Darius-The Reaper
Darius-The Reaper (Warning graphic content and language)
Darius- The Reaper 
Benjamin J. Branham © 2005-2010 REVISED
“You may think you know me, Piggy! But you don’t. You may think you have figured me out. But you haven’t. I am not what you think I am! I even fear myself and my own thoughts. As funny as that may seem. You should fear me! All should fear me! You'll pretend you aren't shaking in your boots, PIG! I can see it standing like an overpowering wall. I can see your sin as it towers before my thoughts! I'LL RIP YOUR EYES OUT AND FORCE THEM DOWN YOUR THROAT! Maybe I am better off just keeping my thoughts to myself there Dickie! I don't want you to piss your pants! What's that you say? I have a way of bending things? Your damn right! I'LL BEND AND BREAK YOU CAPTAIN FUZZY! I twist my reality out of shape and distort it to the frame that I adhere! You are just part of my creation. You exist as long I remain living. They wont give me the chair! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Maybe one day I will do what is truly on my mind, without action or reaction to my satisfaction. I'm going to kill every whore in this god forsaken shit-hole of a town! At the moment, I am very conflicted inside and things aren’t looking all that well. You wanna know why shithead?! It’s because you have these fucking hand cuffs on me! I need to be free! I need to be free, to do what’s right! You don't know what you are doing! I cleanup and do gods work! When I get out of here and you know I will! I’ll be looking for you Dickie! Then I’ll send your ass straight to God! So he can split you open and taste your soul! YOU FUCKING STINKING PIG! I am above all you know, I am supreme! I am The Reaper!”
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That’s what he said to me, just before they drug him out of the court room. Anthony Kelp, a.k.a. Darius Minor, Anthony Angelo, Tony Salvo, Antonio Damone or better known as “The Reaper”. Back then, they sent him off to stay the rest of his life at The Garret Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane. He deserved worse! He should have gotten the death penalty for what he did! He should have had to pay for his so called "insanity"! Yeah right! He's insane? He knew exactly what he was doing and he loved every minute of it.
But he was found incapable of knowing what crimes he had committed. So the assholes say! "Incapable of being able to know the difference between right and wrong?" Although he seemed insane, I found him capable and coherent. He didn't fool me! I had been working on the force for maybe 6 years at the time. During that part of my career, I had never seen such a brutal serial murderer or anything as vicious as The Reaper. Darius was not your typical, Casey or Bundy type perverted psycho. He was more methodical and precise with his ego-maniacal pursuits.
I think that’s what the judge and jury failed to see.. They failed to see his motives and how cautious he was to hide his secrets. Darius liked killing his victims while wearing a hood over his face and stripped down to nothing. "To feel the life!" He said over and over laughing across the table at his deposition.. Using surgical procedures he brutalized his victims in horrific ways. All the while keeping them alive. Leaving them just on the edge of death enough to get a cheap thrill out of it. Tying his captives up and keeping them for long terrorizing torture sessions. Some times days and other times for weeks on end. Who knows how long some them were kept as he "Peat Puppets" as he called them?
His favorite part of his torture session, was what he called, “The Right of Salvation.”. He would slowly cut away pieces of flesh, just above the muscle, but not deep enough to kill them. Then he blessed the wounds by poring blessed sea salt into them. The flesh was cooked in Darius’ own blood and then eaten by him. We later discovered that he had been storing his own blood for his "Rituals" for years before we found him. He also liked to score his victims feet and make them stand a mixture of various chemical solvents of his own concoction. He called this torture a "Foot Washing". He would also make them bath in bleach "To Cleanse the soul, be the reaping” as he would say. He had a room in the basement where he had all of his "Keepsakes". Darius kept them locked away for days until death in the basement, which he called "The Entombment".
Darius had purposely rented a house near a secluded park. He loved parks. He had told me several times, about how much he loved people in parks. Nearly all of his early victims were found in or near one. His basement was found covered in plastic, on the walls, floor and ceiling. We found horrors of all kinds, everywhere we looked. We even found pages from the bible stuffed deep inside large cuts and gouges, in torsos and various body parts, strewn around the room. He claimed that, “God made me the Angel of Death and I am only doing what I am told!” Darius always did what he was told. What his own voice would tell him. His voices told him to take the lives of more than 200 people. Darius will kill more. His sick and gruesome tale is one of mutilation, dismemberment and carnage.
The things that this animal has done in his life are almost beyond words.. Darius started out dabbling with death at a young age. Killing family pets and stray animals became his hobby of choice, for a time. Darius was the child of a single woman. She treated him like a waste can. Dumping and throwing all of her garbage into young Darius. Igniting the fiery unbridled flame of his discontent. She prostituted herself out of her home with any sleazy John that would have her. Sometimes committing sexual acts in front of him and other times making him do sexual acts with she and her men. The abuse in his life forced him to create another part of himself, to escape the destruction of his innocence. So he hid within himself an evil bursting at the seems to get out. When he got to be about eleven years old, he ventured out as far away as he could. Every day a little more each time. Always fearing what might happen to him when he got home. What is mother would make him do or do to him. He always stayed near parks with lots of people.
