Teen victims were drawn to macabre music

Emma Niederbrock, 16, was like many teenagers, longtime family friend James F. Hodgson said.

“In the last year and a half, she’d been going through a lot of changes that concerned her mother and father. But they were staying behind her, showing her they cared for her,“ Hodgson said yesterday.

“She was different—her pink hair and the dark eye makeup—but it just wasn’t a situation where you could take someone and lock her in the basement until this phase was over with and move on . . .

“You hope to hell they have a chance to grow out of it.“

Emma Niederbrock never got that chance. Neither did her mother, Debra S. Kelley, 53; her father, the Rev. Mark A. Niederbrock, 50; or, 18-year old Melanie Wells, who had befriended Emma on the Internet.

All were found dead in Kelley’s Farmville home Friday.

A family struggling through a troubled marriage and a changing only child collided with a netherworld of evil six days earlier, Sept. 12, in Southgate, Mich., a city of about 31,000 people 15 miles south of Detroit.

The Strictly for the Wicked Festival that day brought together fans of an underground, hip-hop form of music that celebrates murder, rape, serial killings and lust.

There were 25 acts, from Stitch Mouth to Dismembered Fetus to BodyBagz.

Kelley, a distinguished criminologist who focused her professional life on violence against women, drove Emma and Wells to the concert—and to a fateful meeting with the young man who authorities say will be charged in the deaths of the Niederbrocks, Kelley and Wells: Richard Samuel Alden McCroskey III, 20, aka LiLdEmOnDoG.

Police have not disclosed the sequence of deaths or the specific manner other than blunt-force trauma.

“It’s the keenest of ironies, an absolute tragedy,“ said Hodgson, who co-wrote a book on violence with Kelley and was planning another.

Hodgson taught with her at Longwood University. His own younger children found Emma a different but engaging personality.

For weeks, Emma Niederbrock had obsessed over meeting with McCroskey, a young man who captivated her in Internet chats.

McCroskey, of Castro Valley, Calif., also reveled in the horrorcore scene. He promoted the Serial Killin Records label and recorded online songs dripping with imagery of death and mutilation. His parents had separated recently, which gave the cherubic-looking McCroskey another tie to Emma, whose parents separated about eight months ago.

The two planned to meet at the concert, and Hodgson believes McCroskey apparently drove back to Virginia with Emma Niederbrock, Wells and Kelley.

It was not clear yesterday whether Mark Niederbrock also made the trip to Michigan.

Kelley’s deep knowledge of the criminal mind stands in contrast to the violence of last week.

“Debra was keenly aware of the possibilities [of Emma’s lifestyle]—that was her profession—but she wanted to stand by her daughter, to try to show support, to be there with her,“ said Hodgson, who now teaches at Virginia State University.

The concert passed without incident.

“There were no calls for service that night, nothing unusual,“ Southgate police Lt. Edward Sukel said.

What befell the occupants of the quiet home in Farmville six days later was something far different.

Some of the officers who responded to the crime scene had attended lectures by Kelley, Hodgson said.

“It’s something beyond belief to me,“ he said. “It is a something I will never get over.“

Kelley, 53, grew up in the Richmond area and was a 1978 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University. She obtained her doctorate in sociology in 1993 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

She had been told by Longwood that she would lose her tenured post there after this year.

Emma was being home-schooled and was seeing a counselor, Hodgson said.

Wells, 18, another follower of the horrorcore music scene, had dropped out of Musselman High School this year just across the Virginia line near Bunker Hill in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle.

Mark Niederbrock had met Kelley in Illinois, where Emma was born. He was a computer whiz who had dabbled in electronics much of his life but suddenly decided to enter the ministry.

“It was totally out of the blue. He told me one day, ‘I think I want to preach,‘“ Hodgson recalled.

Niederbrock graduated from Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond in 2006; he was minister at Walker’s Presbyterian Church in Appomattox County.

He will be buried there in a graveside service Thursday at 11 a.m.

Funeral arrangements for Kelley and her daughter were incomplete last night, as were those for Wells in West Virginia.