Alcohol induced bravado, and maybe some new age satanist leanings make more sense to me than "a joke" as reason to set churches on fire. I just can't guess what kind of "joke" would lead to torching churches!
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Hard To Believe: Friends, teachers of three charged in fires at nine Alabama churches are stunned by the arrests
RELIGION NEWS SERVICE
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.
Ben. Matt. Russ. Their names match their profiles. All-American college boys from the suburbs with big dreams, promising futures, good parents. Between them there was an occasional speeding ticket, the lust for stardom, an unquenchable thirst for beer, but nothing to indicate that they were up to no good in the deep woods of west Alabama.
Benjamin Moseley and Russell DeBusk, both 19, were top theater students at Birmingham-Southern College. Moseley loved the limelight. DeBusk was his sidekick.
Leaders in local film took note of their quirky talent, and the two landed roles in a film by the University of Alabama at Birmingham called the Youth Violence Project. They hoped that community film would be a springboard to Los Angeles, they told the Birmingham-Southern student newspaper. Eerily, the film appeared Wednesday - the day their faces were broadcast internationally after being arrested in the arson of nine Alabama churches.
Less enthralled with fame and film, Matthew Cloyd, 20, hooked up with the others when he and DeBusk lived in the same dorm.
An academic standout, Cloyd grew up a doctor's son in Shelby County. His true love was deer hunting. But hunting was intertwined with alcohol, and a rebellious anger crept into Cloyd's personality.--->>
After he got a speeding ticket - 85 in a 70 - his Web site musings grew cryptically violent. "Let us defy the very morals of society instilled upon us by our parents, our relatives and of course Jesus," he wrote to Moseley last summer as the two planned a road trip.
About the same time, DeBusk and Moseley started dabbling in the occult. They told friends they were Satanists on a hunt for knowledge, though their friends didn't take it too seriously. - http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1137834641058&path=!living&s=1037645509005
I keep asking myself, what were they THINKING?! So sad for all involved.