764 - Part 1
**EXPLICIT CONTENT WARNING** My unexpected journey into the heart of evil starts innocently enough with a viral video that is more than meets the eye.
The sun was setting, and I was making a short trek from my bathroom to my refrigerator to get a glass of wine to go along with the bubble bath I had just prepared for myself. It was a rare opportunity for me. My 6 year old daughter was having a sleepover with her grandma and I had just spent the past 4 hours tracking down a huge lead in my ongoing research into the Highland Park mass shooting, a lead that had yielded a massive breakthrough. After shooting off a few excited emails, I turned off my computer and headed to the bathroom. I thought the stars had finally aligned for me to indulge in a night of rest and relaxation. Except, that night, they hadn’t.
My phone buzzed. I glanced at the notification casually as I poured my glass of wine, expecting to see a congratulatory response regarding my Highland Park research that night. Instead, I found a message from an anonymous Twitter user sitting in my message requests. The contents of that message would mark the beginning of the next major arc in my journey as an independent researcher of strange, online phenomena.
“do you have signal?
I have a lot of info on that Kyle Spitze guy.
His mom was killed yesterday morning… he posted videos…”
I walked to the bath and shut off the water, setting my wine down next to the faucet. I glanced longingly at the bath as I trudged out of the room and back towards my study. This shouldn’t take long, I thought to myself, blissfully unaware that I was about to fall down a truly life changing rabbit hole.
The Strange Case of Kyle Spitze
Two weeks prior the world had become aware of Kyle Spitze. A viral video began circulating on the platform formerly known as Twitter (which I will always call Twitter, out of sheer stubbornness.) In the video, Kyle lay on his bed, a laptop in his lap, bare feet visible, when an unkempt middle-aged man lunged into the open doorway. “I’m gettin’ ready to blow his goddamn brains out,” he murmured out of one side of his mouth, the other side holding a cigarette. In his hand was a pistol that was pointing directly at Kyle’s head. Kyle’s mother, a middle-aged blonde woman with her pants sitting at her ankles, runs up to the man and grabs him on the shoulder in an attempt to avert the chaos.
“Blow my brains out,” Kyle repeats in a low-pitched slur. The slovenly man disappears from the doorway before re-emerging, sights set on Kyle. The woman begins to pull her pants up and a dog barks frantically in the background. “Shoot me I guarantee you’ll go to jail for life.” Kyle stumbles out of the bedroom as the man doubles down on his intent to kill Kyle and his mother. In the hall now. The man has his gun trained directly at Kyle’s phone camera, still filming.
“Point that gun at me again-”
The man fires. If you freeze the video on just the right frame, you can see the bullet exit the barrel in a blast of fire. The video suddenly goes quiet, as if artistically portraying the temporary deafness of the moment. The camera spins around and then pans down at Kyle’s bare feet, which take a couple of stunned steps forward. Blood drops fall onto the ground next to them. “Did he hit you?” the woman yells. “Oh my GOD! You’re going to jail.” Kyle’s camera movements become frantic as he realizes the danger and begins to run towards to door, closing it behind him as he leaves the house. The video ends.
It was a simple, 54 second video, offered by many large accounts on Twitter with no context. One caption read, “Lesson learned - Don’t provoke a guy with a gun.” Salty Cracker, a large YouTube channel, featured a breakdown of the video which was aptly titled, Family that looks like a bunch of meth addicts shoot each other. The sudden virality of this short, out of context video made sense. It was the perfect length. There was a LOT going on: Kyle’s provocation of a deranged gunman, the mother with her pants at her ankles, the all too perfect freeze frame of the bullet leaving the barrel, the blood drops on the floor. In the limited context provided after the video began to circulate, we learned that Kyle was still alive, having been grazed in the ear. The relatively tame outcome made the video easier to stomach. But most importantly, the group of influencers who shared it on Twitter and their followers had no shortage of funny comments and memes to make about the situation.
Law & Crime Side Bar host Jesse Weber was quick to secure an interview with Kyle Spitze, where he revealed that the shooter was his stepdad, 68-year-old Jeffrey Scott West. After the viral video ended, the Blount County SWAT team was deployed and a standoff ensued, ultimately ending when West committed suicide inside the house. Kyle Spitze and his mother Melanie escaped the situation relatively unscathed. Some of the more discerning viewers were left wondering what Kyle had done to provoke the shooting in the first place.
