Bård «Faust» Eithun is the drummer on Emperor’s «In the Nightside Eclipse», the 1994 record considered one of the definitive albums of symphonic black metal. At the same time, the then eighteen-year-old Norwegian killed a man in Lillehammer.
The early years
Bård grew up in a village of 500 people, with strict Lutheran values that pushed him in the opposite direction. Iron Maiden and Kiss brought him to the drums, tape trading took him to Sodom, Kreator, Venom, Bathory and Celtic Frost.
At sixteen he moved to Lillehammer and joined Stigma Diabolicum, later known as Thorns. Shortly after he was living in Oslo, behind the counter of Helvete, Øystein «Euronymous» Aarseth’s record shop. There he joined Emperor with Ihsahn and Samoth, and in the summer of 1992 the band put out the demo «Wrath of the Tyrant».
The incident
On 21 August 1992 Bård was in Lillehammer visiting his mother and was walking back through the Olympic Park. There he was approached by Magne Andreassen; polite at first, until it became clear he wanted the encounter to be sexual.
Bård felt neither fear nor disgust. He agreed to go deeper into the park, took out a folding knife of about ten centimetres and stabbed him three times in the stomach; at the interrogation he admitted to 37 stab wounds.
There he also said the rest: as he was leaving he heard the man groaning. He didn’t turn back out of guilt, but because of the noise — he thought of a heavy stone, feared leaving traces, and in the end kicked him in the head with his boots.
Investigation and arrest
Two days after the murder, on 23 August 1992, Varg Vikernes dragged him into yet another arson: the Holmenkollen chapel, a building from 1903. The bomb with a battery-timer didn’t ignite the petrol; they went back and set fire to bibles in the sanctuary, while the police recorded the fire as a short circuit.
In 1993, on tour in Britain, he confessed the murder to Cradle of Filth singer Dani Filth, after a concert in Liverpool; the latter thought he was kidding.
On 10 August 1993 Vikernes killed Euronymous with 23 stab wounds and the authorities began rounding up anyone connected to the scene. When they knocked on Bård’s door, he admitted everything.
The trial
In February 1994 the trial began, with the prosecution seeking a conviction for premeditated murder. Bård admitted the arson, but disputed the premeditation: he wanted to hit him, not kill him.
The court didn’t accept that version: the roughly twenty minutes of walking through the forest gave him time to think it over or to leave, so he had intent. It recognised mitigating factors — his age, his severe stutter, his suicide attempt at sixteen and the scene’s environment — but didn’t judge them sufficient. On 25 February 1994 he was given a sentence of fourteen years; shortly afterwards he testified as a witness at Vikernes’s trial.
What he’s been doing in recent years
Bård didn’t serve his full sentence: he was released on parole in 2003, after spending nine years and four months in prison, where he took two degrees at the University of Oslo, in the history of religions and the history of ideas. The record was released in February 1994, when he was still awaiting trial.
He lives in a quiet house with his wife and children and every morning goes to his job as a logistics manager. He remains a drummer, in Djevel, but refuses to live off music: anyone who relies on art to pay the rent becomes, he says, a slave to commercial exploitation. He calls his act «senseless», without meaning.
See also
See also: The Story of Mayhem: The Band That Made and Destroyed Black Metal and Varg Vikernes: Pioneer of black metal music and convicted criminal.