Remembering Satan

by Lawrence Wright

  She was now almost completely alone; even her church had turned against her, and she could sense the relentless mechanism of the investigation bearing down upon her, ready to snatch her youngest child out of her hands and to grind away the small core of dignity that was left her in this sensational scandal. When she got home, she bundled Mark into the car and fled, forgetting to turn off the television in her haste. In a way, she felt, the escape was exhilarating. She had never driven even the short distance to Tacoma on her own, and now she was driving all the way across the state, through a snowstorm, to take refuge with relatives. She had never driven in snow before.

  Paul, meanwhile, had produced another memory, this one involving Sandy. “It was late 1975 or early 1976,” he told Schoening and Vukich. “I was at home with Paul Jr. and Chad while Sandy had gone shopping with the girls. It was about seven or eight at night. It was dark out and Jim Rabie, Ray Risch, and [another man] came over to the house.… Knowing that Sandy was gone, they wanted to have sex with the boys. We all went up to the main floor of the house to the first bedroom on the right and the boys undressed. I don’t remember if they undressed themselves or we undressed them, but they did get undressed. Ray had on work clothes—clean coveralls and work boots. He and Jim undressed. I don’t remember what Jim had on. Ray knelt on the floor and Paul Jr. sat on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed and leaned over and orally stimulated Ray’s penis. At the same time, Ray was fondling Paul Jr. Jim Rabie also undressed and had laid Chad on the floor on his stomach, so that he could have anal intercourse with him.… Chad would have been seven to eight and Paul would have been eleven to twelve.…

  “At this time, Sandy came home. All of a sudden. I don’t know if the dog barked or whatever, but she came home.… I think she was early.… She had on a coat and she was carrying a package or a sack and the girls were behind her and our little dachshund came in with them. She kinda said hi as she came up and then when she saw what was happening, uh, I suppose she dropped the sack and, you know, got very angry. I don’t recall the words that were said. I do recall that she was very upset and very angry. Jim Rabie grabbed her by the hair and very forceful, very angrily, almost vicious, said, ‘You can’t do anything to us. If you say anything, Paul will go to prison and your family will be embarrassed.’ And then he told her, he said: ‘I’ll kill the kids.’ ” This was a side of Rabie that Ingram had never seen before. Until now Rabie had always seemed a very gentle person.

  “How were the boys reacting while all this was going on?” asked Schoening.

  “I don’t recall,” said Ingram. “I can kinda see the girls running when they saw what was happening, when they saw the viciousness with which Jim grabbed Sandy by the hair and started screaming at her. They ran into the living room and hid. I believe I was kind of outside the room when all this was going on, and I don’t know what the boys did.”

  Rabie and Risch and the other man took Sandy downstairs, Ingram said. They stripped her and ripped up a sheet and tied her to the bed frame. “She was spread-eagle on the bed,” said Ingram. “Jim Rabie raped her first, and I recall it was vicious—you know, he wasn’t nice at all about it. And then Ray Risch raped her.” Rabie again threatened to kill the children if Sandy told.

  “After they left, I untied her and she put something over her and sat on the end of the bed,” said Ingram. “She said, ‘Why?’ ” Ingram had told her that he had gotten involved in a witchcraft ritual. “I signed a contract with them where I promised secrecy and said I wouldn’t reveal anything about the group or what they did.” It was hopeless to resist, he believed. The only way out of the cult was by death.

  “My memory is becoming clearer as I go through all this,” Ingram said at the end of the session. “It’s getting clearer as more things come out.”

  As Paul was giving his statement to detectives, Sandy was writing in her diary. “It is now Dec. 17th—I am in Spokane. Brought Mark here in case I get arrested,” she wrote. “So much has happened I don’t know if I can say it all—Jesus you know me better than I know myself—You know if all this is true. You know the truth—Please Jesus answer my hearts cry. Help me to get in touch with the truth with reality. I am afraid Jesus. I am afraid. Sometimes I am numb—sometimes I am excited about a new future.… Where have my children gone, my precious babies that I love—Forgive me Forgive me for not seeing—Oh Lord I do not understand. Help me to understand. Help! I took off my wedding ring Dec. 16th in Ellenburg.”