When I first saw the video, I went to the comments section, saw that the videographer hadn’t been killed, and chuckled to myself about the absurdity of the scene. Then I scrolled on to the next post in my feed and mostly forgot about it. But a little later, I saw the same post shared again and went back to the comments. This time, I saw a comment that made me do a double take.
“Kyle isn’t a victim! He’s a Satanic child groomer who gets little girls to cut themselves on camera!”
A link to a Satanic pedophile cult was certainly not the outcome I was expecting.
It just so happens that for several months prior my small, independent research team and I had been closely following news of a fringe, online community known as 764. This group, which could accurately be characterized as a meta-cult, consisted of pseudo-Satanic members who groomed kids they found online into committing sadistic acts of self-harm, animal abuse, and even suicide on camera. The videos were used to extort their young victims into producing increasingly more extreme content. It may start with a nude photo or a sexual act that the underage victim sends to the abuser. The abusers then extort the victims into committing increasingly evil acts. They’d order them to cut their abuser’s name into their body, a sign of ownership known as a “cut sign”. They would order them to slaughter their house pets under threat of murdering their families if they refuse to comply. They would get the young victims on live Discord calls and gave them instructions on how to find the most lethal combination of pills from their parents' medicine cabinets.
The predators find their child victims in places most parents believe are safe online spaces for kids. They lure them from gaming platforms like Minecraft and Roblox and messaging platforms like Discord. They even utilize social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, utilizing hashtags adopted by niche communities dedicated to self-harm and eating disorders. These communities serve as rich victim pools where the predators hunt for kids that are already vulnerable in order to further exploit them.
764 is only one such group in a sprawling network of interrelated communities known as “COM”. When placed on a mind map, COM looks more like an octopus than an organized network of splinter cells, with tentacles that encompass a wide range of cybercriminal activity. There’s Hacking COM, full of script kiddies willing to dox, swat, and commit other cybercrimes for money. They may, for example, call in a bomb threat to a disgruntled customer’s school. Then there’s Extortion COM, which relies on the hackers and overlaps with 764, whose members hack and extort their victims in order to fulfill their motives. There’s an animal abuse side of COM. Like the pedophile side of COM, which is full of CSAM, animal abuse COM is full of illegal animal crushing videos, where high-heeled women disembowel kittens with their pointed high heels. COM also has significant overlap with domestic terror cells. These individuals congregate on “Terrorgram” - the network of Telegram channels comprised of violent extremists that range from white nationalists to Satanic neo-Nazis.
A recent Wired article analyzed more than 3 million messages from 50 chat groups in the COM network, revealing thousands of users in nearly a dozen countries involved in various COM subgroups. They note that such groups have been growing rapidly since their widespread emergence in 2022, when only a handful of cases had been analyzed by National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
We were all too aware of this dark network. Even before the FBI released their September 2023 bulletin warning parents about the network known as 764, we had stumbled across some of these communities. A Discord server full of naked, young bodies, disemboweled animals, and Satanic sigils crudely drawn in blood were tell-tale signs of 764 influence. And even before the FBI acknowledged the group, there had been arrests, the most public being that of Angel Almeida of New York. Almeida, who went by the name “Duck”, was arrested in connection with a gun crime which led investigators to unearth a horde of child pornography and terrorist literature connecting him to the Satanic Neo-Nazi extremist group called the Order of Nine Angles.
Because of my ongoing research into accelerationism, I already had Order of Nine Angles on my radar at this time and had begun tracking mentions of 764 on social media after the FBI press release in 2023. For this reason I became aware of a number of alleged victims of Kyle Spitze who were attempting to get attention in the wake of the video. Victims alleged that Kyle Spitze was a member of 764, that he had groomed and extorted numerous individuals, including minors, into self-harm and sexual exploitation. Upon finding sufficient evidence to treat the alleged victims’ claims as credible, I reached out to two individuals and offered advocacy. The victims stated they were already in contact with police and that an investigation was underway.
Approximately 2 weeks later, on January 31st, 2024, I was contacted by an anonymous source who stated that Kyle Spitze’s mom, Melanie Spitze, had died and that Kyle had posted disturbing videos in his Telegram group of the incident. In the source’s opinion, the Telegram posts indicated that Kyle Spitze had murdered his mother. The source additionally claimed to have evidence that Kyle Spitze had been extorting women to cut themselves since 2016, and that Spitze was in possession of a large quantity of child pornography.
