The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  The group’s fears grew increasingly apocalyptic. “It will get so bad that parents will eat their children,” church leader James Ellison predicted. “Death in the major cities will cause rampant diseases and plagues. Maggot-infested bodies will lie everywhere. Earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, and other natural disasters will grow to gigantic proportions. Witches and satanic Jews will offer people up as sacrifices to their gods, openly and proudly; blacks will rape and kill white women and will torture and kill white men; homosexuals will sodomize whoever they can. Our new government will be a part of the one-world Zionist Communist government. All but the elect will have the mark of the Beast.”72

  The CSA began to hatch plans for terrorist attacks, and Noble nearly bombed a gay church in Kansas City, discovering only at the last moment that he could not bring himself to do it. On April 19, 1985, the group found itself under siege by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The four-day standoff ended after Noble, increasingly disillusioned with the church, helped negotiate a surrender.

  You can take that as a lesson about the dark places where ideas like Todd’s can lead. But before you draw too neat a conclusion from the story, you should think about what happened to another two people who encountered John Todd and his worldview.

  Increasingly attracted to far-right politics, Randy and Vicki Weaver moved from Iowa to the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, where they planned to live as self-sufficiently as possible. Then the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms entrapped Randy on a minor weapons violation and offered him a deal: The charge would be dismissed if he became an informant in the local white separatist movement. Instead Weaver moved his family to a cabin in the wilderness and failed to appear for his trial. It is possible that he deliberately decided to skip it, but he probably wouldn’t have shown up either way—he had been sent the wrong date.

  When federal agents arrived on the scene, they shot the family dog. The Weavers’ son, Sam, not realizing what was going on, fired a shot in response and then fled, at which point an agent shot him in the back. Kevin Harris, a visiting friend, fired at the attacking cops, killing a U.S. marshal. The FBI’s snipers went on to wound both Randy and Harris, and one of the agents killed Vicki, firing a bullet into her head while she held her ten-month-old daughter.

  The ensuing standoff lasted eleven days. After Weaver surrendered, he and Harris were found not guilty of murder. A subsequent internal report concluded that the FBI had violated the Weavers’ constitutional rights, though the man who killed Vicki Weaver never went to jail.

  If the story of the CSA shows how a marginal group’s paranoia about the government can drive it to violence,73 the tale of the Weavers shows how the government’s paranoia about marginal groups can drive it to violence. The FBI looked at a family with fringe views and perceived a potential CSA, and as a result a woman, a boy, a dog, and one of the government’s own agents were killed.

  The problem of Ruby Ridge was repeated a year later, when the ATF raided the Mount Carmel Center, home of the Branch Davidian sect, near Waco, Texas. The feds believed that the church was stockpiling weapons (and claimed, in a request for military support, that its members might have been manufacturing meth as well). It was an ill-conceived operation from the beginning: There was little evidence that the group’s weapons were illegal, there was no evidence at all of the drug lab, and in any event there were several less confrontational ways to arrest the sect’s leader. The situation went south when the Davidians shot at the raiders, killing four agents and starting a fifty-day standoff that ended with an FBI raid, a fire, and nearly all the Davidians dead.

  While the feds confronted the Davidians, the media spread stories, some exaggerated and others simply false, of sexual depravity, weird rituals, and a plot against the outside world—the same sorts of fables that the medieval authorities told about Jews and heretics. The Davidians’ paranoia was no match for the paranoia of their enemies.

  By that time the fear of Satanists had spread far beyond the evangelical world, mixing with three secular scares to create a new face for the Enemy Within.

  The first of those scares was the country’s sudden obsession with missing children, an interest reflected in the new practice of printing lost kids’ faces on milk cartons. The fear began with some high-profile kidnappings and murders—the Atlanta child killings of 1979 to 1981, the 1979 disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz, the 1981 abduction and decapitation of six-year-old Adam Walsh—and it was amplified by misleading statistics that often appeared in the media. An estimate of the number of missing children, for example, might include runaways, teens who returned home within twenty-four hours, and kids taken by parents in custodial disputes. The number of children abducted by strangers was much smaller. But the missing-children cases discussed in the news—and in the movies, and on TV shows, and in novels about child-grabbing conspiracies—highlighted the more rare and horrifying cases.74

  The panic may have reached its most ridiculous moment on April 15, 1986, when police raided the home of the punk rock performer Jello Biafra, searching for evidence to support the obscenity charges that would soon hit Biafra’s band. One of his roommates had been collecting and posting pictures from milk cartons, and the decor alarmed an officer. “What are all those pictures of missing milk carton kids doing on your kitchen wall?” the cop asked the singer. “Do you know where they are?”75

  The second scare was a surge in charges of child molestation. Aware that such crimes had frequently been swept under the rug in the past, many advocates were loath to disbelieve any allegations that came their way, even if they contained obvious fantasies and even if they did not emerge until after the kids had undergone lengthy sessions with sketchy therapists. While that impulse was found in parts of the feminist movement, another source of the fear had a more antifeminist cast. For many people, day care centers represented women’s willingness to abandon their children. With that mind-set, they found it easy to believe that terrible abuses were taking place behind day care center doors.

