Two Actors, a Deer Hunter and a Lot of Anger _ Vented at Churches

c. 2006 Religion News Service BIRMINGHAM, Ala. _ Ben. Matt. Russ. Their names match their profiles. All-American college boys from the suburbs with big dreams, promising futures, good parents. Between them there was an occasional speeding ticket, the lust for stardom, an unquenchable thirst for beer, but nothing to indicate they were up to no […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. _ Ben. Matt. Russ. Their names match their profiles. All-American college boys from the suburbs with big dreams, promising futures, good parents. Between them there was an occasional speeding ticket, the lust for stardom, an unquenchable thirst for beer, but nothing to indicate they were up to no good in the deep woods of west Alabama.

Benjamin Moseley and Russell DeBusk, both 19, were top theater students at Birmingham-Southern College. Moseley loved the limelight. DeBusk was his sidekick.


Leaders in local film took note of their quirky talent, and the duo landed roles in a University of Alabama at Birmingham film called the Youth Violence Project. They believed community film would be a springboard to Los Angeles, they told the Birmingham Southern student newspaper. Eerily, the film appeared Wednesday (March 8) _ the day their faces were broadcast internationally after being arrested in the torching of nine Alabama churches.

Less enthralled with fame and film, Matthew Cloyd, 20, hooked up with the others when he and DeBusk lived in the same dorm.

An academic standout, Cloyd grew up a doctor’s son in Shelby County. His true love was deer hunting. But hunting was intertwined with booze, and a rebellious anger crept into Cloyd’s personality.

After he got a speeding ticket _ 85 in a 70 _ his Web site musings grew cryptically violent. “Let us defy the very morals of society instilled upon us by our parents, our relatives and of course Jesus,” he wrote to Moseley last summer as the two planned a road trip.

About the same time, DeBusk and Moseley started dabbling in the occult. They told friends they were Satanists on a hunt for knowledge, though their friends didn’t take it too seriously.

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DeBusk Described as Funny, Lively and Good at Peacemaking

Russell DeBusk was funny and animated, and few people took him too seriously.

“He’s a real goofy personality,” said Jeremy Burgess, DeBusk’s roommate at Birmingham-Southern College. “He’s almost like a cartoon character.”

No one was laughing Wednesday after DeBusk, Ben Moseley and Matthew Cloyd were arrested in connection with a recent spate of church fires in central and west Alabama.


At Birmingham-Southern, DeBusk was a theater major, following an interest he had established in Hoover (Ala.) High School. A member of Hoover’s class of 2004, he was voted “Most Dramatic” among the more than 430 graduates.

He earned a drama scholarship to Birmingham-Southern, said Sandra Taylor, a retired drama teacher from Hoover High who taught DeBusk at least three years.

“He was a wonderful drama student, very enthusiastic,” Taylor said. “Russ fell in love with drama and the theater and had some talent.”

When he wasn’t acting, DeBusk was working behind the scenes in the technical aspects of theater, said Taylor, who added she had seen DeBusk in at least one production at Birmingham-Southern. “He could do it all.”

DeBusk was a good student and well-behaved in high school, Taylor said. The only thing she ever had to speak to him about was smoking off campus, she said. “He was a smoker, but he was not a behavior problem,” she said.

At Birmingham-Southern, friends say DeBusk was a good student and was often the first to settle an argument between friends.


“He’s the peacemaker,” said Burgess, who added he had not seen a lot of DeBusk lately but assumed he was busy with theater activities.

DeBusk was busy, having just signed on for the lead role in an independent film called “Work,” which was to debut at a local film festival in September, according to Wednesday’s edition of the campus newspaper, The Hilltop News.

But DeBusk apparently had a darker side. Friends said he and Ben Moseley were Satanists, which DeBusk had explained to friends was “not about worshipping the devil, but about the pursuit of knowledge.”

DeBusk last summer invited Burgess and others to go demon hunting. Burgess said it didn’t amount to much.

“All it ended up being was us playing guitar in the woods while a few of them got drunk,” Burgess said. “I didn’t think anything of it.”

Burgess said he and DeBusk discussed religion loosely, debating whether pets go to heaven and what heaven looks like. “He told me I was one of the more intelligent Christians he’s talked to,” Burgess said. “Coming from a Satanist, I didn’t know quite how to interpret that.”


Ian Cunningham, a sophomore who lived in the same dorm as DeBusk, recalled returning from the campus chapel recently to snide remarks from DeBusk and Moseley about being saved. “He would constantly mock me,” Cunningham said of DeBusk.

But because Moseley and DeBusk had a reputation for light-hearted humor, Cunningham took their jibes with a grain of salt.

Taylor said she was saddened and shocked to know of DeBusk’s arrest and could not imagine what would have led him to set church fires.

“I am absolutely floored,” Taylor said. “Russ was kind and gentle to everybody … . I can’t fathom what in the world happened.”

Kids go in a lot of different directions, Taylor said. “I’m praying for him. Lord, he needs it.”

Authorities listed a house in Hoover’s Russet Woods subdivision as DeBusk’s home address. A man who came to the door at the house turned reporters away.


_ By Birmingham (Ala.) News staff writers Gigi Douban and Tom Gordon. News staff writers Jon Anderson and Alec Harvey contributed to this report.

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Moseley: Magnetic and Outgoing

The front man for a band and a Johnny Cash fan, Ben Moseley could compose ditties off the top of his head. The leading man in several Birmingham-Southern campus productions, he drew rave reviews, especially from the cute college co-eds who were frequent posters to Moseley’s page on the Facebook Web site.

“Just wanted you to know you were fabulously amazing in the play,” read a typical post.