The video Kyle had posted to his Telegram channel was disturbing, to say the least. Kyle stands over his dead mother, who is lying on her back. Her hair seems to have been deliberately swept over her face. There appears to be blood on the face underneath her hair. The body appears to have been moved from the bed to the ground, and the bed has a large, human shaped stain of what appears to be fresh blood. The bed sheets are crumpled up and soaked in blood. On the floor next to Melanie Spitze’s body is a Narcan inhaler, which contains a medication used to treat opioid overdoses. Kyle sobs that he woke up and there is blood everywhere and his mom is dead. At times, in between sobs, it sounds as if he is stifling maniacal laughter. He says “I’m killing myself…this is so traumatizing”, then bends over his mom and squeezes her right breast several times while sounding as if he is covering laughter with fake crying. Kyle holds up his blood-soaked hand, revealing a bracelet which matches one in a recent Instagram post on an account believed to belong to him.
What I saw appeared to be the aftermath of a murder. After I confirmed the evidence to be credible, I contacted the Tennessee Fusion Center in order to share the evidence with law enforcement. I spoke with a Special Agent and shared the pertinent information. At that time, the agent told me he had spoken with the Friendsville, TN police and confirmed Melanie Spitze was deceased. He elaborated that the cause of death was suicide. I found it unusual that police would convey such information prior to completing the investigation into a death. They also said that they were aware of Kyle’s online activities, that he had posted a picture of Melanie Spitze’s dead body on Instagram, and they acknowledged that it was a “strange” thing to do. That’s the last I would hear from authorities on the matter, however, Melanie’s cause of death was eventually revealed to be a lethal dose of fentanyl. The massive, unsurviveable quantity of blood, they told us, came from a ruptured esophagus - the consequence of years of alcoholism.
With the police informed and Melanie Spitze’s death confirmed, I made a post on X at the request of the victims, who were desperate to get eyes on the situation. The next day, as the tweet continued to garner attention, I began to receive threats from accounts associated with 764. An individual with the moniker "Acid" sent threatening electronic communications via Twitter/X in an attempt to prevent me from talking about Kyle and his mother publicly. His bio read “764 x NMK - DM me to join 764 hell room”. Hell Room, as I would soon learn, was the name of a common 764 Telegram channel used to post the sickening content created by the group. Acid warned me that I was in the process of being “EDRed”.
EDR stands for Emergency Data Request, a procedure used by U.S. law enforcement agencies for obtaining information from service providers in emergency situations where there is not time to get a subpoena. In 2022, Brian Krebs reported that emergency data requests were being spoofed by hackers to obtain confidential information. I would later receive confirmation from the police that this is a real swatting tactic being employed by a network of cybercriminals associated with COM to dox, swat, and otherwise harass victims as well as journalists and others working to expose the group.
The harassment escalated rapidly as the attackers found an image of my young daughter and posted it alongside a threat to kill and rape me and then kidnap her. At this point, I decided there was a credible and imminent threat and I notified my local police department on the matter, including all of the compiled information we had gathered on the person responsible for making the threats and his associated network.
My team and I were able to assist some minor victims of the group who reached out to me after seeing my tweets about 764. One of these brave victims was pivotal in securing the arrest of her abuser, Kyle Spitze. Though I’ll admit to having a grudge against the FBI, the experience did show me that there are well-intentioned people still working at the Bureau, at least within the pitifully under-funded child crime units. After the Kyle Spitze arrest, I made the decision to continue my pro-bono research and report on these groups publicly, despite the risks that such work entailed.
Kyle Spitze booking photo, February 2022.
Kyle Spitze, who used the online pseudonym “Criminal”, was arrested on federal child exploitation charges on February 22, 2024. He later pled not guilty to a litany of grotesque charges, including distribution of animal crushing videos in addition to child exploitation/child pornography production and distribution. In the criminal affidavit, it was noted that Kyle Spitze was in possession of child exploitation material of children as young as 12 years old. About a month later, as investigators continued to unravel the sordid 764 network and identify key members, Acid was also arrested. He was an 18-year-old from West Sussex, UK named Cameron Finnigan. Finnigan, who was online friends with Kyle Spitze had continually threatened me and my family over my reporting on the 764 network, at one point telling me he would have my house shot up if I continued. He has since been charged with one count of preparation of terrorist acts, one count of possessing a terrorist document, and one count of possessing indecent images of a child. It was also revealed in court that Finnigan was plotting to murder a homeless man in his town.
