The Blood of Satan: The 1974 Michael Taylor Exorcism

0:00 [MUSIC] Early on a Sunday morning in 1974, a vicar's wife picks up the phone to call a doctor, and all she gets is the unattainable tone. She and her church group have been up all night praying over a man named Michael. They believe they pull dozens of demons out of Michael. They're worried about what's still in there, and they're worried about his wife. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Oset is a small town in West Yorkshire, England, and for a long time it ran on wool.

1:04 A big piece of that was Shoddy, which is old wool that gets shredded up and spun back into new cloth, and the town had a whole trade built around it. Plus, coal mining. By the early 1970s, the big local pits had closed, and the Shoddy business had just about disappeared as well. If you were a working man in Oset, the ground was moving under your feet. All the available jobs were drying up. Michael Taylor lived there with his wife, Christine, in Havercroft. Michael was 31, Christine was 29. They had five kids. Michael worked as a butcher, and then he heard his back. After that, work got hard to find. Information on Christine is a little harder to find.

1:45 The record has her age and her kids, and past that it goes pretty blank. And a lot of what you'll hear in this story is about Michael, because courts and doctors spent months writing about him. The exorcist, movie, opened in London in March 1974, people lined up for it, and some local councils banned it outright, including Wakefield, which is right up the road from Oset. The Church of England also used to have a rule called Canon 72. It said a priest needed his bishops' permission for an exorcism. The church scrapped that rule in 1969. After that, nothing on the books said a vicar had to ask first. So back to Michael, his friends were really worried about him.

2:28 He was down, and he was pulling away from people, and they got him into a Christian fellowship group. This crowd was on the charismatic end of things, so you'd get to speaking in tongues and meeting in people's houses. The Taylor's house included. And within days, Michael was speaking in tongues right along with everyone else. A historian who studied the case wrote that the group's leader was a 22-year-old named Marie Robinson. Christine, Michael's wife, came to the meetings too. A psychiatrist named Dr. Hugo Milney later testified that Marie became a dominant person in Michael's emotional world, and that all this happened during the same few weeks his mental health was starting to go. One day, at the Taylor House, with Christine out, Michael kissed Marie.

3:13 Marie told the inquest she recoiled and told him that he loved Christine. She said later on that Michael turned threatening and hit her in the face, and Christine was there for that part. Marie said that the two young women called on the name of Jesus together, and she believed that's what kept Michael from killing her that day. And you can decide for yourself why exactly it was that he stopped. Divine intervention, or he felt like he didn't need to kill her. In Marie's telling, Christine was right there beside her. The group all decided that Michael must be possessed. On the night of October 5th, they brought him to St. Thomas Church in Galber near Barnesley. The vicar there was Peter Vincent, and his wife Sally took part. And so did a Methodist minister named Raymond Smith and his wife Margaret, along with a few others. It went all night. The accounts can't really agree on how many hours exactly it lasted, but it was pretty much all night. By the end, they believed they had cast out dozens of demons from Michael. And again, this is a part where no one can really agree on the count. One version says 40 and other says 43. You'll find 48 demons in some place, and one rounds it all the way up to an even 50 demons cast out of Michael that night. Margaret said that she got word from the Lord that a spirit of murder would break out. And she brought up Christine. Peter told the inquest that by the end he could see murder in Michael's eyes, and he named murder as one of the spirits still living

4:44 inside him. And he said the rest of the group came to that same fear on their own. You've got a whole room full of people who just spent the entire night praying over this man, and they come out of it scared for his wife's life. Christine, they still think that even though they cast out demons left and right from Michael, there's still some living inside him that want to kill his wife. The ritual ended by about five in the morning. By about seven, the church group was saying out loud that Christine was in danger. Sally tried to call their doctor. Line came back with the unobtainable tone. A teacher named Julia Gilby got on the phone for the group and called the medical officer of Heath. And he said he wouldn't come out unless the Taylor's family doctor had approved it, or at least knew about it.

5:30 Julia called the West Yorkshire police next. The police saw it as a medical problem, and they had very little to go on. They had the name Mike and a vague address. A senior detective later told the inquest, police did all they could with that much. You can follow the whole chain of calls on paper and every call ended up pointing at somebody else. Christine was in the middle of it, helping where she could. She agreed the kids could be taken into care. She would not agree to being separated from Michael. The clergy let the two of them go home. Michael, who's just had these dozens of demons cast out of him, and they felt like wanted to kill his wife, not him, but the demons inside him. They let him go home with his wife. Nobody kept them apart. And Sally's call never went through, and the Heath officer wanted the family doctor first and the police at a first name and a vague address. And Michael and Christine went home to Havercroft together that Sunday morning. At around 10 o'clock that morning, Michael attacked Christine with his bare hands. Years later, a prosecutor told the court room that she died very quickly. Michael also killed the family dog, a poodle, that belonged Christine's mother.

6:42 He then walked out into the streets. He was naked and covered in blood. He was shouting that the blood was the blood of Satan. Police took him into custody. This case went to Leeds Crown Court the next spring. On March 25, 1975, the jury returned the special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Under the law back then, you could only get that verdict if the jury accepted Michael did it and found that he was insane when he did it. He was sent to Broadmore, the High Security Psychiatric Hospital. The inquest wrapped up about a month later in Wakefield. The coroner recorded Christine's death as "missadventure" and said there was no criminal element left to decide. He said people who tried ecstrosism without experience were playing with fire. The psychiatrist testified there too.

7:32 He said Michael had started showing signs of mental illness in the weeks before and he called the ecstrosism "the ultimate trigger mechanism" and he explained that if you breathe fast and hard for hours, it can change your consciousness and lead to behavior that you can't control. And he believed that's exactly what happened during the ritual. Somebody asked Peter about the archbishop of Canterbury's view that ecstrosism belonged under church authority. Peter said his authority came from the New Testament and Jesus Christ. Nobody from the church was ever charged in this case. The Church of England got pushed from both sides. A group of 65 academics urged it to keep ecstrosism from getting any official status.

8:14 That summer, archbishop Donald Kogan laid out his own set of principles. There were five of them. Ecstrosism had to be done in collaboration with doctors and it had to be done by experienced people with the authorization of the Diocean Bishop and it had to come with prayer and sacrament and had to stay private with pastoral care afterward. The bishop's sign off the exact thing canon 72 used to require was back. If you look at the Church of England's guidance today, it still calls those same core principles its foundation. Michael spent two years at Broadmore and he spent two more on a secure ward in Bradford before he was released. He landed back in Leeds Crown Court in 2005.

8:58 He was 61 years old by then. He pled guilty to two charges of sexual assault for indecently touching a teenage girl. The court heard that the psychiatric problems from 1975 had come back after a week in custody and that he had cleared it all up once again and got bail. And his lawyer told the judge about a cut wrist and a jump from a bridge that hurt his back in his legs. He asked the police, "Am I going to Broadmore for murdering my wife?" The judge said Michael tried to take his own life four times because of his distress over what he did. The sentence was a three-year community order with psychiatric treatment. And if you pull up the Wakefield Express story on it, the paper still ran the old line about the 40 demons cast out of him with it was claimed tucked in the front of it. Michael would theoretically be 82 years old this year. I couldn't find a reliable record of whether he's still alive or not and what became of the five kids that never made it into public record either. People have written about the demon counts and at least four different ways over the years and you can find every one of them in every single search and I never found Christine's maiden name written down not even one single time. But that's the 1974 exorcism of Michael Taylor.

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