In a pattern similar to a number of murder stories, the gruesome murder of Kate Horan at the hands of parolee Gary Scott Holland is now taking on some memes concerning the occult. While living at the drug treatment facility Walden House in the Upper Haight when he first got out of prison, Holland began frequenting The Sword & Rose to seek "spiritual advice" from the astrologers and Tarot readers there. According to co-owner Patrick Ferry, the place is a center for "white magic" and says that regarding Holland's violent past they advised him to "just move forward" and said "whatever happened, happened." Holland often spoke to Ferry about having women "hanging off him," and later stopped frequenting the place when he moved to that residence hotel in North Beach.

The Examiner also spoke with another ex-con who was at Walden House who claims that Holland slept with Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible and talked about his rituals at the occult shop as something dark and, well, satanic.

Also news to us from that piece, the person whom Holland had tried to kill in Fresno in the mid-90s -- the crime for which he had been serving time in the first place -- was his mother's aunt. He slit her throat, but claimed he was blacked out on drugs at the time.