Situation Leroy Carter J: “Police float the idea that they believed this to be a sacrificial murder”

Share To Action

LeRoy Carter Jr. was born on September 17, 1951 in the state of Louisiana.
His early life isn’t documented nearly at-all. But in the 1970s, Carter found himself embroiled in the overseas conflict. He served in the United States military during the Vietnam war. Carter was like thousands of other veterans coming home from Vietnam trying to find a place in a world that was quickly changed much like other veterans as well. LeRoy seem to have been suffering from mental trauma that came with fighting in the brutal conflict.

Upon his return to the states, Carter began living on the streets as a transient. He soon fell upon the area of San Francisco, which was very homeless-friendly… relatively. There, he became engulfed in some small-time trouble, engaging in petty crimes that earned him a healthy-looking rap-sheet. Because of the nature of the crimes – stuff like stealing, thievery, loitering, etc. – it seems apparent that Carter wasn’t a criminal by-choice… his crimes make him look more like a desperate man struggling to stay afloat.
Despite his struggles living as a tramp, nothing seemed overtly wrong or conspicuous in Carter’s life leading up to February of 1981.

On Saturday, February 7, 1981, Carter was just another homeless vagabond looking for a place to sleep. He ended up walking through his normal haunts of Golden Gate Park, before settling upon a nice spot near Alvord lake – along the Eastern edge of the park, near Stanyan Street. This spot was not only secluded, but quiet, and would allow LeRoy to get a good night’s sleep close to the water. He decided to camp there for the evening, and began unfurling his sleeping bag. As he lay down to rest, LeRoy Carter Jr. had no idea what his grisly future had in-store.

In the morning hours of Sunday, February 8, 1981 a young woman called the police to report that she had discovered a backpack “splattered with blood” in Golden Gate Park. Inside, she found nothing overly ominous, but the blood was enough to prompt her to call.

Officer Dougherty reported to the park to investigate and at first did not see any sign of any foul play – until he came across a sleeping bag. Inside the sleeping bag was most of a body, lying in a pool of blood. The only way the body was able to be identified was by fingerprints.

The most disturbing aspect of the crime scene, however, was the fact that there was no head found with the body. It would seem that whoever was responsible for the murder had taken it with them. The strangest aspect of the scene is what was found alongside the body. In lieu of a head, two kernels of corn and a chicken wing had been jammed into the opening provided by Carter’s severed head. Police would later admit to finding the remains of a mutilated chicken roughly fifty yards away from the body; which explained where the chicken wing had come from, but very little else.

Fingerprints identified the headless man as LeRoy Carter, Jr.
Examination of the body showed that the cut was clean and precise, hinting that the severing of Carter’s head had been “expertly” done and the killer knew what they were doing.

It is believed that – whoever the killer was – they had sliced clean through Carter’s neck, with a weapon believed to either be a very sharp ax or machete. In fact, a deputy coroner later remarked that:
“The cut was very clean, like an expert did it.”

A thorough search of the region around Golden Gate Park failed to turn up any sign of the victim’s head, nor any murder weapons.
Police would later float the idea that they believed this to be a sacrificial murder – perhaps committed by a cult or rogue religious faction – but it was through that the death was recent.

Because of the ritualistic nature of the killing, Sandi Gallant was an investigator with the San Francisco Police Department, who was called in to begin investigating the murder of 29-year old LeRoy Carter Jr. Because of her work on the Jonestown-related cases, Sandi Gallant had become known as the closest thing to a cult expert within the San Francisco Police Department. She had become their go-to for any cases that involved the occult; due, primarily to her interest in the field. At this point in 1981, she had already embraced her nickname as the “cult cop”.

After looking at the case file of the recent decapitation in Golden Gate Park, Detective Gallant noted similarities between this case and some sacrificial rituals performed in the religion Santeria. In particular, she began focusing in on offshoots that were tied to black magic rituals; known examples being Palo Mayombe, which mix Santeria with other beliefs, such as Aztec blood rites, Haitian-style voodoo, Catholicism, and sometimes even devil worship.

Santeria is “a pantheistic Afro-Cuban religious cult developed from the beliefs and customs of the Yoruba people and incorporating some elements of the Catholic religion”. Tens of thousands of Americans practice Santeria. Some core beliefs involve one god creating the universe and smaller gods overseeing niche aspects of the world. Rituals and sacrifice are often used in the practice of Santeria, but the sacrifices are typically small animals and are rarely human. The subsects of the cult mix classic Santeria with other religious beliefs ranging from ancient Aztec practices to Satanism.

