Every one of these cases produced an inventory. Investigators went through a bedroom, a game collection, a circle of friends or a computer, and someone outside the investigation read the list and drew a conclusion. In Tokyo in 1989 the list was thousands of videotapes. In Oklahoma City in 1986 it was a fantasy game and a shelf of occult books. In Lombardy in 2004 it was a metal pub and a group of friends who dressed in black. In Irkutsk in 2011 it was an internet community, and in Penza in 2012 it was a pile of thrillers and horror films. Each time a public argument followed that treated the entertainment as a cause. Each time the courts, which had to decide what happened and who was responsible, said something narrower.
The story is in that gap, not in the crimes themselves: what was said about the tapes, the game, the music and the websites, who said it, and what judges, prosecutors and later researchers made of it.
Between August 1988 and June 1989 four girls aged 4 to 7 were killed in Saitama Prefecture and Tokyo. Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested in Hachioji, in western Tokyo, on July 23, 1989, and confessed in August. The Tokyo District Court sentenced him to death on April 14, 1997. The Tokyo High Court upheld the sentence on June 28, 2001, and the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on January 17, 2006. He was executed on June 17, 2008, at the age of 45.
Police took thousands of videotapes from his room: 5,763 by one count, nearly 6,000 by others. They included anime, horror films and adult titles. Photographs of the room, with tapes and magazines stacked to the ceiling, ran in the press and became the picture of the case.
They were not entirely what they seemed. Toshiyuki Kobayashi, a weekly magazine reporter who was there, later wrote that a television cameraman had set an adult manga on top of a pile before filming, to make a stronger image, and that the room held fewer sensational items than the press had hoped for.
The word otaku already existed. In 1983 the essayist Akio Nakamori had used it in a run of columns, "Research on Otaku," in the magazine Manga Burikko, written after a visit to the Comic Market fan convention. He presented the fans as strange and obsessive, and the columns drew a hard reaction, though many fans took the label up anyway. After 1989 it became an accusation. The Spanish researcher Jorge Rodríguez Cruz cites an August 1989 Asahi Shimbun headline that asked whether the suspect’s companions were anime and videos. The German scholar Björn-Ole Kamm, who studied the Asahi, Yomiuri and Mainichi from 1990 and 1991, recorded the vocabulary of otaku, anime and mania repeated across all three papers. By Rodríguez Cruz’s account the press described otaku as withdrawn people who could not tell fantasy from reality, and dwelt on the suspect’s parents' supposed neglect and on the death of his grandfather, rather than on the bullying he had suffered at school over a deformity of his hands.
Experts joined in. The psychiatrist Osamu Nakata said at the time that, with the video boom, there were a good many young people who had lost touch with reality and were potential criminals of Miyazaki’s type. The commentator urbansea, writing in Bunshun Online in 2019, calls the remark typical of the years that followed: video fans were said to be unable to tell fiction from reality, collectors to treat people as objects, anime fans to be adults who had never grown up. A women’s weekly, Josei Seven, ran a headline warning that children raised in a particular way would turn into "Miyazakis." Urbansea describes the mood as collective hysteria, and reads it as a habit of mind: when an act is beyond understanding, people take comfort in blaming something abnormal and cutting it off from themselves.
A phrase passed into fan legend. "Here are 100,000 Miyazaki Tsutomus" was said to have been announced by a reporter to the crowd at the Comic Market, which Rodríguez Cruz places at Comiket 36; Bunshun calls it an urban legend. The fans answered in other ways. In 1992 a group of manga creators set up a society to defend freedom of expression in manga. In the 2000s the psychiatrist Tamaki Saito argued that psychiatry had been wrong to treat otaku as a diagnosis, that they were better understood as a community, and that confusing fantasy with reality was not a mark of mental illness. Rodríguez Cruz adds that Japan’s 1999 child-protection legislation and its 2014 amendment left manga and anime outside content regulation as works of art, which he attributes largely to the sustained demand of authors for artistic freedom.
Over the Heisei era otaku culture became a major force in Japanese culture and consumer spending and the word became known around the world, while, Bunshun adds, the old stereotype still comes back whenever regulation of expression is debated.
