Introduction
We all have our demons. They sing to us in the dark and sleepless nights. Some of us listen. Some of us don’t. One night, Mark Constantino listened…
You never expect that something tragic will happen to those you know. These things happen to the other guy, somewhere far away, preferably in the next state. But this isn’t always so. I had no idea that September 22, 2015 was going to be any different from the day before and the day before that. That changed when my friend Debbie Bender called me. “Did you see the news?” She asked. “That man who was found murdered in a house in Reno? That’s Jimmy, Debby’s roommate. And now she’s missing. They think Mark has her.”
“No way,” I said, still living in the other guy fantasy world. “Someone’s dead? No, that can’t be them.”
Debbie, who was a friend of a friend of one of Debby’s roommates, persisted. “They think Mark killed Jimmy and took Debby—she’s not answering her phone.”
My mind fought against this. “Maybe she’s getting her hair done, or her nails.” I said, wanting it to be so.
“Maybe,” she agreed.
Then came the news neither of us wanted to hear. There was a hostage situation in Sparks; even as we talked, Mark had already killed Debby. Not knowing this, we assured ourselves it would be okay, and that this would turn out to be someone else’s lives that were falling apart, not Mark’s and not Debby’s. But we were wrong. As the news trickled out that day, I came to the realization that two people who’d once been close friends were dead in a murder/suicide. A rush of memories came flooding back. We’d done the things that ghost hunting friends did; traveled together, hunted ghosts together and eaten meals at each other’s homes.
And then, it ended. And we’d gone our separate ways.
We hadn’t spoken in a number of years. In that time, they’d traveled to many locations, and formed many friendships. Yet something had gone terribly wrong in their lives. I’d seen the Facebook posts that hinted at money problems, heard the rumors of their drunken fights and the escalating marital problems; the paranormal/ghost hunting community is a small one. And gossip spreads fast.
Why did he do it? Why did Mark Constantino murder two people before turning the gun on himself? That question would probably haunt me, and everyone who’d ever known them, for a very long time. The need to make sense of the senseless is powerful. There are just some things we will never know, I reminded myself, as I remembered my friendship with the Constantinos. Difficult as it was to reconcile those two people with the two who had died in such a tragic way that day in September, I would try. I needed to, if not for them, then for myself.
Friendship is a funny thing. Who can say why some people click and others don’t? I liked Mark and Debby from the moment I met them. There was something special about them. Something that sang out, here we are, what you see is what you get. And this was part of their charm; there was nothing fake or studied about either of them.
Debby spoke of her interest in the paranormal as a passion. Indeed it was. There was nothing feigned about it. Their shared passion and enthusiasm for the paranormal was real. They were the students Buddha referred to when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And I was that teacher. They wanted to learn more about the paranormal, specifically its entertainment aspect and I was eager to share what knowledge I possessed. In retrospect, it wasn’t quite as much as I thought. Still I knew more than either of them.
Over the years, I had advanced my presentations technologically from transparencies to Power Point presentations. One Halloween season amid my funky decorations, I helped them to create a Power Point presentation for themselves.
Demon Song Description:
Mark and Debby Constantino. Their names were magical. Once upon a time everyone in the ghost hunting field knew and adored the EVP specialist husband and wife team. They were paranormal royalty…rock stars.
But nothing is ever as it seems, behind closed doors their lives were slowly falling apart. It would end in the worst imaginable tragedy. In desperation, Mark would do the unthinkable. He would kill his beloved Debby, her roommate and himself.
In Demon Song author Janice Oberding has written an honest, at times heartbreaking, account of her friendship with the Constantinos in the early days long before the paranormal field even knew their names. As friend and mentor, Janice traveled the country with Mark and Debby, investigating and appearing at events. Offering a glimpse into that time, Demon Song shows a side of Mark and Debby and Janice that fans didn’t usually see.
