Horrorcore Rap Killings Shock Sleepy Va. Town

Questions abound about music's role in family's slaughter
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 24, 2009 8:29 AM CDT

Farmville is a sleepy Virginia town of 7,000, hardly the kind of place you’d expect a Californian “horrorcore” rapper to brutally bludgeon four people to death, Yet that's exactly what 20-year-old Richard Alden Samuel McCroskey III, aka “Syko Sam,” is suspected of doing. “I mean, things like this don’t happen in Farmville,” says one resident in the reeling community. “Everybody’s blaming it on MySpace. They say it’s the Internet just bringing in creeps.”

Emma Niederbrock, 16, did indeed meet McCroskey online. On Sept. 12 her mother and father took her and another teenage friend to a 10-hour death rap concert in Michigan—an unlikely destination for mom Debra Kelley, a professor specializing in violent criminal behavior, and her Presbyterian pastor husband. There they met McCroskey, authorities say not for the first time, who returned with them to Farmville. Police found all four bodies on Friday.
(More rap music stories.)

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