2749 Knob Hill Drive, Clemmons, NC 27012
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Author: Jewls Krueger
In October 2014, police digging in the backyard of a dilapidated home on Knob Hill Drive in Clemmons, North Carolina, uncovered the skeletal remains of two men who had been missing since 2009. The home belonged to John Alexander Lawson, who had legally changed his name to Pazuzu Illah Algarad after the demon Pazuzu from the 1973 horror film "The Exorcist."
Algarad, a self proclaimed Satanist with filed teeth, full facial tattoos, and a reputation in his rural North Carolina community as a deeply disturbing figure, was charged with the killings along with his fiancée Amber Burch. The case became the subject of a 2017 ABC documentary and a 2019 Viceland television series.
John Alexander Lawson was born August 12, 1978 in San Francisco, California. As a young man he moved with his mother to Clemmons, North Carolina, an unassuming suburb just outside Winston-Salem. By his early 20s he had legally changed his name, converted to a personal blend of occult and Satanic beliefs, and begun cultivating an extreme personal appearance, including filing his teeth into points and covering his face in tattoos.
Algarad lived in a small, single story home at 2749 Knob Hill Drive that had belonged to his mother. After her death by suicide in 2010, he continued to live in the home with a rotating cast of girlfriends, roommates, and friends, including his eventual fiancée Amber Nicole Burch. By the early 2010s, the home had become widely known in the community as a hangout for local goth and Satanist subcultures, with drug use, animal sacrifice rituals, and constant parties on the property. Neighbors made repeated complaints to local police about the home.
Despite Algarad's many encounters with local authorities over the years, two murders went undetected at the property for years.
In July 2009, 32 year old Joshua Fredrick Wetzler was last seen alive entering the Knob Hill home. His family reported him missing, but no body was ever found and investigators had little to go on. In October 2009, just a few months later, 36 year old Tommy Dean Welch was also reported missing after last being seen at the house. The two cases were considered missing person investigations rather than homicides for several years.
Both men had been shot by Pazuzu Algarad and Amber Burch and buried in shallow graves in the backyard of the Knob Hill property. Prosecutors would later argue that the killings appeared to be motivated by a desire to rob the victims, although the exact motives have never been fully detailed publicly.
Further Reading
The case finally broke in October 2014. Forsyth County investigators, acting on new tips, returned to the Knob Hill home and obtained warrants to search the backyard. On October 5, 2014, they began excavating and quickly uncovered human remains in two separate shallow graves. The remains were soon identified as those of Wetzler and Welch.
Algarad and Burch were both arrested and each charged with one count of first degree murder, with Algarad charged in the death of Wetzler and Burch in the death of Welch. A third resident of the home, Krystal Nicole Matlock, was also charged as an accessory.
Pazuzu Algarad never stood trial. On October 28, 2015, while being held at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he had been moved for his own safety, Algarad was found unresponsive in his cell at about 3 a.m. and was pronounced dead at 4:20 a.m. He was 36 years old. The North Carolina Department of Public Safety initially reported the death as an apparent suicide, and an autopsy later confirmed he had died of exsanguination from a deep cut to his left brachial artery. The instrument used to make the wound was never identified by investigators.
Amber Burch pleaded guilty in March 2017 to second degree murder in the death of Tommy Dean Welch, along with armed robbery and accessory after the fact to murder in the death of Joshua Wetzler. Prosecutors said Burch shot Welch twice with a .22 caliber rifle in October 2009 while he was sitting on a couch in the Knob Hill Drive home. She was sentenced to a minimum of 30 years and 8 months in prison with a maximum of 39 years and 2 months. She is currently incarcerated at Anson Correctional Institution in Polkton, North Carolina, with a projected release date of May 20, 2045.
Krystal Nicole Matlock pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact to first degree murder for helping bury Joshua Wetzler. She was sentenced to a minimum of three years and two months and a maximum of four years and ten months. She was released from prison in May 2018.
The home at 2749 Knob Hill Drive sat abandoned and decaying after the murders, becoming a notorious destination for true crime tourists and amateur paranormal investigators. The brick ranch home, which had a two car garage, was widely covered with graffiti, much of it occult in nature, both before and after Algarad's arrest. Phrases including "Evil will triumph" were scrawled across the front door, and the windows had been blacked out from the inside.
After the home was foreclosed on by Wells Fargo on April 7, 2015, the property was demolished on the morning of April 24, 2015. Crowds of neighbors gathered to watch as an excavator brought down the house in under two hours. After the demolition, Wells Fargo conveyed the lot to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD sold the cleared lot on September 15, 2015 for $15,000. As of this writing, the property remains a vacant lot.
The location sits in a quiet, working class residential neighborhood in Clemmons, just southwest of Winston-Salem. Please be respectful of the surrounding neighborhood, stay on public roads and walkways at all times, and do not enter the property under any circumstances.
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