On the morning of Monday, November 28, 1988, the day that Paul R. Ingram was to be arrested, he dressed for his job, at the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, where he had worked for nearly seventeen years, went downstairs and ate breakfast, and then, to his surprise, suddenly vomited. He thought at first that it must be the flu; then he realized that it was simply fear.
Ingram, who was forty-three, was already a familiar figure to most citizens of Olympia, Washington, but before long his face would begin appearing every morning in the Olympian as a self-admitted child molester and Satan worshipper. To most people who knew him, Ingram, who is tall and square-jawed, with oversized glasses and a brown mustache, might seem to be the least likely Satanist in the county. Until that day, he had served as the chief civil deputy of the sheriff’s department and the chairman of the local Republican Party. He had been active in the deputy sheriffs’ association and in the Church of Living Water, a Protestant fundamentalist denomination. He spent much of his time in schools talking to kids about the dangers of drug use. He was himself the father of five living children. (A retarded daughter had recently died in a state institution.) As a politician, he was seen as a bridge between moderate conservatives and the fundamentalist Christian right. As a police officer, he was regarded more highly by the public than by other cops. He had been known in his department for being the sort of hard-ass who enjoyed traffic patrol and would issue a speeding ticket to someone for driving just five miles over the limit, and yet his personnel file contained not a single complaint; instead, it was filled with commendations from citizens who wished to thank him for the courtesy he had shown while issuing their citations.
Now Ingram was about to be caught up in the escalating controversy in this country over the nature of memory—in particular, over the validity of “recovered” memories of what has come to be called “satanic-ritual abuse.” At eight o’clock on that Monday morning, Ingram drove into the parking lot of the courthouse complex, which sits at the very top of a hill beside Capitol Lake. Across the way, the capitol looms, ghostlike, above the low-lying town, and beyond it one can see the Olympic Mountains and Budd Inlet, which is the farthest-reaching finger of Puget Sound. Olympia, perhaps because of its beauty, its classical name, and a shroud of mystery that often hangs over it—in the form of fog or drizzle—has acquired a reputation as a spiritual center. J. Z. Knight, a well-known New Age channeller, owns a large estate east of the city. (She is widely regarded as the richest woman in the county; the local lore is that her horse stables have chandeliers in every stall.) Celebrity acolytes such as Shirley MacLaine and Linda Evans have sometimes passed through Olympia on their way to visit Knight. A small coven of witches runs a local herb shop. Like most Washingtonians, the people of Olympia pride themselves on their tolerance. It would be fair to say that the town is better known for its New Age believers than for its fundamentalist Christians, but both elements are deeply entwined with the life of the town, and are sometimes loudly at odds.
Fifteen minutes after Ingram arrived at work, he was summoned to the office of his boss, Sheriff Gary Edwards, who was one of the few Republican officeholders in the county, and who had personally appointed Ingram to the position of chief civil deputy in 1986. The No. 2 man in the department, Under-Sheriff Neil McClanahan, joined them and relieved Ingram of his automatic pistol, which he habitually wore in an ankle holster. “Paul, there’s a problem,” Edwards said when Ingram sat down. He asked if Ingram knew about the sexual-molestation charges that his two daughters, Ericka and Julie (then twenty-two and eighteen, respectively), had made. Ingram said that he did. He said that he could not remember having ever molested his daughters, but added, “If this did happen, we need to take care of it.” He said, “I can’t see myself doing this,” but added, “There may be a dark side of me that I don’t know about.” What is more, Ingram warned, if the charges were true, then not only his daughters but also his sons would need help. “I’ve never thought about suicide before, and I can handle just about anything, but if it turns out that I have done something I want you to get all my guns out of the house, just in case,” he said. He asked to take a lie-detector test, so he could “get to the bottom of this.”
“I hope you’re not going to make these girls go through a trial,” Edwards said.
Ingram answered that he just wanted to discover the truth and that he was willing to talk to detectives without a lawyer present. At 9 a.m., McClanahan escorted him to the office of Detectives Joe Vukich and Brian Schoening, who handled sex offenses. Both men knew Ingram well. Vukich had known Ingram since joining the force, in 1976; they had worked the same district, and Ingram had often invited Vukich, then a baby-faced rookie, over to his house for barbecue and card games. As far as Vukich could tell, Ingram was a decent, easy-going family man and all-American husband. Ingram was both men’s superior in the department, so from the beginning the interrogation was uncomfortable and conflicted for them and for him.
Several hours into the questioning, Vukich turned on a tape recorder in order to take Ingram’s official statement. Ingram now said, “I really believe that the allegations did occur and that I did violate them and abuse them and probably for a long period of time. I’ve repressed it.”
Vukich asked Ingram why he was confessing if he couldn’t remember the violations, and Ingram replied, “Well, number one, my girls know me. They wouldn’t lie about something like this. And, uh, there’s other evidence.”
“And what, in your mind, would that evidence be?” one of the detectives asked.
“The way they’ve been acting for at least the last couple years and the fact that I’ve not been able to be affectionate with them, uh, even though I want to be,” Ingram said. “I have a hard time hugging them, or even telling them that I love them, and, uh, I just know that that’s not natural.” Ingram went on to say that he had probably touched both Ericka and Julie in an inappropriate sexual manner, but when Schoening and Vukich pressed him to recall specific incidents he again said, “I don’t remember anything.”
It is not unusual in a police investigation for a suspect to say that he doesn’t remember having committed a crime, especially if the crime is a sex offense. Oftentimes, the explanation involves the use of alcohol or drugs, but the claim of a faulty memory can also be a ploy on the part of the suspect to flesh out the charges—to see what evidence, if any, the police have. It was the experience of Schoening and Vukich that a suspect who said he didn’t remember anything was either avoiding the truth or standing on the threshold of a confession, so at this point guilt was the tacit assumption that underlay the interrogation: Ingram wasn’t saying “I didn’t do it”; he was saying he couldn’t see himself doing it.
Vukich turned off the tape recorder while he and Schoening attempted to move Ingram to accept his guilt. During the next twenty minutes, they told him that his daughters were shattered by his abuse, and provided him with some of the details that the girls had included in their statements. Ingram would later recall Vukich’s having assured him that, if he did confess, the memories would come back. According to notes that Schoening took during the interrogation, Ingram was praying feverishly. When the detectives turned on the tape recorder again, Schoening noted that Ingram was staring at the wall, clutching his hands, and that he then went into a “trance-type thing.” He began describing a scene in which he came into his older daughter’s room and removed his bathrobe. Then, he said, “I would’ve removed her clothing, uh, at least the underpants or bottoms to the nightgown.”
“O.K., you say ‘would’ve,’ ” one of the detectives said. “Now, do you mean you would’ve, or did you?”
“I did,” Ingram said.
“After you pulled down her bottom, where did you touch her?”
“I touched her on her breasts and I touched her on her vagina. . . .”
“What did you say to her when she woke up?”
“I would’ve told her to be quiet and, uh, not say anything to anybody and threatened her to say that I would kill her if she told anybody about this,” Ingram said.
“O.K., you say you ‘would’ve.’ Is that would’ve or did you?”
“Uh, I did. . . .”
“And where did you go when you left her room?”
“I would’ve gone back to bed with my wife.”
By the time the interview ended, many hours later, Paul Ingram had confessed to having sex with both of his daughters on numerous occasions, beginning when Ericka was five years old. He had also talked about having impregnated his younger daughter, Julie, and taken her to have an abortion in the nearby town of Shelton when she was fifteen. All these statements accorded in a general way with the charges his daughters had made, although Ingram’s confessions were still maddeningly mired in subjunctive phrases. Brian Schoening, who is a talkative and emotional man, said later that he was deeply affected by Ingram’s detachment in describing his sexual abuse of his daughters. Schoening had never seen such apparent remorselessness on the part of an offender, and it was even more galling to him because Ingram wore the same uniform that he did. Still, there was nothing very unusual about a community leader’s being caught in a disgraceful act. If the case had ended that Monday, with Ingram’s tentative confession, it would doubtless have caused only a brief sensation. In the ordinary course of events, he would probably have been spared a prison sentence and assigned instead to psychological counselling. His case would have long since been forgotten. But no one realized then where the hole in Ingram’s memory would lead.
At four-thirty that afternoon, Ingram changed into the Thurston County jail’s high-visibility orange coveralls and entered an isolation cell, subject to a twenty-four-hour suicide watch. Detective Schoening and Sheriff Edwards then made the dismal trip to Ingram’s house, in East Olympia, to tell his wife, Sandy, the news.
The Ingrams owned ten acres off Fir Tree Road, near the Union Pacific Railroad tracks. The house, which they had built in 1978, was not visible from the road. Although later it would be laden with spooky associations (McClanahan would compare it to the house in “The Amityville Horror”), on that November evening it was nothing more than an attractive barn-shaped structure. Both Paul and Sandy had long made a fetish of self-sufficiency. Paul raised chickens, rabbits, a couple of cows, and even ducks in a pond behind the house. A small herd of goats kept the lawn trim. Sandy maintained a year-round vegetable garden. A neighbor described the property as “well used,” and it was indeed crowded with animal hutches and tools and a number of cars and trucks. For years Sandy had operated a day-care center in the house, so in addition to the normal clutter of family life the yard accommodated a swing set and a sandbox, and the house was full of plastic toys and rest mats.
Until that Monday, Sandy had thought of her marriage as happy, stable, and old-fashioned in a good sense. Paul’s word was law. Because Sandy seldom disagreed with him, they almost never quarrelled. Sandy had also done a turn in public service, having spent one term on the county school board, but for the most part her life was anchored in the home and the church. People who knew them described the Ingrams as a hardworking, Christian family; in fact, several later told the police that they had tried to model their own families on the Ingrams.