The Doctrine of Accelerationism
Oddly enough, my research into this deep, disturbing rabbit hole began with some simple research into mass shootings, which led me to the incel community. I made a very thorough video explaining these circumstances and how they led me to discover the terrorist threat known as accelerationism, and how that further led me to discover research from a woman named Jade Parker, a military intelligence analyst who went missing after claiming to have identified the January 6th Capitol pipe bomber. I highly suggest watching this video before reading further as it is essential to gain an understanding of accelerationism.
My small research team and I hit the ground running as soon as the Kyle Spitze story hit our radar. Together, we had spent the better part of 2 years researching fringe online communities. Our work spanned from mass shootings to Q-Anon, and often intersected with online child harms which we took pride in escalating to authorities, sometimes advocating for the victims along the way. Again, 764 was already on our radar due to its intersection with the Satanic accelerationist group Order of Nine Angles.
While investigating the 764 network, I encountered the most horrific, unimaginable, and disgusting content I have ever seen in my life. These child predators groom children they find online into committing acts of self-harm, animal abuse, sexual exploitation, drug abuse and even suicide on camera for their own sick pleasure. But our investigation quickly began to uncover that 764 and related groups were about much more than just crimes against children – they were rooted in accelerationism.
The Order of Nine Angles is a classic accelerationist group assembled many decades ago by a National Socialist fanaticist named David Myatt. On the surface, O9A is overtly Satanic and built around an apocalyptic death cult ideology. Dozens of official texts have been published, many detailing sinister left-hand path rituals that include human sacrifice. But if you peel back the layers of elaborate mythos, which is mired with puzzles, conflicting messages, and cleverly designed tests referred to as the Labyrinthos Mythologicus, you will reveal an elaborate, sinister ruse, designed by Myatt in an attempt to infiltrate institutions and sway the political landscape in favor of his beloved National Socialism.
O9A adherents are best known for their discrete infiltration of fringe communities, a tactic they call “insight roles”. O9A members are instructed to join the groups and rise up in the ranks, ultimately using their status to provoke them to violence or to further various anti-Western political goals. 764 is yet another example of accelerationist infiltration by these groups. O9A related Twitter accounts have been seen arguing that the members of 764 are “opfers”, the O9A term for a human sacrifice wherein an individual of poor character is selected and used to commit sinister acts on behalf of the cult. In addition to encouraging child predators to incorporate elements of Satanism and the occult into their abuse, these accelerationists also attempt to provoke both the predators and their victims to commit acts of domestic terrorism, most notably mass shootings and other politically motivated violence. Their ultimate goal is to hasten the collapse of Western society (Again, please watch this video about accelerationism to get a better understanding of this concept).
Today, O9A adherents swim like sharks throughout COM and Terrogram, hunting for vulnerable individuals they can groom into committing acts of violence and distributing O9A literature. O9A adherents are especially notorious for spreading a type of content called "Hurtcore" which involves acts of extreme child abuse, including both physical and sexual abuse of babies and toddlers. They also post extreme gore and animal abuse content. Such abhorrent content is used to groom and desensitize their targets.
764 Origins
It's worth pointing out that these child extortion groups have been around longer than the last couple of years, when mainstream began taking notice. COM groups started to form over a decade ago as offshoots of communities related to Minecraft and other online platforms targeted at kids. But only in the past couple of years have the Satanic elements begun to peek through. Before 764 reared its ugly head, a precursor group called CVLT preyed on kids in a similarly evil fashion. A member of CVLT named Kaleb Merritt was arrested in 2021 for grooming, sexually exploiting, and eventually kidnapping a 12-year-old girl from Virginia. He was later sentenced to 350 years in prison. Merritt is also believed to have been affiliated with Order of Nine Angles.
Kaleb Merritt booking photo
Although the origins and etymology of 764 are hotly disputed by current and former members, most evidence indicates that the group was started by a 17-year-old named Bradley Cadenhead who took inspiration from CVLT. Some rumors claim that Cadenhead was groomed by an individual on Minecraft into linking 764 with O9A ideology. Cadenhead was eventually arrested and given a hefty 80 year sentence. In an interview with Beneath the Surface News, the officer in charge of the Cadenhead case stated,
“To be perfectly honest, the child pornography is probably the least egregious crime he has committed; he is a scary kid. His whole thing is about online manipulation.”
