First, however, Ingram wanted to clear up the confusion he felt about being interrogated by his fellow officers. He had been crying and praying in his cell, and he expressed his anxiety that Schoening and Vukich doubted his sincerity. “I really want you to—to believe that I’m telling you the truth.”
“Why is that important to you?” Peterson asked.
“ ’Cuz I don’t think Brian believes me,” said Ingram.
“Their job is not to believe you,” Peterson said bluntly. “It’s to try and get as much information as possible.”
“And I’m trying to—to prove that I am being cooperative,” Ingram stuttered. “There’s—I—I’m—I truly am.”
Schoening responded in the same personal, emotional vein. “I guess what my feeling is … even this morning we gained some additional information, from Julie, okay, and I guess what I’m saying is … she has a good reason to suppress this crime—more than you do, Paul. I mean, this has really happened to her.”
What troubled Joe Vukich is that Ingram was a cop, “and as cops we have a very factual, very punctual, very data-minded frame of reference, if you will.”
“Uh-huh,” Ingram agreed.
“And that’s what makes it hard for us at least to comprehend that you can’t recall this, because I’ll bet you could go back and take a citation you wrote ten years ago … you’d pretty much remember what happened that day.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. In a lot of cases I could do that.”
“That’s what confuses me about this,” Vukich continued. “What happened with Julie happened just last month. It’s—it’s very real, it’s very recent. Granted, it’s very hard to talk about.”
“I can’t see it,” Ingram protested. “I can’t visualize it in my own mind.”
“Your wife called this morning and tells me that Chad is really, really upset and shook about all this and he wants to talk to me as soon as he can,” said Schoening. “What all he’ll have to say I don’t know, but it sounds to me like we’re probably talkin’ about all four of your kids, maybe all five of ’em. Your wife is sittin’ there telling me how she can stand by ya and still love ya. I don’t know why she should.… You’re just tryin’ to keep from tellin’ any more than you have to tell.… It’s kinda like a nonadmission admission.”
Peterson began asking Ingram to describe his sex life with Sandy, which Ingram did with some enthusiasm.
“Did you ever use alcohol as part of your lovemaking?” Peterson asked.
“No, I—it would seem to me that alcohol would sting,” Ingram said, surprised.
“It was pointed out that you used to drink quite a bit,” Peterson said, making himself clear. “Someone said you used to have quite an appetite for beer.”
“Oh,” said Ingram, “what I would do … we got an old refrigerator and put a keg of beer [in it] and we used to have poker parties at the house and I did like to come home after I’d been workin’ swing shift and sit down and have one, uh, maybe two beers.”
Now that he had mentioned the poker parties, the questioning became more focused. “Would you drink more then?” asked Schoening.
“I can’t say I never got intoxicated,” said Ingram. “But I can remember, you know, some of the guys getting pretty wasted, and over a period of four or five hours I might have four beers.”
“Where was your wife during the poker parties?” asked Peterson.
“As I recall, she would’ve gone to bed, ’cuz we’d stay up and play pretty late.”
“So the poker buddies that you played with would be who?” asked Peterson. “Friends from the department, or—”
“Yeah, most of ’em were friends from the department, or friends of theirs,” Ingram agreed. “We’d get, I don’t know, five or eight guys together.” He then named several men, most of whom were police officers. There were two names he failed to mention, a fact that would soon become significant.
“One night I won over a hundred dollars, and my wife
said, ‘Hey, that’s wrong,’ and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll play next weekend and lose it all,’ ” Ingram related. “The next weekend we played and I couldn’t lose for tryin’. It was unreal. I won about a hundred twenty-five dollars, and we just quit.”
“Were the kids aware of the poker parties?” asked Peterson.
“Oh, yeah, ’cuz we played underneath their bedrooms.”
“Anybody go up to see the kids?” asked Vukich.
“I just can’t think of anything where anybody—”
“The reason I ask, Paul, is because Julie told me about a time or two where when there was a poker party she was molested.”
“What we’re talking about, Paul, is she was molested by somebody other than you,” Schoening clarified in his rumbling voice. “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.”
Ingram gasped in surprise. “I just don’t see anything,” he said when Schoening pressed him. “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 … 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.”
Schoening’s remarks would have serious consequences, so it’s important to note the assumptions 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. There was nothing in the record at this point that reflected her terror of being stalked by a potential killer. The extrapolations about her fear of someone else were only guesswork on Schoening’s part. The terms of the investigation had been redefined, however.
“We need to protect her, Paul,” warned Vukich.
“She’s terrified, Paul,” Schoening added.
“I—I hear what you’re sayin’, but just be quiet and let me think,” Ingram pleaded.
“Apparently, it’s somebody that’s still close to you, Paul,” said Schoening, once again departing from the record. Was he guiding Ingram toward some private judgment of his own?
“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 been the one who had investigated Ericka’s prior claim of attempted rape and had decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. At that time, he held the job that Schoening had now, that of senior investigator. Rabie and Schoening had a long-standing and well-known dislike of each other. Ingram had not mentioned his name in his original list of poker players.
