Varg vs. Euronymous[views:2061][posts:10]___________________________________ [Dec 5,2005 6:56pm - BornSoVile ""] [I]Yes, I know it's long. Tough shit.[/I] It has been kind of interesting to see how some people have felt a need to make up stories regarding the why I ended up killing Euronymous. It is sad to see that people make up stories just because the truth is uncomfortable to them. In 1991 most of the metal musicians in Norway believed Euronymous was a so-called cool guy, but in mid or late 1992 most of us realized that he was not. When DSP (Deathlike Silence Productions), his label, released the Burzum debut album, in March 1992, he had to take up a loan to be able to pay for it. He couldn't afford it himself, and he loaned the money from me. When he sold all the Burzum albums he paid his private bills rather than print more records - or pay me back the money he owned me (and I never saw any royalties either, for that sake). So when he was sold out he had no money to print more records. This is probably the reason why some people think I killed him for money, but certainly I wouldn't have gotten my money back by killing him. Breaking his legs would probably have worked, but not killing him. I can always get more money if I want to and I never invest any more than I can afford to loose, anyhow. I have a very relaxed relationship to money, so this rumour is just silly, and it was only talk about 36.000 NOK anyhow (about 5100 USD, about and average month's pay in Norway). I took the consequence of his incompetence and stupidity and started up my own label, called Burznazg (in Tolkien's Black Speech that is "Dark Ring"), that was later (in late 1992) changed to Cymophane (Greek: "Wave to appear", the name of a gem that is shaped like an eye), and decided to do everything myself. I didn't need him. All he did was to sit on his fat arse in his shop and drink Coca Cola and eat kebab anyway. His shop was going down the drain, and it was only a matter of time before he (and thus DSP) was bankrupt. We hadn't given up on him just yet though, not completely, and as a final attempt to get his shop going we agreed that I should do an interview for a newspaper to give metal-music some attention. He was out of Burzum albums, but he had other albums for sale in his shop. When I did the anonymous interview in January 1993 I exaggerated a lot and when the journalist left we - a girl and I - had a good laugh, because he didn't seem to understand that I was pulling his leg. He took everything dead serious. Unfortunately he went to the police the next day (the 19th) and had me arrested, and (the 20th) his newspaper printed his version of what I had said while I was in a holding cell unable to tell anybody that it was just a load of crap I had said to create some interest in a music genre - to help Euronymous get some customers for a change. The interesting thing is that when I was arrested Euronymous closed down the shop instead of taking advantage of the situation, because his parents thought the attention was too uncomfortable! So the "evil" Black Metal hero did what his mother and father told him to! Pretty pathetic, alright, but by doing so he also made all my efforts more or less pointless. I spent six weeks in custody because of that, and all he did was to close down the shop! The customers came in droves, but to a closed shop! How stupid is that?! When I got out from prison I was pretty disillusioned by all that had happened in the media, and the police had made such a mess for me when they had their raid in my apartment that it was hard to run Cymophane like I had planned to. At the same time DSP had (possibly because of the media stunt) gotten a distribution deal with a company in Oslo, and could start printing and selling DSP records again. Euronymous had made a complete fool of himself by closing down the shop, and most of us agreed that he was a damn wimp and an idiot. I was angry at him for not taking advantage of the situation, which was why I had done that silly interview in the first place, and I didn't want anything more to do with him. There was no point in dealing with him. Instead I got a deal with a distribution company in Oslo for Cymophane, and continued on my own. As far as I was concerned he didn't exist anymore. When he phoned me to ask me if they, the guys in Mayhem, could stay at my place when they were in Grieghallen sound studios to finish the Mayhem album, I said no. Nobody else in Bergen wanted to give them a place to stay either, and they had to rent a room at a motel. Nobody had anything against Hellhammer, the only other Mayhem member at the time, but we just didn't want anything to do with Euronymous. I have always had a good relationship to Hellhammer, and he wasn't very impressed with Euronymous either, so to speak. In 1992, when we recorded "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas", he even made jokes that we should kill him! For some months this dislike for Euronymous spread in the metal scene, as more and more people understood what a moron he was, and he blamed me for all of this, and started to hate me. He believed it was my fault people lost their respect for him. In a sense he was right, as I certainly didn't keep my opinions a secret, but I think he brought that upon himself. He was simply disclosed by the way he reacted to the heat. He had made a fool of himself. Further, when the media wrote all that crap about me it made him feel less