Paul and Sandy had met in 1964, at Spokane Community College. Both were putting themselves through school, Sandy as a part-time maid and Paul as a janitor in a dairy plant. Both came from large and devout Catholic families. Sandy had spent two years in a convent school and had seriously considered becoming a nun. Paul had always attended Catholic schools and had studied for the priesthood, but that was largely to please his mother. Whatever priestly vocation he might have had melted away on the day he gave Sandy a lift to work. She was outgoing and full of fun, and they had much in common. Paul was impressed that Sandy was such a hard worker. She also proved to be something of a tomboy; once, on a group outing, they went bobsledding down Mount Spokane on the hood of a ’48 Buick, and Sandy laughed at the wild recklessness of it. Paul had practically no experience with girls; he rarely dated and had spent three years in a seminary. He was a virgin. That changed on their third date. When Sandy became pregnant, they decided to marry, though both sets of parents were alarmed and thought they should wait. On their wedding day, in February of 1965, both were nineteen years old. They had known each other for less than five months.
The family that Paul would help create resembled in many ways the family in which he grew up. His father, Sylvester, was a carpenter, an accountant, and a Jack-of-all-trades who suffered from chronic ill health. His mother, Elizabeth, was a dietitian. Both were strict disciplinarians. She held the family together during hard times that followed a back injury to Sylvester in 1954. The children always had shoes and food, but little else. As the oldest of seven, Paul became the official babysitter and a virtual parent. His sister Robin recalls him as caring and self-sacrificing, and says he never expressed resentment at the extra burden he carried. But Paul felt that his parents showed each other much more love than they showed their children—a bitter observation that his own children came to echo.
Sandy had been the youngest of four children and very much the family pet. Although there had been a history of mental illness in her family, neither Sandy nor Paul worried about the possibility of a hereditary problem. Sandy, especially, wanted a large family; Paul wasn’t so sure, but he didn’t resist the idea. They rented a two-bedroom house in Spokane. When their first child, a son, was born, in September of 1965, Paul took a job as a building supervisor at a medical center. Soon afterward, Sandy learned that she was pregnant again, this time with twins. Ericka and Andrea were born in September of 1966. Andrea, the firstborn, was underweight and sickly; Ericka was plump and healthy. Sandy took Ericka home after a few days, but Andrea remained in the hospital for a week, and when she came home she remained listless. The doctors assured Sandy that there was nothing wrong—Andrea was merely small—but a few days later she seemed to stop breathing. Paul and Sandy rushed to the hospital with their gasping infant, who had turned blue as she struggled to breathe. Tests determined that she had spinal meningitis. A priest came to baptize her and administer last rites, but Andrea confounded the doctors’ expectations and survived. The meningitis, however, caused her brain to swell, with the result that her mental faculties were severely damaged and her skull was permanently enlarged.
The Ingrams quickly outgrew their little house. In early 1967, they bought, for sixty-nine hundred dollars, a three-bedroom house that had been repossessed by the Veterans Administration. The house was surrounded by a four-foot-high cyclone fence, which their son managed to scale while he was still in diapers. Sandy usually found him in the neighborhood, playing with other children, although twice she had to call in the police to locate him. After that, he was kept on a leash when he played outdoors.
Paul hit the road, selling cameras door-to-door. It was his first real chance to travel, and he loved it, but the income never really covered their expenses. Sandy started looking after other people’s children to take up the slack. Meanwhile, Andrea was in and out of the hospital with chronic attacks of pneumonia, and her needs became too great for the couple to handle. When she was still a baby, they sent her to a state institution, where she spent the rest of her life.
Sandy gave birth to a second son, Chad, in 1968. Paul, bowing to reality, took a more reliable job, as a field investigator with the Retail Credit Company. Later that same year, the company offered openings in several other cities. Moving would bring a pay raise and a chance for advancement for Paul. He and Sandy decided on Olympia, because it was small and semirural and appealed to their back-to-nature ideals. They bought a house trailer and moved to the Flying Carpet mobile-home park, in East Olympia. Soon Sandy was getting paid to look after other children in the camp. The income she provided was essential for the family, especially in those early days, but her own children came to feel that she paid more attention to the day-care children than to them.
Before long, the Ingrams were again eager to move to larger quarters. When their fifth child, Julie, was born, in 1970, they secured a bank loan of seventeen thousand five hundred dollars and built a three-bedroom house on a wooded lot in East Olympia. The boys shared one bedroom, and the girls shared another. Later they finished the basement, adding another bedroom and a recreation room. At last, they had room for Sandy’s garden and for the farm animals that Paul hoped would make them self-sufficient. He sold Amway products and, on the side, a brand of dehydrated food. Shadowed by need throughout his own childhood, he was relentless in his drive to create security. From his point of view, he was being a good provider and giving his children an opportunity he had never had. But they began to feel that he valued them more as workers than as sons and daughters.
In 1969, almost as a lark, Paul applied to the reserve corps of the Police Department in Lacey—a small (there were only eight stoplights) suburb of Olympia. He was accepted and began patrolling neighborhoods in the evenings and on weekends with a borrowed pistol, doing traffic duty and handling domestic disputes. He had never in his life enjoyed anything so much. In 1971, he moved from the Lacey Police Department to the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, and a year later the sheriff asked him to join the staff full time. That meant a pay cut of a hundred dollars a month, which the family could scarcely afford, but Sandy supported Paul, because he so obviously enjoyed the work. For the most part, Paul did well and made friends easily. He and Neil McClanahan, then another rookie, shared a county car. Both joined a rotating poker game, along with several other deputies. Sometimes the game took place at the Ingrams’ house. The next morning, the children would scour the floor under the table for fallen change.
In 1972, Paul began having an affair with an older, divorced woman. Paul felt that he could talk to her about matters other than child-rearing. One of the things they often discussed was religion. The woman was a Lutheran, and she talked about her personal relationship with Jesus. The affair foundered when it became clear that Paul would never leave Sandy. He found he was going to Mass less and less often, but he was still enough of a Catholic not to believe in divorce.
Paul and Sandy’s frugality, meanwhile, was paying off. They bought an old Ford pickup with a camper shell, and the family began spending summer vacations camping in Idaho. In 1976, they bought five acres of logged-off property on Fir Tree Road, with an option on an adjacent five acres of land. With characteristic energy, they began clearing the land in their spare time. Friends from the Olympia Police Department helped them to grade a low spot into a pond and put in a septic tank. A nearby gravel pit provided material for a road at a bargain price. Carpenters built a two-story house on the property, and Paul and Sandy painted it inside and out. Jim Rabie, a detective in the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office and a friend of Paul’s, came to wire it, and Rabie’s father built the kitchen cabinets.
At last, Paul and Sandy’s hopes were realized. Their home was surrounded by fir, alder, ash, cottonwood, cedar, and hemlock. In the spring, the dogwoods bloomed, and deer poked around in the bush. The woods were full of raccoons and possums and grouse, and there was an occasional red fox. There were ducks and herons in the pond. Sandy expanded her garden, making room for fruit trees and flowering plants. In addition to the chickens and rabbits that Paul raised, there was enough land to graze a few cows. It felt like paradise to Paul and Sandy. But not to their children. They thought of the place as remote and isolated, and felt as if the chores never stopped.
The previous year, Sandy had begun attending services at the Evergreen Christian Center, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God. Paul was surprised, because Sandy had been deeply involved with their Catholic church, singing in the choir and teaching the catechism class. But he noticed a change in her right away—a softening, which he found very appealing. She began taking the children to the center on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. Eventually, Paul went, too, and he liked the open, welcoming atmosphere, although the hand-waving and speaking in tongues put him off. A month later, Paul responded to an altar call and surrendered his life to Jesus. That fall, the entire family was baptized in the deep water.
The Ingrams were drawn to Pentecostalism in part because of its emphasis on the importance of the family. And yet, in the Ingram household, a troubling rift was developing between the parents and the children. Paul and Sandy were demonstrably affectionate with each other; indeed, there was a sexual charge between them that others could hardly miss. (They slept in the nude on a water bed, and according to Paul they had sex nearly every other day.) With their children, however, they were stern and emotionally reserved. Once the family joined the new congregation, Paul outlawed all sports activities and banned rock-and-roll music unless it was Christian. Tensions worsened in 1978, when Sandy found herself pregnant again. When the child, a third son, named Mark, was born, Paul decided that he was going to make an effort to be a better father. Over time, the older children came to feel that Mark was their father’s favorite; he was coddled rather than ordered about and put to work. Nearly every night, Paul read to Mark at bedtime—something he had never done with the others—and later bought him a computer and spent many evenings playing computer games with him. Ericka and Julie both complained that Mark was being spoiled.
The two older boys were rebellious and showed a disturbing tendency to live secret lives. In 1984, at the age of eighteen, the oldest turned down an appointment to West Point which his father had arranged, and then abruptly left home after wrecking his car for the third time in three months. He parked the car in a cemetery and left behind a note to Sandy saying that he had fallen in with a dangerous crowd. He warned his parents not to try to find him. “When you get this letter I’ll probably be somewhere in South America,” he wrote. Their second son, Chad, whom they considered the quietest and most even-tempered of their children, moved into an apartment in downtown Olympia for a short time during high school, and was arrested for shoplifting candy. Later, he went to Bible school in Tulsa, dropped out, and came back home to live.
Ericka and Julie, who shared a bedroom throughout their childhood, were often considered a pair, although Ericka is four years older than Julie and was by far the more assertive. One can see a family resemblance: they inherited dark-brown hair and eyes from both sides of the family, and have full, rounded faces, such as one might find in a portrait by Vermeer. What struck most people was how different their personalities were. Ericka was moody and self-absorbed, Julie bubbly and outgoing, if somewhat in the shadow of her sister. Certainly Ericka was the beauty of the family. She was still living at home when she turned twenty-two, and was working as a tour guide at the capitol and intermittently attending college—she studied sign language and sometimes served as an interpreter for the deaf—but she had her eye on the larger world. She bought stylish clothes and liked to travel. She had been to Greece, and in August of 1988 she had just returned from attending the Olympics in South Korea. Julie was a homebody, like her mother. People thought she was the image of Sandy, and she dressed like her mother, in jeans and sweatshirts. Two years in a row, Julie had won the state championship in the Future Homemakers of America contest and had gone on to the nationals; that constituted most of her travel experience, except for the family vacations. The two girls were alike in one respect, though: they rarely went on dates—Ericka had been out only twice in the previous three years—and they were extremely shy around boys. Both of them told their mother that they were virgins and intended to remain so until they married.
