THE ULTIMATE EVIL: An Investigation into America's Most Dangerous Satanic Cult

The story of Maury Terry's nine years of obsessive investigation of the Son of Sam and Charles Manson mass murders, relating them to a cult of American Satan-worshippers still at large. Terry was saving everything in print about the Son of Sam murders--and noticing much awry in the reports--even before the arrest of David Berkowitz for the series of murders and assaults supposedly committed by him in 1974-75. Most glaring was the discrepancy in intelligence among letters allegedly written by the ""Son of Sam"" to Jimmy Breslin and others, although the police lumped them all together as from the same hand. To Terry, everything pointed to one or more accomplices, especially when Berkowitz was identified by a witness as being too far from the scene to have arrived in time for the final mayhem attributed to him. Terry's investigation led him to interview Berkowitz himself at Attica State Prison, and to enter into a correspondence with him in which Berkowitz reveals his membership in a Satanic cult that practiced ritual murder as well as bloodletting of animals. Though Berkowitz is indeed guilty of several of the murders, Terry has been able to isolate five other killings seemingly commit ted by Berkowitz's former associates. According to cult specialist Ed Sanders, author of the Manson murder book The Family, the original Satan cult, begun by Aleister Crowley in England, has somehow merged with an offshoot of a Scientology splinter group called The Process and become involved in the criminal drug trade. Terry's investigation carries him to North Dakota and California, with a number of his cult-dropout informants later dying violently. Whoever breaks the code is marked. Very unsettling indeed and convincing as far as it goes. Terry is certain that this publication itself will result in new victims.