While popular culture, movies, and television often portray magic and the occult as entertaining, bizarre, or even thrilling, reality sometimes reveals a much darker side. There are still people who claim to practice magic—and some have committed horrific crimes under the guise of rituals or dark delusions.
These crimes may lack the cinematic appeal seen in films, but the horror behind them is often far stranger than fiction.
1. The “Sacrifice” Recorded on a Phone
Angela Sanford was charged with the 2010 murder of Joel Leyva after luring him to Sandia Foothills Open Space in New Mexico. She asked him to undress, and as he began to do so—with Sanford sitting on top of him—she stabbed him more than ten times with a ritual knife commonly used in Wiccan ceremonies. Leyva suffered multiple stab wounds to his head, neck, and abdomen.
2. A Protection Spell Turns Deadly
In Iowa, Lawrence Harris was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of his adopted daughters, Kendra and Alysia Swing. The two young girls were found strangled and stabbed in their home. Harris claimed he’d tried to cast a protection spell for their brother, but insisted the spell tragically backfired and led to their deaths.
Alysia’s blood was found on Harris’s hands, body, and on a long knife he described as a “ritual knife,” discovered inside his book of spells. His attorneys argued insanity, but the jury convicted him on two counts of first-degree murder.
3. Ritual Murder on the Eve of the Blue Moon
In 2015, Wayne Hartrang Sr. from Pensacola, Florida, was arrested for killing three members of his family. Police found Voncile Smith and her two half-brothers, Richard and John, dead in their home.
4. Conspiracy to Kill a Pregnant Teen to Lift a Curse
In Illinois in 2005, Irenia Kutner, Ginny Wolfe, and Oscar Eke were charged with stabbing Joshua Bennett to death, and later accused—along with Misty Gangloff—of plotting to kill 16-year-old Lindsey Kassinger, who was pregnant. Testimony revealed their plan was to kill Kassinger and her unborn child to break a curse Kutner had convinced the group was upon them.
Eke admitted he'd “got into magic” for about a year after being drawn in by vampire movies and Harry Potter. Gangloff denied any real interest in magic but acknowledged owning books about it, and confessed to sticking pins in a doll several times a week, claiming it was just to “relieve stress.”
Members of the group attended a séance where they were supposedly told that Kassinger and her baby must die. Three days before Bennett’s murder, Eke said he'd attended another séance with Kutner and a man named David Lindner (who was himself shot and killed during a related home invasion in February 2006). Eke claimed he believed his friends and family would die if Kassinger and her child lived. Kutner reportedly interpreted flickering candles at the séance as a “sign” that Kassinger and her baby had to be killed—and that anyone else present should be harmed as well.
5. Human Sacrifice as a Gift to a Lover
In 1996, Diana Haun kidnapped Sherri Dally from a Target parking lot in Ventura, California. Haun, using a rented Nissan Altima that later showed traces of blood, took Dally to a remote canyon, where she killed her. Haun, a former model and aspiring actress, disguised herself as a security guard for the kidnapping.
Haun had dabbled in occult practices and told a coworker she planned to offer a “human sacrifice” as a birthday present for her lover, Michael Dally—the married man she'd been seeing for two years. Her plan was to murder Dally’s wife, Sherri, as a way of pleasing him.
6. The Witch and the Devil Murder
In 2009, Kara Williams-Covert and her boyfriend Dale Farquhar were accused in Ventura, California, of killing a man named Larry Fisk. At first thought to be a crime of jealousy, police later found a diary in a Palm Springs apartment that exposed bizarre details of a second, satanic-inspired crime.
In her diary, Williams called herself “the witch,” while Farquhar styled himself “the real devil.” The couple claimed the diary was just a horror movie script. The narrative imagined “Dave Hatcher” (based on Farquhar) in an open relationship with “Kat the Witch” (based on Williams), a meth addict who lured men home for sex.
Prosecutors argued that Williams reenacted the fictional script by luring the victim to her apartment, where he was killed. Investigators believe she tried the same with another man on Halloween 2009, but failed, before the murder took place on Friday, November 13. The diary also included handwritten song lyrics with lines like: “Get up and kill, kill, kill” and “a plague in Palm Springs… a plague of mass murder.”
7. Killing His Mother and Eating Her Heart
In 2001, Joseph Calla II was sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing his 79-year-old mother, Lydia Calla. He confessed to beating her to death, cutting her open, and removing some of her organs. One officer reported seeing Calla, naked and covered in blood, standing over the body and eating what turned out to be her heart, which showed bite marks and was missing a piece.