The Ingrams became a part of the extraordinary growth of Pentecostalism in America during the seventies and eighties. When the Evergreen Christian Center grew too large for the family’s taste, they transferred to the Church of Living Water, an affiliate of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which had been founded by the well-known evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in the nineteen-twenties. The Church of Living Water, too, grew quickly. Today it occupies eight buildings that take up most of a city block. Like many congregations that once endured the stigma of being “Holy Rollers” on the poor side of town, the church projects an atmosphere that is intended to be informal and inviting. The sanctuary is a windowless theatre called the Living Room, where the pastoral staff sits on a dais in easy chairs beside an artificial fireplace. It has the ambience of the set of a daytime television talk show. There is a small gospel choir and a band.
The Ingrams were regulars at the church every Sunday morning and every Wednesday evening, and also participated in countless socials and study groups and retreats. Sandy started a food-and-clothing charity called Twelve Baskets, which became an important part of the church’s community service. Frequently, Ericka would interpret the sermons for deaf members of the congregation. She also persuaded her parents to take in two deaf girls as foster children, which proved to be an awkward arrangement for Paul and Sandy, because communication was so difficult.
The Church of Living Water sponsored an annual two-day retreat for teen-age girls called Heart to Heart, held at a camp on a nearby lake. Julie and Ericka had attended for several years. Now, in August of 1988, Ericka was serving as a counsellor. Five years earlier, during a fellowship discussion, Ericka had related an incident of what she characterized as attempted rape by a man she knew. The subject of sexual abuse sometimes arose during these sessions, and counsellors took such revelations seriously. The authorities were alerted, and Jim Rabie, the detective from the sheriff’s office, followed up on Ericka’s charge. He determined that there wasn’t much substance to it—a married man had given Ericka a ride and put his hand on her knee—and the investigation was not pursued. In 1985, during another Heart to Heart retreat, Julie said she had been sexually abused by a neighbor who lived on the Ingram property. When word of that charge got back to Paul, he took Julie to the county prosecutor and helped her file a complaint. During that investigation, Ericka also accused the neighbor of improper sexual contact. Julie, however, became less and less able to speak about the alleged incident. In the meantime, inconsistencies in her story began to surface, and the county prosecutor eventually dropped the charges.
During the 1988 Heart to Heart, a woman from California named Karla Franko came to speak to the sixty girls in attendance. Franko, a charismatic Christian, believes she has been given the Biblical gifts of healing and spiritual discernment. Before going to Bible college, she had been a dancer and a standup comic as well as an actress, and had had parts in several sitcoms and TV commercials. Often in speaking to youth groups such as this one, Franko would feel herself filled with the Holy Spirit, and would make pronouncements that the Spirit urged upon her. Many extraordinary events took place at the 1988 retreat. At one point, Franko told the mesmerized group that she had a mental picture of a little girl hiding in a coat closet, and saw a crack of light under the door. Footsteps were approaching. Suddenly, there was the sound of a key locking the door. At that, a girl in the audience stood up, heaving with sobs, and cried out that she had been that little girl. Franko then had another vision. She said that someone in the audience had been molested as a young girl by a relative. Suddenly, a deaf girl rushed out of the room. A woman named Paula Davis, who, along with Ericka, was interpreting for the deaf campers, went after the girl, and found her in the bathroom with her head in the toilet, trying to drown herself. A short while later, a number of other girls came forward to say that they, too, had been abused. The counsellors had their hands full.
Late in the afternoon of the last day of the retreat, the campers boarded buses to return to the church. Ericka remained, in the conference center, sobbing disconsolately. She sat cross-legged on the floor of the stage with her head hanging between her knees. She would not say what was wrong. The other counsellors gave up trying to talk to her. They just gathered around her quietly to show their support. Finally, according to one of the counsellors, she declared, “I have been abused sexually by my father.”
“She seemed to be devastated just by having said those words,” the counsellor later told police.
Actually, that was only one version of the event—the version that the investigators placed in their files and later made available to defense attorneys. Another witness to the scene was Karla Franko, and she had a different account of what happened. Franko recalls that as she was getting ready to leave a counsellor came to her and asked her to pray over Ericka. “What does she need prayer for?” Franko asked. The counsellor shrugged. Franko went and stood over Ericka and began praying aloud. She felt the Lord prompting her with information. She stepped back and was silent. The word “molestation” presented itself to her.
“You have been abused as a child, sexually abused,” Franko announced. Ericka, she says, sat quietly weeping, unable to respond. Franko got another divine prompting, which told her, “It’s by her father, and it’s been happening for years.” When Franko said this aloud, Ericka began to sob hysterically. Franko prayed for the Lord to heal her. When Ericka’s weeping eventually began to subside, Franko urged her to seek counselling, in order to get to the memories that were causing her so much pain. At no time, says Franko, did Ericka utter a word; she was so devastated by Franko’s revelation that she could do little more than nod in acknowledgment.
Not long after the church retreat, both daughters abruptly moved out of the house. Ericka left during the last week of September. She left the two deaf girls behind, in her parents’ care. Julie left six weeks later. Both moved in with friends, but would not tell their parents where they were or give any explanation for their actions. Paul and Sandy were distraught, especially about Julie. It was becoming a pattern in the Ingram household for the children to suddenly flee and hide, although Ericka, at twenty-two, had remained in the house longer than any of the others.
Ericka arranged to meet her mother after the evening church services the Sunday before Thanksgiving. That night there was an open house to dedicate the new sanctuary. Julie was there, and Paul took the opportunity to ask her to lunch. He said he wanted to talk about why she had moved out. Julie seemed to be in a cheerful mood and readily agreed. Paul then took ten-year-old Mark home, and Sandy went to meet Ericka at a nearby Denny’s restaurant. She sat at a table and ordered a cup of tea. For months, she had sensed that Ericka was unhappy, but whenever she asked what was wrong the only response Ericka had been able to give was a cryptic “You don’t want to know.” Now Ericka arrived in the company of her best friend, Paula Davis, who had been on the retreat and who was to be her advocate in all that followed. Over the next two hours, Ericka talked of having been repeatedly molested by her father when she was young. In the last several years, she said, the older two of her brothers had molested her as well. Ericka linked her father’s abuse to the poker parties that had gone on in their old house. She said that the abuse had stopped when Paul was born again in the Pentecostal church, in 1975. As Ericka spoke, Sandy stared intently into her teacup. Finally, she asked Ericka why she had never spoken about this before. “Mom, I did tell you,” Ericka replied. “I tried to tell you, and you wouldn’t listen.”
“You’re the only one in the family who didn’t know,” Davis added.
Sandy went home and confronted Paul. He said, “I never touched those girls.” Chad was working late at the Y.M.C.A., and Sandy waited up for him. “You know I’ve always been a good boy, Mama,” he said when she told him of Ericka’s accusations. She called an assistant pastor, John Bratun, at her church, and found that he had already heard about the allegations from the retreat counsellors. According to Paul, the pastor told her that the charges were probably true, because children didn’t make up those kinds of things. Sandy and Paul had planned to drive to the Pacific Coast the next day for a week’s vacation. In the morning, Sandy picked Julie up at the house where she was staying and drove her to school. On the way, Julie confirmed that her father and her oldest brother had molested her, too. She said that she had last been molested by her father five years earlier, when she was thirteen.
Against her better judgment, Sandy agreed to go ahead with the vacation. That very afternoon, a counsellor from the local rape-crisis center took Julie to meet with police investigators, one of whom was Joe Vukich. The story she told them was somewhat different from what she had told her mother earlier that day, and far more detailed. She said that the abuse had begun when she was in the fifth grade; her father was working the graveyard shift then, and sometimes he would sneak into the room where Ericka and Julie slept. He would be either naked or wearing shorts or sweats. He would get into bed with one of the girls and have vaginal or anal sex with her. As Julie told the story, she hid her face behind a curtain of brown hair. Each response came after a lengthy pause. Some questions she refused to answer. Because the investigators were concerned about the statute of limitations, which then extended for seven years in the case of assaults on minors, they concentrated on the most recent events. Julie told them that the last time her father had sexually abused her was three years before, when she was fifteen. Detective Vukich asked Julie why she had never told anyone about the assaults, and she replied that her mother had never wanted to listen.
That evening, Vukich and Detective Paul Johnson, of the Olympia Police Department, interviewed Ericka at the home of a friend of hers from church. Vukich recalled later that he was immediately struck by how pretty Ericka was, and how vulnerable. She stated that her father had begun sexually abusing her when she was five years old. When Vukich asked her to recall the last incident of abuse, she said she thought that she must have been in the fourth grade. Unfortunately, that was well beyond the statute of limitations. Vukich kept pressing for more details. “Once, I felt like I hurt all over when I woke up—the bed was wet and yucky,” Ericka said. Suddenly she burst into tears and ran into the bathroom. The detectives could hear her sobbing loudly for ten minutes. When she came back into the room, she said, “I caught a disease from my dad about a year ago. The doctor is in California, and also there is a doctor in Olympia who treated me.”
The detectives left at about midnight. With the testimony of two victims in hand, and with the promise of medical evidence, they already had a strong case to give to the county prosecutor.
Ericka called Karla Franko in California, and Franko expressed surprise at hearing from her. Ericka repeated some of the details she had given to Vukich and then informed Franko, “It is all coming down. They have Julie’s confession.” When Franko asked Ericka what she thought would happen to her father, she said he was going to lose his job.
Vukich interviewed Ericka again, during the Thanksgiving weekend. This time, she said that the last incident of abuse had actually occurred during the final week of September, when she awoke to find her father kneeling beside her bed, touching her vagina. Vukich didn’t question why she hadn’t told him of this incident sooner; it’s not unusual for victims of sexual abuse to make partial disclosures. But it was notable that in the space of one week both girls had assigned several different dates to the last incidence of abuse. In Ericka’s case the time frame had moved from a decade earlier to a year earlier and then to just two months earlier.