  8

  On December 18, Detectives Brian Schoening and Joe Vukich finally located Paul Ross, the eldest of the Ingram children. His flight from home had led him to Reno, Nevada, where he was working in a warehouse. They went by his apartment; he wasn’t home. Schoening left a note on the door asking him to call them at the motel where they were staying. He called at eight-fifteen the next morning. There was a warrant outstanding for him in Thurston County for malicious mischief—he was accused of having battered someone’s car with a baseball bat—and he wanted to know if that was why the officers had come. No, Schoening told him, there was a problem in his family. His father and two other men, whom Schoening didn’t name, were in jail, and his sisters were in protective custody. The rest of his family was safe. Schoening didn’t reveal what the charges were, but when Paul Ross met with the detectives several hours later he guessed that his father had been charged with a sexual offense.

  There are no recordings of Schoening and Vukich’s interview with Paul Ross, only notes made by Schoening and the boy’s own statements later. The detectives found Paul Ross to be hostile, bitter, and evasive. “I’d like to shoot my dad,” he admitted. “I’ve always hated him.” He said he wasn’t surprised that his father was in jail, because his father had physically abused him. Specifically, the young man recalled an incident several years before in which his father had thrown an axe at him. Ingram had been standing on a deck behind the house, and Paul Ross and Chad had been in the backyard, below him. Angry because the blade was dulled, their father had thrown the axe from the deck, and if Paul Ross hadn’t moved it would have struck him. What was significant about this memory was that, unlike so many others the detectives had heard, two other people had remembered it, and remembered it more or less the same way. Chad had said that it was a roofing axe that the boys had lent to a neighbor. It had gotten dull, which upset their father. He wanted the boys to sharpen it. Paul’s account was that he had only meant to toss the axe down to his sons and had been surprised when it landed right at the boys’ feet. He had always felt bad about the incident, he said, and supposed that this was the reason his eldest child had left home. The axe story had the feel of a normal memory; it was practically the only one in the case.

  As the one person in the family who had not been exposed to the church grapevine and who claimed not to have heard about his father’s arrest until that morning, Paul Ross was the least contaminated source the detectives had encountered. As they spoke to him, however, a now familiar fixated expression came over his face. He sat in the detectives’ motel room, staring out at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and his voice took on the monotonous quality of a trancelike state. Schoening was incredulous. It seemed as if everyone he talked to on this case fell into a trance. For him, these interviews were an emotional seesaw; whenever one of the Ingrams went robotic, Schoening would start chewing the furniture. What was driving him crazy was the absence of feeling. He was filling in the pain, the outrage, the humiliation, the horror, from his own emotional palette.

  Because the interview with Paul Ross was not recorded, one cannot know how much information the detectives fed to him, or what might have been suggested while the young man was entranced. Vukich asked what he remembered about sexual abuse from his childhood. Nothing came to mind at first. He did recall the poker parties, and he mentioned the names of several of the players, including Rabie and Risch; then he picked out their photographs and those of several others. He said that he hated Rabie. He called Risch “a gay guy.” When the detectives asked
him to explain, Paul Ross recalled an evening when he was ten or eleven years old. He heard “a muffled cry, a yelp, almost like somebody stepping on a dog’s tail.” He crept downstairs to investigate. The door to his parents’ bedroom was open just a crack. Peeking in, he saw his mother tied to the bed, “spread eagle,” with belts around her feet and what appeared to be stockings lashing her arms to the posts. “Jim Rabie was ‘screwing’ her,” Schoening’s report related, “and his dad had his ‘dick’ in her mouth.” Ray Risch and another man were “to the left, ‘jacking each other off.’ His dad came over and hit him so hard it almost knocked him out, yelled at him to leave them alone, and closed the door.” Paul Ross then got a fifth of whiskey and retreated to his room. He became an alcoholic that very night, he said.

  This story was so close to the memory that Paul had produced only a few days before. The detail about Sandy being tied to the bed was a match, almost like the axe story. And yet, if Sandy was a victim of such a brutal rape, why couldn’t she remember it? Why couldn’t Paul Ross remember his own abuse by Rabie and Risch the same night they raped his mother? What about the years of abuse his sisters endured—why didn’t he know about or remember that? He did mention one occasion when his father came into the bedroom he shared with Chad and took his younger brother out of the room in the middle of the night. The boy was crying. That was all that came to mind.

