Remembering Satan

by Lawrence Wright

  “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,” said Chad. He said the witch’s visits occurred once or twice a week, lasting for half an hour, until they moved out of the old house. “I would hear the whistle; I would feel the pressure on my chest; I would be on the floor; but I would never feel myself getting out of bed, moving to the floor, and then I would be on the floor and then I would be back in bed, but never feel myself going from the floor back to the bed.” As for his brother, Chad recalled that when the witch was in the room, Paul Ross would be gone, “but then when I would wake up, I would look and he would be there.”

  “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?”

  “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 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 Chad’s 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 thinkin’? 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 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 those 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?”

  When he came to the interview, Chad had been threatened with arrest. Now that he had accepted his status as victim, he was being offered a view of the rewards he might claim. Peterson urged him to “go public” with his new discovery. “Wouldn’t it feel great to say this was real—it’s not a dream?” said Peterson.

  “That’s why 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 employees of the sheriff’s office. 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, Chad examined the pictures again.

  “Who’s the face in the dream?” asked Vukich, when the tape was turned back on.

  “Jim Rabie,” Chad 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.”

  6

  Loreli Thompson has a playful manner, but she hides her eyes behind dark, silver-rimmed aviator glasses. As a young girl, growing up in Olympia, Thompson had been drawn to puzzles of every kind—codes, crosswords, mysteries—and by junior high she had decided she wanted to be a detective. When she finally achieved her goal, in November of 1984, she was the first female detective in the county. While she was still a rookie, she encountered her first pedophile, a man who had molested several young girls in an apartment complex. Thompson persuaded him to confess. She discovered that she had an instinct for sex crimes, one of the most puzzling departments of criminal behavior. In order to better understand the motivations of sexual offenders, Thompson got a master’s degree in clinical psychology, which was added to her master’s in criminal justice. Her reports are full of telling psychological observations.

  She saw every kind of sexual offender, from sadistic rapists to exhibitionists and voyeurs. In many cases she found that an understanding pat on the hand would help lead the perpetrator to her ultimate goal, which was to persuade him to confess. Thompson tries to keep her cases out of the courtroom. It was often difficult for juries to make sense of sex crimes or sometimes even to believe that crimes had taken place, especially when there was little evidence other than an accusation. When the accusation came from a child, juries tended to be even more skeptical. Thompson had seen how easily confused children could become in the presence of a forceful defense attorney; moreover, most sexual
offenses against very young children are digital or oral, which means that there is characteristically very little evidence, no sperm or scarring. In Washington State, there are three categories of what is still informally called statutory rape. First-degree rape or molestation of a child pertains to children under twelve and a perpetrator who is more than twenty-four months older than the victim—for example, an eleven-year-old girl who engages in sex with a fourteen-year-old boy. Second-degree rape involves children who are twelve and thirteen. Third-degree rape (the offense Paul Ingram was charged with, because these alleged offenses are ones that took place within the statute of limitations) occurs in the case of an underaged victim and a perpetrator who is more than four years older; a fifteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old cannot legally have sex in Washington, although two fifteen-year-olds can.

  After Jim Rabie’s retirement, Loreli Thompson came to be regarded as the best sex-crimes investigator in the county. Other departments would sometimes consult her, especially in crimes against children, and by the time the Ingram case came into her life, she had already seen perhaps three hundred child victims in Thurston County. Some were as young as two years old. Many had been repeatedly molested for years. Because of her reputation and skill, Thompson was given the delicate task of interviewing Julie. In her experience, there was nothing very unusual about two little girls growing up in a house with a pedophile. She witnessed 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 more success in getting statements out of four-year-old children who had been raped and beaten. 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.

  All the familiar road signs of a typical police investigation had been turned about. The detectives were groping to understand what was going on in their community—and, indeed, in their own department. The alleged central perpetrator was admitting to more depraved crimes than the victims were charging (until this point, neither of the Ingram daughters had said anything about satanic abuse). It seemed nearly impossible to coordinate all the accusations into a coherent set of charges. The investigators realized that they were probing into strange and unsettling territory. Jaded cops who regularly visited the worst precincts of the human psyche were thoroughly shaken by the emerging revelations of the Ingram case. The memories that Paul Ingram was producing were at once disjointed and intricately detailed, like shards of a shattered vase. Ingram could describe the ornate fragments, but he seemed to have no way of piecing them back together. 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 the nationwide satanic conspiracy.

  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.