The dark story behind the notorious North Carolina murderer

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The dark story behind the notorious North Carolina *********

CLEMMONS, N.C. (WGHP) — It’s been 10 years since investigators unearthed the skeletal ******** of two people in the backyard of a man named Pazuzu Ilah Algarad in Clemmons, North Carolina, a discovery that sent shockwaves across the country.

On Oct. 5, 2014, investigators found the ******** of Joshua Wetzler and Tommy Dean Welch, and the sheriff’s office arrested Algarad, then-35, and his self-proclaimed wife Amber Nicole Burch, then-24, on one count each of ******* and accessory after the fact to *******.

In the years leading up to the discovery, neighbors had spun rumors about the strange home on Knob Hill Drive, its windows blacked out and yard hidden behind a fence. Outside of the house, a letter warded off law enforcement, a cross hung upside down and a sticker carried a grim promise: “Evil will triumph,” all omens of what truly lay inside.

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Exactly a month after their bodies were found, Algarad’s domain was revealed for the world to see. Video from Forsyth County Housing and Community Development showed a sickening scene. Trash littered so densely through the home that investigators could not walk into certain rooms, a warning scribbled on a bathroom door warning that each word you read would take another second off of your life and holes where the bodies of Algarad’s victims deteriorated for years, away from prying eyes.

John Lawson

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John Alexander Lawson was born in San Francisco, California, in December of 1978.

He was raised primarily by his mother, Cynthia James, who had grown up in Forsyth County and graduated from Parkland High School. The pair moved back to North Carolina when John was 2.

For years, they were a normal family.

Cynthia says she first noticed a change in her son when she remarried. The pair and his new stepfather, Johnny, moved into the home on Knob Hill Drive in Clemmons. But John and Johnny didn’t always get along, and the boy became a recluse.

When the couple separated, neighbors said that’s when they started to see John outside again, though he rarely appeared at school. He repeated second and ninth grades before dropping out. He would later tell doctors that ninth grade was “when the phobia around people started.”

He admitted he was a poor student, typically receiving flunking grades for his classwork. He would frequently ****** with other students, and he admitted to being verbally disrespectful to teachers.

That’s when his appearance began to change.

Becoming Pazuzudata:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

He shaved off his long locks and began dressing himself in a style that evoked the demons with which he had grown obsessed.

He started looking for anything to help him cope with how he saw the world. A forensic evaluation showed that he had started regularly consuming alcohol at age 13. His mother said she was worried about the people he was spending time with.

“There’s this one guy that was doing ***** and got John into doing that, and I don’t know if I just turned a ****** eye,” James said.

James brought him to what was then the Reynolds Health Center on Highland Avenue, but he wasn’t there long. Soon, he was back out and plunging deeper into a new identity.

He legally changed his name from John to Pazuzu in homage to

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, perhaps best known for its depiction in the movie “The Exorcist.” His new surname, Ilah Algarad, translates from Arabic to mean “**** of locusts.”

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James said that Algarad did not worship the ******, but rather a “dragon,” as she put it, named Tiamat, a reference to a

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What had begun with clothing evolved into body modification as he accumulated more homemade tattoos on his face and whittled his teeth to points.

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who said the tattoos on Pazuzu Algarad’s face tell a story. He said Algarad’s facial tattoos were all versions of different tribal markings. The tattoo on Algarad’s ***** was a Polynesian Moko tattoo, drawn on warriors during ceremonies or sacrifices to show tribal affiliation. A tattoo on Algarad’s cheek was a version of Celtic knotwork, mostly worn by Viking warriors.

Mindset

In February of 2006, at the age of 27, Algarad went to Daymark Recovery Services.

Psychiatrists had determined that Algarad suffered from schizophrenia, agoraphobia and alcoholism. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder characterized by a distortion of emotional reality accompanied with delusions and hallucinations. Agoraphobia is an abnormal ***** of being in open and public places. Greensboro Psychiatrist Dr. Phil Lavine says Algarad’s schizotypal personality disorder would have led him to experience unusual perceptual experiences, odd thinking or speech, to be suspicious and paranoid.

In a pretrial interview in 2010, Algarad told the doctors that he often experienced panic symptoms when he left his home. Those feelings caused Algarad to suffer from depression. Vance said Algarad drank alcohol to cope with his other mental health issues.

“Whenever he is outside his house he feels markedly increased anxiety, leading at times to actual episodes of panic,” Dr. Charles Vance, a forensic psychiatrist at the former Dorothea **** Hospital in Raleigh, wrote in an evaluation of Algarad before his trial. “As a result of this anxiety, he has tremendously limited his activities, essentially making himself a prisoner in his own home.”

The doctors said he was physically healthy and taking medications for his mental illnesses, including Paxil, Lamictal and Ativan, but Algarad said the drugs made him “feel like a zombie” which led him to stop taking them.

Algarad’s mental illness, however, was not the culprit behind Algarad’s *********, Lavine said.

