Bad parenting and the horrorcore murders

This is a sad, sick story: four people in a small Virginia town -- a man, his wife, their teen daughter and her friend -- allegedly murdered by a guest who, like the couple's daughter, was into "horrorcore," a sort of rap music whose lyrics focus on celebrating homicide. Excerpts:

Mark Niederbrock and his estranged wife escorted their daughter and Wells to Michigan, Ennis said. The concert, billed on Web sites as the "Strictly for the Wicked Festival," was held in a small venue near Detroit, featuring acts such as Insane Poetry, Mental Ward, Stitch Mouth and Phrozen Body Boy & the Devil Town Triad. Asked whether the teenagers' first encounter with McCroskey was at the concert, Ennis said, "I don't believe so."

When the parents returned to Farmville with their daughter and her friend, McCroskey [the horrorcore rapper charged with the killings] accompanied them, said Luther Glenn, 57, an elder of Walker's Presbyterian Church, where Niederbrock preached. The church, with about 60 members, is deep in woods 20 miles west of town, near a dot on the map called Hixburg. Although Niederbrock graduated from a Richmond seminary about six years ago, he had put off going through the extensive Presbyterian ordination process.

Like others, Glenn, a farmer, was at a loss to explain why his minister would trek 600 miles with his daughter so she could listen to death rap performers enthuse about ax murders, bloody rapes and other depravities.

Unbelievable. Ever heard of horrorcore rap? Me, no. Wikipedia: "Horrorcore defines the style of hip hop music that focuses around horror-influenced topics that include Satanism, cannibalism, suicide, murder and rape."

Here's more. Napier is a truck driver who gave the murder suspect a ride after he wrecked a car following the alleged murders:

He did not tell Napier that he and 16-year-old Emma Niederbrock, a local Presbyterian minister's daughter, had found each other through their mutual love of "horrorcore" music, an obscure hip-hop genre obsessed with mutilation, murder and satanism.

Throughout the conversation, Napier did his best to ignore the powerful stench emanating from the passenger seat. He had noticed it inside the Honda when winching it out of the ditch.

Despite rolling down both windows, Napier heaved visibly twice.

Napier dropped McCroskey at a local gas station, and that was the last he saw of him -- until footage of the arrest appeared on television.

On his MySpace page, McCroskey is hooded, his face obscured by a skull bandanna. He stands before a Gothic church in a lightning storm, a hatchet in his raised right hand. In a song posted on YouTube, the Castro Valley, Calif., man growls about the "evil voices inside my head."

"They just want me to murder continuously.

"They want me to take lives on a mass murder spree.

"They love the smell of a body that's rotten and decayed.

"That's what I think about when I'm stalking my prey."

Fellow horrorcore artist Andres Shrim cautions against reading too much into such lyrics.

Shrim, who goes by the stage name SickTanicK the Soulless, writes about killing Christians and dismembering people. While he acknowledges the genre's words and imagery can seem "brutal," he says the songs only reflect "the reality of the world we are living in."

More:

Shrim says he met Emma and Melanie [the teenage victims] at a horrorcore festival a couple of years ago in Chicago. Emma's mother brought them.

Little information has surfaced about Emma. She was home-schooled. And unlike McCroskey's MySpace page, her site is marked private, except for photos of a pretty girl with long, pink-colored hair.

Wells and her family moved to West Virginia from Louisville, Ky., just before Wells was to enter high school. She dropped out but was studying for her high school equivalency diploma, says friend Marcella Kennedy.

"Melanie had so much character and imagination," she says. "She sported the kind of optimism that didn't leave a sickly sweet taste in your mouth, if that makes any sense."

But a darker Wells emerges from the pages of her MySpace page.

On the site, she lists her religion as LaVeyan Satanism, in which there is no deity but one's self. She posted violent poems in which she details torturing and killing boyfriends who have been unfaithful, and photos show her cavorting in cemeteries and lying atop gravestones.

Under interests, Wells listed, among other things, "cigarettes, alcohol, partying, sex, drugs, metal, SKR (Serial Killin Records), lust, restorative arts, blood and gore, open graves, dead people, animals."

OK, absorb all this for a second. Ask yourself: what the hell was wrong with these parents?! Your child becomes fascinated with a macabre sort of music that celebrates grisly murders and suchlike, you do your very best to rescue her from that pit. You don't freaking take her to concerts where degenerates rap for hours about raping and dismembering human beings. You don't let your daughter become best friends with a Satanist who loves sex, drugs and playing in open graves. You don't let a stranger who spends his time composing songs reveling in murder and torture, a man your daughter met on the Internet, come stay in your home. Isn't all this, you know, common sense? What is wrong with parents like this? We are supposed to be our children's protectors, not their enablers. Look, they're all dead now, and I don't mean to be callous. But it's hard for me to get past the decisions the adults in this story made that led to this crime. It's as if they allowed their children to play with rattlesnakes, took them out hunting for rattlesnakes, and encouraged them to bring rattlesnakes into the house and pass them around.