The David Glatzel possession and the "Devil Made Me Do It" trial

Brookfield, Connecticut. Summer 1980. Debbie Glatzel and her fiancé, Arne Cheyenne Johnson, were about to move into a rental house. Her younger brother David, a boy of 11 or 12, came along to help clean it.

2 July 1980, by one account. David saw a little old man, "burnt and black-looking." He wore a plaid shirt and jeans with a hole in one knee. David said he had "feet like a deer." The figure pointed at him and spoke. "Beware!" Then, David said, it shoved him onto a waterbed left by a previous tenant. And it vanished.

It kept coming back. It followed him home. The family described "a man with big black eyes, a thin face with animal features and jagged teeth, pointed ears, horns and hoofs." At other times, an old man with a white beard, in a flannel shirt and jeans. No one but David ever saw it.

The family saw something else. "He would kick, bite, spit, swear," they said. He pulled at invisible hands around his neck. Powerful forces would "flop him rapidly head-to-toe like a rag doll." He hissed and growled, spoke in otherworldly voices, and recited the Bible and Paradise Lost. Red marks, scratches and bruises appeared without explanation.

After a priest blessed the house, the family called the Warrens. Lorraine Warren said she saw "a black mist materialize next to David," while the Warrens said the boy gave them the names of 43 demons and underwent three lesser exorcisms. At one, dated 2 September 1980, Johnson reportedly challenged the presence. "Leave this little kid alone. Take me on."

October 1980. The Warrens warned Brookfield police that the situation was becoming dangerous.

16 February 1981. Alan Bono, 40, had bought lunch and drinks and drank heavily. Back at the kennel on Federal Road where he worked, he seized a 9-year-old cousin and refused to let go. Debbie described Johnson "growling like an animal." He stabbed Bono with a pocket knife. Bono died hours later. It was the first recorded killing in Brookfield's 193-year history.

Defence lawyer Martin Minnella offered a plea of not guilty by virtue of possession. "The courts have dealt with the existence of God. Now they're going to have to deal with the existence of the Devil." Judge Robert Callahan rejected it, and on 24 November 1981 a jury in Danbury convicted Johnson of first-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to 10 to 20 years and released in 1986.

The Diocese of Bridgeport declined to say what had been involved, and said no formal exorcism was carried out. In 2007 Carl Glatzel Jr. and David sued Lorraine Warren and Brittle, alleging that the Warrens and Brittle had "concocted a phony story about demons in an attempt to get rich and famous at our expense." Carl says David had mental illness as a child and has since recovered. The suit was dismissed, and Brittle took his book out of print while insisting it was true. Johnson and Debbie still support the Warrens' account.

Brittle's The Devil in Connecticut appeared in 1983. NBC aired The Demon Murder Case the same year. In 2021 the story became The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. In 2023 Netflix released The Devil on Trial, with the family's own cassette tapes and Polaroids. The brothers still disagree about what happened in that house.