Remembering Satan (25 page)

            
I
n May 1989, Richard Ofshe had a telephone conversation with Paul Ingram in which he urged him to try to withdraw his guilty plea before the sentencing. Ingram said that although he had been having doubts himself about the validity of some of his memories, he was still hopeful that he would be able to fill in the blanks with new memories that would explain the many contradictions in his own stories and those of his wife and children.

“I’ll tell you something, Paul—you are never going to get them,” Ofshe said. “There is no way that you are going to be able to remember anything that is going to reconcile all the lies that have been told about this in the last few months.”

“Assuming that you are right, you know I am still not willing to make the girls get up on the stand if there is a chance that I am going to emotionally damage them for the rest of their lives,” Ingram replied. He said both the prosecutor and his own attorney had told them this might happen. Besides, he still believed that he was repressing material that could explain everything. “Let’s even look at the guys that go through, like, Vietnam,” he added. “They hide a lot of those memories.”

“Maybe somebody can blank out one event that was just life-threatening to them, terrifying, disgusting beyond belief,” Ofshe conceded. “Nobody can blank out as many events as
you think you blanked out—it has never happened,” Ofshe went on. “Paul, everything that you have told me this evening adds up to one thing. There exists a process that you have learned to use that allows you to invent images that are consistent with what you think should be happening.”

Ingram was unmoved.

Two months later, however, in his prison cell, he reconsidered. He had been keeping a log in which he divided his memories into three categories: “Definitely Happened,” “Not So Definitely Happened,” and “Not Sure.” At the time of his plea, most of his memories had been lodged in the first category, but afterward they began an insidious migration into the other two. On the morning of July 19, 1989, the anxiety that had been building within him reached a crisis. While he was praying, he later related, he heard a murmur, “Let go of the rope.” A deep feeling of peace settled over him. His mind began to clear. Suddenly, he could see that all the visualizations of rituals and abuse had been fantasies, not actual memories. He no longer believed that he was a satanist or a child abuser, or even the victim of child abuse himself. The experience approximated for him a religious conversion. He wrote in his Bible, “PRI DIED TO SELF 7-19-89.”

Ingram got a new lawyer, who filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea on the grounds that he had been coerced in the course of being interrogated and had given incriminating testimony while in a trancelike state. Unfortunately, it was too late to stop the train that Ingram boarded when he pleaded guilty. All the lawyer could do was to petition for leniency at the sentencing hearing, which took place in April of 1990.

“I’m Ericka Ingram. I was the daughter of Paul Ingram,” Ericka stated in a surprise appearance at the hearing. Ericka wore a simple, pale dress, and she looked wan and stricken. She asked the judge to impose the greatest possible sentence.
Otherwise, “I believe he will either kill me or Julie,” she warned. “He destroyed me and Julie’s life and our entire family, and he doesn’t care. He is obviously a very dangerous man.” As she spoke, Schoening and Vukich sat in the back of the court and wept openly.

When Ericka finished, the judge asked Paul Ingram if he had anything to say.

Ingram rose and said in a clear voice, “I stand before you, I stand before God. I have never sexually abused my daughters. I am not guilty of these crimes.” The judge showed no interest in this change of heart. Ordinarily, under the worst circumstances, Ingram would serve thirty-three to forty-three months for each count, running concurrently, which meant that he would be in prison for no more than three and a half years. The standards in the state of Washington are such that most first-time sex offenders receive a six-month sentence if they agree to urdergo treatment—a sentence Ingram had already served. The judge agreed with the prosecutor, however, that this was not an ordinary circumstance. Moreover, because Ingram was now saying that the events didn’t happen, the judge believed that treatment would not be helpful. He sentenced Ingram to twenty years in prison, with the possibility of parole after twelve years.
^*

When the county prosecutor’s office dropped the charges against Rabie and Risch, Ericka asked an attorney named Thomas Olmstead to file a suit against Thurston County for negligence in failing to supervise Ingram and Rabie,
^†
Ericka
has asserted that some thirty satanists controlled the county and conspired to derail the case. Undersheriff McClanahan and Detective Schoening are among those Ericka has named as satanists. “How high does this go?” asks Olmstead, who is a fundamentalist Christian and a former FBI agent. “The governor? Who knows?”

Sandy Ingram, now divorced from Paul, has changed her name and lives in another town with Mark. Both Chad and Paul Ross have married and moved away. Ericka is living in California. Julie remains in the Olympia area, but she now uses a different name. The Ingram family, such as it was, has been destroyed. In the end, what had once held them together, their memories, is what blew them apart.

Jim Rabie and Ray Risch still live in Olympia, although they are widely believed to be guilty men who got away with heinous crimes. Risch works in the same automobile repair shop where he worked before, but he is rarely given any supervisory tasks. “There isn’t a day that goes by that it doesn’t get brought up,” he says. “The cloud is still there. It’s not a good memory.” His wife reports that his mind is still scattered, and that it has been hard to keep up payments on their mobile home.