Sandy tried to talk to Paul about the allegations while they were on vacation, but he was extremely reticent. He spent a lot of time reading his Bible and walking on the beach, but he had trouble concentrating. He said he felt as if there were a solid mass of fear in his stomach, as dense and impacted as a bowling ball. Sandy stayed in the condominium they had rented, and cried. Paul assured her that nothing had happened, and Sandy believed him, but she was filled with dread. At one point, Paul suggested that the girls were trying to split them up, but neither he nor Sandy could imagine why their daughters would want to do such a thing.
And so, when Sheriff Edwards and Detective Schoening knocked on the Ingrams’ door that afternoon of Monday, November 28th, and told Sandy that Paul had confessed, she went into shock. Her knees buckled, and she nearly fainted. She wobbled into the dining room and sat down at the table. Edwards and Schoening were afraid to leave her alone; she was so distraught that they feared she, too, might consider killing herself. They got in touch with the Ingrams’ pastor, Ron Long, and waited with Sandy until Long and one of his associates, John Bratun, arrived. The last image that Schoening recalls of that night is of Sandy still sitting at the table, pale and stricken, with her pastors standing on either side. His heart went out to her. He was glad that he had already gathered up the weapons in the house.
Schoening had not known Sandy well until then, having met her only occasionally, at the sheriff’s-office annual Christmas parties and summer picnics, and he was surprised at how deeply her agony affected him. The contrast between Sandy’s emotional collapse and Paul’s puzzled detachment was especially distressing. It had been a long and troubling day, but Schoening found that, unlike most cases he had handled, he couldn’t leave this one at the office. That night, he had the first of a series of nightmares.
“County g.o.p. leader faces sex-assault charge,” the front page of the Olympian proclaimed the next morning. The names of the victims were withheld, in accordance with the newspaper’s policy, but Olympia is a small town, and anyone who wanted to know the details had probably already heard them, and had also heard that the police were interviewing the children in Sandy’s day-care business, which she had immediately closed. In the chaos of the moment, few who knew Sandy remembered that November 29th was her forty-third birthday.
Sheriff Edwards was well aware of the consequences of seeming to protect one of his own—especially a political appointee whom he had jumped up through the ranks and made one of his chief deputies. Rather than turn the matter over to another agency, however, Edwards decided to have his own department conduct the investigation, and he hoped to ward off criticism by inviting detectives from other police departments in the area to participate. This decision would prove to be the first of many mistakes. The Thurston County Sheriff’s Office is a modest operation—at the time, seventy-three officers served a county of a hundred and sixty-five thousand residents—and a personal crisis in one employee’s family affected everyone else. No matter how objective Ingram’s co-workers might try to be, their passions were instantly engaged. They felt surprised, embarrassed, and betrayed by their colleague. This was not merely one family’s tragedy but a catastrophe for the morale of the whole department. To some extent, they, too, were victims in the case.
On the morning after his arrest, Paul Ingram met with Richard Peterson, a Tacoma psychologist who often works with the local police. Peterson interviewed Ingram to determine his mental state and decide whether it was safe for him to be at large. As they talked about the case, Ingram asked why, if he had committed these heinous acts, he had no memory of them. Peterson told him that it was not uncommon for sexual offenders to bury the memories of their crimes, because they were simply too horrible to consider. He went on to say that Ingram himself had probably been abused as a child. Ingram might recall being molested by an uncle, or even by his father, Peterson postulated. Ingram said that the only sexual memory he could recall from his early childhood was his mother’s cautioning him not to scratch his crotch in public. According to Ingram, Peterson assured him that, once he confessed, the repressed memories would come flooding back. But he had confessed already, Ingram said, and he didn’t remember any more today than he had remembered yesterday. He asked Peterson to attend the afternoon interrogation with Schoening and Vukich; perhaps Peterson could unblock whatever was keeping him from remembering.
That day, Vukich acquired two letters that Julie had written to a teacher, Kristi Webster, five or six weeks before. Webster had noticed a profound change in Julie’s behavior in the fall of 1988. The eager, hardworking student Webster had known the previous semester had become a morose and distracted girl, with a haggard and blank face, who dragged through her classes. Along with a friend, Julie had got in trouble for making long-distance calls from a school telephone. Because she had never broken a rule before, Webster asked Julie to write a note explaining why she was misbehaving. Julie wrote:
The significant statement in this part of the letter was that the abuse was still occurring at the time it was written. What followed, however, was even more explosive and changed the course of the investigation entirely. For Julie’s memory now implicated people other than family members:
A sex ring of pedophiles would in itself be big news in Thurston County, but Vukich realized that the letter was even more incriminating than it seemed. He knew about the poker games—Ericka had mentioned them in her confrontation with her mother—but he also knew that many of the poker players were colleagues of Ingram’s at the sheriff’s office. Lieutenant Tom Lynch, who was supervising the Ingram investigation, had been a regular at the games; so had Under-Sheriff McClanahan; even Vukich had sat in on some nights. The game had seemed to him completely innocent. Had it all been a charade, a front for a conspiracy of sex criminals operating out of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office?
Julie’s second letter to Kristi Webster revealed the degree of her despair:
That afternoon, with this new information in hand, Vukich and Schoening renewed their interrogation of Paul Ingram. Peterson joined them. As the psychologist had predicted, the first memory Ingram produced was of an uncle who had sexually abused him when he was a child, in Spokane. Peterson then asked him about his use of alcohol, and Ingram said that he would put a keg of beer in the refrigerator before the poker parties. “I can’t say I never got intoxicated,” he said. “But I can remember, you know, some of the guys getting pretty wasted and over a period of four or five hours or more I might have four beers.”
“So the poker buddies that you played with would be who?” Peterson asked. “Friends from the department or—”
“Yeah, most of them were friends from the department, or friends of theirs,” Ingram agreed, and he named several men, most of whom were police officers.
“Anybody ever go up to see the kids?” Vukich asked.
“I just can’t think of anything where anybody—”
“The reason I ask, Paul, is that Julie told me about a time or two where there was a poker party and she was molested.”
“What we’re talking about, Paul, is she was molested by somebody other than you,” Schoening said. “She even remembers being— somebody tying her up on the bed and two people, at least, taking turns with her while somebody else watched, probably you.”
“I just don’t see anything,” said Ingram. “Let me think about this for a minute. Let me see if I can get in there. Assuming it happened, she would’ve had to have had a bed, bedroom, by herself I would think. . . . Uh . . .”
The pauses in Ingram’s statement sometimes lasted ten full minutes, intensifying the frustration on the part of the questioners. He would grab hold of his hair and lean forward, dead still, until his limbs went to sleep, while the investigators stood around, fuming with impatience. Schoening prodded Ingram by saying that even as they talked Julie was in fear for her life. “That person is still out on the street. That person is some friend of yours that worked or works for this department.” He added, “Apparently, it’s somebody that’s still close to you, Paul.”
Schoening’s remarks would have serious consequences, so it’s important to note the assumptions that are buried in them. Julie’s fears, insofar as she had expressed them, were about whether she was doing the right thing in coming forward with her story, and whether she would break up her family as a result. The only person she had seemed to be afraid of was her father. The extrapolations about her fear of someone else were only guesswork on Schoening’s part. The terms of the investigation had been redefined, however.
“Jim Rabie played poker with us. Jim and I have been fairly close,” Ingram said helpfully. James L. Rabie, the man who had done the electrical work on the Ingrams’ house as a favor, once worked sex crimes. As a matter of fact, he had once held the job that Schoening had now. Rabie and Schoening had a long-standing and well-known dislike of each other.
“Is Jim the person she’s talking about?” Vukich asked.
“Just—just don’t put words in my mouth,” Ingram responded. “I’m trying to get— to bring something up here. Uh, uh, Jim’s the only one that comes to mind. . . .”
“In this picture you have, Paul, do you see ropes?”
“Uh, you’ve, you put the ropes there and I’m trying to figure out what I’ve got,” said Ingram. “It kind of looks to me like she’d be lying face down . . . kind of like she’s hog-tied.”
“What else do you see? Who else do you see?”
“Maybe one other person, but I—I don’t see a face, but Jim Rabie stands out, boy, for some reason.”
Schoening went out in the hall to collect himself. Lieutenant Lynch saw him there and, because Schoening appeared so agitated, relieved him of his gun. “It’s not Paul Ingram I want to kill,” Schoening told him. “It’s Jim Rabie.”
As Schoening walked back into the office, he passed Peterson coming out, his eyes streaming with tears. The scenes of bondage that Ingram was describing—coupled with his infuriating detachment—were emotionally overpowering. Vukich, too, had tears in his eyes. But Ingram sat calmly, and he grinned in greeting when Schoening came back in. Schoening had never seen anything like this monstrous equanimity.
“Paul, have you ever had any sexual relations with Jim Rabie?” Schoening asked.
“I don’t think so,” Ingram said. “I’d just hate to think of myself as a homosexual.”
Peterson returned and asked Ingram if he was involved in black magic. Ingram replied that there was a time when he had read his horoscope in the newspaper. “I don’t know what you’re driving at,” he added.
“The Satan cult kind of thing,” Schoening said.
This was the first mention of Satanism in the Ingram case. Later, the detectives claimed that Ingram had previously brought the subject up himself, but it’s obvious that in this exchange he did not pick up the theme—at least consciously. All Ingram could recall was that as a child, on Halloween, he had tied a cat in a sack and hung it from a telephone pole.
Over the next hour, as Schoening, Vukich, and Peterson pressed him to respond to his daughters’ fears and emotional pain, Ingram’s mood changed dramatically. He began to pray and cry out. He asked that his pastor be called. Everyone in the room sensed that a breakthrough was approaching.
“It goes back to the poker games, Paul,” Vukich reminded Ingram as he closed his eyes and began rocking violently back and forth.
“Choose life over living death,” Peterson exhorted, lapsing into the religious language that seemed to reach Ingram. “You are as alone as Jesus was in the desert when he was comforted.”