important. Suddenly he was no longer the "main character" in the hardcore metal scene. As he saw it, that too was all my fault. This is probably the reason people claim the killing was a result of a power struggle between two leading figures in the scene, but the truth is that this was only important to him. I couldn't care less about this. I didn't even socialize with that many metal people, and when I went out I preferred to go to house parties and to an underground techno club in Bergen, called "Føniks" (Phoenix), while most of the metal guys went to some rock'n'roll place. In fact I went to the techno club to get away from all the new metal people, because I didn't like the attention from them. I preferred the attention of nice girls, so to speak. Later Mayhem got a new guitarist, Snorre W. Ruch of Thorns, from Trondheim, and when he moved to Bergen I let him sleep on a guest bed, in the living room of my apartment, until he got his own apartment. At this point Euronymous had begun to plot against my life. He wanted to kill me. In his view I was the problem, so by killing me he believed he problem would go away. His problem was that he included a few of the metal people in his plot to kill me, and they told me. He had told them because he trusted them, but obviously they had warmer feelings for me than for him, so to speak. At one point he phoned Snorre, who lived in my apartment, and Snorre let me listen to what Euronymous had to say. He told Snorre that "Varg must disappear for good" and similar, confirming the plans others had told me about earlier. A lot people has claimed that I overreacted, because Euronymous was such a wimp anyhow, and he didn't have the guts to even try to kill me. Sure, he was a wimp, but this time he didn't tell everybody about his plans, like he usually did. I took this serious because he only told a very few people he trusted, his closest friends - or those he believed were his closest friends anyhow. Also, in August 1993 he was about to go to prison for four months, after being convicted for injuring two people with a broken bottle, because they had "looked at his girlfriend" at a bus-stop. He was not a very sympathetic guy, and when he felt that he had his back against the wall he was capable of executing his plans. If scared enough even the biggest cowards become dangerous. The same day he told Snorre about his intentions to kill me (and thus indirectly told me, as I was listening to their conversation), I received a letter from him, where he pretended to be so very positive and where he was very friendly and wanted to meet me to discuss a contract that I had not yet signed. This was the only excuse he had to contact me, and it seemed like he was trying to set me up. According to his "friends" the plan was to meet me, knock me out with a stun-gun, tie me up and put me in the trunk of a car. He would then drive into the countryside, tie me to a tree and torture me to death while videotaping everything. My reaction to this was naturally anger. What the Hell did he think he was? The same day I decided to drive to Oslo, hand him the signed contract and tell him to "f*** off", basically, and by doing so take away all the excuses he had to contact me ever again. I have to admit that I didn't rule out beating him up too, though. Just before I left Snorre told me he wanted to come along, because he had some new guitar riffs to show him. I intended to continue to Sarpsborg with a load of Burzum T-shirts (to Metallion of "Slayer" magazine as far as I remember), and just leave Snorre in Oslo with Euronymous. The odd (and disloyal) Snorre didn't seem to have any problems being a friend of both of us, by the way, like a normal person (with a backbone) would. We left Bergen around 21:00 and we arrived in Oslo around 03:00 - 04:00 (I no longer remember exactly; it happened more than eleven years ago). We had taken turns driving, and when we arrived I was sleeping in the back seat. Because of that I had taken my belt off, and when we stopped I handed it to him and asked him to put it a safe place. I had a knife in the belt, and driving around with a knife lying in the backseat is not very safe. We went to the front door of the building block and I called his doorbell. He was sleeping. You might think that visiting people in the middle of the night was a bit strange, but it was perfectly normal to us. A lot of people in the metal scene were "nocturnal creatures", so to speak. He asked who it was, and I said my name. "I am sleeping. Can't You come back later?" he said. "I got the contract. Let me in", I said and he buzzed me inn. His flat was on the fifth (or forth?) floor and I began climbing the stairs. Snorre wanted to have a cigarette, and smoking was banned in Euronymous' apartment (and in my car), so he waited downstairs to have a smoke. Euronymous was waiting for me in entrance, looking very nervous, and I handed him the contract. I may add that of course he was nervous. The guy he planned to murder showed up at his doorstep in the middle of the night. I then asked him what the "f***" he was up to, and when I took a step forwards he panicked. He freaked out and attacked me with a kick in the chest. I simply threw him to the door, and was a bit stunned. I wasn't stunned by his kick, but by the fact he had attacked me. I didn't expect that. Not in his apartment and not like that. He had just started to train "kick boxing" and like all beginners thought he had become "Bruce Lee" overnight, but still. After a few seconds he jumped from the floor and dashed for the kitchen. I knew he had a knife lying on the kitchen table, and I figured that "if he's going to have a knife, I'm going to have a knife too". My belt knife was in the car, because it was in the belt I had left there, but I had a pocket knife, or rather a boot knife (with an 8 cm long blade) in my pocket. I jumped out in front of him and managed to stop him before he got his hands on the kitchen knife. At this point he had showed his intentions, so when he ran for the bedroom I figured he was going for another weapon. He had some weeks earlier told some people that he would soon get the shotgun back from the police (used by "Dead" when he shot himself), so I figured that was what he was going for, or he was going for his stun-gun. (Although he actually didn't have a stun-gun or the shotgun in his apartment, I didn't know that.) I gave chase, stabbed him and was a bit surprised when he ran out of the apartment instead. It made no sense to flee and it made me angry to know that he had started the fight, but the moment it didn't go his way he decided to flee instead, instead of fighting like a man. Such is always something I have disliked strongly. (Some people have claimed I slew a helpless and unarmed man, but first of all he tried to get a knife before I did, and certainly he could have armed himself if he had chosen to stay and fight instead of running away like a coward. There was a number of other things in his apartment he could have used to defend himself with, when he failed to get hold of his kitchen knife.) Outside we met Snorre, who had finished his cigarette. All the doors looked the same, and Snorre was a pretty absent-minded fellow, so he had ended up in the attic, one floor up, by mistake. Confused he had gone back down and used his lighter flame to light up the door sign, trying to read it and figure out if this was the right apartment. As he was trying to read the door sign Euronymous came running out in his underwear, bleeding and screaming like a madman. Snorre was so surprised and terrified he looked like a ghost, and it looked as if his eyeballs were about to fall out of his head. According to Snorre he was so surprised and shocked he had a black-out and didn't remember anything until I later asked him if he was okay. Euronymous ran down a flight of stairs and stopped to call the neighbour's door bell. He quickly realized that I had come after him, so he continued to flee down the stairs, knocking on the walls, trying to call the door-bells of the neighbours as he ran past them, and screaming for help. I stabbed him (three or four times) in his left shoulder as he ran - that was the only part I could hit while we were running anyhow. He then stumbled and broke a lamp on the wall, probably with his head or arm, and fell into the glass fragments - in his underwear. I ran past him and waited. Snorre was still upstairs, and I had no idea how he would react to all of this. Perhaps it was a set-up and he was in on it? Perhaps he too would attack me? I didn't know. When Snorre came running he looked very scared and I just let him ran straight past me. I realized he was not a part of this, so I asked him if he was okay (because he certainly didn't look okay). By then Euronymous was back on his feet. He looked resigned and said: "It's enough", but then he tried to kick me again, and I finished him off by thrusting the knife through his skull, through his forehead, and he died instantaneously. The eyes turned around in his head and a moan could be heard as he emptied his lungs when he died. He fell down to a sitting position, but the knife was stuck in his head, so I held him up, as I held onto the knife. When I jerked the knife from his skull he fell forward, and rolled down a flight of stairs like a sack of potatoes - making enough noise to wake up the whole neighbourhood (it was a noisy, metal staircase). This might sound like an odd way to kill him, but my knife was very small and it was only pointed. The blade was not sharp. It was so blunt I wouldn't have been able to cut a tomato in two with it without crushing it instead. The only way to kill him quickly with that knife would be to pierce his heart or skull. In fact I would have been able to kill him much easier and quicker had I not had a knife at all, and instead had just beat him to death. The only reason I had pulled a knife was because he was trying to, and I figured it would be fair that I had a knife too, although the knife I had wasn't much. He had showed his intention to kill me, and even though he was no longer a direct threat to me, there and then, I did not feel any bad for killing him. His cowardice had made me angry and I saw no reason to let him live, not when he had showed his intent to kill me. Had I let him live I would only let him have another attempt at my life, later on. Killing a person with a 8 cm ling blunt knife is a bloody affair, but although the blood had splashed all over the walls inside the staircase, as we ran downwards, I had no blood in my face, only on my upper body. Anyhow, Snorre had the car keys so I ran out to stop him from driving away, leaving me behind in Oslo, soaked in blood. I took the car keys from him, opened the door, gave him back the car keys and told him to drive. I jumped into my sleeping bag, that I had in the trunk of the car, before I got into the car myself, to make