Brian Schoening took to sleeping with the lights on. The interviews with Ingram went on for hours and hours, sometimes from early morning until nearly seven at night. Schoening began to dread the daily gamut of emotions, which at night would be replayed in his mind as grisly nightmares. One scene in particular haunted him. It was based on the image of Julie being hogtied on the floor, although in Schoening’s recurring dream the victim was his beloved granddaughter. He would try to reach her, but for some reason he never could.
In the dream, she always looked terrified, and she would call out her pet name for him, “Boppa.” Sometimes the dream would come before Schoening could even get to sleep. He would often awaken crying or shouting out loud. In the morning he would return to a world where nothing was normal.
Any extensive police investigation is freighted with suggestive details that color the detectives’ judgments about the suspects and the defendants. Thompson, for instance, interviewed the former wives of Rabie and Risch. Rabie’s ex described him as insecure and claimed that in the latter part of their eleven-year marriage, which ended in 1977, he developed a taste for pornographic books and movies. He was never interested in the occult, however. He had a passion for Louis L’Amour westerns, and the only quirk in his personality that she could recall was his irrational fear of birds. The former Mrs. Risch said that her husband “walked out and left us on the first of June in ’seventy-six.” She also alleged that Risch was a liar. What she meant by that, she said, was “it was difficult for Ray to face reality. He would take the situation such as in the area of jobs, he always had a fantastic prospect coming up and he was gonna get this great job—you know, lots of money. There were many times when he would tell me one thing and I would find out that it was not the truth. So I got to the point where I did not really trust his words on a lot of things.” Risch never abused the children, the woman said, but her son once told her about a strange incident concerning Paul Ingram. “It sounded too fantastic, but now that this has come up …”
“What’d he say?” Thompson asked.
“He said something about one time when his dad had scared him, that he made him lay down in the driveway and Paul had driven the car over the top of him … and it scared him really bad.… This has got to be the imagin—” She suddenly broke off, then declared: “You know, no sane adult is going to frighten a little four- or five-year-old and make him
lay down … but then again …” She didn’t know what to make of it.
The psychologist, 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. A former assistant professor of psychology at Oberlin College in Ohio, Peterson had come to Washington in 1982 to work for the Mentally Ill Offender program, which he did for two years before going into private practice in Tacoma, specializing in forensic and clinical psychology. Since that time, he had worked with as many as three thousand sexual offenders. 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. 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. Peterson at least had some familiarity with these matters—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 purportedly counted among its members Smith’s mother. Smith recovered these memories while she was undergoing therapy, following a miscarriage. Usually the memories surfaced when Smith was in a hypnotic trance. Her account became a model for the many survivor stories that would follow,
although, typically, there was no evidence that any of her story was true. Indeed, her sisters (unmentioned in the book) and her father deny that these fantastic events occurred, and police in her native Victoria, British Columbia, were unable to substantiate any of the baby sacrifices that Smith remembered. Smith’s mother is deceased.
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 the results of an investigation into thirty-six such cases around the country. It was one of the first skeptical examinations of the ritual-abuse phenomenon. The reporters, Tom Charlier and Shirley Downing, found that most cases evolved out of a single incident involving one child; but through publicity and runaway police inquiries, the investigations spread, and subsequent accusations were made against police officers, defense lawyers, and even the social service workers investigating the complaints. In the thirty-six cases examined, ninety-one people were arrested and charged with abusing children or endangering them; and of the seventy-nine defendants whose cases had been settled, twenty-three had been convicted, most on lesser charges that had nothing to do with ritual abuse. There was virtually no evidence in any of these cases except for the uncorroborated stories of the very young children. 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 ($15 million) 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 360 children over a ten-year period. It began in 1983 when a housewife, who had a history of mental illness, claimed that Raymond Buckey
had sexually assaulted her son, who was two and a half at the time. She said that her child described airplane flights, animal sacrifice, and sex rituals inside churches. The Manhattan Beach Police Department then sent a letter to two hundred families whose children attended the preschool, saying that the police were investigating possible criminal acts, including oral sex, fondling of genitals, sodomy (“possibly committed under the pretense of ‘taking the child’s temperature’ ”), and the photographing of naked children. The panicked parents, who until then had not noticed any signs of abuse, were referred to the Children’s Institute International. A nonprofit sex-abuse center, CII was run by a woman who interviewed children while wearing a clown outfit and who later testified before Congress that she believed in a network of “child predators” who were operating day-care centers as covers for child pornography. Soon children who initially had denied that any abuse had taken place remembered going to the cemetery on buses with shovels and pickaxes to dig up coffins. They told about teachers flying through the air and seeing naked nuns and priests frolicking in secret tunnels under the school (no such tunnels were ever found). Glenn E. Stevens, who was a co-prosecutor in the McMartin case, quit in disgust, denouncing the prosecution as a massive hoax. “If a child said no, nothing ever happened to them, the interviewer would then say, ‘You’re not being a very bright boy. Your friends have come in and told us they were touched. Don’t you want to be as smart as them?’ ” Stevens said. 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, usually involving details similar to those publicized in the McMartin case, such as devil worship, open graves, cannibalism, airplane trips, nude photography,
being urinated or defecated on, and murdering babies. The McMartin parents formed a group called Believe the Children, which waged the campaign in the media and provided support for parents who felt that their children had been similarly abused. Within a year in the Los Angeles area alone, allegations of ritual abuse arose at sixty-three other day-care centers. One sensational case appeared in 1986 in Sequim, Washington, not far from Olympia, after a woman noticed a rash on her granddaughter’s vagina. Five children later stated that they had been taken to graveyards and assaulted by adults in hooded robes. Charges against the preschool operator in Sequim and her son were later dropped because of insufficient evidence.
Peterson became sufficiently interested in the subject to conduct a 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 SRA, 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 maladies characterized by an unintegrated sense of identity, the best-known of which is multiple-personality disorder, or MPD. People who suffer from dissociative disorders also have disturbances of memory, 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 SRA. 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. It was 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 conceded, but they went on to say: “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, counselors, and psychiatrists were also coming to that conclusion. Furthermore, Braun saw a link between multiple-personality disorder and SRA; he believed that of the two hundred thousand Americans that he estimated were suffering from MPD, up to one-fourth could be victims of SRA.
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 SRA phenomenon, rather than vice versa, 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. That concern had caused lawmakers in a number of states, including Washington, to reject testimony that had been enhanced through hypnosis. 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 30 percent of the respondents had treated at least one client who claimed to have suffered from satanic-ritual abuse, and 93 percent 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 SRA involved a national conspiracy of multigenerational 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 extreme abuse were likely to have repressed the memories of it and that (contrary to scientific evidence) hypnosis increased the likelihood of accurately recalling what had happened.