A powerful examination of mental illness, murder, a broken judicial system, a sensationalist media, and the rotten, apathetic core of white picket fence America (thoughts on the first season)

I despise the human race. People are ugly and pointless creatures. I sit back and I watch them and they anger me. I should get a medal for murdering these stupid people. Maybe when I'm dead, the gods of chaos shall grant me power.

John Alexander Lawson aka. Pazuzu Illah Algarad; Letter to his mother from Central Prison, North Carolina (October 26, 2015)

The news media goes into overd__rive with the gore and the constant commentary about evil and Satan and all the rest. But that's just entertainment. The gruesome details don't begin to answer the real questions – how can law enforcement in our community allow something like this to go on, how did we let this go on? Clemmons is a wonderful place to grow up; you're surrounded by the church, you're surrounded by family, everyone's a conservative Christian, everybody votes the same way, they eat the same stuff. But while they go about their business, these ugly things, these tough things are bubbling under the surface. And a guy like Pazuzu Algarad, he's a local myth, maybe a local joke, but nobody really pays attention to him, nobody realises how serious it is. Until it's too late.

Chad Nance; Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Camel City Dispatch, a local news blog in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

In William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist, and William Friedkin's 1973 filmic adaptation, a young girl is possessed by a demon named Pazuzu, a figure from the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian mythologies of Ancient Mesopotamia. The king of the demons of the wind, although Pazuzu was considered evil, he was regarded as apotropaic, insofar as he would stand against the goddess Lamashtu, who ate new-borns. Additionally, his appearance was said to be so horrific that it would drive away other lesser demons. Fast-forward a few thousand years, and travel a few thousand miles to Clemmons, North Carolina where Pazuzu Illah Algarad (born John Alexander Lawson) is a mentally-ill young man who worships Satan, sacrifices animals, and claims he can control the weather. And he murdered at least three people.

Although The Devil You Know, which aired on Vice, is an excellent overview of the Pazuzu Algarad case, its real focus is the efforts of local journalist Chad Nance to get beyond the sensationalist media headlines of cannibalism, witchcraft, filed teeth, and forked tongues and get to the issues which not only gave rise to someone like Pazuzu, but which allowed him to operate with relative impunity despite law enforcement knowing for at least five years that he was involved with murder. Through Nance, the show branches off to examine issues such as addiction, law enforcement, societal apathy, and the ease with which directionless and marginalised young people can drift into potentially dangerous situations in the hope of finding somewhere they can belong. Devil You Know paints a vivid, compelling, and often heart-breaking picture of a community and way-of-life that appears idyllic, but which is rotten at the core and fundamentally broken in so many ways.

Unlike a lot of cases examined in multi-episode docu-series, the facts behind the Pazuzu Algarad case are fairly straight-forward and not really in dispute. John Alexander Lawson was born in San Francisco in August 1978, but in 1980 his parents, Timothy and Cynthia, relocated to Clemmons, a predominantly conservative Christian suburb of Winston-Salem in Forsyth County, North Carolina. Divorced in 1986, Timothy returned to California, but Cynthia and John remained in NC. Cynthia was known to like the company of men, particularly bikers, and Pazuzu would later say he first learned about sex by watching his mother entertain a local biker gang. In 1990, Cynthia married a man named Johnny James and the trio moved into No.2749 Knob Hill Drive. John despised his mother's second husband, to the point that when Johnny would return from work, John would lock himself in his bedroom and refuse to come out. Things got so bad that in 1991, Cynthia and Johnny sent John for professional help.

Accounts differ as to what happened next, with some saying John was sectioned until Cynthia and Johnny could no longer afford to pay for his treatment, whilst others say he was only merely sent for counselling. Whatever the case, within a few months, John was back home. Meanwhile, he was bullied relentlessly; constantly smelling of faeces, he was given the nickname "Turd Boy". Over the next few years, he had several run-ins with police for things such as public intoxication and fighting, and started to become interested in a kind of clichéd Satanism, that had little to do with actual Satanism (which is primarily a non-theistic belief system). Having unsuccessfully repeated ninth grade twice, John dropped out of school altogether when he was 17. With things at home still untenable, Cynthia asked Johnny to leave, hoping that John's behaviour might improve without Johnny around. Johnny warned her it was a bad idea, saying she'd let John walk all over her and things would get worse. Upon leaving, he was quickly proven correct.