The legal question was criminal responsibility. Over the years Miyazaki was evaluated by psychiatrists many times, with diagnoses that included dissociative identity disorder and schizophrenia, and he received psychiatric treatment in detention for more than ten years. The Tokyo District Court held that he understood the nature and consequences of his acts and was therefore criminally responsible, and the higher courts left that conclusion in place. In a report on mental health and the death penalty, Amnesty International Japan lists him among prisoners who reportedly had a mental illness before execution.
The execution itself reopened the argument in another form. It came two years and four months after the sentence became final, against an average wait of about eight years over the previous decade, a pace the news site J-CAST called a "speedy execution." Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama said the review had been careful and the timing was by chance. Nine days earlier seven people had died in a killing in Akihabara, the Tokyo district associated with otaku culture, and the media noticed the timing. The journalist Akihiro Otani said executions tend to come when public anger over crime is high; the Ministry of Justice would not say whether Akihabara played a part. Maiko Tagusari, Miyazaki’s lawyer, said of the execution: "We strongly protest."
The tapes also fed a story about one series. Guinea Pig, a run of low-budget Japanese horror films, began in the mid-1980s. The manga artist Hideshi Hino conceived the series as adaptations of his own manga and wrote and directed two entries, in 1985 and 1988, according to Gata Magazine, a film site. Dazed, writing on Japanese direct-to-video cinema, says several Guinea Pig tapes were among those in Miyazaki’s possession; Gata says one was in his collection and that one or more entries were suspected of influencing him. The two accounts differ on the number.
A second story ran in the other direction. In 1991, Gata writes, the actor Charlie Sheen is said to have obtained a copy of Hino’s 1985 entry, taken it for a genuine recording, and reported it to the FBI, and the makers are said to have answered with a making-of film showing that the effects were not real. Gata itself hedges the claim with "is said to." What it describes is a rumor about a film mistaken for real evidence, told in the years after a Tokyo case had taught the press to look at the tapes.
Sean Sellers was 16 when Robert Bower, 35, was killed in Oklahoma City in September 1985, and when his own mother, Vonda Bellofatto, 32, and his stepfather, Paul Bellofatto, 43, were killed there in March 1986. On October 2, 1986, a jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death on each. He was 17. He was executed on February 4, 1999, at the age of 29.
The trial turned on his state of mind, and the defense put the occult at the center of it. Witnesses described Satanism in the area and his own involvement. Defense counsel portrayed him, in the Tenth Circuit’s words, as a victim of "Satanism and occult worship" and argued that an obsession with Dungeons and Dragons had controlled his actions. A psychiatric expert testified that he was legally unconscious during all three killings and could not form the intent that first-degree murder requires; the state answered with a psychologist who, Amnesty International noted, had not tested his sanity at the time of the crimes. The judge refused instructions on automatism and on manslaughter, so the jurors could convict of first-degree murder or acquit, and excluded testimony about another person’s involvement in Satanism and a school notebook. Defense spending on psychiatric help, the federal courts noted, had been limited to 750 dollars.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in 1991. It held that the Satanism testimony was cumulative, since other witnesses had already described Satanism in the area and Sellers’s own involvement, and that nothing showed his conduct was beyond his control. It also struck one aggravating circumstance, that the killings were especially cruel, because the evidence did not support it. None of the opinions describes an organized group taking part in the killings. The question at trial was his mental state, not a cult.
Sellers had played Dungeons and Dragons, and that made him useful to the people campaigning against it. Patricia Pulling had sued her son’s school principal and the game’s publishers in 1982 after her son’s death; the suits were dismissed, and in 1983 she set up Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, which took her onto 60 Minutes with the game’s co-creator, Gary Gygax. In her book The Devil’s Web, Pulling wrote that Sellers had become involved with the game at about 13 and had gone from there into the occult, as Michael Stackpole records in the report he published in 1990.
Sellers disagreed with her in writing. In a letter to Stackpole, a game designer who was examining the claims that role-playing led young people into crime, he wrote that he had not been a Satanist while he played, that library research for a game adventure had led him to occult books, and that "it was Satanism not D&D that had a decisive role in my crimes." He likened the game’s part in his story to the part an interest in electronics may play in someone who later misuses it. Of Pulling, he wrote that she had "an aptitude for going beyond moderation," and that using his past as a typical example of the game’s effects was "either irrational or fanatical." Stackpole concluded in 1990 that Sellers’s own account contradicted Pulling’s use of him, that the link in her lists of game-related deaths was "forced," and that she "is not an expert in games."