“God’s given you the tools to do this, Paul,” Vukich said. “You’ve got to show him by what you do and what you say as to whether or not you’re worthy of his love and redemption and salvation.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Ingram cried in a frenzy. “Help me, Lord! Help me, Lord!”
“One of the things that would help you, Paul, is if you’d stop asking for help and just let yourself sit back, not try to think about anything,” Peterson said, in a tone that was suddenly quiet and calming. “Just let yourself go and relax. No one’s going to hurt you. We want to help. Just relax.”
In response, Ingram went visibly limp. He hunched over and put his face in his hands.
“Why don’t you tell us what happened to Julie, Paul?” Vukich said. “What happened at that poker game?”
“I see Julie lying on the floor on a sheet. Her hands are tied to her feet. She’s on her stomach,” Ingram said. His voice was high and faint. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was in a trance of some kind. “I’m standing there looking at her. Somebody else is on my left.”
“Who is that?”
“The only person that keeps coming back is Jim Rabie.”
“Turn and look at that person,” Schoening said.
“He’s standing right next to you, Paul,” Vukich said. “All you have to do is just look to your left and there he is.”
“He—he’s standing up,” Ingram said. “I see his penis sticking up in the air.”
“Does he have any clothes on?”
“I don’t think so. . . .”
“What’s he doing to your daughter?” Schoening asked.
“. . . Uh, her legs are close together, but maybe she’s being rolled over onto her side. . . .”
“Is she clothed or unclothed?” Peterson asked.
“Unclothed, I believe. . . .”
“What’s this person doing?”
“He’s kneeling. His penis is by her stomach. Uh, he’s big. I mean, broad-shouldered, big person.”
“Does he have any jewelry on?” Vukich asked.
“May have a watch on his right hand.”
“What time does it say?”
“Uh, two o’clock. . . .”
“Is somebody taking pictures?” Vukich asked.
“Uh, pictures, is there somebody off to the right of me? Uh, it’s possible, let me look. I see, I see a camera.”
“Who’s taking the pictures?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see a person behind the camera.”
“That person’s very important,” Peterson said. “He’s the one that holds the key. . . .”
“Well, the person that I think I see is Ray Risch,” Ingram said. Raymond L. Risch, Jr., was a mechanic who worked for the Washington State Patrol.
This interview lasted until late in the evening. John Bratun, the associate pastor of the Church of Living Water, whom Ingram had asked to have summoned, arrived after dinner, as did Gary Preble, an attorney, whom Ingram had also asked for. Ingram knew Preble through the local Republican Party. Preble was a devout charismatic Christian, but he had practically no criminal experience and certainly had no idea that he was about to take on the biggest case in Thurston County history.
The little office where the interrogation took place became stale and overheated from the press of so many bodies. “Boy, it’s almost like I’m making it up, but I’m not,” Ingram said as the interview drew to a close. He had now implicated several people in addition to Jim Rabie and Ray Risch. He had produced several new memories of sexual abuse, one occasion as recent as the week before he left on vacation. He had also begun to see “weird shadows” and tombstones. “It’s like I’m watching a movie,” he said. “Like a horror movie.”
At five o’clock on Thursday, December 1st, Jim Rabie met his wife, Ruth, and Ray Risch at the County Seat Deli, across the street from the courthouse complex. Rabie and Risch were good friends; they met for lunch nearly every day and often got together for dinner with their wives. Rabie, who was forty-five years old, is a gregarious man with a plump face and sleepy eyes. Although it is not really detectable, one leg is an inch and a half shorter than the other, and he wears a built-up shoe. Risch, who was forty-one, is six feet four and thin, with a dark beard. He wears tortoiseshell glasses that are always sliding down his nose, and he has a shy habit of laughing and looking up and away. He never seems to know what to do with his long limbs, so when he relaxes he has a way of crossing his arms and wrapping his legs around each other at the knee and ankle, like vines. When round Jim Rabie and gangly Ray Risch are together, they have a certain Laurel and Hardy quality. Both are avid readers and like to work on cars.
That Thursday afternoon, Rabie was exhausted. He suffers from narcolepsy and usually requires two naps a day; in fact, that disease, and his propensity to fall asleep at inopportune moments, had caused his retirement from the sheriff’s office, in 1987, after fourteen years in the department. In the year since, he had been working as a lobbyist for the Washington State Law Enforcement Association and serving as the lieutenant governor of the local Kiwanis organization. That very day, Rabie had been to several Kiwanis meetings in different cities in the state, beginning early in the morning, and he had one more to go to that evening.
The table talk, of course, was about their friend Paul Ingram. Both men knew him well; Rabie had been Ingram’s campaign manager when he made a losing bid for the state legislature, in 1984. Rabie had just called Sandy to ask if there was anything he could do. “How could this have been going on and me not know it?” she had asked him plaintively. He didn’t know what to say. In his experience as a sex-crimes investigator, he had found that many awful things could go on in a family without their being acknowledged, even by the victims. Because of that, in fact, he had lobbied successfully to change the law in the State of Washington so that the perpetrator of a sex crime against a minor could be held liable for seven years, rather than three. (Later, the law was amended again, to allow charges to be brought for three years after a victim remembers a crime. It was a pioneering statute and has since been replicated by twenty-two other states.)
Rabie and Risch didn’t know at the time that either of them was under suspicion, but, as they were talking, Ingram was across the street in the interview room producing additional memories of their having molested his children. That morning, Julie had picked their faces out of a photo lineup and had described an incident in which, during one of the poker games, Rabie came into her room, raped her, and cut her with a knife.
When they finished chatting, Rabie went to his Kiwanis meeting and then drove across the street to return a slide projector to the sheriff’s office; he had borrowed it from the crime-prevention office, which Ingram headed. Since no one had ever asked Rabie to return his office key when he retired, he simply unlocked the back door and walked in. It was after seven. Rabie was wearing his red Kiwanis blazer. In the hallway, he saw Tom Lynch walking into the office that Schoening and Vukich shared. Rabie stuck his head in to say hello. The detectives looked startled.
“What are you doing here?” Lynch asked.
“Returning this,” Rabie said. “I’m a little surprised to see you here this late.”
He wasn’t nearly as surprised as they were.
“Can I ask a question?” Rabie continued earnestly, taking a seat in the same chair that many suspects had sat in when Jim Rabie was a detective in this very office. “I know that possibly you guys can’t answer it, but has Paul been honest? I mean totally honest, because unless he is he will not be amenable to treatment.” Then, according to Lynch’s notes, Rabie said, “Paul and I have been very close for a long time, and maybe it would help if I talked to him.”
At that point, Schoening told him, “You’ve been named.”
According to the detectives, instead of immediately and adamantly denying the charge Rabie undid his tie and opened his shirt and sat back in the chair with an immense sigh. Vukich and Schoening exchanged a look. They identified this as the “Oh, no, I’ve been caught” reaction.
According to the police report, Rabie’s initial response was eerily similar to Ingram’s. He said that he couldn’t remember the events he was being charged with, and he speculated that perhaps he had a “dark side.” Also like Ingram, Rabie asked several times to take a polygraph exam. At nine-thirty, Schoening turned on the tape and read Rabie his rights. “Individual people, separately, have corroborated that you masturbated in front of and on Julie. Julie tells us that; so does Paul Ingram tell us that,” Schoening said, selecting one of various conflicting stories. “Don’t you think you’re in a denial stage?”
“I must be, because I honestly do not have any recollection of that happening, and I do not believe that I could’ve done it and blocked it out. . . .”
“How do you feel right now?”
“Scared,” Rabie admitted. “Because I know from your end of it that if you’ve got what you tell me you have that I’m not leaving here. I’m gonna be in custody. And I have a firm belief that any cop that’s charged is guilty until proven otherwise.” The significance of his plight swiftly settled on him. “An ex-cop in prison is almost a sign of death,” he observed. Even if he got off, the fact that he had been charged would mean that his reputation was destroyed, his lobbying career was finished, his Kiwanis work was over, his marriage was placed in peril, and he might not be allowed ever to see his granddaughters again, because suspicion that he was a child molester would always hover around him. In short, his life was ruined.
“I can’t figure out why, if I did this, I wouldn’t remember it happening,” Rabie said, echoing the complaint of both Paul and Sandy.
“There’s photographs of it, Jim,” Schoening said, although this was not true. “How about a picture of you lying on the floor, nude, next to Julie?”
“If I saw a picture of that I would have to believe it had occurred,” Rabie said.
While Rabie was being interrogated, Detective Paul Johnson, of the Olympia Police Department, and Detective Loreli Thompson, of the Lacey Police Department, had been assigned to question Ray Risch. “Is this about Paul?” Risch asked when they knocked on his door. Soon he was sitting in an adjacent room of the sheriff’s office having his rights read to him. “I noted that Risch’s legs were crossed both at the knee and at the ankle,” Detective Thompson wrote in her report. To her, the suspect appeared to be protecting something. “I also noted that when questioning would become intense at points, his arms would cross tightly across his chest.”
On being confronted with what appeared to be overwhelming evidence against him, Risch offered the same sort of equivocal statements about memory that both Ingram and Rabie had. “I wasn’t present that I know of, unless I blocked it out of my head,” he said.
The interrogations went on into the early morning—Rabie in one room, Risch in another, and Peterson, the psychologist, shuttling back and forth. “We’re talking about a situation here, Jim, where you have, if you will, a cult,” Vukich told Rabie, offering what was becoming the official theory. “A cultist-type attraction and activity between these . . . individuals that has continued over a prolonged period of time.”
Eventually, each man was told that his friend had broken down and was implicating him, although this was not true. Risch began to weep. “This has gone far enough!” he cried.
“Paul said you guys bullied him and you made him do this and he didn’t want to do this,” Schoening told Rabie. “Ray is saying basically the same thing. Only, he’s saying that he was the one who was the weakling, and he’s saying you and Paul were the worst two.”
