The fixated young fan celebrated his 18th birthday with a cake iced with an
image of the horned monster from the cover of the next Judas Priest album.
Soon afterward, exploiting the soaring tenor voice he trained in his high
school's madrigal choir, Tim Owens donned studded bracelets and a leather
vest and began singing in a string of Judas Priest cover bands, mimicking
every nuance of Judas Priest's vocalist, Rob Halford, from his haunting
howls to his habit of closing some shows by riding a Harley-Davidson
motorcycle on stage.

Owens is now 29, and the walls of his den are still covered with
photographs of Judas Priest. But this time, he is in them. In an
extraordinarily improbable variant of the all-American success story -- a
hybrid of Horatio Alger's rewarded hard work and Walter Mitty's fulfilled
fantasy -- Owens has risen from devotee to icon, from metal-head to
metal-god.

He is about to be transformed from a hard-working singer in a cover band
and a suit-wearing traveling salesman of office supplies into Ripper Owens,
the new lead vocalist for the band he once worshiped.

It is as if a sandlot baseball player not only got a chance to play in the
majors but got to be Cal Ripken Jr. A young man whose life for a decade had
revolved around a particular persona had been given license to assume that
identity.

And although long-lived rock bands often go through changes in membership
over the years -- with Judas Priest itself having had more than half a
dozen drummers in its 25-year existence -- rock aficionados are hard put to
cite any other instance in which a musician from a tribute band moved up to
the real thing, and certainly not as lead vocalist.

Adding to the remarkable nature of Owens's career move is the fact that he
came to the attention of Judas Priest not because he sought the band out
but by dint of a grainy, homemade videotape of one of his performances,
made without his knowledge by two Judas Priest fans.

"I still can't quite believe it," said Owens, who has a Charlie Brown
youthfulness in his round face and lives in a neat little frame house next
door to his parents in a blue-collar Akron neighborhood surrounded by
crumbling factories, junkyards and tattoo parlors.

The group and its manager have been grooming Owens for his new role, trying
to mold an image that minimizes the past. The name Tim is becoming only a
memory. Comparisons to Halford are discouraged. So are stories of birthday
cakes, madrigals and mothers.

"That's not very heavy metal," explained Jane Andrews, Judas Priest's
manager. "We don't want to turn off the fans."

But Judas Priest fans are already fascinated. The legend of Ripper is
spreading on the World Wide Web and in magazines like Metal Edge. In a
chrome-and-leather universe, one in which metal-heads dress and coif to ape
their heroes, one of their own has ascended into the heavens.

Like any Horatio Alger tale, the saga of Ripper Owens began with
working-class roots, in Kenmore, a close-knit Akron neighborhood of cozy,
neatly tended houses in the decaying heart of the post-industrial American
Midwest. His father, Troy, works in a jewelry warehouse. His mother runs a
baby-sitting service in her living room.

The teen-age Tim Owens, like most of his friends, was drawn to hard rock,
but he was musically omnivorous. "When I was in grade school, we all acted
like Kiss," he said. "But I was also going round singing Billy Joel. I was
a huge Elvis fan."

His parents shared his musical eclecticism, enjoying the heavy metal sound
as much as they enjoyed the Rolling Stones and Dion.

Yet unlike his friends, Tim Owens also loved music of the Renaissance, and
his supple tenor was at the heart of the prize-winning 16-member madrigal
choir at Kenmore High.

"He had the grungy jeans and bandanna and garage bands," recalls Sally
Schneider, the choir director. "But he also looked great in a tuxedo
singing Orlando di Lasso," the Italian madrigal composer.
Still, his first love was Judas Priest. On weekend nights, Owens would
stand at the front of the pit at the Akron Agora, a heavy metal club,
singing along on every lyric as U.S. Metal, a popular local cover band,
bashed its way through Priest classics like Victim of Changes.
He watched intently as the band's lead singer, Jim Williams, did his
imitation of Judas Priest's Rob Halford. As Owens sang along with the show
onstage, he began his Judas Priest tutorial by mimicking a mimic.
One night he was noticed by Dan Johnson and Steve Trent, two musicians who
were looking for a singer for a new band. "Timmy was a little pudgy kid,
but he was belting out these songs so loud you could hear him over the PA,"
said Johnson. "His highs were incredibly shrill. We said to each other,
`What about him?' "

The result of the encounter was Dammage Inc, a band that developed a loyal
local following as it played songs by Judas Priest, Metallica, Slayer and
Anthrax. But Judas Priest was always the heart of the group's repertory.
Even when the band changed its name to Brainicide and shifted its musical
style, Owens and his friends continued to play what had become a signature
song, Judas Priest's Victim of Changes.