764 founder Bradley Cadenhead
Other COM members have also incorporated similar occultist aesthetics and rituals into their abuse. It's rumored that Angel Almeida, a notorious 764 members associated with the O9A Nexion Tempel ov Blood, seeded O9A ideologies into 764 and related communities by starting his own "Nexion" (the word for an O9A chapter) within COM. Almeida is said to have extorted girls as form of sacrifice to an Islamic demon called Shaytan. 47-year-old Richard Densmore, who went by the name Rabid, ran a Discord server rife with abuse and illegal content which he called “Sewer”. According to a Medium article about COM and 764, a leaked conversation exerpt showed Densmore expressing interest in forming a “Satanic blood cult.”
Angel Almeida with a visible Order of Nine Angles logo tattooed on his right chest
Richard Densmore “Rabid” booking photo
The Satanic Panic Implications
Once Kyle Spitze and Cameron Finnigan were in jail and the immediate threats to my life stopped, I re-centered my focus onto the bigger picture. After all, I’m always the first to criticize federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies for “targeting the targets” instead of the actual terrorists. I began to seek out more conclusive information about who was driving the neo-Nazi and occultist ideologies into 764 and other COM groups. Early on in my investigation, an anonymous researcher within the group told me that she believed the Satanic elements were being pushed by people much higher in the group. These individuals would encourage lower ranking members to embrace the ideology, send them occult materials to study, and instruct them to incorporate symbolism into their extortion activities. The outputs of such indoctrination were CSAM and self-harm content rife with jarring Satanic imagery.
Among the occult symbols seen in these images are the pentagram, Leviathan’s Cross or “Satan’s Cross” (also called the Brimstone cross, associated with the fire and brimstone of Hell), Cross of Saint Peter (upside down cross), Sigil of Baphomet and the Sauvastika (backwards Swastika representative of Kali worship). These symbols are borrowed from a multitude of Satanic disciplines, including from Anton Lavey’s Church of Satan, a mild, politically correct Satanic church adamant in their efforts to reduce the negative stigma towards Satanism as a whole.
A crudely painted homage to Kyle Spitze, made by a minor victim.
The Satanic elements of the 764 story led many to doubt its legitimacy. Church of Satan adherents (and even the Church of Satan official Twitter page) came out of the woodworks to contest their affiliation with such debauchery. Occult experts were quick to point out the errors and inconsistencies in the application of symbolism. For example, one Church of Satan associate crassly pointed out that the Leviathan Cross was painted incorrectly in one image. The image in question was painted, in blood, by a 12-year-old minor victim of Kyle Spitze at his instruction. Inconsistencies in sigils and the inappropriate application of symbolism is irrelevant given the context that naïve children are being extorted into making this imagery. It’s important to keep in mind that within these circles, the occult knowledge is held by only a few higher-ranking members and is being communicated downward.
In addition, normal people who have been blinded by their bias against the Satanic Panic also dismissed early reports on 764 as being conspiracy theories. The Satanic Panic had the ultimate consequence of discrediting all things associated with Satanism, a sort of poison dagger. Consequently, people are less likely to listen to victims and advocates because any mention of Satanism naturally increases skepticism around even factual matters. It’s even possible that this association could be intentionally seeded into a group with the explicit intent of making victims sound crazy. At the same time, it would be inappropriate to omit these details when reporting on the 764 network. The Satanic and occultist elements act as a distinct calling card, an important aid to help parents and law enforcement identify the group.
It is imperative to identify the higher-ranking members of this group in order to end the cycle of abuse. Many of the more visible 764 members, such as Kyle Spitze, were victims of grooming and extortion themselves. This perpetual cycle of trauma will continue, with even the youngest victims facing a higher lifetime risk of becoming an abuser themselves. Tackling this issue is a lot like fighting a widespread fire. In order to quench the flames, we must first seek out and shut off the ignition source, or new fires will continuously emerge as we put them out. In the same way, the higher-ranking groomers will continue to find victims to exploit and indoctrinate into harming themselves and other children until stopped.
That’s certainly not meant to detract from the committed law enforcement efforts to put egregious offenders like Kyle Spitze, Richard Densmore, Cameron Finnigan and others behind bars. While these men were quite possibly grooming victims in their own right, they still pose a significant risk to society. Like a fire, all of the flames will need to be extinguished in order to stop the burn. But in the same way we tackle the large ignition source prior to tackling the smaller fires on the perimeter, an effort should be made to arrest higher level terrorists as well. And so, my investigations continued…