SATURDAY ON TRUE CRIME UNCENSORED!
Margery B. Metzger is our special guest!
On January 7, 1994, residents of the Berkshire Hills woke up to a typical snowy winter day in the majestic woods of Western Massachusetts. The quaint New England towns, the idyllic scenery and the people who lived there could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Rocked as imaginable evil converged on them, a pall would be cast over the region and its inhabitants for years to follow.
That day, a trial was beginning for a college student who celebrated his 18th birthday by purchasing an assault rifle, then opening fire on campus killing two and wounding four others. Elsewhere, two young girls were accosted in the changing room at the local pool. Another young girl narrowly escaped being abducted at gunpoint on her way to school. Her quick thinking resulted later in profound repercussions regarding the case of a young boy who vanished from a strip mall, baffling law enforcement, his body was discovered three years earlier by deer hunters in a remote wooded area 200 miles away.
All these events appeared unrelated, but it seemed to police agencies and local residents that the world had suddenly gone mad. After all, they told each other, “These things don’t happen here!”
In a chilling, dramatic narrative HIDDEN DEMONS: Evil Visits a Small New England Town, by Margery Metzger, details these events and reveals a savage serial killer who lurked in the shadows. But the bravery of a father and daughter, and the remarkable work of law enforcement officers, would turn the table.
When writer / director Seth Ferranti received a twenty-five year LSD kingpin conviction, after faking his suicide and landing on the US Marshals Top-15 Most Wanted list, he thought his life was over. As a first time, non-violent offender, the lengthy sentence attracted media attention from The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Washington Times, and others.
As a drug dealing teen Ferranti sold LSD and marijuana at 15 East Coast colleges, crisscrossing across five states- Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Maryland- a wanna-be rock star and Hunter S. Thompson-style outlaw whose hero’s were Henry Rollins, Axl Rose, and Jim Morrison. He followed the Grateful Dead and considered himself a counter culture rebel, not a criminal, as he was breaking laws which he thought were wrong.
He stands by those convictions today and see’s himself more as an activist who was a little ahead of the times. A trailblazer of the legal cannabis and psychedelic movements. As a twenty-two year old from the suburbs, who basically grew up as a military brat in California and overseas, the prison sentence Ferranti received due to the War on Drugs was longer than he’d lived to that point.
But despite the unjust sentence, Seth decided to rise above his past and focus on his future. He began building a writing and journalism career from inside the belly of the beast. With unlimited access to criminals and their stories Ferranti started crafting raw portrayals of prison life and crack era gangsters. Discovering a passion and talent for writing Ferranti also studied the trade earning an associates, bachelors, and masters degree while in prison.