Remembering Satan

by Lawrence Wright

  “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.”

  “God’s given you the tools to do this,” 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 instantly went 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. “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 look to your left and there he is.”

  “He’s—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,” said Ingram. He then mentioned the name of another sheriff’s deputy who might also be in the room. For some reason, the investigators had no interest in this other man.

  “Go back to that person who’s standing there with his penis sticking up in the air, Paul,” said Schoening. “What’s he doing to your daughter?”

  “Getting down on his knees,” said Ingram. “He’s behind my daughter.”

  “Is he puttin’ his penis in her?”

  “Uh, her legs are close together, but maybe she’s being rolled over onto her side.”

  “What she saying, Paul?”

  “She’s saying no.…”

  “He’s rolling her over,” said Vukich. “What’s happening next?”

  “She can’t go over on her back ’cuz her legs and her hands are there. It looks like she might have something around her mouth.”

  “A gag?”

  “Like a gag,” Ingram agreed.

  “Who put that on her?”

  “I might have. I—I don’t know.…”

  “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.”

  “Any marks on his back?”

  “He’s hairy.”

  “Does he have any jewelry on?” Vukich asked.

  “May have a watch on his right hand.” Rabie is left-handed and wears his watch on his right hand.

  “What time does it say?”

  “Uh, two o’clock.”

  “How close are you to him?” asked Peterson.

  “I’m pretty close.”

  “How are you dressed?”

  “I don’t think I’ve got anything on.”

  “Do you have an erection?”

  “I think so.…”

  “Are you rubbing yourself against her?”

  “Uh, yes.…”

  “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, arrived after dinner in response to Ingram’s request, 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 told the detectives. “Like a horror movie.”

  4

  Thursday, December 1, was a busy day for Jim Rabie. For the past year he had been working as a lobbyist for the Washington State Law Enforcement Association and serving as the lieutenant governor of the state Kiwanis organization. That day Rabie had three Kiwanis meetings in three different cities, beginning early in the morning and not finishing until late that night. By mid-afternoon he was exhausted. He suffers from narcolepsy and usually requires two naps a day to keep himself going; in fact, that disease, and his tendency to fall asleep at inopportune moments, had caused him to retire from the sheriff’s office in 1987, after fourteen years in the department.

  Rabie was a sociable type with a plump face and sleepy eyes. At the age of forty-five, he still had dark and curly hair. Although it was not really detectable, one leg was an inch and a half shorter than the other one, the result of a car wreck when he was a child, and he wore a built-up shoe. He didn’t limp, but he couldn’t move around very quickly. Most people who knew him thought of Rabie as a pleasant, decent fellow who liked a joke and usually wore a smile.

  At three o’clock he stopped by the office of his insurance agent to pay off a bill. He asked the agent, who was a friend, if he had heard about the arrest of Paul Ingram. Rabie himself had gotten the news from a source in the department. He was dumbfounded, he told the agent, because Paul was such a close friend—Ingram had been Rabie’s best man at his wedding, and Rabie had been Ingram’s campaign manager when he made a losing bid for the state legislature, in 1984. “It just goes to show you, child abuse can happen anywhere,” Rabie said.

  The agent remarked that it must be frightening for a cop to face prison. Rabie said that the machinery of law enforcement had to be very careful when arresting a police officer, and for that reason he thought that the case against Ingram must be compelling. But he was puzzled by the fact that Paul seemed to be “playing games” with the investigators. When Rabie himself was investigating sexual abuse, a suspect who confessed was usually given a “safe to be at large” evaluation and let out of jail after a day or two. A suspect who was not cooperative was probably “in denial,” Rabie said. Such a person would be sent to a state institution for evaluation and faced a likely prison sentence. As a cop, Ingram would know this.

  The two men then talked about other cases of abuse and agreed that in most such cases the perpetrators were people who themselves had been abused as children. Often the abuse was completely blocked out of active memory and would come to light only when a person entered therapy later in life for some sexual concern, such as frigidity. It was for that very reason, said Rabie, that he lobbied successfully to get the statute of limitations changed 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.)

  The agent decided to take a break and smoke a cigarette, so he walked outside with Rabie. The two men stood on the sidewalk shooting the breeze. Later, the agent would try to reconstruct the conversation, which at the time seemed interesting but certainly not consequential. He remembered that Rabie said that Joe Vukich was the investigating officer and that Vukich might “go too deep.” It was a mistake to try to get all the details of a crime, many of which wouldn’t be needed to gain a conviction. Rabie also mentioned that he had “an affinity” for abusers. He understood how they felt. It was that very quality, Rabie believed, that had helped him elicit confessions.

  When the agent finished his cigarette, he went back to work, and Rabie drove over to the County Seat Deli, a cozy spot across the street from the courthouse complex that was always full of lawyers, judges, deputies, clerks, and secretaries who work at the county offices. At five o’clock he was meeting his wife, Ruth, and his friend Ray Risch for a bi
te to eat.

  Risch, who was forty-one in 1988, was six feet four and thin, with a dark beard. He wore tortoiseshell glasses that were always sliding down his nose, and he had a shy habit of laughing and looking up and away—an oddly demure gesture in such a large man. He never seemed to know what to do with his long limbs, so when he was relaxing he had 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 were together, one couldn’t help thinking of Laurel and Hardy. Everyone who knew them would remark that Rabie and Risch were pals; they met for lunch nearly every day and often got together for dinner with their wives. Both were avid readers and like to work on cars. Rabie was the talker. Risch liked to listen and laugh.

  The table talk, of course, was about their friend Paul Ingram. Ruth Rabie was a corrections officer in the Thurston County jail, where Ingram was being held. A firm, quiet grandmother who was looking forward to retirement, Ruth had been married to Jim for nearly twelve years. They had met when she joined the women’s reserves in the sheriff’s department. As a jailer, Ruth privately worried that Ingram was going to do something crazy that would cause him to be killed. This was just a wild and irrational thought, since Ingram was on suicide watch and being carefully monitored, but it was so strange having a friend and a high official in the sheriff’s office suddenly behind bars.

  Jim said that earlier he had 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, he had found that many awful things could go on in a family without being acknowledged, even by the victims.

  “There are two Paul Ingrams,” Ray Risch said enigmatically. Jim asked what he meant by that. Ray said that every police officer has two personalities: one the ordinary civilian guy, the other the authoritative person behind the badge. The same was true of Jim when he was in the department, Ray observed.