Living almost entirely off Cynthia, who was now working two jobs, John was soon on the way to alcohol and drug addiction, as he slowly turned the house into a rule-free party destination for his friends. Modelling his look on Drexel, the dreadlocked character played by Gary Oldman in Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), and basing his persona on Charles Manson, Anton LaVey, and Alistair Crowley, John started to sell drugs and openly worship Satan, and in 2002, he legally changed his name to Pazuzu Illah Algarad. He filed his teeth to sharp points and covered his body (including his face) in occult tattoos, although reports that he split his tongue were inaccurate. He stopped bathing and brushing his teeth, claimed to know black magic, said he could control the weather, and began to gather around him a group of "followers", mainly young women, whom he called his "fiancés". As time went on, the activities at No.2749 became more extreme – orgies were a regular occurrence; Pazuzu and his friends would often cut one another and drink each other's blood; animal sacrifices became common; and although Cynthia was still living there, people no longer used the toilet to relieve themselves, simply urinating or defecating wherever they stood.

In 2011, Pazuzu was convicted of misdemeanour assault for choking Cynthia, and in a separate incident, Amber Burch, his main "fiancé", was accused of punching her, although Cynthia refused to press charges. A year prior, Pazuzu had been arrested in connection with the murder of Joseph Chandler (30), who was found dead by the Yadkin River, having been shot several times in the head. Pazuzu was sent for psychiatric evaluation and was diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder and agoraphobia, but was found competent. His associate, Nicholas Rizzi, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, whilst Pazuzu was charged with accessory after the fact and sentenced to probation. From 2009 onwards, police started receiving a steady string of tips claiming that there was a body buried in the backyard at No.2749. They visited the house in 2010, asking Pazuzu if the reports were true. When he said they weren't, the police left. So yeah, solid police work. In 2012, they obtained a search warrant for the property but found nothing.

However, the tips kept coming, and in October 2014, the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office returned, finding not one but two shallow graves in the backyard, each containing skeletal remains. Pazuzu and Burch (now his "wife") were charged with murder, whilst Krystal Matlock, one of his fiancés, was charged with accessory after the fact. The bodies belonged to Josh Wetzler (b. 1977) and Tommy Dean Welch (b. 1978), both of whom had been missing since 2009. It later emerged that one of the first tips received by police (one of the many they had ignored) was from Stacey Carter, Wetzler's wife, who had heard rumours that Josh had been killed and buried. In April 2015, No.2749 was deemed "unfit for human habitation" and demolished. In May, after attempting to commit suicide, Pazuzu was moved to Central Prison in Raleigh on a Safe Keeping Order. And this is roughly where the documentary begins.

Directed by Patricia Gillespie, the show features an impressive cross-section of interviewees, giving a broad overview of the case from a variety of perspectives. There's Chad Nance (co-founder and editor-in-chief of Camel City Dispatch in Winston-Salem, North Carolina), Stacey Carter (Josh Wetzler's wife), Matt Flowers (John's friend before his transformation into Pazuzu), Nate Anderson (one of Pazuzu's "followers"), Jenna Woodring (Nate's girlfriend), Sheila Chandler (Joseph Chandler's mother), Michael Hewitt (reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal), Terina Billings (Pazuzu's neighbour and the first to report him to police), "Krazy Dave" Adams and Sylvia LeBeau (two of Pazuzu's followers), Chief Deputy Brad Stanley (Forsyth County Sheriff's Office), Sgt. Sean Reid (CSI, Forsyth County Sheriff's Office), Cadie Wagner-Davis (Amber Burch's childhood friend), Pam Walker (Director of Communications, North Carolina Department of Public Safety), Amanda Martin (First Amendment attorney), and Cynthia James (Pazuzu's mother).

The show states its intentions from the beginning, with Nance explaining that, for him, Pazuzu's story isn't about cannibalism or Satanism or animal sacrifices or orgies – it's about a broken mental healthcare system that allowed an ill young man to fall through the cracks, it's about an indifferent law enforcement agency that allowed him to act without repercussions for years, it's about a man (Matt Flowers) so disgusted by the actions of his best friend that he's driven to act, and it's about the tragedy of Josh Wetzler and the concomitant pain of Stacey Carter. In this sense, the first episode, "There's a Satanist in the Suburbs", goes into Wetzler's background to a far greater degree than Pazuzu's, which is unexpected – how many documentaries dealing with murder spend more time telling us about a victim than about the killer? Wetzler and Carter had planned to open a horse rehabilitation centre, into which they'd sunk their life savings. However, in 2007, the bank dramatically increased their repayments, they fell behind on the mortgage, and in 2008, they lost the farm and most of their money. As their relationship started to fall apart, Wetzler turned to selling weed and mushrooms to try to make ends meet. However, in 2009, after having some mushrooms sent to his house in the mail (a federal crime), he was arrested and convicted on a felony drug charge.