The game was one front. In 1985 Tipper Gore and other women set up the Parents Music Resource Center, which pushed for ratings and warning labels on records and published a list of fifteen songs, singling out Venom’s "Possessed" and Mercyful Fate’s "Into the Coven" for occult content, according to Fangoria, a horror magazine. Television added to it. In 1988 Geraldo Rivera presented a prime-time special, Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, which Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as built around a purported but false epidemic of satanic ritual abuse in the United States; Rivera publicly apologized in 1995. Sellers appeared on Rivera’s program, including that special, and made several radio appearances with the evangelist Bob Larson, among them a cult crime seminar in November 1989.
One video of the period shows how he was used. A blogger who reviewed a one-hour interview with Sellers, conducted by Fletcher Brothers, a pastor who ran a residential program for troubled teenagers, argues that it dates from 1989 or later, because it refers to the 1988 Rivera special and uses footage from it. Brothers opens by saying Satanism is rampant in the United States and Canada, presents Sellers as the saved example of a demonic affliction, and closes by selling a companion video for ten dollars. Sellers himself made several videos, shown around the world, on the dangers of cults and Satanism, Amnesty International reported, and people who saw him on television wrote to him and credited him with helping them through crises of their own.
The court record moved away from the panic. In 1992 three mental health professionals diagnosed Sellers with a childhood brain injury and multiple personality disorder, which they diagnosed as present at the time of the killings; in 1987 the psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis had described him as chronically psychotic. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals held in 1995 that the disorder claim had been waived because it could have been raised at trial. In February 1998 the Tenth Circuit said it was "troubled by the extent of uncontroverted clinical evidence" that he had the disorder and acknowledged that the crimes may have been committed by an alternate personality, but held that federal habeas relief was unavailable and left him to executive clemency. On January 27, 1999 the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted to deny it, and members of his own family, including a stepsister, urged that clemency be refused. He told the board he could never make up for his crimes.
The same teenager who had been shown on television as proof that games and occult books lead to crime was, to the courts that finally reviewed his case, a defendant with a contested psychiatric diagnosis and a death sentence for crimes committed at 16.
The Beasts of Satan, in Italian the Bestie di Satana, were young people from the Milan hinterland and the lower part of the province of Varese, brought together by heavy metal. They met in metal pubs, among them the Midnight in Milan, and Fanpage describes their ambition as making metal music with their own band. Between 1998 and 2004 the group was tied to the deaths of Fabio Tollis, 16, and Chiara Marino, 19, in January 1998, of Andrea Bontade, 19, in September 1998, and of Mariangela Pezzotta, 27, in January 2004. The case reached the courts only because of the 2004 killing. Andrea Volpe and Elisabetta Ballarin were arrested on January 24, 2004, and Volpe’s statements led to the rest.
Coverage tied the crimes to music. AFP’s report described the group as a heavy metal rock band and Volpe as a self-described devil worshipper who wore black clothing decorated with devil images. At the trial, Michele Tollis, Fabio’s father, testified that heavy metal concerts were places where sects recruited, and named Paolo "Ozzy" Leoni as the group’s real leader. Gianluca Bontade, Andrea’s brother, testified that Andrea had first joined the group for the music and then stopped being the same person. Il Giorno, reporting Volpe’s release in 2020, still linked the group’s crimes to heavy metal and Satanic themes.
The public alarm outran the courtroom. AFP wrote in 2005 that a parliamentary group had reported hundreds of satanic cult groups in Italy, with more young people joining, that a police official, Marco Strano, said Satanism was rising sharply but was hard to measure, and that a Catholic college in Rome had begun a course on Satanism and exorcism for priests and seminarians. Leggi Oggi, a legal news site, printed figures of about 600,000 adherents in Italy and about 8,000 new satanic sects a year, attributed to a hotline run by a Catholic community with the State Police, without saying who produced the estimates. Antonio Pizzi, the prosecutor at Busto Arsizio and later attorney general in Bari, called the phenomenon underestimated and warned of signs such as black clothing and symbols on notebooks.
