woods — they did eventually follow up on it. Using cadaver dogs, police discovered Lauwers’ remains, buried in a shallow grave, on July 4. An autopsy would show he died from dozens of stab wounds to his back and face, particularly around his left eye.
Meanwhile, Kasso and Troiano had made it to Chicago, but they lost interest in their plan to go to California. They missed their friends. So they sold some drugs and used the proceeds to buy a cheap car and drove it back to Northport.
When they got back to Northport, they still didn’t know that the police had been tipped off. They partied with their friends, and when the party was over, crashed out in their car.
But someone reported the car as suspicious to police. The first responding officer saw Kasso and Troiano sleeping inside, and knew immediately who they were. He called for back-up. The two woke up to 18 officers surrounding them, guns drawn.
Images of a handcuffed, wild-eyed Kasso wearing an AC/DC shirt quickly spread across the country.
Police also arrested Quinones, who quickly made a deal: immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony. Based on his testimony, both Kasso and Troiano were charged with the murder of Lauwers.
While he at first denied it, under questioning, Kasso confessed. He never gave a reason for why he killed Lauwers, but he did say that while he was stabbing him, he was shouting “Satanic stuff.” Quinones said that Kasso yelled at Lauwers, “Say you love Satan!” a line that would be repeated endlessly in newsprint, glossy magazines, and television screens.
But Kasso would never face trial. The day after his arrest, on July 7, 1984, he hanged himself in his cell.
By now the media had gotten wind of Kasso’s supposed Satanism, mostly thanks to a police press release stating he belonged to a Satanic cult and performed Satanic rituals. In 1984, the Satanic Panic was just getting into high gear, and the Kasso case was just the kind of red meat it fed on. Kasso and his accomplices were everything the moralizing reactionaries warned us about: druggies, Satanists, who listened to heavy metal. The media circus went on for months, inspiring numerous talk-show hosts and TV specials, including 20/20 and Geraldo Rivera. His 1988 prime-time special, Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, featured the Kasso case, and was just the kind of serious, fair-minded journalism you’d expect from Geraldo in the 80s.
With Quinones immune and Kasso dead, Troiano was now the only member of the trio who was going to face trial. The only evidence the prosecution had was Quinones’ testimony. Troiano’s story changed from one day to the next; as he explained to his lawyer, “it’s hard to remember exactly what happened when the trees are melting and the stars are rushing around.”
This was the key to his defense. Both Quinones and Troiano admitted to having taken at least 10 tabs of acid each and having smoked multiple bags of angel dust. Neither of their testimonies could be believed.
The stab wounds in Lauwers’ back could indicate he had been held down, as Quinones claimed. But it could also indicate that Lauwers was passed out when Kasso attacked him. Without any concrete evidence tying Troiano to the actual murder, he was found not guilty.
While the Satanic Panic had been in full swing since 1980, it had originated with fears about Satanists in childcare facilities. Before the Kasso case, the religious right had only recently begun attributing Satanism and ritual abuse to rock music and Dungeons & Dragons. The Kasso case gave rocket fuel to allegations that heavy metal music was the gateway to hell, exerting mind-control powers over helpless teens, brainwashing them into worshiping Satan and committing murder. The backlash — particularly in the Bible Belt — was severe. Heavy metal band T-shirts were banned in schools, posters ripped from teenagers’ walls and burned, and cassettes and albums destroyed.
But Satan has always been an easy scapegoat. No one wants to look at the fact that Kasso started doing serious drugs at such an early age — a red flag for abuse victims. No one wants to acknowledge that his seemingly normal parents kicked out their mentally ill teenaged son, leaving him to sleep in the woods, the floor of his friends’ houses, or whatever garage he could get into. It seems like there was a lot more going on with Kasso, but since he took his own life so young, we’ll never really know the whole story.