Rabie realized that this could be a bluff, but he was also aware that in a case like this, consisting of multiple suspects, one person could be offered a certain degree of immunity to provide testimony against the others—and that often it was a scramble to pin the ringleader tag on another suspect. “Give me the responsibility, because I’ve blocked it out enough—I must be the worst one,” Rabie said glumly. “The only option is to lock me up, and you’re going to have to throw away the key, because if I can’t remember this, then I am so damn dangerous I do not deserve to be loose.”
The next day, December 2nd, Ingram met in Vukich and Schoening’s office with Pastor John Bratun. “I know I have a demon in me,” Ingram said, and he asked Bratun to perform an exorcism.
“You don’t have a demon, but you’ve got several spirits,” Bratun told him. He set a wastebasket in the middle of the floor and called out from Ingram the spirits of sexual immorality and gluttony, among others. As he did, Ingram attempted to regurgitate into the wastebasket, with little success. Still, he felt “delivered,” he said, and when he went back into the interrogation room he produced a new memory. In this memory, Rabie, who is five feet eight inches tall, pushed Ingram, who is six feet two, down the stairs. “He wanted to do something that I didn’t want him to do,” Ingram said. “He said he wanted Chad. . . . Rabie shoved his way into Chad’s room and ripped the boy’s pants off. . . . I was powerless to do anything. He forced Chad down and had anal sex with him.”
That afternoon, Detective Loreli Thompson interviewed Chad, then twenty years old. The young man said that he had never been abused, sexually or in any other physical manner, by his father or anyone else. He said that Paul sometimes lost control and yelled at the children, but otherwise their relationship was “O.K.” Chad was beginning to have doubts about the veracity of his own recollections, though. Recently, he and his mother had been looking through family photographs and other household items in an effort to prompt their memories. So far, neither of them was able to remember anything extraordinary.
Paul’s memory, however, was becoming more and more active, aided by the visualizations that Peterson and the detectives encouraged and, he claims, by constant prayer and assurances from Pastor Bratun that God would not allow thoughts other than those which were true to come into his memory. Ingram began seeing people in robes kneeling around a fire. He thought he saw a corpse. There was a person on his left in a red robe and wearing a helmet of cloth. “Maybe the Devil,” he suggested. People were wailing. Ingram remembered standing on a platform and looking down into the fire. He had been given a large knife and was expected to sacrifice a live black cat. He cut out the beating heart and held it on the tip of the knife. “At one point, Ingram said the cat might have been a human doll,” Schoening wrote in his report. “This was related by Ingram as a third party looking at the scenario, i.e., I see; I feel; reminds me of; I hear, etc.” Ingram also produced a memory of himself and Jim Rabie murdering a prostitute in Seattle in 1983, thereby implicating both of them in an infamous unsolved murder spree known as the Green River killings. The bodies of at least forty women had been found in Washington and Oregon between 1982 and 1984, and the authorities thought it was the work of a serial killer. At Schoening’s request, the Green River Task Force looked into Ingram’s memories of the slaying but could find nothing that corresponded with any of the victims.
Where were all these memories coming from? Were they real or were they fantasies? If they were real, why couldn’t any two people agree on them? The Ingram daughters had said nothing about satanic rituals, but through the church grapevine they were getting the gist of their father’s latest revelations. Ericka confided to a friend that her father was talking too much and giving too many details—that he was saying things she didn’t want to remember, and she wished he would just be quiet.
Ericka herself was now saying that her father had sexually abused her on almost every night of the last week she lived at home. Detective Thompson interviewed one of the deaf girls who had been living with the Ingrams (and had since moved to another home). The girl said that the Ingram house was full of hate. “I don’t want, angry, ignore, don’t talk with me anymore,” she said through her interpreter. She remembered that Sandy and Ericka had bickered because Ericka wanted to leave,and that Ericka had been grounded. She had not, however, observed any abuse.
Since Jim Rabie’s retirement, Detective Thompson was regarded as the best sex-crimes investigator in the county. She had a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and her reports were full of telling observations. As the only female detective on the case, she was given the delicate task of interviewing Julie. In Thompson’s experience, there was nothing very bizarre about two little girls growing up in a house with a pedophile. She saw the effects of child abuse every day. Paul Ingram’s emerging satanic memories did sound a jarring note to Thompson, but then what else could explain the wreck of a girl who sat in her office, practically mute, idly shredding her clothing and pulling her hair? Julie was the most traumatized victim that Thompson had ever seen. She had had more success in getting statements out of four-year-old children who had been savagely raped. Julie would sometimes write about the abuse in her upright, legible script, but she simply could not speak about it aloud. Early on, Thompson came to believe that Julie had been tortured.
On December 8th, Chad went to see his father in jail. It was a shattering experience for him. Paul, who had always been so aloof from his children, was sobbing so hard that he could speak only in gasps. He managed to say that Chad had been a victim, and pleaded with him to try to remember the abuse. “You have to get it out,” he said.
“I’ve never seen him like that,” Chad later told Schoening. “It’s like it was a different person. It wasn’t my dad there. That wasn’t my dad there. That wasn’t my dad. . . . It didn’t even feel like him when I hugged him.”
Chad accompanied Schoening to the interrogation room, where Peterson was waiting. He began by again denying that he had ever been molested. He did acknowledge having attempted to commit suicide three years before, when he was seventeen. “Probably something my dad said. I can’t remember the specifics,” he said. He had a pale trace of a razor cut on his wrist.
“It was something very traumatic to you that your dad said that really hurt you,” Schoening said, theorizing. “Maybe it hurt your manhood.”
Chad tentatively replied that his father might have called him a loser. “But I don’t think he said that. I can’t remember.”
“You can remember what happened,” Peterson admonished him. “You can choose to remember that if you want to.”
“The memories are there,” Schoening added.
“I know, I know,” said Chad. “I just can’t.”
“Well, I’m not surprised,” Peterson said. “It’s not unusual with kids who’ve been through what you’ve been through to not be able to remember. Number one, they don’t want to remember. Number two, they’ve been programmed not to remember.”
“Mm-hm.”
Sometime later, Peterson said, “I can tell you that the way to being what you want to become—a healthy adult—is to deal with those memories.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Because they have—they—I say ‘they’ because I believe that there’s a ‘they’ who have done this to you.”
“Mm-hm.”
At moments, the conversation lurched into therapy or instant psychoanalysis, as Chad was urged to reveal his thoughts about his family and his rather limited sexual experience. Eventually, the interrogators prodded the young man into talking about his mental problems. He admitted that he had heard voices inside his head. Then, in a painfully halting manner, he described vivid dreams he had had as a child: “People outside my window, looking in, but I knew that wasn’t possible, because . . . we were on two floors and I would . . . I would have dreams of, uh, little people . . . short people coming and walking on me . . . walking on my bed . . . uh, I would look outside and . . . out of my door.” The little people reminded him of the Seven Dwarfs, he said.
“Those are dreams of being invaded,” Peterson declared.
“Yeah, and I would look out my door and I would see . . . a house of mirrors and . . . and no way of getting out.”
“Of being violated, trapped in an unescapable situation,” Peterson said, interpreting. “What happened to you was so horrible.”
“Right.”
“You want to believe it’s dreams,” Schoening said. “You don’t want to believe it’s real. It was real. It was real, Chad.”
“No, this was outside my window, though,” Chad protested, pointing out that his bedroom had been on the second floor. Also, his brother had slept in the same room—why hadn’t he ever seen anything?
“What you saw was real,” Schoening insisted. “This same type of stuff has come out of your dad, too. . . .”
“I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t move except to close the curtain,” Chad went on. “The only thing I could feel is pressure on my chest.”
“What was on your chest?” Peterson asked.
“Well, this is a different dream,” Chad said, recalling a recurring nightmare of his adolescence. “Every time a train came by, a whistle would blow and a witch would come in my window. . . . I would wake up, but I couldn’t move. It was like the blankets were tucked under and . . . I couldn’t move my arms.”
“You were being restrained?” Peterson asked.
“Right, and there was somebody on top of me.”
“That’s exactly real,” Schoening said excitedly. “That’s the key, Chad. That’s what was really going on.”
“Chad, these things happened to you,” Peterson insisted. “They assaulted your ability to know what was real.”
“O.K. . . .”
“Pretty hard to remember this?”
“No, it was like it was yesterday.” Chad then recalled that when the train whistle blew, he would find himself on the floor, and a fat witch with long black hair and a black robe would be sitting on top of him.
“Look at her face,” Schoening said. “Who is this person? Somebody who is a friend of your family’s?”
“It was usually dark. . . .”
“Who does this person remind you of?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to know or you don’t know?” Peterson asked.
“Probably I don’t want to know.”
“Somebody you respect?” Schoening asked.
“Right.”
“Is there something there physically to keep your mouth from making noise?” Schoening asked.
“No, because I remember breathing.”
“What’s in your mouth?”
“I don’t know. A cloth, maybe.”
“It’s very important, Chad. What’s it feel like in your mouth?”
“Uh, it’s not hard.”
“Just let the memory come,” Peterson advised. “It’s not what you think about; it’s what you’re trying not to think about.” When Chad resisted being steered any further, Peterson and Schoening told him that he had been programmed not to remember anything. “Why’d you have to run away from it?” Peterson demanded.
And Schoening added, “You wanted to go somewhere safe, right?”
“No, it was safe here,” said Chad. “I’ve always felt safe.”
“Even when all this was going on?” Schoening asked.
“Except for the dreams,” Chad said, obviously bewildered. “I— Because I thought they were, I put them off as dreams.”
“Destruction of his sense of reality,” Peterson said authoritatively. “Destruction of any ability to feel. Total, absolute obedience and subservience to the group.”
A few minutes later, Schoening said, “Let’s go back to when you were fourteen to sixteen and this person’s sitting on you.” How much room did Chad think there had been between the witch’s pelvic area and his chin? Chad supposed there had been a foot or so. “They would sit there real high,” Schoening reminded him. “And you got something in your mouth.”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s not cloth.”
“Right.”
“It’s not hard, like a piece of wood.”
“Right.”
“What is it?”
Chad thought a moment about this riddle and then began to laugh nervously. “You just made me think— Oh, golly.”
“What is it?” Schoening insisted.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“What were you thinking? C’mon.”
