Fort Myers became the setting for a 1996 crime spree by six teenage boys who called themselves the Lords of Chaos. Beginning with arson and escalating to murder, the group’s actions made the city a particularly violent example in the book’s account of Black Metal’s spread beyond Scandinavia. The narrative links the Florida crimes in spirit to the earlier Norwegian wave, while treating the group’s own formation and plans as a distinct local story.

Setting and Wider Context

The crimes began on April 13, 1996, in Fort Myers. By then, the book describes the Norwegian church-burning wave as having ebbed after leading participants were jailed, killed, or moved on from the scene, even as Black Metal and its rebellious appeal continued to spread internationally. It places the Florida group among cases showing how that wider cultural current could surface far from Norway, without establishing that the Fort Myers boys were part of an organized Black Metal network.

The Crime Spree

The group began by burning a supermarket construction trailer and then a Baptist church. The attacks grew more dangerous when the boys set fire to a thatched aviary beside a theme restaurant, killing the exotic birds inside. At a disused Coca-Cola bottling plant, they positioned propane tanks, withdrew, and ignited the building with a Molotov cocktail; the structure was nearly destroyed as they watched from across the street. Six days later, they carried out a masked armed robbery and carjacking outside another restaurant.

On April 30, Walpurgisnacht, band director Mark Schwebes caught the boys on their high-school grounds. They had cans of peaches, which he confiscated, and he ordered them home, warning that a school deputy would visit the next day. The account later clarifies that the group had been preparing to burn the school; why they had the canned peaches remains unexplained. A few hours after the confrontation, Schwebes was murdered at his home. Three days later, police arrested key members as they were preparing to rob a restaurant at gunpoint, where two of them worked. Investigators said the plan was to kidnap the manager and shoot anyone who intervened.

The Group and Its Plans

The account names the five members besides leader Kevin Foster as Derek Shields, Peter Magnotti, Christopher Black, Christopher Burnett, and Thomas Torrone. Foster, eighteen, was described as the ringleader; he had access to weapons through his stepfather’s pawn shop and was familiar with their use. Investigators recovered weapons from the boys’ cars and homes. Sheriff Larry King cautioned against neatly classifying them as either a gang or a militia: the group had traits associated with both, but its members had formed the Lords of Chaos around their stated intention to create disorder.

The account describes distinct roles in Schwebes’s killing. Shields, who belonged to the school band, knocked at the door so that the teacher would answer; he then signaled Foster to fire. The book reports that Foster allegedly fired a second shot because the group believed Schwebes was homosexual. Shields later pleaded guilty to murder and agreed to testify against two co-defendants in exchange for life imprisonment without parole, avoiding the death penalty.

The boys’ plans extended beyond the attacks they had carried out. They intended to use money from the restaurant robbery to travel to Walt Disney World, steal life-sized character costumes, and disguise themselves while shooting Black visitors. Sheriff John McDougall doubted the plan would have worked given the park’s security, but said the group would have reacted violently if stopped. King likewise described the planned attack as an effort to wreak havoc in the park. The arrests therefore interrupted a proposed mass attack as well as the immediate robbery.

Significance of the Location

Fort Myers anchors a sequence in which adolescent rebellion took form not only as symbolic identification but as coordinated arson, armed crime, and murder. The book’s comparison to Norway is explicitly one of spirit and resemblance; it does not make the Florida group an extension of the Norwegian scene. The city’s role in the narrative is instead to show how the name and imagery of Black Metal could travel internationally while local circumstances, access to weapons, and the boys’ own choices shaped a separate and increasingly lethal course.