Venezuela Pastor and Family Decapitated in Satanic Ritual
CARACAS — This case of brutal crime is macabre even by the often bizarre standards of Venezuela’s particularly vicious brand of violence.
An Evangelist preacher, his wife and their four-year-old daughter were all found dead inside their home at San Jose de Guanipa in El Tigrito, an oil town in Anzoategui state, east-central Venezuela, last Friday.
Reports reaching Caracas say they’d all been decapitated.
Jean Carlos Salazar, 30, his wife, Ingrid Higuera, 33, and their little girl Karla, had lived in the house for over a year. He was the pastor at the nearby World Center of Peace and had come to be well-known in the district.
Investigators are working on a theory that the multiple slaying was carried out by people from some sort of satanic cult. They say the inside walls of the house had been painted with slogans suggesting such a connection.
However, the murderers evidently thought twice about leaving behind this evidence and, the grim deed done, decided to set the house on fire. It was the consequent blaze that alerted neighbors that something was amiss at around 3.30 in the morning.
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Given that there were no signs of the front door of the house having been forced open, there’s a suspicion Salazar may have known the killers, and even let them in. One curious detail is that, inside the house, the doors to the rooms where the victims were found were locked.
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