Florida appears in two sharply different roles: as the home of Deicide, whose confrontational public image became part of the book’s account of extreme-metal culture, and as the setting for the 1996 Fort Myers crime spree attributed to a group of teenagers calling themselves the Lords of Chaos. The state’s significance lies in this juxtaposition, not in any demonstrated causal link between the band and the later crimes.

Deicide and Florida’s musical association

The book identifies Florida as the home of Deicide, a band whose image it compares with the medieval Satanism celebrated by early Norwegian black metal. Singer Glen Benton had branded an inverted cross into his forehead and advocated animal sacrifice in interviews. The account also notes that Deicide’s albums had reportedly sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, giving the band a reach well beyond its home state.

That wider reach matters to the book’s treatment of music and criminal imitation. In a separate case in New Jersey, two teenagers told police that their fascination with Deicide had led them to kill a neighbor’s dog and said they had listened to the band beforehand. The episode is presented as an example of how a band’s imagery could enter public accounts of violence; it does not establish that Deicide caused the crime, or connect that New Jersey incident to Florida itself.

The Fort Myers crime spree

In spring 1996, six male teenagers began a series of crimes in Fort Myers. On April 13, they set fire to a supermarket construction trailer, then burned a Baptist church. The group next ignited a thatched aviary beside a theme restaurant, killing the collection of exotic birds kept there. Each successive act widened the scale of the destruction and gave the group’s self-fashioned identity an increasingly public, theatrical form.

The teenagers then placed propane tanks inside a disused Coca-Cola bottling plant, withdrew, and threw a Molotov cocktail into the building. The resulting explosion nearly destroyed the structure; the group watched from across the street. Six days later, they carried out an armed robbery and carjacking outside another restaurant. The sequence moved from arson to a coordinated attack involving explosives and then robbery, rather than remaining a single episode of vandalism.

Mark Schwebes and the Disney World plan

On April 30, at 11 p.m., high-school band director Mark Schwebes encountered members of the group on school grounds. They had cans of peaches, which he confiscated, and he ordered them to go home, warning that a school deputy would visit the next day. The book later clarifies that the teenagers had been preparing to burn the school; the reason for the canned peaches remains unexplained.

Schwebes was subsequently killed at his home. According to the account, Derek Shields, a member of the school band, knocked so that Schwebes would answer the door and signaled Kevin Foster to fire. After the group was jailed, investigators learned that the six had accumulated weapons in their cars and homes. Shields pleaded guilty to murder and agreed to testify against two co-defendants in exchange for a life sentence without parole.

The group had also discussed a plan for its graduation-night celebration at Walt Disney World: steal life-sized cartoon costumes, wear them in the park, and use concealed identities to carry out random attacks on Black visitors. Sheriff John McDougall doubted that the plan could have proceeded smoothly under the park’s security, but believed the teenagers would have reacted violently if challenged. The plot was never carried out; its disclosure nevertheless shows how far the group’s ambitions had moved beyond the crimes already committed.

Florida in the book’s account

The Fort Myers episode gives Florida a specific place in the book’s broader comparison of extreme-metal culture, media attention, and criminal spectacle. The teenagers named themselves the Lords of Chaos, and the account emphasizes their staged progression of arson, destruction, robbery, and plans for further violence. It also notes that the group included high-achieving students, including one with a full college scholarship and another who had scored 158 on an IQ test, resisting a simple explanation based on academic failure.

Set beside the reference to Deicide, the Fort Myers account distinguishes musical association from criminal action. Florida is connected to a band whose public image circulated widely, and separately to crimes whose perpetrators constructed their own identity and plans. The book’s geography therefore marks a point of contact between music, notoriety, and violence, without collapsing those different connections into a single cause.