Nance uses this as a launching pad to examine some of the incongruities found under the surface of the Pazuzu case. Speaking of how Pazuzu got merely a few months' probation after participating in a murder, for example, Nance opines, "the system is really just broken. You have Pazuzu and his posse committing crimes that seriously affect everyone around them, but they get just right back out on the streets. But non-violent crimes like having a bag of pot or mushrooms in your pocket? Those lead to felony convictions that fills up prison and totally ruin lives." He argues that when one has a federal drug conviction, one loses all opportunities; Wetzler could never get another loan, his employability would diminish drastically, his status in the view of law enforcement becomes less important should something happen to him. He was a first-time felon with no previous charges of any kind, yet his drug bust essentially handed him a life-long Scarlet Letter and the stigmatisation that accompanies it.

Nance argues that in such situations, context should be everything, understanding why someone has done what they've done, yet in reality, context is seen as irrelevant. In the course of a few months, Wetzler went from being a reliable husband and father building a life for his family to someone who would occasionally disappear for weeks at a time, and it was this nomadic tendency which brought him into the orbit of Pazuzu, and ultimately led to his death. When Wetzler disappeared in July 2009, Stacey thought it was simply one of his normal disappearances, not reporting him missing until February 2010. When she did so, she learned that police had found his car abandoned only a few days after he'd disappeared, but they'd never told her. Had she known about the car, she'd have reported him missing sooner, reinforcing Nance's assertion that with a drug charge, you become less important in the eyes of law enforcement – he wasn't a husband and father who might be in danger, he was a drug dealer skipping town.

Aside from looking at the unnecessary tragedy that was Wetzler's murder, the show examines other issues that one might not expect from a documentary about a Satan-worshipping murderer. For example, the third episode, "Did the Devil or the Disorder Make Him Do It?", sees Nance delve into John Lawson's background, spending a lot of time on the fact that it was obvious from his early childhood that John had serious mental health problems, but he simply never got the help he needed, primarily because, Nance argues, he wasn't from a wealthy enough family. So whilst the show unequivocally condemns Pazuzu the man, so too does it have great compassion and sympathy for the child he once was.

Another major theme is addiction, with the show being remarkably open about Nate and Jenna's heroin addiction, showing them openly shooting up on-camera. In the case of Jenna, before she's even said anything, we see her injecting, and whilst she's happy to admit she doesn't want to kick the habit, Nate laments how he's been an addict for more years than he's been clean, pointing out (as he's shooting up) that drug possession is a violation of his parole and would land him in jail if he were caught. This all leads to one of the show's most unexpected scenes – an actual literal escape from a courthouse when Nate's lawyer tells him he's going to be arrested, and so he and Jenna just walk out the door, as a caption tells us Nate promptly went on the run. In its own dark way, it's rather funny, but only if we ignore the fact that we're seeing these two young people destroying themselves, and the best explanation either of them can come up with as to why is, essentially, there's nothing else to do in Clemmons.

Indeed, directionless youth, in general, is an important theme, as it was this kind of societal alienation that brought so many impressionable young people into Pazuzu's circle. Speaking of the sense of anarchy and lawlessness at No.2749, Nance states, "it's like this mad place where you can act out your darkest fantasies to no judgement. And actually, I can see the appeal for a generation who is having a hard time even finding a job. The idea that you can go somewhere judgement-free with no pressure on you, where somebody's going to give you drugs and let you behave how you want? There's an appeal to that." He's not wrong.