  In fact, there wasn’t a single bit of Paul Ross’s statement that the detectives could use. It was so tantalizing, so frustrating. They couldn’t charge suspects for crimes the victims couldn’t recall. If only Paul Ross could remember more, or admit that he also had been abused! As it was, Paul Ross was more of a liability than an asset to the prosecution. At one point, Schoening became so upset he backed the young man against a wall. “We know you’re a victim!” he insisted. The young man demanded a break. He said he needed to be alone. He promised that he would be back in thirty minutes. He walked out and didn’t come back.

  He did locate his mother, however, and telephoned her for the first time in two years. “Mom, I know everything that happened,” he told her, according to Sandy’s later statement. She said he related what he had said to the detectives, including the rape scene. Sandy asked Paul Ross if he had repressed these memories and then suddenly recovered them. No, her son told her, he had always remembered them, but lately he had been going to a hypnotist who was helping him remember even more.

  Sandy recalled the remark that Ericka’s friend Paula Davis had made to her that night at Denny’s when Ericka had first disclosed the abuse to her. “You’re the only one in the family who didn’t know,” Davis had said. That must have been true, Sandy realized. Now the only person in her family, except herself, who maintained that he had never been abused was nine-year-old Mark.

  On December 20, back in Olympia, Joe Vukich and Loreli Thompson met with Ericka and her advocate, Paula Davis, at the sheriff’s office. Davis, twenty-nine, was a schoolteacher who described herself as Ericka’s best friend. Under Washington state law, victims of violent or sexual crimes are entitled to have a spokesperson present at any interview. Given the victim’s state of mind, the investigators thought it appropriate to conduct the session in a special room that had been set up—ironically, by Jim Rabie—for interviews with abused children. Ericka and Paula sat in miniature chairs, amid the plastic toys and security blankets.

  Vukich asked Ericka if her brothers or her sister had ever discussed their abuse with her. “No.” Ericka was monosyllabic. Sometimes it seemed that she didn’t even hear the questions. Vukich managed to get her to say that the last time Rabie had molested her was three months earlier, in September.

  “Was your sister in the room with you?” asked Vukich.

  “No.”

  After a while, she whispered that she needed to stop for a moment. The detectives left her in the room with Paula. When Vukich glanced in through a small window in the door, he saw the two women sitting on the floor. Ericka was cuddled up in Paula’s lap, sobbing. His heart went out to her. He’d never seen a grown woman reduced to such a state.

  “Do you remember what we asked you, Ericka, about what Mr. Rabie did when he came over to the bed?” Vukich said when the interview resumed.

  Ericka sat mute, shifting in her chair and tugging at a thread on her jeans. A minute passed.

  “And this was the last week of September,” Thompson said to break the silence.

  “What was it that he did, Ericka?” Vukich asked again. “Did he make you do something to him?”

  “Yes.” She hid her face in Paula’s shoulder.

  “Did he make you touch him somewhere? You’re shaking your head. Is that yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “What part of his body did you have to touch, Ericka?” Thompson asked.

  “Can we stop for a minute? I have to go to the bathroom,” Ericka suddenly announced, and she left the room. The detectives could hear her retching in the toilet. Davis went after her. The two women were gone for some time. When they came back, Ericka handed the detectives a sheet of paper on which she had written a detailed statement. Vukich read it aloud for the record:

  I was asleep in my room in bed and heard Jim Rabie come in and that’s when I looked up and saw him. He started touching me with his hands first on the outside of my sweats, then underneath. He touched my chest and on my private parts, front and back. He inserted his fingers in my front and back private parts. He kept telling me to be quiet in a threatening voice. My mom and dad were awake someplace in the house. He forced my head to his front private part with his hands. He was very rough and hurt me with his hands. It seemed that this continued for a long time. I was scared and didn’t know what to do. He had previously threatened me that he would kill me and do worse things to me if I refused or if I told. He thrust his front private part into my mouth repeatedly for a long time. Then he ejaculated in my mouth. His pants were down, but not off. Then he started making grunting noises. Then he started touching me orally with his mouth on my chest and front and back private parts. This seemed to continue for a long time and he was very rough and hurt me. Then he stopped and said I knew what would happen if I told. Then he urinated all over my body in bed. He didn’t defecate on me this time. Later, my father came in.

