Suspect in Hatchet Murder May Be a Satanist, Police Say

An 89-year-old woman may have been hacked to death in her Glendale home earlier this month as a “human sacrifice” to the devil, according to a sworn police affidavit filed to obtain a search warrant.

Glendale police insisted Wednesday that they are still unsure of the motive for the hatchet attack on Josephine Adinolfi, but the search warrant affidavit gives a chilling description of an investigator’s belief that homicide suspect David Condry may have been driven by a belief in Satan.

Before her death, Adinolfi had for the past six years rented the 31-year-old Condry a little house behind her neat, white-frame house on West Salem Street. Investigator William R. Currie’s search warrant affidavit paints a scene of horror as Adinolfi’s grandson, Augustus Pisano, entered her home Feb. 8 and was attacked by a screaming Condry wielding a hatchet.

Although wounded in the attack, Pisano managed to subdue Condry and then found the nude body of his grandmother in a bedroom where she apparently had been hacked to death, Currie stated.

Condry, who is jailed on suspicion of murder, told police that he had struck Adinolfi with a hatchet, according to the affidavit.

When booked, Currie wrote, officers discovered “the suspect was wearing a pentagram--a five-pointed star associated with satanic rituals” on a chain around his neck, and he also had a magazine clipping with headlines about human sacrifice and satanic slayings.