This theme is also touched on in relation to Matt Flowers, who emerges in episodes three and four as the de-facto protagonist of sorts. If this is anyone's documentary, it's Nance and Stacey's, but Flowers is the light at its otherwise dark centre. Flowers met Lawson before Lawson had transitioned into Pazuzu and the two became close friends. However, Flowers saw that Lawson was heading down a dangerous path, and felt that if he remained in Clemmons, he might follow. And so he enlisted, serving two tours in Iraq, before being honourably discharged. Returning to Clemmons, he found the John Lawson he knew all-but gone, replaced by the Satan-worshipping, dreadlocked, unwashed Pazuzu. When Flowers learned that Pazuzu had supposedly killed and buried someone, he was one of the first to contact the police, even telling them where in the garden the grave was supposed to be. However, when nothing happened, and as years went by, Flowers saw Pazuzu becoming increasingly unhinged and dangerous. In a remarkable admission, he explains that he told police that if they didn't properly investigate, then he was going to kill Pazuzu himself to prevent anyone else dying. And believe me, there's not a doubt in my mind that he would have done it. Or the police's mind, apparently, as this directly led to Pazuzu's arrest. But what's really extraordinary about how the show presents this part of the story is how guilt-ridden Flowers is; not only because he turned his best friend in, but because he feels that if he hadn't joined the military, he would have been able to prevent Pazuzu from killing anyone in the first place. He's a million miles from the conquering hero you might expect, Saint Michael slaying the Dragon – that he turned on his best friend haunts him deeply, and the heart-breaking self-destructive behaviour with which we see him engage in the fourth episode, "Another Dead Boy", is difficult to watch. There are many compelling characters here – Chad Nance and his relentless drive for the truth, Stacey Carter and her grief for Josh, Sheila Chandler and her anger that her son's murder was brushed aside, Cynthia James and her refusal to accept any blame, Nate and Jenna and their downward spiral. But to see Flowers sitting alone in a bar burning himself with cigarettes, talking about his untreated PTSD, and grieving about his involvement in Pazuzu's downfall is almost as dark and upsetting as the show gets. Almost. But not quite.

More on that in a moment. The show is also pretty clear in its suggestion that none of this needed to have happened – from the time of the Chandler murder in 2009, and certainly, upon the first reports of a body in the backyard, Pazuzu should have been off the street. Instead, the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office did next-to-nothing for five years. Its sole representative in the show is Chief Deputy Brad Stanley, but he does his cause no good whatsoever, talking about not having probable cause and making statements such as "it's not a normal practice to find deceased people in shallow graves in the backyards of neighbourhoods". He actually says that. In fact, Sylvia LeBeau, who came into Pazuzu's circle when she was only a teenager, did more than law enforcement. Upon being introduced to Stacey, who had heard Josh was buried in the garden, Sylvia came up with a plan to wear a wire in the hopes of recording something incriminating. All she managed to get was Nate saying that he had heard Pazuzu had killed some people, but she and Stacey took this to police, which resulted in nothing happening, with police telling them it wasn't probable cause for a search warrant. The show never comes out and says law enforcement was negligent, but simply by presenting the facts, it's certainly intimated.

It's in the fourth and fifth episode that the show really steps outside the mould of multi-episode crime documentaries and becomes something else – an examination of despair, an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of suburbia. This is accomplished in several ways. For example, there's the aforementioned scene where we see Flowers burning himself. This moment is intercut with a difficult-to-watch sequence which sees Jenna nonchalantly turn to prostitution to get money for drugs, and the cumulative effect of such editing is extremely effective, creating a sense of hopelessness that transcends anything individualised and becomes more about society at large. It's within this general theme where the show features its darkest and most heartbreaking moment. During the fourth episode, Nance reveals that his son has started to mess around with drugs, and there's a scene where he describes working late one night when he looked up and saw his son in the doorway – sweating, pale, shaking, his eyes bloodshot. Nance describes, or tries to describe, the emotion of seeing this person who is his son, but who isn't his son. It's his son's body, but it's not his son's soul. It's deeply upsetting and thought-provoking, and it's not somewhere I was expecting to end up with a documentary about a murderer. So hats off to the filmmakers for having the courage to go that far and yet never for one second have it feel manipulative or irrelevant.

I was extremely impressed with The Devil You Know. In the last episode, "The Burden of Truth", Nance says of John Lawson, "he has been absolutely marginalised, reduced to dust. All because the community he was a part of ignored the signs that he needed help." And this is a central point. The show is not about a Satanist murderer called Pazuzu. It's about the child he once was and how that child was failed. It's about the people who were affected by the murders and how they are trying to get on with their lives. It's about societal indifference. It's about apathy. And as it branches out to take in issues such as addiction, PTSD, guilt, and police incompetence, the wider it casts its net, the better it gets, painting an increasingly complete picture of a community that is either incapable of or uninterested in caring. Genuinely surprising me on multiple occasions, genuinely moving me on others The Devil You Know may disappoint those looking for salaciousness and Satan and gore, but for those more interested in the why than the how, and in the aftermath than the act, this is a richly rewarding viewing experience.

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