Who can tell what’s really going on in a family? To look at the Glatzels — brothers David, Alan, and Carl, sister Debbie and their parents — you’d think they were about as normal as it gets. But in 1980, the family underwent an ordeal that put one of their children in peril, shook the foundations of their faith, and turned deadly — for reasons that are still difficult to fully explain. Their story is at the center of new documentary The Devil on Trial, and leaves audiences with one disturbing question on their mind: Could demonic possession actually be real?
The answer depends on how you define reality. On this week’s episode of the podcast You Can’t Make This Up, Chris Holt, director of The Devil on Trial, adds context to a complex story of a family in crisis, and ultimately a murder — and what happened when the story caught national attention from believers and skeptics alike. Read on for excerpts from his interview, below — which include an explanation of what might have really happened to young David Glatzel. Listen on You Can’t Make This Up.
The story begins when Debbie Glatzel decided that it was time to leave home and move in with her boyfriend, Arne Cheyenne Johnson. The pair rented a house a town over, away from the rest of Debbie’s family.
“The whole family went over the day before the big move to clean [the house] up,” Holt told You Can’t Make This Up. “David was the youngest of the family — he was 10. He’d been given the task of sweeping up the upstairs bedroom in the house.”
While young David was sweeping the floor, he says he felt a presence, before being physically overcome and, as Holt described it, “pushed around the room.” In the following days, David started to experience incidents at home as well, leading some members of the Glatzel family to believe he was possessed by the devil — and seek to get him an exorcism.
As Holt explained, the process of getting an exorcism is quite complicated, and the Glatzels had to do their due diligence in order to even get David considered for the process.
“Every year, hundreds of exorcists are trained in Vatican City, and there are hundreds of exorcists in America. [The Catholic Church] believes these things exist — they believe in the existence of evil, and the existence of demonic possession,” Holt said on the podcast. “The trouble is that it gives the church such bad press, so they like to investigate it as thoroughly as they possibly can — they’ll go through every single avenue.”
David was tested by a psychiatrist at the time, and there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Eventually, the church sent a cardinal to the Glatzel home to investigate.
“[In the documentary], Alan describes the cardinal all dressed in red, arriving at the house in a red Porsche — [a cardinal] is about as high up as they go, they sent the big guns to find out what was happening in that house. And it was kind of a gray area between a full-on exorcism and what they call a deliverance. It’s a system of prayers over the subject… the priest is reciting [the prayer] meant to cast the demon out. It’s a Latin prayer that’s been used for centuries.
Also in attendance at David Glatzel’s exorcism? Ed and Lorraine Warren.
The self-proclaimed demonologist couple was instrumental in making the initial claim that David was possessed. The pair gained tremendous notoriety in the area at the time for their work (and much of it has been retold in the fictional horror franchise The Conjuring).
“The Warrens seem to have latched onto every single creaking floorboard and strange goings on in an attic in Connecticut over a period of years and years,” Holt said.
According to Holt, Judy (David’s mother) and Debbie Glatzel attended one of the Warrens’ talks at a local library — and when they felt like David had become possessed, they called them immediately.
In The Devil on Trial, audiences hear audio of David’s exorcism, much of which is incredibly disturbing. As the cardinal and the Warrens performed the procedure, the boy began thrashing about wildly, and screaming profanities. That’s when Debbie Glatzel’s boyfriend, Arne, decided to step in.
“Arne became incredibly concerned about David — he said that he turned blue and was choking,” Holt explained. “It was at that point that Arne gripped David and allegedly said, ‘Leave the boy alone. Come on, take me on, take me on.’ What [supposedly] happened next was a thing called transmigration where the evil entity can leave the possessed person and enter any number of people who are involved in the exorcism. It could be the priest, it could be a family member. It’s just whoever it really decides to latch onto. And because Arne had challenged the demon, it went for Arne. Allegedly.”
Months after David’s exorcism, Johnson got into a heated argument with he and Debbie’s landlord, 40-year-old Alan Bono, on the night he, Debbie, and his sister were hanging out, drinking beer, and eating pizza.
“As Arne describes it, Alan Bono was getting more and more drunk, and getting louder and louder, and Arne was really uncomfortable being around him,” Holt said. “So they decided to leave, and as they were going down the steps, Alan Bono grabbed Arne’s sister and wouldn’t let her go. The way Arne describes it is that he blacked out, and when he came around, he was standing over Alan Bono with a knife and he’d killed him. He doesn’t remember the stabbing at all. It’s Debbie that sort of narrates the story of the stabbing, and she says that something came over Arne that night. His eyes turned black, and he just entered this sort of rage.”
Johnson was arrested for Bono’s murder. The press labeled it the “The devil made me do it” case, and Johnson’s lawyer, Martin Minella, was compelled enough by the evidence to use demonic possession as his alibi defense in trial –– a first in US history. However, the trial judge rejected demonic possession as an acceptable defense, so Minella pivoted to a self-defense plea.
After the story of David’s exorcism and Arne’s crime unfold in The Devil on Trial, a new subject is introduced: David’s brother, Carl Glatzel. Carl says he believes the Warrens were con artists, and is skeptical that David and Arne were possessed, stating that Arne was known to be possessive of Debbie, and that there were rumors she was having an affair with Alan Bono. Pointing to records his mother kept, Carl claims she put Sominex sleeping pills in the family’s food to subdue and control them. He thinks this may have caused his brother’s hallucinations.
“We really didn’t have a clue about [the Sominex story] when we first started,” Holt said. “That came from sitting down and talking to Carl. It was a real revelation to him as well — almost like the light bulb went off over his head when he realized it. The more he dug into what was happening and what Judy Glazer was doing to the brothers, the more shocked he was and the more upset he was really, because it kind of does explain everything, really.”
Despite Carl’s massive revelation towards the end of The Devil on Trial, Holt said that he believes David was telling the truth.
“For me, it sort of proved in a way that David wasn’t lying. If that was the case, and Judy Glatzel was drugging her family, then these hallucinations David was experiencing were real. The motivations of the mother, and who should have known better, and who should have really stopped what she was doing is questionable. It throws a real magnifying glass on her motivations, and why she was doing this.”
Hear more from this interview with director Chris Holt on You Can’t Make This Up, or watch The Devil on Trial on Netflix.
