Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine Reveals the Terrifying Sickbed Confession That Revealed a ‘Sinister’ Deception

Many of his earliest, most aggressively unhinged songs were fueled by what Dave Mustaine calls “religious abuse” at the hands of his mother, who was a devout Jehovah’s Witness until her death in 1990.

The Megadeth frontman is not allowed to celebrate birthdays, accept Christmas gifts or even recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He says the experience ruined his childhood and alienated him from his peers.

As a result, he rebelled as a teenager and explored black magic and the occult before finding fame as the lead guitarist of Metallica.

After being kicked out of the Grammy-winning band due to his drug and alcohol abuse, he went on to form Megadeth, with hits including Symphony of Destruction and Holy Wars.

But now the 64-year-old rocker has claimed that the religion was responsible for an even bigger family trauma – one that has haunted him since childhood and which, tragically, will never be resolved.

In his forthcoming memoir, In my darkest hourMustaine, who also battled throat cancer in 2019, writes about growing up in a “weird and dysfunctional household (I wouldn’t even call it a home).”

He says he always suspected that the woman who raised him, Emily Marie Mustaine, was not his mother at all, but that one of his sisters had committed the cardinal sin of becoming pregnant as an unmarried teenager.

“Perhaps,” he writes in the memoir, “out of shame and religious and social pressure, they ‘left’ for a while (as people sometimes did in those days) and then gave the baby to Grandma to raise as her own. Grandma, in this case, the woman I knew as my mother.’

He adds, “Maybe the commotion contributed to my father’s disappearance.”

His mother and abusive alcoholic father divorced when Mustaine was just four. Mustaine has spoken in the past about how he lived in fear of his father’s unpredictable and violent mood swings.

“Perhaps,” he adds, “it had thrown my mother into the mad vortex of religious fanaticism.

‘I can’t quite explain why I felt that way, but I did. Sometimes I even dreamed about it.’

In those dreams, his father and mother were both absent, and in their place was his eldest sister, Michelle.

‘She always took care of me, in a loving, caring way, as if she was afraid something terrible would happen.

“We also looked alike, which isn’t really a shock considering we were siblings, but I always wondered why I looked more like my sister – well, all three of my sisters, actually – than my own mother.”

Of course, he admits that this may all have simply been a case of wishful thinking – a childish desire to make sense of his chaotic, traumatic childhood.

But just as he was finishing his memoir, he received a mysterious phone call from his middle sister, Suzanne, who is in hospice care with Parkinson’s disease and “suffering from all the horrible things that come with that disease, including dementia.”

He writes, “She floats in and out of clarity, telling stories that are completely accurate and others that make no sense at all.”

Together with his sister’s assistant, he tried to create coherent sentences from this ‘albeit vague conversation’.

They heard the name ‘David.’

“What did you say?” the assistant asked.

Suzanne mumbled something else.

“He’s your baby?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you mean David?”

After a long silence, Suzanne replied, “Yes.”

Mustaine admits that his sister could have used the word “baby” in the informal sense – “like a big sister might do when referring to a little brother.”

“Or,” he adds, “do you read something gothic in it, something sinister?”

What, he thinks, if Michelle wasn’t his mother at all. She was the oldest – 18 years older than Mustaine – so that made sense. She was also very protective and loving around her brother.

Suzanne, on the other hand, was only fifteen when Mustaine was born.

‘Her birth of an illegitimate child would have been more scandalous. And perhaps that would explain the bitterness and resentment she so often showed toward me,” he writes.

‘Maybe I would have ruined her life. Perhaps the very fact of my existence caused sadness and anger.

“Or maybe my imagination was working overtime, as sometimes happens.”

Whatever the truth, he will probably never find the answer he is looking for.

Both his mother and Michelle are now dead. His youngest sister, Debbie, is now only three years older than him and therefore has no memory of his birth.

“And Suzanne is here, but not really here,” he writes. ‘So it will remain a mystery for the rest of my life.

‘What is the importance of this?’ he asks. ‘Why don’t I leave it all behind, along with the other detritus of my Dickensian youth? Why dig down rabbit holes that are best left undiscovered?

“I think the answer to that would be, I don’t want to leave it behind. I don’t want to forget it. The memories drive me. The hunger, physical and metaphorical, motivates me to live a better life and make the most of my time on this planet. I’ve always felt that way, but cancer has a way of turning up the volume of the ticking clock.”

The guitarist, who converted to Christianity around 2002 and refused for years to play some of the band’s most controversial hits, admits he spent a lot of time praying during cancer treatment.

Those prayers, he says, were largely focused on keeping his family, wife of 35 years Pam, and their children Electra, 28, and Justis, 34, together.

Now cancer-free for seven years, he writes, “Here we are, the same close-knit family we have always been. I can’t help but feel blessed, and it’s not so much the cancer that drives home that point, but the persistent, incessant reminder of where I came from and the broken family I escaped from.”

In My Darkest Hour by David Mustaine will be published on September 8 by Da Capo, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.