The nearly universal response was shock Wednesday when friends learned Moseley, a 19-year-old BSC student studying theater, had been charged in connection with the west Alabama church burnings.

“I knew you liked to go play in the wood,” read a post to his Web page Wednesday, “But churches man? C’mon didn’t your mom teach you anything.”

Friends at Birmingham-Southern said Moseley was not studious. He got by. And he had a wild side.


On his page at Facebook, which allows students to post their profiles and communicate with each other, Moseley described his interests as strumming the guitar, “singing, acting, clubbing, dancing, partying, whiskeying.” He notes his fondness for 40-ounce beers, and includes the wisdom: “You can always retake a class but you can Never Relive a Party!”

Messages left by friends celebrate the usual college debauchery, but especially intense are those posted by Matthew Cloyd, which suggest the two went out in the woods throughout the fall to drink, hunt deer, drive at high speeds and elude law enforcement.

At Clay-Chalkville High School, where Moseley graduated in 2004, he was homecoming king, student council president his senior year, and voted funniest and the student who contributed the most to the class.

Don Everett Garrett, a theater and language arts instructor at Paine Intermediate School, was a neighbor of Moseley’s for 14 years in Grayson Valley. “I am in total shock. I knew him as a 5-year-old and watched him grow up. He was just a normal kid. As a matter of fact, he’s the kind of kid you’d say, `I want my kid to grow up and be like him.”’

Moseley’s father, Stephen A. Moseley, is an elected Jefferson County constable and appointed member of the board that oversees the Center Point Fire District. “The parents were very present parents,” said Garrett, who said he’s only talked with Moseley in passing for the past two years. “Dad was always active with him. They built a treehouse together in the back yard.”

Hal MacIntosh, drama teacher at Clay-Chalkville High School, said Moseley was one of his best students. “He was a good guy. He played lead roles in just about everything.”


A former classmate of Moseley’s said he was shocked to learn of his friend’s arrest in the church fires. “I would never expect this from him. It’s a huge surprise to me and I hope there is some mistake in all this,” said Andy Bradley, a former drama student at Clay-Chalkville High School.

“He was just the class clown,” said Stephanie Farris, who has known Moseley since middle school and now is a student at Montevallo University. “He wanted to be the next Jim Carrey.”

At college, Moseley’s talents and charms made him a quick success. He played a rapist who has the tables turned on him in a play called “Extremities,” and he acted with DeBusk in “Young Zombies in Love.”

“Girls love Ben,” said Ian Cunningham. “He’s the lady charmer of the school.”

In the campus newspaper this week, Moseley is described as being involved in an independent film project and planning to move to Los Angeles after graduation. He and DeBusk had been shooting footage for a feature-length film they hoped to submit to a local film festival.

Jeremy Burgess, DeBusk’s roommate, said what surprised him most was Moseley doing something and keeping it secret.

“He’s not the secret-hiding type,” he said.

_ By Birmingham (Ala.) News staff writers Anita Debroe and Thomas Spencer. News staff writers Alec Harvey, Christie Dedman and Gigi Douban contributed to this report.


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Cloyd _ the Scholar

By all accounts, Matthew Lee Cloyd was a scholar _ an intelligent boy with a bright future in medicine, just like his father.

He graduated from Oak Mountain High School in 2003 with honors and several advanced placement courses under his belt.

At Birmingham-Southern College, he pledged the Sigma Chi fraternity and pursued Spanish and pre-med studies. He moved out of his parents home on upscale Indian Crest Drive and into the dorms.

That’s where he met Russell DeBusk and Ben Moseley, a friendship that could change all their futures. It was Cloyd’s Toyota 4Runner that investigators used to link the trio to nine west Alabama church burnings.

Cloyd needed the SUV for deer hunting, a passion so strong he lists a hunting guide, “Hunting Whitetails by the Moon,” as his favorite book on Facebook, a Web site students use to meet and chat. Cloyd’s profile there indicates the math team scholar from Oak Mountain days had expanded his interests.

In high school, he was in the National Honor Society, on the algebra team as a freshman, the geometry team as a sophomore and inducted into Mu Alpha Theta math society his junior year. He was involved in the Key Club service organization in ninth grade and was voted Most Outstanding Student in History that same year.


Athletics also were big for Cloyd, who played soccer his freshman year and golf his sophomore year.

Ironically, he was a member of the high school organization Students Against Destructive Decisions.

By college, soccer was still an interest. But he added “killing innocent animals, running over squirrels with my 4runner” and the misspelled “alcholic libations.”

Cloyd spent two years at BSC, then transferred in the fall to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he was a junior. But he remained friends with Moseley and DeBusk.

“Moseley time has betrayed us! It has alotted itself for too much work and not enough libational excursions! Call me mi amor and we shall drink eric robert rudolph back in to hiding!” he wrote on Facebook in September.

News of Cloyd’s involvement in the church burnings was shocking to his former high school classmates.

“He was involved in everything,” said Merry Brooke Vaughn, who graduated from high school with Cloyd and now attends LaGrange College. “He was always smiling; never mean. He never seemed like he would do anything bad.”


The arrest also stunned everyone at Oak Mountain High School, said Principal Randy Fuller.

“We are just deeply concerned for the student and his family,” Fuller said. “I can’t recall that student giving me any trouble. We never expected anything like this.”

Cloydí’ father, Dr. Michael Cloyd, practices occupational medicine at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and his mother, Kimberly Cloyd, is a registered nurse.

Alisa Smith, math teacher and Mu Alpha Theta sponsor, said Cloyd was always polite and respectful.

“He was a very good student. In class, he didn’t talk a lot. He followed the rules and seemed to be liked by his peers.”

_ By Birmingham (Ala.) News staff writers Marie Leeche and Carla Crowder

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