"There's this point in the live version when Halford holds this `no, no,
noooooooo,' " Johnson said. "And Tim would hold that note infinitely,
absolutely as long as he could. Every time, he would stagger around the
stage and nearly fall down, deprived of oxygen."

The local mosh pit crowds loved it, and the band attracted a loyal
following. But in 1990, Brainicide headed into uncharted territory that one
local fan described as "death metal meets psychotic metal." There wasn't
much room for vocals, so Owens left and replaced his first role model,
Williams, in U.S. Metal.

The next year, while still playing in U.S. Metal, he also became the
vocalist for Winters Bane, a band writing original songs in an almost
operatic heavy-metal style.

Married and the father of a little girl (he later divorced and now declines
to talk about his family), Owens also focused more on his day job as a
purchasing agent for Akron's oldest law firm, Buckingham, Doolittle &
Burroughs.

"At work Tim would be conservative -- no earrings, short hair," said Robert
Forwark, the firm's purchasing manager. "We'd go out golfing."
In 1994, Winters Bane recorded an album for a German label, Massacre
Records, that sold about 8,000 copies abroad but was never released in the
United States. To help raise its profile, the group worked out an effective
touring technique in which it booked profitable shows under the name
British Steel -- a Judas Priest tribute band -- then opened under its own
name.
"It worked great," Owens said. "We went from getting $50 a show to $1,000.
I'd sing 45 minutes of Winters Bane originals, then put on the leather and
do two hours of Priest. People would look up and say, `Hey, isn't that the
same guy?' "

Owens left the law firm and took a part-time sales job, which meshed better
with his music. But metal was fading and grunge was ascendant. In 1995,
Owens joined Seattle, a cover band doing alternative rock. He did well in
his double life, making enough money to buy a used Jaguar sedan. He had
Judas Priest tattoos, but high enough on his arms to be hidden by the
sleeves of golfing shirts.

Through the early 1990s, the same musical tide that prompted Owens to
abandon heavy metal had also relegated his longtime heroes to the discount
bins in music stores.

The last time Judas Priest made headlines was in 1990, when a trial judge
in Nevada rejected a $6.2 million product liability lawsuit claiming that
subliminal messages in a Judas Priest song had prompted two Nevada
teen-agers to shoot themselves in the head. The next year, after having
sold 15 million albums since 1973, the band essentially dissolved when
Halford quit to pursue other musical projects.

In 1993, however, the other band members decided to try to re-form and find
a new front man. They listened to hundreds of tapes and auditions of
talented singers, but no one was quite right. Then, through a remarkable
series of chance events, Owens's vocal abilities and ferocious stage manner
came to the attention of his idols.

The key was a grainy, jerky videotape of Owens in his Rob Halford role in
British Steel, made in 1995 at Sherlock's, a club in Erie, Pa. The tape had
been made by a pair of Judas Priest fans, Christa Lentine, a tanning-parlor
attendant from Churchville, N.Y., and her cousin Julie Vitto, from
Rochester. After the show, the women told Owens they knew members of Judas
Priest. "They said, `Judas Priest is going to get this tape,' " Owens
recalled. "I said, `Yeah, right.' "

In fact, Lentine was dating Scott Travis, the band's drummer. In February
1996, as Travis was packing to go to England for a final round of
auditions, Lentine stuck the old tape of Owens in one of the drummer's
bags. "I said, `You've got to check out this guy,' " she said. "Scott
didn't have any interest. He said they weren't looking for a Rob clone."
Nonetheless, over in Wales, where the band was preparing for the tryouts,
Travis and his band mates decided to watch the video. They were incredulous
as they heard Owens' voice alternately growl and soar and watched him prowl
the stage, his black leather and close-cropped hair remarkably similar to
that of their former front man.