The judges took a narrower view. On January 30, 2006, the court at Busto Arsizio sentenced Nicola Sapone to two life terms, Leoni and Marco Zampollo to 26 years each, Eros Monterosso to 24 years and Ballarin to 24 years and three months. Volpe, who had chosen a fast-track procedure, had received 30 years in February 2005, more than the 20 years prosecutors sought, and Pietro Guerrieri 16 and a half years over Bontade’s death, which the court treated as an induced suicide. The court did not accept the charge of criminal association, which means it did not find that the defendants formed a standing organization. Lawyers for the defense said at once that this would matter on appeal. The Milan appeal court convicted the defendants in May 2007, with sentences from life imprisonment to 20 years, and the sentences were upheld by the Court of Cassation. Volpe, who had confessed and cooperated, received 20 years on appeal, served 16 and was released in 2020.
Later commentators went further. Fabio Sanvitale and Armando Palmegiani, authors of a book on the case who reviewed the court record, said in 2021 that Satanism played a much smaller role than reported, that they saw no satanic ritual even in the two earliest killings, that "gruppo" fit the defendants better than "sect," that Volpe’s claim of a higher-ranking figure giving orders was never supported by evidence, and that the public reaction had been exaggerated. Press coverage, they said, was full of clichés and produced hysteria, and the wave of Satanism in Italy followed a trend that had come from the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. They described Maccione’s statements as changing over the years and adding confusion.
Those who lost someone saw it differently. Michele Tollis, who spent six years investigating his son’s death on his own, called the 2006 verdict a just condemnation and said Satanism had been underestimated by the institutions. Pizzi, too, called the phenomenon underestimated. The sentences, for their part, attribute the deaths to named people, and none of them rests on a genre of music.
Between November 2010 and April 2011 a run of night-time crimes against passersby in Akademgorodok, the academic district of Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, left six people dead. The two men responsible were from the district. Artyom Anoufriev, whose name is also written Anufriev, was a first-year medical student; Nikita Lytkin was a schoolmate, a few months younger. The Irkutsk Regional Court convicted both on April 2, 2013, of six murders, nine attempted murders, three robberies, desecration of a body and creating an extremist community. Anoufriev received life imprisonment. Lytkin received 24 years, which the Supreme Court of Russia cut to 20. He died by suicide on November 30, 2021, two days after a suicide attempt in an Irkutsk-region colony. Anoufriev was serving his life term as of December 2021.
Here the screen that was blamed was a computer. Yevgeny Karchevsky, the Investigative Committee officer who led the case, said in an interview in October 2011 that the two wanted attention and recognition, had tried one movement after another, first skinheads and then a misanthropic ideology from social networks, and had kept a body of material on their computers that he compared to a bible. He described Lytkin’s mother as admitting that she had not limited his computer use or his time with the other suspect. He did not say that films, television or computer games had caused the crimes, and did not raise them at all. Both men, he said, were judged sane, and psychological and psychiatric examinations judged their development normal for their age.
At the trial, the historian Alexander Kostrov testified as an expert that the two had moved from skinhead groups to the neo-Nazi "White Force" and from there to misanthropy, an ideology of hatred of humanity, rejection of law and a wish for the world to end, and that they had admired real offenders, among them the convicted serial offender Alexander Pichushkin. The pair called themselves "superhumans" and promoted misanthropic ideas in online groups, and after the arrests other online groups campaigned for them. The court’s finding was of an extremist community. A woman who survived one of the assaults said that teenagers' unsupervised use of the internet is dangerous, because it lets isolated young people adopt ideologies that excuse violence, and called for tougher laws.
In a newspaper interview in 2012 Lytkin said he liked killing and that it was about feeling stronger. In a letter printed that December he described the rejection and humiliation he had suffered in school and named Anoufriev as the only person he confided in. The explanation the case produced in public was about an ideology, an online community and two young men who wanted to be seen. It was not about a genre of entertainment.
Alexander Bychkov was 23 when he was detained in Belinsky, in Penza Oblast, after a burglary at a shop in January 2012. Investigators spoke in March 2012 of confessions and of a diary in which he had recorded the killings. The Penza Regional Court convicted him on March 22, 2013, of murder of two or more people and murder to conceal another crime, and of theft with unlawful entry, and sentenced him to life imprisonment in a special-regime colony. The prosecutor’s office withdrew a charge of desecrating a body before the verdict. The Supreme Court of Russia upheld the sentence, a ruling reported on June 21, 2013.
The Penza regional prosecutor’s office listed a large number of films with violent content, mainly thrillers and horror, among his possessions. The court’s account of his motive, as the prosecutor’s office described it, concerned a hostile attitude toward people whom he judged to live disreputably. It did not concern a film. A forensic psychological and psychiatric examination diagnosed a mixed personality disorder that did not prevent him from understanding his actions, and the court found him sane.
