Subliminal Messages at Heart of Case

RENO —  How do you prove something exists if it cannot be seen or heard?

That’s the challenge facing attorneys Timothy Post, Ken McKenna and Vivian Lynch. They represent the families of two Sparks youths, Raymond Belknap, 18, and James Vance, 20, who shot themselves on Dec. 23, 1985, after an afternoon of drinking beer, smoking pot and listening to the music of Judas Priest.

Belknap died instantly. Vance survived the suicide attempt but died three years later, allegedly due to related complications. The parents of both young men hold the British heavy-metal band responsible for the deaths of their sons and have filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Judas Priest and its record company, CBS Records.

The unprecedented case in Washoe District Court centers around the alleged existence of subliminal messages purported to be implanted on the band’s album, “Stained Class.” Subliminal messages, experts say, are stimuli that function below the threshold of conscious perception.

“Our job is not easy,” Post said. “It’s like chasing phantoms. Sometimes the fact that you can’t find it may be an indication that it’s right in front of your face. It’s like we’re the ghostbusters or something.”

Two years ago, Post and the other attorneys representing the plaintiffs hired William Nickloff Jr., a Sacramento sound engineer and private investigator, to scour the “Stained Class” album for subliminal clues. Nickloff allegedly uncovered a subliminal chant which said the words “do it” implanted on a cut titled “Better By You, Better Than Me.”

Two weeks ago, Nickloff appeared at the trial as an expert witness for parents. Utilizing a home computer music software package and a portable stereo, he played digitized samples of specific phrases from the album forward and backward.

He testified that he believed the band took extensive precautions to implant the alleged subliminal “do it” commands at several key points in the song, splashing the phrase in phonetic segments across 11 of the 24 tracks on the master recording, so as to escape detection. In a random survey by a Reno newspaper reporter, only two of 12 courtroom observers said they heard the “do it” chant. Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead sat poker-faced throughout the demonstration.

Anthony J. Pellicano, a Los Angeles private investigator and audio tape analyst who is scheduled to testify as an expert witness for Judas Priest and CBS on Wednesday, insists that there is no subliminal content or backward sounds anywhere on the recording.

“These allegations are like something straight out a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode,” said Pellicano, seated before a wall of computers, oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers in his Hollywood laboratory. “I will prove in court that there are absolutely no subliminal messages on the album.”

In the last two years, Pellicano said that he has spent more than 200 hours analyzing the original 24-track recording of “Better By You, Better By Me.”

“I don’t dispute that there appears to be a a two-beat rhythmic sound present,” Pellicano said. “But it was not put there intentionally and it certainly does not say ‘do it.’ ”

According to Pellicano, the alleged subliminal “do it” chant is actually the result of a breathy sound caused by the inhalation and exhalation of the lead vocalist in combination with a wispy electric guitar strum.

Victoria Gehman Evans, an expert witness who staged a second computer demonstration in court Monday on behalf of the parents, said she too can testify to the presence of the subliminal “do it.”

“This album is a time bomb waiting to go off,” Evans, a University of Nevada lecturer who holds masters degrees in physics and computer science, told The Times.

“I have found enough subliminal references to suicide in different songs on the ‘Stained Class’ album to know that this is not some kind of isolated incident. I don’t pretend to know why, but I do believe it was done deliberately.”

In addition to the forward “do it” subliminal phrase, Evans alleged that the album contains numerous backward sayings such as “commit suicide” and “try suicide.” Evans said that the only way a listener can consciously hear these phrases is to physically spin the record backwards on a turntable.

Attorneys for the parents claim that such backward sayings can be unscrambled by the subconscious mind even when a record is played in the normal direction. In that regard, the plaintiffs maintain that the alleged backward sayings could have influenced the shootings.

Pellicano disputed the argument.

“Do you have any idea of the number of permutations it would take to come up with words that would say one thing in reverse and still correlate to the forward content of the lyric and also operate within the natural rhyme scheme of the song?” Pellicano asked.

“If you let your imagination run wild, you can infuse just about any sound or image with a variety of subjective interpretations. But in science, we don’t talk about imagination--we talk about facts.”