“I can’t connect up from a schizotypal personality structure to murders,” the psychiatrist said, calling the case an “outlier.”

According to Lavine, Algarad would not have responded well to medications.

“He had alcohol problems for a long time, and then he started getting into methamphetamines, which is not likely to help him but to make his anxiety issues worse,” Lavine said.

He left Daymark after two months, then returned again in October of 2008. Documents show Algarad’s reason for leaving was a transportation issue.

Within the next year, James says she was in the home as Algarad and his self-described wife, Amber Nicole Burch, ******* Joshua Fredrick Wetzler and Tommy Dean Welch.

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July 2009

Algarad was loaded up with drugs and alcohol, James says, when she remembers him walking into the house one morning in July.

“I come out of my room and I said, ‘What’s going on?’” James recalled.

There stood her son, holding a rifle, Wetzler’s body on the floor.

“Josh is laying on the floor and I’m like, ‘My ****,’ I mean, I don’t remember what. I mean I’m going crazy, and he just stood there,” she said.

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She asked him to sit in the den before she returned to her bedroom where she thought about her options before choosing to do nothing.

“So then I came out. I said, ‘I’m going to go to work,’” James recalled.

By the time she came back, Algarad and his friends had moved the man’s body to the basement, and James once again closed the door to her bedroom behind her.

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August 2009

Deputies got their first tip that Algarad had ******* Wetzler a mere two weeks after it happened.

In August of 2009, a woman named Terina Billings contacted the sheriff’s office with a lead. She said her father, Allen Billings, had seen a body in the basement of Algarad’s home on July 19, 2009, and helped Algarad bury body parts in the backyard. Allen had reportedly told his daughter that Algarad has used cat litter and chlorine to conceal the odor. As for why Algarad ******* the man, Algarad had reportedly told Allen Billings that he had shot the man 10 times for being a snitch, according to Terina Billings’ account in the search warrant.

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When investigators spoke with Allen Billings, he denied his involvement but did say that Algarad had admitted three days prior to ********* and ******** someone.

With that, the investigator, identified in warrants only as Detective Foster, went to see Algarad face to face, though no one had been reported missing at the time. Algarad allowed the investigator to come inside. Deputies spoke with Algarad and asked him questions. They told him that they had information that he had shot and ******* someone. But, as they walked around the home, basement and backyard, no substantial evidence surfaced.

“There was supposedly something about chlorine,” said Brad Stanley, special assistant at the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office. “Well, yes, there was chlorine, but there’s a swimming pool in the back, so there would have been chlorine. There was something about cat litter that had come up. OK, they had 15 or so cats.”

Over the next six months or so, a few more anonymous tips came in.

“We would get bits and pieces, and then people’s stories would change,” Stanley said.

October 2009

Tommy Welch disappeared on Oct. 3, 2009. That night, the plan was to have family night.

“We gave hugs [and said] we will be back later and we will watch a movie, get us some pizza, once kids went to bed — that was our plan,” said Carrie Price, Tommy Welch’s sister-in-law.

Price and her husband left Tommy and his mom at their Clemmons home. A little while later Tommy walked a half mile to his home and said he would be right back. He never returned.

When Algarad’s mother James heard gunshots, she walked into a scene similar to what she had found in July.

“Amber came to the entry of the hall there, and she says, ‘Go back to your room.’ Alright, OK.”

The gunshots were the sound of Birch ********* and ******** Tommy Dean Welch. He was slumped over on the couch in their home.

“I guess I was scared of her,” James said.

February 2010

Stacey Carter, Wetzler’s former girlfriend and the mother of his child, had known Wetzler to disappear for long periods at a time, but alarm bells rang when she heard from a friend that Algarad had murdered Wetzler.

On Feb. 9, 2010, Carter spoke with Foster.

“I didn’t know at the time that we weren’t the first people that had reported that, that the police had already been told about it,” Carter said.

Unbeknownst to Carter, Winston-Salem police had found Wetzler’s car, a 1989 Buick, days after she had last seen him. It had been found abandoned at an apartment complex on the 300 block of Brookline Street on July 26, 2009. The driver’s side window was rolled down, and the keys were still in the ignition. It had not been reported stolen.

She reported Wetzler missing to the Davie County Sheriff’s Office a few days later on Feb. 15, 2010.

“Had I known that his car had been found abandoned, we would have immediately started looking for him,” Carter said.

On Feb. 23, 2010, Foster was granted the first warrant to search Algarad’s home.

The sheriff’s office asked for the help of North Carolina State and the North Carolina Archaeological Research Center, but the doctor heading up the program said his crew would not be available for another two weeks. He also mentioned that cadaver dogs may or may not be able to detect the body ******* with the given circumstances.

Nevertheless, the sheriff’s office moved forward with the help of the SBI, Davie County Sheriff’s Office and Triad bloodhounds.

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Ultimately, even the bloodhounds were unable to pick up on a scent in Algarad’s backyard.