The motive accounts that reached the press in 2012 were different again. Life.ru reported that the diary showed him killing in order to prove himself to a former girlfriend who had called him weak, a "rag" and not a "wolf." Oleg Troshin, head of the Penza investigative department, spoke through Interfax of revenge on behalf of a brother. He first confessed to six killings; investigators later spoke of nine, and the court convicted him of nine. In Penza, then, the horror films were part of an inventory and were not part of a finding.
The objects that were blamed were visible. Tapes can be counted, a game can be named, a pub can be photographed and a website can be quoted. Motives and states of mind are slower to prove, and in these five cases the courts spent their time on the slower material: criminal responsibility in Tokyo, a contested psychiatric defense in Oklahoma, the question of whether a group was a criminal association in Busto Arsizio, an extremist community in Irkutsk, a diary and a personality disorder in Penza. None of the verdicts rests on a film, a record or a game.
The panics left their own marks. In Japan a word for hobbyists became a criminal stereotype that psychiatrists, journalists and a women’s weekly reinforced, and that fans spent years contesting. In the United States the critics of one game counted Sellers among their examples while he wrote that the game had not been decisive, and the television specials of the period were later described by Britannica as built on a false epidemic. In Italy an alarm about hundreds of cult groups sat beside a court that declined to treat eight defendants as a criminal association. In Russia the investigator who explained two young men’s crimes pointed to the internet, a political ideology and unsupervised free time, and did not mention films.
The labels outlived the verdicts. In Japan, Bunshun notes, the stereotype still returns when regulation of expression is debated, and the name of the man executed in 2008 stays its shorthand.
• 1982: Patricia Pulling sues her son’s school principal and the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons; the suits are dismissed. In 1983 she sets up Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons.
• 1983: Akio Nakamori publishes "Research on Otaku" in Manga Burikko.
• 1985: Tipper Gore and others set up the Parents Music Resource Center. September 1985: Robert Bower is killed in Oklahoma City.
• March 1986: Sean Sellers’s mother and stepfather are killed in Oklahoma City.
• October 2, 1986: a jury convicts Sellers of three counts of first-degree murder and sentences him to death.
• 1988: Geraldo Rivera presents Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground; Hideshi Hino’s Mermaid in a Manhole is released.
• August 1988 to June 1989: four girls are killed in Saitama and Tokyo.
• July 23, 1989: Tsutomu Miyazaki is arrested in Hachioji; he confesses in August, and an Asahi Shimbun headline asks whether his companions are anime and videos.
• November 1989: Sellers takes part in a cult crime seminar with Bob Larson.
• 1990: Stackpole publishes his report on the claims about the game.
• 1991: the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirms Sellers’s convictions and sentences; the Charlie Sheen story about a Guinea Pig film is said to date from this year.
• 1992: Japanese manga creators set up a society for freedom of expression; three professionals diagnose Sellers with multiple personality disorder.
• April 14, 1997: Miyazaki is sentenced to death in Tokyo.
• January 17, 1998: Fabio Tollis and Chiara Marino are killed near Somma Lombardo.
• February 4, 1998: the Tenth Circuit denies Sellers’s habeas appeal and says it is troubled by the clinical evidence.
• February 4, 1999: Sellers is executed.
• January 24, 2004: Andrea Volpe and Elisabetta Ballarin are arrested.
• February 2005: Volpe is sentenced to 30 years.
• January 17, 2006: the Supreme Court of Japan dismisses Miyazaki’s appeal.
• January 30, 2006: the Busto Arsizio court sentences Sapone to two life terms and does not accept the charge of criminal association.
• May 2007: the Milan appeal court convicts the Beasts of Satan defendants.
• June 8, 2008: seven people die in Akihabara. June 17, 2008: Miyazaki is executed.
• November 2010 to April 2011: the Akademgorodok crimes.
• January 2012: Alexander Bychkov is detained in Belinsky.
• March 22, 2013: Bychkov is sentenced to life. April 2, 2013: Anoufriev and Lytkin are convicted in Irkutsk; the Supreme Court of Russia later cuts Lytkin’s term to 20 years.
• 2020: Volpe is released.
• November 30, 2021: Lytkin dies by suicide.