Teenage girl tells court how 'devil' forced her mother into performing sexual acts

A teenage girl telling the court how a paranormal voice told her mother and sister to perform sexual acts on a broomstick, as a disturbing case of satanic sexual abuse continued today.

The 15-year-old girl was testifying via videoconference in the compilation of evidence against her 18-year-old boyfriend.

The man stands accused of the rape of a vulnerable woman, causing her and her vulnerable daughter to perform sexual acts against their will, violent indecent assault on a person who was unable to resist, holding both women against their will, forcing them to perform acts contrary to their decency, as well as slightly injuring them.

He also stands accused of causing the witness - his girlfriend - and her mother to fear violence and with participating in sexual activities with the underage girl.

House clocks setting themselves to 3am 

The girl, who was just 14 at the time of the incidents, told the court that her mother had started using the Ouija board after she was caught cheating on her husband, many years before. “These things have been happening since I was a girl…the closet doors opening and closing of their own accord and the clocks in the house all setting themselves to 3am,” she said.

Her mother would buy “satanic dolls with spirits in them” from the internet. The girl said she had run an internet search on the name of the doll and read that it would burst water pipes, something which had also subsequently happened at her home.

The mother was not afraid though, and when the doll was stolen from her workplace she hadn’t filed a police report. The woman would use a pendulum and dowsing rods in front of her daughter up till as recently as a year ago, said the girl. “She bought another doll called the ‘devil’s daughter.’ When I looked at it, it made me dizzy and I had to go to stay with my grandfather.”

“When I was at home, myself and my mother…when my sister converted to Islam, we had heard baby cries and the opening and closing of wardrobes and so on,” said the girl.

She told magistrate Aaron Bugeja that her mother and sister had told her how before she was born, a shadowy figure wearing a hat and long coat had pushed her mother down the stairs at their house.

The witness said she had seen paranormal activity since she was a young child and had started hearing a sinister voice in the house around August last year. “We’d hear voices...me, my mother, sister and father,” she said.

“Sometimes it would be a baby, sometimes three at once, sometimes an older person’s voice. Everyone in the house would hear it and it would come from various directions,” she said.

Inspector Oriana Spiteri asked what language the voice would speak in. “Sometimes it would speak in English, Maltese, Latin, sometimes as a baby, a man, a woman.” The witness said she only spoke Maltese and English but her mother had identified the third language as Latin from her previous occult experiences. 

Asked by the inspector whether she had ever seen her mother performing the rituals, she said she had. 

She no longer heard the voices as she now lived with her grandfather, she said.

READ MORE: Youth cajoled gullible mum and daughter into bizarre 'Satanic' sex abuse

Pact with the devil

“Mum had made a pact with the devil to have and endless supply of money. Her pay would never run out,” she said. “My mum is obsessed with money. But when she told me about it [the pact] her money ran out. She had a lot of debt.”

“The voice would tell my mother not to smoke, it would tell me to stay at home and not go out. Normal stuff.”

Had the voice ever said something abnormal, she was asked. One time the voice had ordered them out of the house as it was his, she replied.

The question was rephrased. 

Asked if the voice had ever asked to do “weird things”, she said that on one occasion her mother had said that she “had to do something”, explaining that the mother and her other daughter would have to perform sex acts on a broomstick. “I covered my boyfriend with a blanket so he couldn’t see, and my mother then asked me to use the broomstick on her but I refused. I think my sister did it.” 

“I saw my sister putting the broomstick up my mother’s private parts,” continued the witness, explaining that the accused’s head was still under the pillow at the time, as the witness was holding it there. She hadn’t heard the voice on that occasion.

The prosecution asked whether she had tried to stop her mother “I couldn’t, what could I do? I said ‘uwejja vera?’ but what can I do. These are supernatural things…something could then happen to me. I was always afraid as a child that this would affect me. These things aren’t normal.”

On another occasion, her mother had told her that the voice had told her to strip naked and recount some stories of how she had sex with men who were not her father. The witness had needed to speak to psychologists and was physically sick after the incidents, she said.

More spooky goings-on occurred when the girl’s English friend had slept over. She had gone to the toilet at around 11pm when all of a sudden the mirror jumped off the wall, hand prints forming on it. The mother had wiped them off and they had returned and later, a young girl’s face appeared in the mirror, she said. These were normal things to her mother, recalled the girl.

As for the accused, the girl said she had first met him on 1 May at the cinema and that it wasn’t long before he started visiting her home. He was 17 when their relationship started, turning 18 a month later. Asked whether they would have sex, she said they would sometimes, “but not because he forced me. Because I love him.” She said she was aware of the report that he had raped her sister.

Mother wanted an excorcism

Defence counsel Jason Azzopardi asked the witness why an exorcist was saying mass at their house. The mother had approached him and he came up with the idea, she said, but her mother was already in hospital at the time.

Azzopardi suggested that the priest had warned the mother that an excorcism would be useless if she continued to dabble in the occult. She said he had. “We would be doing it for nothing, he had said. You must change.”

At one point, they had also gone to a certain satanist called Dimech “who would hold black masses in a large building” and who would sleep with her mother, she said.  

The broomstick incident had not been done for fun, but because they had been instructed to do so by the voice, she said in reply to a question by Azzopardi. 

Asked whether the accused’s name had ever been mentioned at any time, she said it hadn’t.

Had she ever seen her father with an inverted cross on his forehead, asked Azzopardi, pointedly. “Yes when I was a girl. My mum would cheat on him and he had started beating my mother and a blue inverted cross appeared on his forehead. He was very afraid which was unusual for him.”

Was there a time when the voice had told her to go have a bath with her sister, asked Azzopardi. “Mhm. It was around Christmas time. I put my swimsuit on because I felt embarrassed.” There was no time before where she had done this. 

Where had the accused been when this order was given, asked the lawyer.

The order came from the living room, she replied. The accused had been sitting beside her at that moment, said the girl. It was impossible that this voice belonged to the accused, she said. 

The case continues.

Names are being withheld by order of the court.