Hello, I'm new here. I'm not a native speaker so please excuse me if my English isn't that great, hopefully it's still clear enough.
I was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis from 1996 to 2013, and I'm still well invested in the occult, especially Thelema and Aleister Crowley's bibliography in general, I wouldn't call myself an expert or anything but I studied thoughtfully ALL of the works of him and have given more than a hundred lectures on the topic. Furthermore my wife has been a Wiccan since the 90s so, while our two personal spiritual journeys are pretty different, I'd say I fundamentally have a great understanding of both of them (Damien on the other hand just confused them out, but he for sure was interested in them, even though his studies were pretty limited).
Why this premise? Because after roughly 8 years of knowledge about the case and a few years of research (I watched the Devil's Know movie when it came out and from there went down the rabbit hole and read every document, court file, books from both the nons and guilty crowd etc...) I'm 100% certain the murders were ritualistic and without doubs occult driven. I'll try to summarize all that's relevant in this regard (which is pretty much everything, it's somewhat hilarious how few people sees it).
The year of the murder itself is a pretty ******* red flag: 1993... 93 is the most important number in Thelema (the occult philosophy created and theorized by Crowley), you can take a look here if you're interested:
93 (Thelema) - Wikipedia
Damien while on trial stated he NEVER read anything by Crowley but only works about him, which is a total lie since if you go on Callahan you can find sketches and notes written by him which pretty much summarize perfectly the contents of a specific work of Crowley, "Magick".
Now, the year is just the icing on the cake, if you take a look at the full date (May 5th, 1993) you can notice it's the date on which Beltane's sabbat take place. If you Google it you can find out Wikipedia says Beltane actually takes place on May 1st, but I can assure you this is not accurate at all, since basically all Wiccan covens just celebrate on the closest full moon... when did it happen on 1993? You can bet on it, May 5. It's also important to understand that Beltane is the sabbat were sex is used the most during celebrations, in fact, my wife's coven pretty much never perform orgies on the other sabbats of the year. I know the autopsy revealed no sexual abuse occured, but it's interesting nevertheless since Crowley himself wasn't really interested in anal or vaginal intercourse until later in his spiritual life, in the early works it was all about oral sex. Could that also be excluded from the autopsy? I honestly don't know.
Continuing with Crowley, in basically all of his early works like Magick (which Damien for sure read) he also philosophically theorize power may be absorbed from blood, especially mestrual and children one. When does Crowley put the cut off? You can bet on it, 8/9 years olds, afterwards he considers them pre-adolescents. Another interesting thing which AFAIK is not stated on Crowley's published books but can be verified by looking at a few of his grimoires available to the the A'A' and OTO is the fact that water, especially during the sunset, is theorized to be best place where to perform ceremonial magic. Well, since this information is not available on the purchasable/borrowable books, Damien couldn't have know about it, right? WRONG, on Frank Robert Donovan's "Never on a broomstick" (a book Damien talked about while on trial) there's a DIRECT full-quote of one magic ritual written by Crowley, which he stated was to be performed in water AND BE BINDED WITH KNOTS. This is huge, since while people in this thread said it's common to have knots used as binding charms on Wicca, and that's true, they didn't mention it's NOT common at all in Thelema and Crowley's derivatived cicles to use them, EXPECT for the rituals performed with the use of water. Pretty huge coincidence I'd say.
Another interesting fact to look at is the time of the murder itself, as I already said before, sunset historically is the preferred time witches (not only Wiccans) prefer to start performing rituals for sabbats: this way you can absorbe the energy of the full moon from the go as soon as it starts rising on the sky (and continue until the sun returns). When did sunset occurred on May 5 1993? 7-8PM, exactly when the murders are believed to have happened.
I also have thought about the number 3 (the victims), which may seem interesting, but from my years of experience I never found a ritual written BY CROWLEY or other authors Damien read where 3 is a number believed to be significant, so yeah, this may really be a coincidence. Nevertheless, it's actually used a lot in a few occult practices (Kabbalah and the likes), they're just not the ones Damien was interested about, so it may be really insignificant in this case.
Anyway, I believe considering Damien's knowledge about the specific rituals I mentioned is verificable (he even talked about them to the police), the fact he and the other boys don't have an alibi at all, all the confessions etc... for them to be innocent they would have to be the unluckiest persons ever lived on earth, at the very least.
