The small city of Carl Junction, Missouri, started to see a sharp increase in animal mutilations in the late 1980s.

That was a time period that was still firmly in the turmoil of what the media would later call the satanic panic, but at the

tail end enough to where law enforcement was becoming wise to the fact that media coverage

could often do more harm than good.

Teenagers dabbling in the occult had been a widespread problem for over a decade at that point,

so police responding to calls about satanic graffiti or murdered pets were left with two options.

Either they told the media and risked a panic,

or they quietly took the report and tried to investigate everything as a one-off issue.

The police in and around Carl Junction and the nearby Joplin area were trying to shy away from

the panicked assumptions that so many others were falling into about cult rumors and greater conspiracies.

So when dogs went missing and houses were vandalized,

they tried their best to always tell the media they had no reason to suspect anything was connected unless

they knew for a fact it was.

Satanism was exceedingly popular among rebellious youth at the time, so much so that libraries couldn't keep books about Satanism on the shelves.

The second someone checked a book back in, it was out the door again.

Things really only seemed to get worse whenever the local police or church officials around Joplin tried to talk about the Satanism problem.

In late 1986, some church officials said they were, quote, declaring war on Satan. Some church

said they were quote declaring war on Satan. In response, someone broke into a Joplin church and built their own satanic altar next to the real one.

Police quickly realized that bringing attention to the vandalism was just giving the

vandals what they wanted.

Police were keeping an eye on things, but thought that for the most part the

satanic graffiti and dead animals were just random acts by different youths here and there.

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