Murder Most Foul, It’s the Stinkiest
by Jim Washburn
Remember when a crazed rural killing of three was enough to captivate the nation for months, spawn a classic book, a movie of the book and eventually two movies about writing the book? In the half-century since the In Cold Blood murders, nutty, senseless mass murders have become so commonplace that the rural murderer really has to go to town to make his efforts stand out.
In that regard, accused murderer and “horrorcore” singer Richard Samuel “Syko Sam” McCroskey III barely makes the cut, even though his tale has some twists, such as the horrorcore bit. Much as the troubadours of old meditated upon love, horrorcore is a hip-hop sub-genre that’s a-swoon over themes of murder and dismemberment. Perhaps dissatisfied with the lack of ambience in digital recording mediums, McCroskey allegedly personally dispatched a Farmville, Virginia Presbyterian minister, the minister’s college professor wife, his daughter and a friend via blunt force trauma so gruesome that local police refused to describe it.
McCroskey had been a guest of the 16-year-old daughter, who’d planned to accompany the 20-year-old rapper to a horrorcore fest in Michigan, three states away. I’m all for permissiveness, but on this occasion, it might have been prudent if her preacher dad had been more of the strict, Footloose type.
Lacking that, McCroskey had been invited out from California to meet the family, and mayhem ensued. Then he evidently chilled with the deceased for quite some time. A day after the bodies were discovered, McCroskey was apprehended at the local airport. (The footage is on YouTube, as are his music videos, not to mention me talking to Santa Claus in an unrelated incident). Prior to that, when his stolen car broke down, he’d hitched a ride with tow truck driver Elton Napier.
It is Napier’s insights that make this tale worth telling.
McCroskey, fresh from days with the dead, was wearing a hooded sweatshirt when he climbed into Napier’s cabin, and “was smelling bad, like real bad. I can’t describe it,” Napier recalled, continuing, “I just held my head out the window so the wind would hit me in the face. That was the stinkiest rascal I’ve ever smelled.”
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