“Something we would do differently, we would probably wait, but again, given the information that we had at the time and the circumstances, the decision was made to proceed,” Stanley said.

That decision to try to stop Algarad before he could potentially ***** again, though regrettable, may have been justified.

June 2010

A few months later, on June 7, 2010, investigators found the body of 30-year-old Joseph Emerick Chandler at Donnaha Park near the Yadkin River. He had been shot and *******.

Chandler was the third man to disappear from the Clemmons area between July 2009 and July 2010.

Nicholas Pasquale Rizzi, of Lewisville, was charged with involuntary manslaughter in Chandler’s ******. Algarad, then-31, was charged with accessory after the fact of involuntary manslaughter for allowing Rizzi to stay at his Knob Hill Drive home.

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Rizzi was convicted of involuntary manslaughter on March 31, 2011, and sentenced to one year and one month in prison.

Algarad pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact of involuntary manslaughter in 2012. A judge sentenced him to serve 10 months to 12 months in prison and placed him on probation for five years. He was on probation when the bodies were found in his yard.

September 2011

Algarad’s self-proclaimed wife, Burch, assaulted his mother, James, on Sept. 22, 2011. While Burch was in jail, James went to the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office.

James told deputies that in late 2009 she’d heard a gunshot and saw Burch holding her rifle. But when deputies said they needed to question Algarad about the *******, that’s where James’s help stopped. Police said it was “a classic case of a mother protecting her son.”

When Algarad was released the next year, following his accessory after the fact to involuntary manslaughter conviction, things calmed.

September 2014

A few more years went by until a couple more leads came in and led deputies to a woman named Dixie Ross in late September 2014.

“All the information started coming in there at one time and so we pieced it together, prepared the search warrant, looked at the previous search warrant.”

Ross told deputies Burch texted her to come over to the Knob Hill home in early October 2009. When she got there, Burch told her, smiling, “I just did my first.” It would later prove to be the ********* of Tommy Dean Welch.

Ross, now in *****, helped Burch dig a ***** looking for an excuse to stop, Ross said her sandals kept falling off while jumping on the shovel. Burch took her shoes off, gave them to Ross. And then put on Tommy Dean Welch’s before starting to sing, ‘I’m wearing a ***** man’s shoes out loud over and over.”

Four days later, deputies got their second search warrant for Algarad’s home.

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After arresting Algarad and Burch, investigators spent days digging, collecting every shred of evidence they could.

Investigators had to use self-contained breathing apparatuses to go inside.

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Deputies went back to guard the home out of ***** people would go there on Halloween.

Oct. 5, 2014

When investigators unearthed the skeletal ******** of two people in their backyard, the sheriff’s office arrested Pazuzu Illah Algarad, then-35, and Amber Nicole Burch, then-24,

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.

The two were at home when they were arrested.

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for his 2012 conviction of accessory after the fact in connection with the ********* ****** of Joseph Emmrick Chandler.

Both were charged with one count each of ******* and accessory after the fact to *******. Both were placed in the Forsyth County Detention Center with no bond, according to deputies.

Burch’s warrants said that she ******* an unidentified male and with the help of Algarad ******* the body in the back yard

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, nearly five years to the day before the bodies were uncovered.

The ******** were taken to Wake Forest ******** Medical Center for examination.

Authorities were on the scene for much of the day.

“It was big news. People were gathered there for days upon days,” Stanley said.

April 2015

The property would be sold back to the bank three times before, at 8:45 in the morning on Friday, April 24, 2015, the walls were torn down as neighbors erupted in cheers. A track hoe flattened the home piece by piece. Dust debris gathered for years floated off into the spring sky.

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In the meantime, Pazuzu had attempted to commit ******** in the Forsyth County Detention Center and was transferred to Central Prison in Raleigh for safekeeping, where he continued to write his mother letters.

October 2015

It was Oct. 26, 2015, when Algarad sent his mother his last letter from Central Prison in Raleigh.

“It said, ‘Mom,’ of course,” James said. “‘Shaka muku,’ which means what’s up in Arabic. And he says, ‘I’m so bored. Got a letter from you and one from Amber. I despise the human race. People are ugly and pointless creatures. I sit back and watch them and they anger me. I should get a medal for murdering these ******* [expletive]. Maybe when I’m *****, the gods of chaos shall grant me the power.’ I mean, he was so hurt and ******, you know? ‘So how’s things your way? When are you and Kim coming to see me again? Well, I’m hungry and tired, so I’ll write you again here soon. I love you.’”

Two days later, he was *****. His ****** was ruled a ********, the cause blood loss from a deep wound to a major blood vessel in his left arm.

The autopsy revealed tattoos that had largely gone unseen to the public. Some reading “Pazuzu,” “********,” “******,” “villain,” “666,” “joker” and “Live fast and ****.”

James kept Algarad’s ******** in an urn in her living room.

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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#dark #story #notorious #North #Carolina #*********

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