Calla, who had a long history of severe mental illness, claimed the “spirits of witches” possessed him and forced him to act. Other officers recalled him muttering about “Satanic worship" and accusing them of interrupting his sacrifice.
8. Using Magic to Lure Her Husband to His Death
In Canada in 1995, Cheryl Dale was sentenced to life for poisoning her estranged husband, Scott Dale, with antifreeze-laced wine. Although they’d been separated for four years, she gave him the poisoned wine as a gift, then stayed on the phone with him for nine hours, coaxing him to drink all of it with promises of reconciliation.
A witness at the trial, Nancy Fillmore—one of Cheryl’s lovers—testified that she saw Cheryl take out occult books, light candles, and chant strange spells after Scott left her house. Other witnesses said Cheryl made a doll in Scott’s likeness, stuck pins in it, and buried it.
Ironically, Nancy Fillmore herself died in 1997 when her apartment was set on fire by a teenager Cheryl had lured into killing her.
9. Attempted Murder with Deadly Nightshade
In 2000, Heather Miller was convicted of trying to kill her husband Kevin Miller. Before resorting to murder, she tried to “drive him out of her life” via black magic. When that didn’t work, she began poisoning his food daily with belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade. The plan fell apart after Miller confided in her neighbor, Mindy Robbins, who wore a wire to help police. The two women were also romantically involved, and shared an interest in the occult.
10. Killing a Mother on Claims She Was a Demon
In 2016, in Ellenville, New York, Sarah Gilbert killed her mother Mary in their apartment. Mary had been involved in occult practices since her teenage years, and this reportedly had a negative impact on her children. Sarah, who suffered from delusions and hallucinations involving witches and demons, came to believe her mother was a demon in disguise. She attacked Mary with a fire extinguisher and stabbed her several times with a 15-inch kitchen knife.
11- Cat Killed After Being Called a "Demon"
In Texas in 2015, a man called the police to report that his wife was having a severe psychotic episode after killing their cat. When officers arrived, the woman claimed she was hearing voices, believed herself to be a witch, and admitted to killing the cat to eat it because it was a "demon." The cat was found disemboweled, with some parts cooking in a pan on the stove.
12- Murder Over a Broken "Blood Oath"
In Washington State in 2010, Eric Christensen was convicted of first-degree murder after killing his girlfriend, Sherry Harlan. He claimed he had to kill her because she broke a "blood oath" they had made. The investigation revealed that he mutilated her body, removing her genitalia and dismembering her. Her skull was found in her burned-out car, while other body parts were discovered in trash bags in the woods and along roadsides. Christensen admitted he became enraged after discovering texts from another man on her phone and saw killing her as the only way to enforce their pact.
13- Teenage Girl Killed in Ritual in Botswana
In 1994, a teenage girl was kidnapped and later found dead, her body mutilated. Parts of her corpse had been used in what is locally known as "ritual medicine" to bring wealth and success.
14- Attempted Assassination of a President Using Witchcraft
In Zambia in 2025, two men were convicted for plotting to kill the country’s president through witchcraft and ritual magic. They were caught with animal tails, herbs, and mysterious paraphernalia. Both received two-year sentences with hard labor under an old law criminalizing the use of witchcraft to cause harm.
When Witchcraft Becomes an Excuse for Oppression
While the murder cases described here were committed by people who genuinely believed in occult rituals or sorcery, that's only part of the story. History is full of examples where people were executed or tortured simply for practicing unusual rituals, or even because of mere suspicion (read more on the Salem Witch Trials). Often, such accusations relied more on rumor and interpretation than on real evidence , turning witchcraft into a dangerous charge and a tool for oppression or revenge.
It’s impossible to ignore the lack of justice in many of these cases. Throughout history, mere suspicion of sorcery has been enough to bring men and women to court—where they could be convicted based on rumor or confessions extracted under torture. Thousands of innocent people were burned during the European Inquisitions in the name of combating witchcraft, and even in modern times, individuals in various countries have been executed or jailed simply for owning supernatural books or practicing local rituals that might be entirely harmless.
Witchcraft remains a blurry concept, somewhere between faith, superstition, and crime. Accusations can easily be twisted and misused. What’s sometimes labeled a "witchcraft crime" may actually be hiding something else entirely—or simply reflect a society’s fear of the unknown and its search for a scapegoat to explain tragedy.
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