The Lancaster Devil

“He has the serpent tongue, the cloven tongue,” a victim’s brother addressed the South Caroloian courts in 2015 before turning to his brother’s killer. “You a devil, man!”

Irate, heartbroken and shaken with anger, Antwan James had then stormed out of the courtroom, leaving behind the man who’d just been found guilty of murdering one of the closest and most important people in Antwan’s life.

This was the climatic end to a case that had started all the way back in November 2013 when a man went missing. A group of children playing in the woods in Lancaster, South Carolina, about a month after this man’s disappearance then made a disturbing and grotesque discovery. Partially hidden with brush and leaves was the decomposing remains of a man in his thirties, his head had nearly been hacked away from his body.

Frightened, the children had then run home to tell their parents what they’d found and the police were called to the scene shortly after. There investigators discovered what was left of the thirty-three-year-old Rickey James, the very same man who’d gone missing about a month prior.

Rickey had most definitely been murdered. He’d been bound with rope wrapped around him all the way from his neck to his ankles, his neck slashed and his body then left exposed to the mercy of the elements. His death had been the result of thirty-nine stab wounds that had come from a butcher knife.

The area of the woods he’d been found in showed no signs of a struggle or looked like Rickey had been taken there against his will, but that was a fact of this case that was, perhaps, the only unsurprising part of the story for Rickey’s family and friends. Rickey was known to drink and when he drank, he became more trusting and open to the people around them, no matter who they were or appeared to be. It looked like, unfortunately for everyone involved, that Rickey had put his faith in the wrong people.

While the investigators waited on forensic evidence to back up their suspicions, they turned their attention to their main suspect. Usually in a case like this, where Rickey was known to talk to almost anyone, the list of suspects would be quite extensive, but this time around, the investigators had only one potential name in mind. 

Within sight of the body was a house and in that house lived the twenty-four-year-old David Adam Pate. Even at twenty-four, David had an extensive rap sheet and a long history with the system, but he also had ties to local gangs and prison hate groups. With a black man now turning up murdered just yards from David’s home, the investigators couldn’t help but wonder just how much he was involved.

Talking to David looked like the next logical step for the investigators to take, but they took their time approaching him.

Rickey’s story turned into one of those rare cases where the authorities had eyes and ears on their main suspect right from the get-go and everyone could sleep at night, safe in the knowledge that David wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.

David was already in jail. He’d been picked up only two weeks before the gruesome discovery in the woods for disorderly conduct and jail was where he was going to remain for the time being. All the investigators had to do was wait for the forensic evidence to pin down their culprit and they would have their man.

And that’s exactly what they got.

DNA evidence collected from the scene and from the victim’s body placed David at the murder, but this open and shut case went from grotesque to down right wretched, almost as soon as David was brought in for questioning.

Without hesitation David confessed to killing Rickey and then he dove into the chilling and disturbingly calculated details. Beaming and full of pride, David told the investigators that he’d used a butcher knife like the one Michael Myers uses in the Halloween movies to kill his victim.

It looked like taking a life had all been a game to him. 

According to himself, David had approached Rickey that night and sensed an opportunity to put the over twenty knives he kept stashed away at home to the test. The plan was to lure Rickey back to David’s home with the promise of more drinks and kill him there, but as the two men approached, David had a change of heart. Fearing that the already inebriated Rickey would smell a trap if David invited him back to his home when they had only just met, David then suggested that they should head into the woods to drink more wine instead.

Rickey agreed.

David would later say that everything that happened rested solely on Rickey’s shoulders. “It was his fault. Why would anyone go drinking and go into the woods with someone who looks like me?”

David was referring to the many facial tattoos he had at the time of the murder, one of which reads “Satan” and is above his eyebrow, but he also had a split tongue that David would later proudly display in his mugshot.

Out in the woods, Rickey and David continued to drink for a while, but a few drinks later and David got down to the real reason why he’d invited Rickey out there. David then pulled out his butcher knife and began stabbing the startled Rickey. After inflicting thirty-nine stab wounds and killing Rickey, David then turned his attention to Rickey’s neck. He slashed and cut, wanting to decapitate his victim.

“I wanted to cut his dad gum head off,” he told the investigators. “I just couldn’t get through the bone.”

Wanting to decapitate Rickey was the closest that David ever came to giving a motive to his killing and to why he chose Rickey in the first place and it was a motive that everyone found more than lacking.

Once David realized that he wouldn’t actually be able to follow through with his plans, he then changed tracks and tried to cover up his crime. He bound Rickey in ropes from neck to ankles to make dragging his remains around the forest easier, but even then he had a hard time of it. He first tried to take Rickey down to a nearby creek to dispose of him, but found that David was too drunk and had smoked “too much dope” to actually get the job done.

The intoxicated David was then left trying to piece together some sort of plan because he wanted to keep that spot they were in the woods available. He liked the patch of the woods, especially because he could see it from his own home, but he had a chilling reason to explain to the investigators why he was so protective of that particular spot. It turned out that David liked that bit of the woods so much that he knew that he wanted to kill there again. 

But if he ever wanted to achieve that gruesome goal, he knew he had to cover his tracks and get rid of the evidence first.

He then came up with the idea of simply covering Rickey’s remains with brush and leaves.

Despite claiming to the investigators that he’d been too intoxicated to think straight, Rickey later was recorded talking to his mother from prison. In the call he claims to remember every single detail of the killing because he never wanted to forget it.

Realizing that this was his moment to go down in infamy, David Pate stole an opportunity to create a viral sensation during his new mugshot. With his face already covered in gang related and satanic tattoos, he stuck his severed tongue out right at the moment his picture was taken. Investigators would later say that it was one of the “creepiest” mugshots they’d ever seen.

David, his crimes and his confession shocked the world, but not those closest to him. His brothers described him as “the devil” and claimed that he deserved everything that was coming to him in court and in prison.

Two years later, when David finally had his day in front of the judge, he took to the stand and pleaded guilty. All that was left for the judge to do then was to determine David’s sentence. To try to push the judge towards giving a harsher sentence, the prosecution played the chilling footage of David’s confession, footage that the judge cut off before finishing, saying that he and the court had seen enough.

Smiling to the judge and the cameras, David seemed to enjoy hearing that he would be spending the rest of his life in jail. He even kept smiling when Rickey’s brother, Antwan Rashawn James, began yelling and berating him in court. David refused to turn around and face Antwan, so Antwan delivered his speech to the back of David’s head before leaving the courtroom.

“I hope he suffers; I hate him… He is the definition of the devil,” Antwan told the court and the press, showing just how deeply he’d been affected by the loss of his brother.