Darius never played with any of the other children or talked to anyone. No one really paid much attention to him. One day while watching some children at play. Darius sees a young girl playing off by herself. He watched her for along time and then approached her. He tried to talk to her but she ignored him. Out of spite or anger, he pushed the girl causing her to fall down a flight of concrete steps leading to the restrooms. The fall breaking her neck in the process, killing the little girl instantly. Darius stood over her staring. Some passers by saw him standing there and walked over to see what was going on, catching him with his hand up the little girls dress. He tried to justify himself by saying, “I wanted to see what it would do! I think God told me to!” Then later he told the judge at the trial that he "liked watching her do cartwheels." He told the court that, “she cartwheeled herself down the steps and I had nothing to do with it! I told her not to do it!” He started crying but no one was fooled by it or they just couldn't sympathize with a boy with no future. To many people had seen him with his hand up her dress... The judge found him guilty and put him in the local juvenile detention center for 6 months; pending psychological evaluations.
During that time, he was raped by several of the older inmates. This happened to Darius on many different occasions. He got revenge on one of them by biting the other boys penis off. It happened when the offender tried to force oral sex on Darius. I am sure this just fueled his drive to feed his evil. Shortly after that, they removed him from the detention center and placed him back into the care of his mother or should I say uncaring of his tormentor? Darius seemed fine or at least that was what the mother told social workers. He may have been fine up until around the time he turned fourteen, or at least he stayed out of trouble until then. That is until the malice burning a hole in his gut lead him into disturbing circumstances. Darius at 14, started to sneak around windows late at night during the summer.. He liked to look in on people. Especially young woman that were asleep or hopefully undressing. He taught himself how to be stealthy and liked to wear loose dark clothing on these outings. Some nights he would get brave and would climb in open windows, to steal an item of clothing or something personal.
He had never been caught in four years. His urges grew and grew until he finally committed the act of murder at 18 on an elderly lady in her home.. Apparently he had broken in and the old woman had caught him. He had no way out, so he beat her to death with her cane, of which he had torn from her hands. Nearly tearing her arm off at the shoulder. He beat her badly, totally crushing her skull and mutilating her face till it became completely unrecognizable... Darius told me himself, “Her skull looked like a pumpkin that had been kicked in. Like a bunch of mush! Her brains were like bloody scrambled eggs with little pieces of shell mixed in. I thought about tasting her, but back then I didn’t have the constitution. If I had to do it all over again, I think I would have eaten part of her brains. She was an old bitch though! That didn't seem very appetizing.” After he had beaten her, he tried to pull the body across the floor, but it was too heavy for him. So Darius left her laying and took the cane with him as he fled the scene.
When he was finally found by the police, he was sitting on a bench in a park near the woman’s house with the cane clinched in his hand. He sat there quietly; a gruesome half smile on his face, staring blankly into the dark. He calmly told the arresting officers as they he put him in a marked police car, “I stepped on one of her eyeballs and slipped on her brains. I fell to floor beside her mess. I think she’s dead. You might wanna clean that up. She can't do it her self now can she?” He was tried and the courts found him legally insane and placed him in a sanitarium for the criminally ill. He spent 10 years of his life locked away in a padded cell. He would have remained there, but the psychiatrist taking care of him appealed to the court, saying "Darius is improving and we would like to help him find a place in normal society. We think he should be allowed a chance at a somewhat normal life." The court, apparently finding that he seemed normal and rehabilitated, decided to release him. They even helped him find a job and an apartment!
Darius continued to see his doctors, for a few months, until one day he just stopped showing up. Fearing he had stopped taking his medication, the doctors sent the police to his home. I was the lead detective on call. When we got there everything seemed normal. We entered his house and began our search. As we entered the living room I could see books laying around on topics like, gross human anatomy, vivisection and various surgical manuals describing everything from paper cuts, heart surgery, amputation and everything in between. Pornography covered the walls as well. All of the models in the pictures had various pieces of the bodies anatomy removed. One of the other detectives made me aware of a note that they had seen taped to the bedroom wall, it read: “I am leaving to do the LORD'S work. These hands are red, these hands hold hearts and lives. I will do what God tells me to do! Don’t try to find me, and don’t expect me to come quietly. The LORD gives and I take away! He calls the reaper! For his fields are full and overgrowing with weeds!”
Quickly I made the call to put out an APB for the capture of Darius. Little did i know that I was dealing with more than a mad man. Darius was something completely different. Something beyond human. Calls started to come in from precincts all over the city. Darius was killing anyone that got in his way. The first new victim was a young woman on her way home. He snatched her off of the street and cut her tongue and eyes out and then both of her hands. He then threw her hands down a sewer drain near by and left her for dead. She bled out from the amputation. All of her life draining into the cutter. It took her 30 minutes die. More calls, more murders. The numbers kept climbing and over a period of week he had murdered 75 people and no one could find or catch him. He was like a ghost. Impossible to touch and to invisible to see. Darkness was his fortress. During the day he slept in a steam drain near the city reservoir. Of course we didn't know this at the time. We discovered through an anonymous tip that someone was seen dragging a person into the sewers. This meant one thing and one thing only; we had to capture The Reaper before more human lives were taken. And more lives would be taken.