After abandoning his lobbying consultancy, Rabie worked for several months for a friend who owns a carpet shop, until customer complaints about his presence began to hurt business. Now he has a job with a vehicle-transport company. His legal bills, along with Risch’s—which Rabie helped to pay-have exceeded ninety thousand dollars. Both men sued the county for false arrest and malicious prosecution, but their suit was dismissed by the United States District Court.
^*
At this reporter’s request, Rabie agreed to take another lie detector
test, which covered the same material as the one he had failed earlier. This time, he passed it.

As for the investigators, most of them have not altered their views. Undersheriff McClanahan, despite being denounced himself as a satanist by Ericka, remains unswayed. “Satanic abuse is real,” he contends. “This case proves it.”

Indeed, with Ingram’s conviction, the case has become a primary exhibit in the SRA controversy. On December 2, 1991, many of the principals met in a television studio in New York. “Today, this woman will come face to face with the man that she says sexually tortured her in satanic rituals for seventeen years. A show you don’t want to miss,” said Sally Jessy Raphaël to her television audience. The camera focused on Ericka Ingram, wearing a cobalt-blue sweater and sitting meekly in a chair beside Raphaël. Arguably, it was shows like this one that created the Ingram fantasy in the first place.

“They were people in the community, like policemen,” Ericka said as she described the cult. “There were some judges, doctors, lawyers. Different people in the community that had high political standings.”

“What happened at the rituals?” Raphaël asked, her voice full of prodding compassion. “I know it must be pretty awful, but what happened?”

“First they would start with just, like, chanting,” Ericka said. “Sometimes they would kill a baby.”

“A baby?” Raphaël echoed. “Where would they get babies?”

“Sometimes people in the cult would have them just for this.”

“Did this happen to you?” Raphaël asked. “You remember being on a table and people having sex with you?”

Ericka nodded.

“Wow. What else?”

“Sometimes they would drink blood,” Ericka said. The members of the audience looked at her gravely and occasionally
shook their heads in dismay. “One time, when I was sixteen, they gave me an abortion. I was five months pregnant. And the baby was still alive when they took it out. And they put it on top of me and then they cut it up. And then, when it was—when it was dead, then people in the group ate parts of it.” A gasp arose from the thrilled audience. Later Ericka asserted, “I spent most of my life in the hospital. And that is true. And, I mean, doctors were just, like, looking at my body, just going—
ugh
!”

Raphaël introduced Jim Rabie, who was there trying to reclaim some of his reputation in the only forum available. “He says, even though he is innocent, his life, and that of his family, has been permanently damaged,” Raphaël said.

“It destroyed a business that I had,” Rabie explained, his voice cracking. “It has caused my family untold heartache.”

But the audience wasn’t interested in Rabie’s problems. “Ericka, I feel so sorry for you,” one woman in the audience said. “I have no idea why she would ever bring up this guy if he was not guilty.”

Richard Ofshe was also on the show, matched against Bob Larson, a radio evangelist who has built his ministry by spreading satanic hysteria. “What is this whole thing about satanism, Dr. Ofshe?” Raphaël asked.

“Right now, there is an epidemic of these kinds of allegations in the country,” Ofshe said. “They are totally unproven.”

“There’s an epidemic of satanism in the country, not allegations,” Larson interjected.

“Why would you say there is this epidemic, as a sociologist?” Raphaël asked.

“In part because it’s a way of reasserting the coherence and authority of fundamentalist perspectives in society,” Ofshe said.

“All right, let’s talk to Bob,” said Raphaël, turning to the evangelist, who has thinning reddish-blond hair and a beard. “Bob, you’ve got a man here saying that in no case—and there
have been one hundred court cases, I believe, maybe even more, involving satanic rituals in our country—in no case has there ever been any evidence, hard-core evidence, nor has anyone, except Ericka’s father, ever said that they’ve done that. In other words, there’s never been a confession.”

“He’s only technically correct,” Larson said.

“Technically correct,” Raphaël repeated flatly. When Larson cited the enormous number of people in therapy who have complained of satanic abuse, Raphaël asked again, “Why, if there are all these people under care, why isn’t there one shred of evidence?”

“The difficulty is that the evidentiary basis of the justice system is not commensurate with what you deal with in a therapeutic process,” Larson said. “When are we going to start believing people who come forward like this, instead of putting them through some type of legal litmus test?” One supposes that the “legal litmus test” he was referring to was the need for Ericka to provide credible testimony in order to convict Rabie of the crimes she accuses him of. Larson’s voice rose in indignation. “These are people who suffered the most incredible abuse!” he cried. “My God! This woman has been defecated on, urinated on—”

“By him!” Ericka cried, pointing at the hapless Rabie.

“She’s experienced bestiality and group sex by this man!” Larson said as he laid a pastoral hand on Ericka’s knee. “When are we going to start believing the victims?”

“Believe us!” Ericka cried.

^*
Ingram’s motion to withdraw his guilty plea was rejected by the appellate court in January of 1992, and by the Washington State Supreme Court in September of that same year. At this writing, the case is in federal court, but Ingram’s chances there would appear to be slim, since the courts have shown little interest in granting an appeal to anyone who has pleaded guilty.

^†
The suit was still pending as this was written, in September 1993.

^*
It was before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals at this writing.

Epilogue