Devil in the Basement: White Supremacy, Satanic Ritual and My Family
About this ebook
“Gritty… Fascinating.” – Robert Markowitz, New York Times essayist
“Alone and bitter, [the killer] fabricated a horrible revenge—on the world and himself.” – The West Virginian
“Charlotte Laws is a tsunami.” – Snatch Magazine
Devil in the Basement reveals the shocking truth about my family. I learned about the murders, bombings, and devil worship when I visited my ancestors’ hometown of Fairmont, West Virginia. As a former private eye, I investigated what had happened and even ventured into the eerie basement where the satanic rituals had occurred.
The story begins in 1928 when thousands of Ku Klux Klan members march through this sleepy town. My great uncle Jal’s passions were ignited that day, as were those of my grandfather Tucker, who changed his Italian name to “sound white” with hopes of escaping poverty and racism, and of becoming a U.S. Senator. Meanwhile, my great-grandmother set up a criminal enterprise in the back barn, and my great aunt was hauled off to an insane asylum before becoming the mistress of a Detroit mobster.
But this story is not just about my family. It is also about their creepy neighbor Ernie, who had a ghoulish, life-sized doll. He abused his wives and dabbled in his favorite pastime: evil. He liked evil. He was creative when it came to evil. He was all about evil.
Devil in the Basement is a story of love and horror, racism and hope, of Christian piety and satanic ritual. It is a book that shines a light on one of the most ghastly real life incidents in West Virginia history. It is a story you will never forget.
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About the author
Charlotte Laws has authored best-selling books as well as over a hundred articles in noted publications, such as the Washington Post, Salon, the L.A. Daily News, Huffington Post, Gawker, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times. She starred on the NBC show The Filter and has been a weekly political commentator on BBC television for the past three years. She has appeared on CNN, Nightline, Fox News, MSNBC, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Late Show, and Larry King Live, and she has been the subject of articles by the Associated Press and in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Post, the Guardian, and the New Yorker, to name a few.
Laws was a Los Angeles politician for eight years and worked with the FBI. She has experimented with twenty-eight occupations, some of them quite unusual. She has been an executive director, an actress, a cab driver, a private investigator, a stand-up comic, a backup singer for an Elvis imitator, a city commissioner, and a bodyguard for a prostitute.
Laws penned the award-winning books Rebel in High Heels and Devil in the Basement, and she was voted one of the “thirty fiercest women in the world” by BuzzFeed. She has a doctorate from the University of Southern California as well as two master’s degrees and two bachelor’s degrees. She completed postdoctoral work at Oxford University, England.
Laws is an internationally known animal advocate and anti-revenge porn activist (often called “the Erin Brockovich of revenge porn”). She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, her three rescue dogs, and an assortment of rescue hens.