“I thought it was a penis, O.K.? I— It could be.”
“O.K., don’t be embarrassed. It could be,” Schoening said. “Let it out. It’s O.K.”
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Chad said miserably.
Once the interrogators had been able to translate the nightmares into reality, the rest followed easily. The witch underwent a sex change, and Chad’s initial certainty that he had never been abused was completely overturned. The little people of Chad’s first dream, who had reminded him of the Seven Dwarfs, were reinterpreted as being members of a cult who regularly abused him over most of his life. But Chad had forgotten about all of it, the interrogators told him. He had been conditioned to accept the abuse and then to repress the memories.
“By God, those who’ve done this to you ought to pay for what they’ve done,” Peterson said. “And I’ll tell you something, you have the right to sue these fuckers and get as much as you want from them.”
“That’d be nice,” Chad said.
“You’re damn right it’d be nice. Pay for a college education.”
“Yeah.”
“Pay for a nice car. Get you started in life.”
“Well, I’ve already got a nice car.”
“Yeah, but do you have a BMW?”
“I want to see the faces so I can . . . say these are the ones that did it to me,” Chad concluded. “I have to put a face to it.”
At this point, the detectives turned off the tape.
Earlier, Chad had examined the same photo lineup that his sisters had seen, including some twenty driver’s-license pictures, mostly of former sheriff’s-office employees. Of those pictured, Rabie and Risch had been the closest friends of Paul Ingram and the ones most likely to be recognized by the children. Chad knew both men well; in fact, he had done odd jobs for them on several occasions. But when he was first presented with the lineup he couldn’t identify any abusers. During the interval while the tape was off, however, Chad examined the pictures again.
“Who’s the face in the dream?” Chad was asked when the tape was turned back on.
“Jim Rabie,” he answered.
The following day, Chad produced a memory of being assaulted by Ray Risch in the basement of the Ingrams’ house when he was ten or twelve years old. At this point, Chad leaned forward and stared at the floor “in a trance-like state,” Schoening’s notes record. “Sometimes he would go for 5-10 minutes without saying anything and at one point, drool came out of his mouth and onto the floor.”
Richard Peterson had never been involved in a police interrogation before, and he had no official role in this one beyond determining whether it was safe for the suspects to be at large. His active presence and that of Pastor Bratun at several key interviews would later become a subject of controversy in the defense of Rabie and Risch. At the time, however, the detectives were grateful for Peterson’s participation. They were groping to understand what was going on in their community—and, indeed, in their own department. All the familiar road signs of a typical police investigation had been turned upside down. The investigators were investigating not just one but several colleagues and former co-workers. The alleged central perpetrator was admitting to more depraved crimes than the victims were alleging. It seemed nearly impossible to coördinate all the accusations into a coherent set of charges. Moreover, the investigators realized that they were probing into strange and unsettling territory. Jaded detectives who regularly visited the worst precincts of the human psyche were thoroughly shaken by the emerging revelations of the Ingram case. Brian Schoening took to sleeping with the lights on. The hours and hours he spent interviewing members of the Ingram family were replayed in his mind as grisly nightmares. The memories that Paul Ingram was producing were at once fragmented and detailed: it was as if he could describe the ornate weave of an Oriental rug without being able to discern the over-all pattern. Even more disquieting to the investigators was a growing conviction that the Ingram case was, as they frequently said to each other, “the tip of the iceberg”—the iceberg being a nationwide satanic conspiracy.
Peterson, at least, had some experience in these matters. He was a familiar presence in the jails and courtrooms of Washington State, where he was often called upon to testify about a suspect’s mental condition. He also maintained a private practice in Tacoma. The year before, he had had the unnerving experience of encountering patients who remembered being victims of satanic abuse.
Thousands of therapists have reported similar cases in recent years, but to Peterson, in 1987, it was still rare enough to be surprising. “Survivor” stories began to surface with the publication, in 1980, of a book called “Michelle Remembers,” written by a thirty-year-old Canadian named Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pazder (who later became her husband). The book describes Smith’s memories of black-magic ceremonies and of atrocities she was subjected to by a satanic coven, which counted among its members Smith’s mother. Smith recovered these previously buried memories while she was in therapy, and usually during a kind of self-induced hypnotic trance. Her account became a model for the many survivor stories that would follow, although, characteristically, there was no evidence that any of her story was true.
Most accusations of satanic-ritual abuse in the early eighties were attached to allegations of sexual molestation in day-care centers. In January, 1988, Memphis’s daily paper, the Commercial Appeal, published one of the first skeptical examinations of the satanic-ritual-abuse phenomenon. The series reported that investigators and prosecutors in the day-care cases often used “Michelle Remembers” as a reference guide. The best-known of these cases involved the Virginia McMartin Preschool, in Manhattan Beach, California, and it engendered the longest and most expensive criminal-court case in American history. Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son, Raymond Buckey, along with five other child-care workers, were charged with molesting hundreds of children over a ten-year period. A number of children testified that they had been subjected to satanic rituals, such as animal sacrifices and sexual abuse inside churches. Michelle Smith and other “survivors” met with some of the children and the parents in the McMartin case. Eventually, most of the charges were dropped and the others resulted in acquittal or mistrial, but by then there had been more than a hundred cases around the country in which children made accusations of fantastic abuse, involving being taken on cross-country airplane trips and witnessing burials in open graves, cannibalism, and human sacrifices.
Peterson became sufficiently interested in the subject to conduct a casual survey of Tacoma and Seattle therapists in early 1988, and he found that a quarter of the respondents had treated victims of satanic-ritual abuse, or S.R.A., as it was coming to be known in the rapidly developing literature of the phenomenon. That same year, an influential paper appeared, under the title “A New Clinical Syndrome: Patients Reporting Ritual Abuse in Childhood by Satanic Cults.” The authors were two psychiatrists, Walter C. Young and Bennett G. Braun, and a psychologist, Roberta G. Sachs, who specialized in dissociative disorders. These are psychiatric disorders characterized by an unintegrated sense of identity, the best-known of which is multiple-personality disorder, or M.P.D. People who suffer from dissociative disorders also have disturbances of their memory function, which can range from dreamlike recall, to partial memory lapses—or fugue states—to complete psychogenic amnesia and out-of-body sensations. The authors interviewed thirty-seven people undergoing treatment for dissociative disorders who also spoke of having been victims of S.R.A. They found an astonishing similarity in the stories of the patients they analyzed. The most common abuses reported were of being forcibly drugged during rituals; of being sexually abused, often with sexual devices; of witnessing the abuse or torture of other people or the mutilation of animals; of being buried alive in coffins; of being forced to participate in the sacrifice of human adults or babies; of being ceremonially “married” to Satan; of being impregnated during a ritual and later having to sacrifice the fetus or infant to Satan; and of being made to eat human body parts. The stories also comprised a virtual checklist of the atrocities originally described in “Michelle Remembers.”
“The lack of independent verification of the reports of cult abuse presented in this paper prevents a definitive statement that the ritual cult abuse is true,” the authors wrote. “Despite the fact that some patients have discussed ritual abuse with other patients, and the fact that patients have had contact with referring therapists who may have provided information to them, it was our opinion that the ritual abuse was real.” Many other therapists, counsellors, and psychiatrists were also coming to that conclusion. Furthermore, Braun saw a link between multiple-personality disorder and S.R.A.; he believed that, of the two hundred thousand Americans that he estimated were suffering from M.P.D., up to one-fourth could be victims of S.R.A.
Dr. George K. Ganaway, who is the program director of the Ridgeview Center for Dissociative Disorders in Smyrna, Georgia, observed the same link but drew a different conclusion from it. Ganaway suggested that dissociative disorders might account for the S.R.A. phenomenon, because the alleged victims were highly hypnotizable, suggestible, and fantasy-prone. In a 1991 speech before the American Psychological Association called “Alternative Hypotheses Regarding Satanic Ritual Abuse Memories,” Ganaway warned, “When individuals are highly hypnotizable, they may spontaneously enter autohypnotic trance states, particularly during stressful interview situations. . . . Experimental hypnosis evidence indicates that memories retrieved in a hypnotic trance state are likely to contain a combination of both fact and fantasy in a mixture that cannot be accurately determined without external corroboration. Furthermore, hypnosis increases the subject’s confidence in the veracity of both correct and incorrect recalled material.” Highly hypnotizable individuals suspend critical judgment while in trance states and compulsively seek to comply with the suggestions of the interviewer, Ganaway said. There was thus an obvious danger that an unwary therapist might unconsciously guide patients to conclusions that already existed in the therapist’s mind. In an earlier paper, “Historical Versus Narrative Truth: Clarifying the Role of Exogenous Trauma in the Etiology of MPD and its Variants,” Ganaway had proposed that much of what was being remembered as satanic-ritual abuse was in fact an invented “screen memory” masking more prosaically brutal forms of actual abuse, such as beatings, rapes, deprivations, or incarcerations. This paper became a touchstone for mental-health workers who believed that something awful had happened to their anguished patients but that, whatever it was, it was something other than satanic-ritual abuse.
A 1991 survey of members of the American Psychological Association found that thirty per cent of the respondents had treated at least one client who claimed to have suffered from satanic-ritual abuse, and ninety-three per cent of those who completed a second survey believed their clients’ claims to be true. Another poll addressed the opinions of social workers in California. Nearly half of those interviewed accepted the idea that S.R.A. involved a national conspiracy of multi-generational abusers and baby-killers and that many of these people were prominent in their communities and appeared to live completely exemplary lives. A majority of those polled believed that victims of such abuse were likely to have repressed the memories of it and that hypnosis increased the likelihood of accurately recalling what had happened.
The question of whether S.R.A. is real has riven the mental-health field. On the one hand, there are those who compare survivors of satanic-ritual abuse to people who claim to remember past lives or to have been abducted by aliens: the evidence—or lack of it—is about the same in each instance. On the other hand, there are those who compare survivors of S.R.A. to the survivors of less spectacular forms of child abuse. They point out that in many cases memories of what one might call ordinary abuse are forgotten, and are recovered only in therapy, through the same process that produces memories of ritual abuse. If some recovered memories are deemed authentic, they ask, then why not others? Where does one draw the line in deciding what to believe?