Detective Sandi Gallant was well-aware of the reputation that Santeria had, especially in the early 1980’s – as the “Satanic Panic” craze really began to kick off. In order to try and get the most from this line of investigation, she decided to consult Charles Wetli, a man believed to be one of the leading experts on Santeria in the U.S. Wetli worked on the other side of the country, as the coroner of Dade County, Florida.

Wetli was consulted on the unsolved murder case from Golden Gate Park, and noted that it bore all of the hallmarks of human sacrifice. Together, the two began to formulate a theory, based on the death of LeRoy Carter Jr. being a Santeria-esque ritual. If it was, they postulated, the ritual was likely not yet complete.

Following her consultation with Charles Wetli, Sandi Gallant returned to her superiors with multiple theories about the unsolved murder from Golden Gate Park.

The murdered young man whose body they found – minus the head – had been killed in a sacrificial ritual, performed by practitioners of Santeria or some zealous offshoot. At least, that is what Gallant told her bosses, before going into some more detail.

Gallant claimed that the killers had likely decapitated the victim, LeRoy Carter Jr., in order to obtain his head. Then, they had used the head to create some kind of ritualistic brew, using parts of his brain and – possibly – even his eyes and ears, which would also be consumed.

Sandi Gallant claimed that this process took three weeks – approximately 21 days – a period of time which would then be doubled, before the head was returned to the scene of the crime. As she later told the LA Times:
“At the end of those 21 days, if the priest deemed it appropriate, he would actually sleep in an area with this head and with this cauldron for another 21-day period. Then on the 42nd day he discards the head… in close proximity to where he took it from. To him, that was a sacred way of returning the head.”

Gallant believed that, in total, this ritualistic process took six weeks – 42 days – before the skull would be returned to the place that the victim was killed. In this case, that would be in Golden Gate Park, along Alvord Lake.

Unfortunately, this theory seemed to fall on deaf ears. Gallant – who herself wasn’t even a huge believer in this theory – says that her caution was virtually ignored.
“We literally were laughed at by our homicide investigators, and our chief of detectives. It was like, ‘Give me a break. This stuff doesn’t happen.'”

And as the 42-day mark neared, even Gallant was filled with self-doubt.
On March 22nd, 1981 – 42 days after the murder of LeRoy Carter Jr. – Sandi Gallant and her partner returned to the scene of the crime: Golden Gate Park.

Some newspaper reports state that the pair staked out the area throughout the day, but by Gallant’s own admission, they were skeptical of the belief that the killer – or killers – would return to the scene.

It was by happenstance that the two were out there on that day, patrolling the park to see if anything was afoot. They began walking through the park, eventually coming upon the area along Alvord Lake, where LeRoy Carter Jr. had been murdered six weeks prior.

There, placed in the weeds next to the water… was the decomposing head of LeRoy Carter Jr.
Somehow – and someway – the person(s) responsible for this grisly murder had managed to not only elude any police suspicion, but had managed to return the victim’s lost body part to the scene of the crime without raising any alarms.

With the return of the head to the crime scene, the ritual that Sandi Gallant had predicted was completed.
In the investigation to find out what had happened to LeRoy Carter, Sandi Gallant had predicated a very peculiar series of events involving human sacrifice, weird spiritual rituals, and a near-suspension of disbelief.

Now, she had been proven correct. But in the process of being proven right, the killer – or killers – had slipped right through the grasp of law enforcement.

Sandi Gallant would later tell the LA Times that she very much regrets not following up on her own theory more urgently:
“Our problem was, even though our homicide detectives didn’t buy it, my partner and I weren’t out there doing surveillance on the 42nd day either. I think looking back on it, we had a real difficult time, too, believing that something like this could happen. Even though it was our theory.”

Following the discovery of the victim’s head in Golden Gate Park, an emphasis was placed on investigating the human sacrifice angle – which Gallant had proposed the month prior. However, it was too little and too late – whoever the killers were, they had left behind no trace of themselves.
The murder of LeRoy Carter, Jr. remains unsolved.

Watch Situation Leroy Carter J: “Police float the idea that they believed this to be a sacrificial murder” now!