On May 3, a gruesome scene awaited St. Louis police inside Herter's Southampton-neighborhood apartment.
As detectives entered the one-bedroom unit, they were greeted by an array of religious imagery. On a bulletin board, Herter had used thumbtacks to pin renderings of Jesus and the Virgin Mary next to handwritten notes: a two-page list of "Names of God," account numbers for EBT cards and a list of personal debts with dollar amounts. He had saved prayer cards and outlined a series of Lenten sacrifices on lined notebook paper. "No Sex, Porn, or Masturbation," he scrawled above pledges to forgo sugar and soda. Near the bottom, he wrote "Penance: Fast, Abstain, Rope, Cilice."
In the bathroom, police found the center of the crime scene. The killing had been brutal, spilling blood across the tile floor and spattering the walls all the way up to a window ledge above the bathtub, where a yellow rubber duck was flecked with red. Police would later note that Herter's victim had cuts all over his body.
Investigators believe the man was killed on May 2, the day before they found his body, according to court documents. The same report says police also found a "samurai style sword" in the apartment. Herter was already gone.
Chris Andoe, a real estate agent who handles rentals in the building, says a maintenance man ran into Herter in the hallway on May 3 just before he left. There had been ongoing complaints from other tenants, says Andoe, who is also editor of Out In STL, a magazine owned by the RFT's parent company.
"He was on the cusp of eviction several times, because of noise and excessive traffic," Andoe says.
Herter was known to sing loudly and smoke compulsively. More than a few neighbors had nervously eyed the sword he sometimes carried while whizzing around on his orange-and-black scooter.
The problem of the day was a window next to the hallway door. It kept getting broken. No one could say for sure who was responsible, but suspicion focused on Herter or possibly his guests.
It had been Andoe who rented the apartment to Herter. Originally, his application was denied, but Herter was able to find a cosigner, and Andoe walked him through the paperwork.
"He's kind of a childlike guy," Andoe recalls. Herter told him, "You're very kind and sexy to be so helpful," an over-the-top compliment that struck Andoe as odd. "I got the impression that was the way he got through the world, by flattering men in position to help him."
In the hallway May 3, confronted by the maintenance man, Herter seemed jittery and brusque, especially when the worker said he needed to inspect the apartment for damage. To let the man in would be to reveal the horror of McCarthy's death.
In Herter's telling, he says he forcefully told the worker "not today," and sent the man on his way. But Andoe says Herter, after initially refusing to allow entry, pretended he left his apartment key in his car and excused himself to get it. The maintenance man waited as Herter instead slipped into McCarthy's 2015 Chevrolet Equinox and drove off. It would be another day before police tracked him to a rundown motel about 70 miles away.
Seth Herter grew up in upstate New York and Alabama, bouncing around the South after high school. He says he was in Texas in his early twenties when he was first diagnosed with mental illness, including post-traumatic stress disorder and schizoaffective disorder — a mental condition that encompasses symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions and hallucinations, as well as aspects of bipolar or other mood disorders.
Herter's mother had similarly shown symptoms of mental illness in her early twenties, says his father, Greg Herter. She abandoned the family when Seth was just three years old and his sisters were two years old and six months. Greg Herter says he scrambled to keep everything together, but it was hard on the kids and him.
"We've had counseling through the years with different places, different people, because we all needed it," he says in a phone interview. Still, he thought they were managing. All the kids were top students, and Herter's sisters have both been successful. While Herter seemed to lack much motivation to work, his father says, he was always bright.
"He was a really delightful child," Greg Herter says. "He never drank or did drugs. He was on the chess club, for Christ's sake."
But things changed as Herter grew older. Raised Catholic, he considered joining the priesthood, and had even hitchhiked after high school to a monastery about 300 miles way, he and his father say. Herter says he was rejected from the order for reasons he still doesn't know. With no other real plans, he began to drift from city to city. "I'd find a friend and move to another place," he says.
Twice his travels brought him to St. Louis: first around 2010 or 2011, and again in mid-2013 after another stint in Texas.
In St. Louis, his illness caused him to act out in various, sometimes-public ways. He danced on street corners and clashed with neighbors. He amassed religious icons in his apartment and wrote long lists of people to pray for in a green journal. (Miscarried children and Barack Obama made the list. So did Donald Trump and Herter's great-grandmother.) Most of what he did was harmless.
"They saw him as a very comical guy, riding around on his little scooter," Greg Herter says of St. Louis' reaction to his son.
On many mornings, Herter could be found along Hampton Avenue, performing for groggy commuters. He might stop anywhere along the roadway south of Interstate 44, but he seemed to prefer the Chippewa intersection. Kevin Bennett, 37, regularly saw him there as he headed to work.
"It seemed like a very positive thing," he says. "He wasn't yelling at anybody or blaring obnoxious music."
Waiting at a light one morning, Bennett filmed a 55-second video. Herter, well dressed in a camel-hair coat and dark scarf, spins and dips, dancing as if he were in a nightclub instead of across the street from Target, in the shadow of a Walgreens.
"Hampton Dancing Man, getting after it this morning," Bennett says in the video. "Putting out the good vibes for all the commuters."
Bennett was already gone from the neighborhood for a few years when he posted his video on YouTube and a Reddit forum dedicated to St. Louis. He got a handful of comments, nothing overwhelming, but a Fox 2 producer took notice, typed up six sentences and posted the video on the TV station's website.
"We can't tell if it was the great deal he found at Target, the Big Mac he just ate or the Walgreen's drug store that got him shaking," the story said.
Everyone may be entitled to their fifteen minutes of fame, but this was only about 30 seconds' worth. Still, in Herter's mind, it provided support for the bizarre theories slowly taking hold. Of his dancing on Hampton, he says now, "That was me going out in public and demonstrating to people that I was the Antichrist."
The performances were a test. If others took notice, it meant they saw his powers, and that meant his powers must be real. It did not occur to him that anyone dancing on the corner of busy road would draw some attention.
Online, he blogged about his "public dance ministry," linking to the Fox 2 story. "It has been very successful in the local area, and has caused quite a stir in the local community," he wrote.
Herter's name was not in the news story or in the posts on Reddit or YouTube. Bennett says he never actually met him and knew nothing about his background, much less his subsequent involvement in a murder, until being contacted by the RFT.
"It's shocking," he says. "I was actually wondering what he did all day besides stand on the corner and dance."