"I've seen some amazing things in my life," said Glen Tipton, a founding
member of the band. "But I couldn't believe this."

Then came a cascade of phone calls, first from the band to Vitto to find
out if the tape was doctored, then from Vitto to Owens, who was instructed
to call Andrews, the band's manager. When he telephoned Andrews, she asked
if he had a passport.

Two days later, Owens was on an overnight flight to England and then
heading by car to the farm in Wales where the band was holed up.
"I could hear music inside," Owens recalled. "I walk in the dining room,
and there's this giant table. There's Ian Hill. And then there's Scott way
down playing drums. And Glen sitting on an amp, jamming. You're used to
seeing them on posters all around your room, and then you're there with
them."

The band, an engineer and Andrews retreated to a glass sound booth and
started rolling a voiceless tape. The song was Victim of Changes, Owens'
old standard. He roared into the first verse, "Whisky woman, don't you know
it, driving me insane -- " but was interrupted as Tipton cut short the
tape, hit a button and spoke over an intercom: "You've got the job."
"We'd listened to literally thousands of singers," Tipton said later.

"Russian Eskimos, men, women, people from all corners of the world, knowns, unknowns.
But here we knew without a shadow of a doubt we'd found our man.
He went out there and completely stunned us."

Owens sang a few more tunes, including The Ripper, a dark ode to Jack the
Ripper. Tipton immediately decided that Ripper should be the newcomer's
stage name.

The next morning, Owens was taken to the airport for the trip back to
Akron.

Soon word leaked around Akron and then onto the Internet. By May 1996,
magazines devoted to heavy metal were announcing that Judas Priest was
back. But news of Owens' success, and his remarkable journey, is only now
filtering beyond that arena.

Owens signed a deal with Judas Priest last year that will catapult him
financially far beyond the world of used Jaguars and old touring vans.
Still, through much of last summer, he continued singing with Seattle and
selling office supplies.

Only now is he planning to switch to an unlisted phone number and move from
the street where he grew up. For privacy, he said, he may move to his
brother's neighborhood, where one can get a nice place on a 1.3-acre lot
for $130,000. He is planning to sell the Jaguar and buy a used Ford
Explorer -- something less apt to catch the eye of a fan.

His parents are undergoing something of a transformation as well. For his
50th birthday, his father got pierced ears and a Judas Priest tattoo on his
broad bicep. Mrs. Owens receives frequent calls from Tipton and the other
band members. "It's like we're in a dream," she said.

The discovery of Owens has clearly revived the stock of Judas Priest, which
recently signed with CMC International Records, a division of BMG headed by
Tom Lipsky, who has made a career out of boosting sales of aging acts
ranging from Pat Benatar to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

This summer, Owens has been splitting his time between Akron and a studio
near London, where he recorded the vocal tracks for Jugulator, Judas
Priest's first album of new material in seven years. The album, which
Tipton, a lead guitarist, describes as "brutal, metal for the '90s," is
scheduled for release around Halloween.

Lipsky, who had heard about the new vocalist through a heavy-metal promoter
and flew to London in May to listen to tapes, says of the newcomer: "Ripper
is a blessing from above. He's got the power, the range, and he's down and
dirty enough to sell it."

Perhaps predictably, a spokesman for Rob Halford, the singer Owens
replaced, is rather less complimentary. Halford's manager, John Baxter,
described the revamped Judas Priest as "silly and offending at the same
time" and added that it was particularly disturbing to hear members of the
band say that Owens is the best singer Judas Priest ever had.

For his part, Owens expresses admiration for Halford, but he quickly shifts
into talking about the future. Now that he has finished recording the new
Judas Priest album, his transformation is almost complete.

He still has his old band mates and other friends over for barbecues in the
backyard in Kenmore. But his old mock Judas Priest costume of leather and
studs is in the attic. "I was just fitted for new gear," he said.