  Vukich could barely control his emotions as he read this; he felt overwhelmed by the monstrousness of the scene Ericka had just described. “I think I’d like to start at the end, where you say ‘He didn’t defecate on me this time,’ ” Vukich said gently. “Were there other times when this same scenario happened where he did defecate on you?”

  “Yes.”

  When Ericka left the interview room, Vukich took her handwritten statement down the hall and threw it on his lieutenant’s desk. “The son of a bitch shit on her!” he cried. His voice was quaking. He had never felt this way about a victim before. His feelings were more those of a protective older brother, he believed, or the loving father she had apparently never had—even though he was not that much older than Ericka. When the other detectives observed how emotional Vukich became in speaking about her, they joked nervously that he was falling in love.

  The same day that Ericka was making this statement, Sandy drove back to Olympia. She had decided to leave Mark in the care of her relatives in Spokane in order to keep him out of the grasp of the Child Protective Services. She knew, however, that she wouldn’t be able to hide him forever.

  Sandy went straight to Pastor Bratun’s office. This time, Bratun was more understanding. He explained to her that when he had said she was eighty percent evil he was also saying there was a side to her that was twenty percent good. This was the side that had brought her back. This was the side that was trying to remember. To encourage her he revealed some of the new memories that Ingram was producing. Many of them concerned satanic scenes. One involved a former girlfriend of Ray Risch’s, who Paul said was the high priestess of the cult. Paul had remembered having sex with her after a ritual in a barn. He had signed an
oath in blood, pledging loyalty to the cult. If he tried to break away, his younger daughter would be killed. Sandy said she couldn’t remember any such scenes. Paul had also recalled Sandy having sex with Risch, Bratun told her. He asked if that had ever happened. Sandy said no, then hesitated. “Oh, no!” she cried, and fell forward, burying her head between her knees.

  The first memory Sandy produced resembled the scene her eldest child had described. She was not tied to the bed, however, and it was Risch having sex with her, not Rabie. Paul stood to one side, guarding the door. Then another memory surfaced. This time she was tied up, but she was on the living room floor. Rabie was there, naked, and for some reason he was on all fours, howling like a dog. Sandy then saw herself in a closet with Paul. He had hold of her hair and was hitting her with a stick of kindling. The others were in the living room, laughing at her, calling her fat. Paul pulled her out of the closet and hurled her on the bed, where Rabie and Risch had anal intercourse with her. It seemed to Sandy that these events must have happened sometime before 1978.

  After leaving Bratun’s office, Sandy returned to Spokane to spend Christmas with Mark.

  Paul Ingram had just been transferred to a jail in another county. His bail was set at $200,000. Once he was away from the daily interrogations and the constant reinforcement of the detectives and the urgings of his pastor, he began to have renewed doubts about the accuracy of some of his memories. A Christian counselor hired by Ingram’s attorney administered a series of diagnostic tests. On the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), Ingram showed himself to be adaptable, resourceful, and self-reliant, if also restless, nonconforming, and easily bored. “Individuals who have this MMPI profile often perceive the world in different and original ways,” wrote the counselor in his report. “They may be perceived as somewhat eccentric, unpredictable, or imaginative. They tend to think differently, at times negatively, and frequently are perceived as aloof, touchy, emotionally distant or apart, and preoccupied.” The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) revealed a person with an exaggerated need to be liked. Ingram showed a “rigid and tense compliance to social convention.” He was the kind of person who was prone to follow orders. People such as Ingram “tend to show a perfectionist element, and condemnation causes them considerable tension, especially if conveyed by persons in authority.… This overall cooperativeness may hide strong rebellious feelings that may occasionally break through the front of propriety and restraint. These individuals lack insight, are often indecisive, and are easily upset by deviations from their daily routine. A pattern of rigid self-control is typical, and individuals with this profile only occasionally relax the edgy tension and guarded defensiveness that conceal their anxious feelings.” The Rorschach test described a person who “has difficulty getting the whole picture.” In the opinion of the counselor, Ingram “distorts data to meet his own needs rather than showing an outright thought disorder.”