How delicate this argument has become was apparent at the August, 1992, meeting of the American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C. Michael Nash, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, presented a clinical account of a patient who had reported remembering an abduction by aliens. “I successfully treated this highly hypnotizable man over a period of three months, using standard uncovering techniques and employing hypnosis on two occasions,” Nash, who took the position that the abduction story was relevant material but not literally true, reported. “About two months into this therapy, his symptoms abated: he was sleeping normally again, his ruminations and flashbacks had resolved, he returned to his usual level of interpersonal engagement, and his productivity at work improved. What we did worked. Nevertheless, let me underscore this: he walked out of my office as utterly convinced that he had been abducted as when he walked in. As a matter of fact he thanked me for helping him ‘fill in the gaps of my memory.’ I suppose I need not tell you how unhappy I was about his particular choice of words here.” Nash went on, “Here we have a stark example of a tenaciously believed-in fantasy which is almost certainly not true, but which, nonetheless, has all the signs of a previously repressed traumatic memory. I work routinely with adult women who have been sexually abused, and I could discern no difference between this patient’s clinical presentation around the trauma and that of my sexually abused patients. Worse yet, the patient seemed to get better as he was able to elaborate on the report of trauma and integrate it into his own view of the world.”
The conclusion that Nash drew from this experience was that “in terms of clinical utility, it may not really matter whether the event actually happened or not. . . . In the end, we (as clinicians) cannot tell the difference between believed-in fantasy about the past and viable memory of the past. Indeed there may be no structural difference between the two.” In reaction to Nash’s speech, someone in the audience asked if he had ever considered another hypothesis in his treatment of the young man, which was that the alien abduction actually had occurred.
Therapists were not the only source of information on S.R.A. in 1988. On October 25th, just before Julie wrote the second note to her teacher, disclosing the abuse by her father and the poker players, the Ingram family sat down together and watched a prime-time Geraldo Rivera special on NBC entitled “Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground.” It was one of the most widely watched documentaries in television history, although it was only one of many such shows. (The day before, the subject of Rivera’s daily program had been “Satanic Breeders: Babies for Sacrifice.”) “No region in this country is beyond the reach of the Devil worshippers,” Rivera said from Nebraska. “Even here in the heartland of America, stories of ritual abuse crop up. The children you’re about to meet were born into it. They say their parents forced them to witness bloody rituals and even, they say, to participate in ritual murder.” Then he showed a clip of a young girl who testified, “My dad was involved in a lot of it. He’s, like, one of the main guys; he’s a leader or something. He made us have sex with him and with other guys and with other people.”
That year also saw the publication of several more books on the subject, including “Satan’s Underground,” by a woman writing under the pseudonym Lauren Stratford, which purported to be a true account of abuse and sexual slavery she endured as a child. “Satan’s Underground” became a paperback best-seller, and it was widely read in fundamentalist Christian congregations. For many religious believers, stories of satanic-ritual abuse merely confirmed a world view they already strongly held. Hal Lindsey and Johanna Michaelsen, two other popular Christian authors, endorsed “Satan’s Underground,” and thereby added considerably to its credibility. “If there is one thing that cult satanists do well, it’s cover their tracks in such a way as to thoroughly discredit witnesses who might seek to come against them,” Michaelsen wrote in the foreword. She elaborated on what has become the standard explanation for the lack of evidence of cult crimes: “Animals are indeed killed and buried, but are later dug up and disposed of elsewhere. The children are frequently given a stupefying drug before the rituals so that their senses and perceptions are easily manipulated in the dim candlelight of the ritual scene. The pornographic photographs taken of the children don’t show up because they’re carefully kept in vaults of private collectors.” Eventually, however, the original publisher decided to withdraw “Satan’s Underground,” after a well-researched article in Cornerstone, a Christian magazine, attacked the book as a hoax, and portrayed the author as a deluded and unfortunate woman from a rigid, Presbyterian family, who had a history of self-mutilation and of making sexual accusations that were never verified. It chanced that in the summer of 1988 Ericka Ingram had noticed a copy of “Satan’s Underground” on the coffee table of a house where she was babysitting and had asked if she could borrow it. When she returned it, she said she had read it all the way through, but she later told police that she had read only a few chapters, then tossed the book into the back seat of her car, because the shock of recognition had been too great for her to bear.
Thus, two communities that normally have little to do with each other—fundamentalist Christians and a particular set of mental-health professionals—found common ground in the question dominating any consideration of satanic-ritual abuse: whether to believe that it actually exists. In the absence of evidence that these stories or memories of satanic-ritual abuse were real, one could either reject them as absurd, withhold judgment until evidence appeared, or accept them on faith. The middle ground was rapidly shrinking as the proselytizers for both groups spread the word that S.R.A. was real and anyone who doubted it either was “in denial” or was part of the satanic underground. (Interestingly, the rise in reports of S.R.A. coincided with the collapse of international Communism, to suggest that one external enemy was being replaced by another, closer to home. Braun made the connection explicit in a speech in 1988, describing the satanic conspiracy as “a national-international type organization that’s got a structure somewhat similar to the communist cell structure, where it goes from . . . small groups, to local consuls, regional consuls, district consuls, national consuls and they have meetings at different times.”)
The Los Angeles County Commission for Women formed a task force in 1988 to call attention to the purported rise in satanic-ritual abuse, thereby claiming S.R.A. as a women’s issue, ostensibly because women and children were the main victims of cult crimes. The commission issued a report that defined satanic-ritual abuse as “a brutal form of abuse of children, adolescents, and adults, consisting of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and involving the use of rituals,” and continued:
The report goes on to say that the central feature of ritual abuse is mind control, which is achieved through the sophisticated use of brainwashing, drugs, and hypnosis: “The purpose of the mind control is to compel ritual abuse victims to keep the secret of their abuse, to conform to the beliefs and behaviors of the cult, and to become functioning members who serve the cult by carrying out the directives of its leaders without being detected within society at large.”
Elizabeth S. Rose (the pseudonym of a freelance writer who says she herself is an S.R.A. survivor) wrote in a recent cover story in Ms., “People would rather believe that survivors—particularly women survivors—are crazy. This keeps many survivors from coming forward.” The cover line read, “believe it! cult ritual abuse exists.” At Safeplace, the rape-crisis center where Julie Ingram sought refuge, counsellors say that the disbelief that usually greets such charges parallels the incredulity that often greeted bona-fide allegations of incest and sexual abuse only a few years ago. Nevertheless, the counsellors have frequent internal debates about whether the increasing numbers of women who come to them talking about satanic-ritual abuse and human sacrifice are telling the truth. “Here’s my dilemma,” Tyra Lindquist, the administrative coördinator of the center, said recently. “We are already struggling against a tidal wave of disbelief—it’s a tidal wave! Nobody wants to believe how bad it really is for women and children. Whoever walks in or calls us on the phone will tell us what she needs to tell us to survive this minute, this day. Our job is to help her survive through recovery. It’s not our role to believe or disbelieve.”
A fourth group to become concerned with the S.R.A. phenomenon were the police detectives charged with looking into the crimes of the alleged cults. Joe Vukich recalls going to a homicide seminar in Portland, Oregon, where a detective from Boise, Idaho, gave a presentation on cult crimes. “Folks, I’m here to tell you this stuff is going on!” the detective said. Vukich turned to an officer sitting next to him and remarked, “Not in my department. I’d know about it.” Soon dozens of police workshops around the country were discussing the phenomenon. Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder were often featured speakers, along with specialist “cult cops,” who were likely to be fundamentalist Christians. During the Ingram investigation Schoening and Vukich travelled to Canada to participate in an S.R.A. workshop. They were shocked to find themselves greeted as experts on the subject. Before long, they and other Olympia detectives were besieged by calls from police officers around the country who were engaged in investigating recovered memories of satanic-ritual abuse.
Early in the Ingram case, Under-Sheriff McClanahan called Supervisory Special Agent Kenneth V. Lanning at the behavioral-sciences unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Lanning, the F.B.I.’s research expert on the sexual victimization of children, had been hearing stories of sexual abuse with occult overtones since 1983. At first, he had tended to believe the stories, but as the number of alleged cases skyrocketed he had grown skeptical. Soon hundreds of victims were accusing thousands of offenders. By the mid-eighties, the annual number of alleged satanic murders had reached the tens of thousands. As a result of information provided by a prison official in Utah, word circulated in the police workshops that satanic cults were sacrificing between fifty and sixty thousand people every year in the United States, although the annual national total of homicides averages less than twenty-five thousand. Believers contend that no bodies are found because satanists often eat their victims and have access to sophisticated methods of disposal. It amazed Lanning that police officers, who regularly complained about inaccuracies in the media and often joked about tabloid-television accounts of “true” crimes, were susceptible to such material when it involved Satanism. Yes, there were psychotic killers who heard the voice of Satan, just as there were psychotic killers who heard the voice of Jesus, but that didn’t mean that they were members of an organized religious cult, Lanning argued. If satanic-ritual murder was defined as a killing that was committed by two or more people whose primary motive was to fulfull a prescribed satanic ritual, then Lanning could not find a single documented case of the phenomenon in the United States. He worried that many officers were allowing their personal religious beliefs to affect their judgment. (McClanahan, as it happened, had converted to Catholicism just a few months before the Ingram case broke, but he believes that religion had no effect on the investigation.)
Lanning told McClanahan that after looking into hundreds of similar stories he had come to the conclusion that they were merely a symptom of modern hysteria. McClanahan replied that the Ingram case was different: he had a perpetrator who was confessing to the crimes and implicating other members of the cult, and there was a likelihood that he would obtain other evidence, such as scars and photographs. “Well, you’ve got more than anybody else,” Lanning conceded. When McClanahan hung up, it struck him that the Ingram case was much more important than anyone had realized—that it was the one case in America that could prove, finally, that satanic-ritual abuse was real. ♦
(This is the first part of a two-part article.)