“Is Jim the person she’s talking about?” Vukich asked.
“Just—just don’t put words in my mouth,” Ingram responded. “Jim has some—I guess I’d say—what I consider to be unnatural sexual attractions.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“We went over to Yakima one time for something, and Jim bought some magazines, said to help him in his job when he was doing sex crimes. And he looked at ’em. I didn’t. I just don’t do that kind of thing.… Geez, I’d hate to think he’d had anything to do with my kids.”
“How would you feel if he did?”
“Anger—uh, bitterness comes in. I just, gosh …” Ingram went quiet for a moment. “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 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 facedown … kind of like she’s hogtied.”
“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. Sergeant Lynch saw him there. Schoening appeared so agitated that Lynch 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 where the interrogation was taking place, he passed Peterson coming out, his eyes streaming with tears. Peterson, so gruff, so schooled in the cruel twists of the criminal and the insane mind, had been emotionally overpowered, not only by the scenes of bondage that Ingram was describing but also by Ingram’s infuriating detachment. 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, in that same puzzled tone that was becoming unbearable for the interrogators. “I’d just hate to think of myself as a homosexual.”
“Did I hear you say that you offered your wife to Jim?” Peterson said as he came back in the room, apparently misunderstanding the gist of the conversation.
“That I offered my wife?” Ingram asked. “No, I …
Number one, my wife would—I don’t want to say she’d kill me, but she’d come close to it.”
“Have you ever had any affairs at all, Paul? Extramarital affairs?” Schoening asked.
Ingram admitted that he had had an affair. “It was right about the time Julie was born.”
This line of questioning had long since left the track of the original question of sex abuse. Without a lawyer present, the detectives and the psychologist were firing in all directions, hoping to hit some as yet unspecified target.
“Have you ever worn any of your wife’s undergarments?” asked Schoening.
“I don’t think so,” Ingram replied. “I’d say no.”
“Have you ever done any peeping?”
Ingram vividly recalled that, when he was working as a supervisor for a cleaning crew at Seattle First National Bank, every evening a woman across the street would undress in front of her window. “I’d stand up in the second-floor window and watch her,” Ingram said. “She did a little dance. It got to the point that all the women were watchin’ her, too. Finally somebody complained and the police made her close the blind.”
“Why do you think you remember some of this stuff pretty well and … don’t remember about your sons and daughters?” asked Schoening.
Ingram said he didn’t know.
“Do you think it’s because that involvement with your sons and daughters is illegal and it’s hard for you to admit to that?” asked Vukich.
“More than illegal,” said Ingram. “In my mind it’s immoral and unnatural.”
“Have you ever influenced or watched or had anything to do with your sons molesting your daughter?” asked Schoening.
“I don’t have a picture, and that’s the only way I can describe it to you.”
That question would prove to be significant later in the case, as would one that soon followed, from Dr. Peterson, who asked, “Before your conversion to Christianity, were you ever involved in any kind of 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, Schoening, Vukich, and Peterson changed their strategy. They began to concentrate on Ingram’s guilt. The mood began to change. “Do you know how badly damaged your daughter is?” asked Peterson, referring in this instance to Julie. “Eighteen years old, she’s a senior in high school, and she can’t look at wedding things.… She thinks she’s responsible for destroying your family.”
“That she’s dirty,” said Schoening.
“She shakes at the thought of having to talk about this stuff,” Peterson continued. “She’s frightened of you.”
“And she’s frightened of whoever this other person is,” Schoening added, once again hypothesizing.
“She can’t name the other person?” asked Ingram. “I don’t want to put her through this, don’t get me wrong.”
“You’re putting her through it by not recalling,” said Peterson.
“Yeah, you are, Paul, ’cuz right now she’s havin’ a difficult time talkin’ about it,” said Schoening. “You gotta help if you want this stopped or you may have either a suicidal daughter or a dead daughter.… She can’t take much more of this,
Paul. I mean, it’s all comin’ back to her and she’s havin’ a real difficult time.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“I’ve got some notes here,” said Peterson. “When she was having her period, she says you put your penis in her butt. Did you hear that? Anal sex with your daughter.”
“My kids always tell the truth,” Ingram replied.
“Why don’t you listen to what she wrote here, Paul,” said Vukich. “She says, ‘I was four years old, he would have poker game at our house and a lot of men would come over and play poker with my dad and they would all get drunk and one or two at a time would come into my room and have sex with me.’ Now, your daughter wrote that.”
“This is her writing, Paul,” echoed Schoening.
“And you told us that she’s honest,” said Vukich.
“Oh, yes, my kids are honest.” Ingram was sobbing now.
“So it’s time, Paul,” said Schoening. “Quit beatin’ around the bush and let’s get this out.”
Everyone in the room sensed that they were on the edge of a breakthrough. Between the tears, Ingram prayed aloud. He asked that his pastor be called.
“It goes back to the poker games, Paul,” Vukich reminded him as Ingram 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.”