The “Craigslist Killer” has been arrested. A 18 year old Pennsylvania girl named Miranda Barbour is accused of joining her husband in the murder of  Troy LaFerrara.

However, she claims that she has also murdered 19 others. And, on top of that, she says “The Devil made her do it”!

According to dailyitem.com,

Miranda said when she was 4, she was sexually molested by a relative.

Elizabeth Dean, Miranda’s mother, confirmed Saturday that her sister’s husband was later arrested and charged with sexual abuse of a minor and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

“It was bad,” Dean said. “I never let (her) stay anywhere except for my sister’s house, and I was devastated when I found out.”

Nine years later, Miranda joined a satanic cult in Alaska. Soon after, Miranda said, she had her first experience in murder.

Barbour said she went with the leader of the satanic cult to meet a man who owed the cult leader money.

“It was in an alley and he (the cult leader) shot him,” she said, declining to identify the cult leader.

“Then he said to me that it was my turn to shoot him. I hate guns. I don’t use guns. I couldn’t do it, so he came behind me and he took his hands and put them on top of mine and we pulled the trigger. And then from there I just continued to kill.”

While in the satanic cult, Miranda became pregnant. The cult did not want her to have the baby, so, she said, members tied her to a bed, gave her drugs and she had an “in-house abortion.”

However, her mother on Saturday said that when Miranda told her about the abortion, she took her daughter to a doctor who said there were no signs of an ended pregnancy.

Miranda said she spent the next three years in Alaska, continuing in the satanic cult and participating in several murders.

“I wasn’t always there (mentally),” she said, adding that she had begun to use drugs. “I knew something was bad inside me and the satanic beliefs brought it out. I embraced it.”

During those three years, Miranda said she became pregnant again.

“And I moved to North Carolina,” she said. “I wanted to start over and forget everything I did.”

She left Alaska as a high-ranking official in the satanic world, leaving the father of her second pregnancy, a man named Forest, the No. 2 leader in their cult, who was murdered.

Back in 2009, examiner.com posted an article about Satanic Cults and their involvement in crime and murder,

“The adherents of this violent [quasi-]religion number over 300,000, ” claims Lieutenant Larry Jones of the Boise, ID Police Department.

“The kids become involved in sacrificial rituals, violent song lyrics, Satanic symbolism, suicide notes or recordings, all enhanced with illegal, mind-altering drugs, which play a major role [in the drama of a Black Mass]. And the added secrecy of the cult members makes estimating their numbers impossible.” says Detective Jerry Simandl, a veteran of the Chicago Police Department and assigned to the Gang Crime Task Force.

Are there any estimates based on other information or police intelligence? The San Francisco Police Department’s Sandi Gallant can only estimate that ” … at most 1% of Heavy-Metal music fans become seriously involved in the occult.”

It should be pointed out that when Det. Gallant talks about Heavy-Metal music, she isn’t referring to bands such as Guns & Roses, Metallica and other popular musicians, but to the sub-category of HM music known as Black Metal, played by bands that are truly underground with a limited audience.

The question is, how many Americans actually believe in Satan?

Per a story posted on patheos.com on 9/21/13,

Almost six in ten Americans believe the devil is real, and more than half think that people can be possessed by demons. 

Those results are from a recent YouGov poll of 1,000 respondents, though it’s not clear how reliable the numbers are — I couldn’t find an explanation of the methodology. YouGov says its poll has a margin of error of three percent.

When you drill down past the headline and summary, you can see which religious adherents are most likely to believe that Satan exists. To no one’s surprise, “born-again” Christians top the list at 86%. The Lord of Darkness is met with a lot more skepticism in non-Christian circles: only 17% of Jews and 25% of Muslims believe that he’s real, as do 20 percent of Nones.

One odd poll result is that education level appears to be a bad predictor for devil-belief. YouGov tells us that 39% of high school dropouts think that exorcism is an effective way to deal with demonic possession. That number climbs to 49% for respondents who have “some college, and it’s still a fairly staggering 44% among post-grads. I’m not sure that makes sense: almost every other study I’ve seen, foreign and domestic, indicates that more education drives down superstition.

There are internal anomalies, too. When asked Do you believe someone can be possessed by the devil?, only 11 percent of Jewish respondents answered “Yes”; but when the question was Do you believe in the power of exorcism?, 37% of Jews answered in the affirmative. I don’t think that computes.

One thing to keep in mind is that Jews form only about two percent of the U.S. population, and Muslims less than one percent. If YouGov managed to find a representative sample of 1,000 people living in the United States, only 20 respondents would have been Jewish, and only eight or nine would have been Muslim.

Indeed, in this survey, the 11% of Jews who believe someone can be possessed by the devil came from a sample with only 23 Jews. The 37% of Jews who believe in exorcism came from a sample size that’s in the single digits. Those sub-samples are way too small to accurately represent the larger Jewish or Muslim population. As always, the devil is in the details.

Several years ago, thanks to the CBS television show, “Touched By an Angel”, Americans became fascinated by angels.

Then, about ten years ago, people started becoming fascinated by “ghost hunting” reality programs such the silly “Most Haunted”, a British Import from the BBC and the American Programs “Paranormal State”, “Ghost Adventures”, and the popular “Ghost Hunter”.

Now, if Americans can believe in angels (which they should) and ghosts, is it such a stretch that Satan and his demons can affect our lives?

In fact, regarding those ghost hunting shows, a former Pastor of mine, told me, “As Christians, we know where we go when we die, right? What makes you think that these”ghosts” these programs encounter aren’t really imps and demons playing games?

Something to think about…

So, do I think that Miranda Barbour killed all of those people because she was involved in a Satanic Cult?

It is a very distinct possibility.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. – Ephesians 6:12

Until He Comes,

KJ