The suspect, who lived with his mother in Hoodsport along the Hood Canal, told sheriff’s deputies he thought his mother was a demon, according to court documents.
Sheriff’s deputies in Mason County say a 25-year-old man killed his mother on Christmas Day by stabbing the 62-year-old woman in the skull with a knife and beating her with a baseball bat because she was a demon, according to documents from the Mason County Sheriff’s Office.
A judge ordered the man held in lieu of $500,000 bail Wednesday for investigation of charges of first-degree murder and scheduled his next court appearance for Jan. 7. He has not yet been charged, according to the Mason County Prosecutor’s Office.
According to a five-page probable-cause statement drafted by a sheriff’s detective, the man showed up at the home of another family member who lives about a mile from his mother’s house on Hoodsport, on Hood Canal, wearing only his underwear and covered in blood, according to the probable-cause statement. The man, according to deputies, was “talking about demons and that his mother was a demon and he just slayed the demon,” the family member told a dispatcher. Another family member had gone to check on the man’s mother and found her dead, according to the document.
A search by sheriff’s deputies found the woman’s battered body and a baseball bat that appeared to have blood on it, the document says.
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In an interview with sheriff’s deputies, the suspect “requested that his handcuffs remain on as he was concerned for [two deputies’] safety if his hands were free,” the document says. At one point, he asked one of the deputies if he was a demon, too.
The deputy said the man believed his mother was an entity called Baphomet, a goat-headed demon that is a sigil in the Church of Satan.
The man told deputies he had lived in California with his father and believed his mother died many years earlier, according to the document. Eventually, his mother “re-entered his life,” and about two years ago she began to tell him he was sick and to order him to do things, he told deputies. When that treatment began, the man believed she was a demon, the document says.
The suspect told deputies he had been prescribed several antipsychotic drugs and had not taken them for two to four days, according to the probable-cause document.