sure I didn't leave any blood traces in the car. At that point I figured it was best to try and get away. What I didn't know, was that Snorre was still in shock, so he just drove around in Oslo for 20 minutes, and eventually I had to take over. On our way to Oslo Snorre saw a police control on the highway to Bergen just outside Oslo, so we had to take another way. We drove north towards Trondheim and then took off westwards after a while. I stopped by a lake and took off all my clothes. I tied rocks into the clothes and swam out on the lake to let them sink where the water was deep. Luckily I still had the T-shirts I intended to sell in Sarpsborg (like I said, to Metallion, as far as I remember), and Jørn of Hades had forgotten a sweatshirt in the backseat of my car (ironically a Kreator shirt, with the text "Pleasure To Kill"), so I had a clean sweatshirt too (well, not "clean", but at least it wasn't soaked in blood). Finally, I had a very, very dirty pair of trousers that had been lying in the floor in the back of the car for ages, so I had an almost complete set of clothes. Driving "commando" and without socks was no problem. (Snorre later showed the police where I had gotten rid of the clothes, but all they could find was a T-shirt, with the picture of a Viking and the text: "Norway: The Land Of The Vikings", that had no traces of blood. Everything else was gone, and even scuba divers couldn't find anything. They had no proof whatsoever that the T-shirt had belonged to me [and who on Earth would ever expect me to wear a T-shirt with such a motive? ]. The other clothes had probably sunken into the deep mud at the bottom of the lake, as intended.) A friend of ours was still in my apartment. When I decided to go to Oslo we had been watching videos and eating pizza, and when we left he was allowed to stay there to finish the films and eat up. At this point I wanted him to leave the apartment, in case the police already knew what had happened. We stopped in Hønefoss in a phone booth, just to tell the guy in my apartment to go home. The first booth we saw was surrounded by teenagers, and we didn't want anybody to see us in Eastern Norway at the time, so we kept going until we found another phone booth. I was driving so Snorre went out to make the call, and then a police car came driving down the road. Apparently the teenagers had smashed the phone booth, before they moved on to smash the next one, and somebody had called the police. When the policeman arrived and saw us he believed we were the people he was looking for. (Is that a good example of "Murphy's Law" or what?). The phone was broken, and Snorre returned to the car. I drove off, with the police car about a hundred yards behind us, and I figured that if he stopped us and even just wrote down our names, it would be impossible to get an alibi. So I drove faster and faster, with the police car following in the same speed, and when I came to the train station in Hønefoss I turned right and drove like a complete maniac (with howling tires, spinning wheels, slipping rear wheels in the turns and everything else you might expect from a B-movie "get-away"). I was driving a VW Golf, and we were driving so fast that before we knew it we were on the "high way" to Bergen again - and we had lost the police. He had probably not even bothered to give chase (or, less likely, he had failed to keep up with us), as later inquiries (by the police) showed that he had not even reported this incident to his superiors. At this point I figured they might already be looking for us, and in case they we post was too long read more at your own risk |
| _______________________________ [Dec 5,2005 8:24pm - retzam ""] I read this a few months ago. It was interesting. Who knows what's true or not though; I don't think of Varg as a very reliable person, considering how much he contradicts himself from interview to interview (and within interviews). |
| _____________________________________________________________ [Dec 5,2005 8:29pm - babyshakedoesnt feel like loggin in ""] i dont take anything he says seriously i find him corny and kinda gay himself....i only liked two of his albums then again im not really into black metal so there ya go |
| ___________________________________ [Dec 5,2005 8:32pm - BornSoVile ""] I think they both wanted to kill each other, Varg beat him to it. |
| _____________________________________ [Dec 5,2005 9:06pm - rigor penis ""] I wouldn't dought they where gay lovers |
| _________________________________ [Dec 5,2005 9:06pm - brian_dc ""] draaaaaaaaama |
| _____________________________________ [Dec 5,2005 9:37pm - Philonymous ""] that was very interesting Varg is a interesting dude, regardless of how many times hes changed his shit I love readign about him |
| _______________________________ [Dec 5,2005 9:41pm - retzam ""] rigor penis said: I wouldn't dought they where gay lovers Doubt man! Doubt! |
| ____________________________________________ [Dec 5,2005 9:41pm - DrinkHardThrashHard ""] Old news. But his essays are mandatory reading. |
| _________________________________ [Dec 5,2005 9:43pm - brian_dc ""] yeah, it was a fun read |
| _______________________________ [Dec 5,2005 9:46pm - retzam ""] Philonymous said:that was very interesting Varg is a interesting dude, regardless of how many times hes changed his shit I love readign about him I know what you mean. Despite what I said before, plenty of his interviews have held my interest. |