The greatest tragedy in a brief round of teen dabbler satanic activity when I was a juvenile investigator in the late 1980s was homeowners’ ignorance about their insurance policies.
Plano Police Department had a rash of crimes involving high school “teen dabblers” in satanism. Mostly, their crimes were petty vandalism.
But the crimes that hurt people the most occurred in vacant homes listed for sale. We had a series of burglaries and major vandalism cases in those homes. A group of kids would break in and conduct their “rituals.” They would spray paint profanity, the symbol for Anarchy, an inverted pentagram, and “666” around the walls in the house. They would break every piece of glass inside the house – mirrors, light bulbs, glass tabletops, etc. And they would urinate and defecate in multiple places on furniture or the carpet and smear it on the walls.
The homeowner or a realtor would report the crime several days after it had happened, but pinpointing the specific night was usually difficult. Damage typically ran well over $10,000.
Most of these homes were on the market because the homeowner had moved to a newer, larger home prior to the vandalism. After moving out, they had cleaned, repainted, and staged the older home for sale. By the time the house was ready to show to prospective buyers, it had already been vacant for a month or more.
What the homeowners didn’t realize is that a typical homeowner’s insurance policy needs to be modified after the owner moves out. A policy on an occupied property ceases to be in effect after the house becomes vacant.
Most of the families had were already cash-strapped by that point. They had made a down payment on the new house and paid to fix up the old house for sale. But by failing to update the insurance policy, they had allowed coverage to lapse. After a teen dabbler vandalism such as described above, they now had to come up with another $10,000 or more cash to repair the damage to put the house back on the market.
I saw husbands and wives break down in anguish and desperation when they could not scrape up the money for repairs, shocked that their insurance company declined to pay due to lapsed coverage. If only they had known to modify the policy once they moved out, the extra expenses could have been mitigated.
We seldom caught the kids who did the damage. We would get a plethora of fingerprints and other evidence, but rarely developed suspects. On the rare occasions when we did, they were usually first offenders and got probation. It then became a civil matter for the victim homeowner to recover damages from the kids’ parents.
I presented at the 1988 IAI conference in Sacramento and wrote a paper for the Journal of Forensic Identification on processing those scenes, but by the early 1990s the fad seemed to have faded out. I’ve often wondered about the families whose homes and finances were ruined by the senseless acts of those kids. And the kids themselves – did they ever grow out of it?