  The most infamous episode involved the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, a case study in how interrogators can manipulate small children. Kids were badgered when they said they hadn’t been victimized, and they were praised when they said what the interviewer wanted to hear. The more the children said, the more positive reinforcement they got, and the questioners didn’t seem to mind when the tales grew outlandish. One child, Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker report in their book on the case, began by saying she had no secrets to share, then eventually declared that she had been raped. After more days of questioning, she said “she was forced to drink [a teacher’s] urine and to consume his feces covered with chocolate sauce.” With time the girl “was talking about animals being slaughtered at the school and about how she was taken to a ‘mansion’ to be molested,” about adults “forcing her to take drugs, about fellating animals, about trips to a church and ‘devil land,’ and about being made to touch dead people.”76

  The members of the press were initially credulous about the claims. Tom Jarriel, previously ABC’s chief White House correspondent, described McMartin as “a sexual house of horrors” in a 1984 report for the show 20/20.77 Even when the case against the alleged molesters started to fall apart, similar witch hunts erupted in other locations without much public objection. Indeed, when prominent figures did urge caution or challenge unlikely evidence, they often found themselves accused of participating in the crimes themselves.

  If you joined or led the attacks, on the other hand, you weren’t likely to pay a penalty. One politician who oversaw two overreaching child-abuse prosecutions was a Miami prosecutor named Janet Reno. In 1993, having made a name for herself, Reno went on to become the country’s attorney general; one of her first acts in that office was to approve the FBI raid that brought the federal standoff with the Branch Davidians to a fiery end. She had given the order, she explained, because she had been told that “babies were being beaten” within the co
mpound.78

  From mid-September 1986 to mid-February 1987, one sociologist reported, “Popular magazines published an average of one story about child abuse, child molestation, or missing children each week.”79 Add a third secular scare—the anticult agitation that had been bubbling since the 1970s—and the culture was receptive to the idea that a network of Satanic sects was engaged in the ritual abuse and slaughter of innocent children.

  To see how much of the Todd/Warnke worldview the mainstream had absorbed, consider the special report that 20/20 devoted to the subject in 1985. The show’s anchor, Hugh Downs, declares at the start that “police have been skeptical when investigating these acts, just as we are in reporting them. But there is no question that something is going on out there.”80 Then Tom Jarriel starts describing that something. A drug-related killing in which the murderer appeared to have Satanic leanings. Reports of animal mutilations around the country, which “often” were “clearly used in some kind of bizarre ritual” but have “no official explanation.” An Alabama investigation of “what appears to have been a ritual” with “various Satanic paraphernalia, including pictures of the devil.” And then there’s the “Satanic graffiti” that’s “turning up on public buildings and abandoned buildings, where police suspect secret meetings are being held.” The camera zeroes in on several specimens of the graffiti, including an eye in a pyramid, which Jarriel describes as “the evil eye.”

  From there we go to a potted explanation of who Satan is, a long clip from the movie Rosemary’s Baby (in which “modern Satanism was shockingly dramatized”), and an interview with Mike Warnke, uncritically identified as “a former Satanist,” who displays some suitably spooky-looking Devil-worship paraphernalia. We are told that a teenager hanged himself after writing on his body “666,” “Satan lives,” and “I’m coming home, master.” Then we wade deeper into conspiracy territory, with statements from two police officers, Sandi Gallant of San Francisco and Dale Griffis of Tiffin, Ohio. “We have kids being killed,” Griffis intones gravely. “We have people missing in America. We have our own MIAs right here.” Not content to invoke the ghost of Vietnam, he adds, “We have cattle being killed. We have all types of perversion going on.”

  A trip to a shopping mall reveals “how easy it is for children, or adults for that matter, to get their hands on Satanic material.” The video store, we see, stocks a lot of horror movies. (Cut to Warnke. “If the devil has PR, then it is cinema,” he says.) The mall bookstore sells Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible and other occultist texts. And the music store is filled with heavy metal albums, plus records that have what “some believe” are backward Satanic references. (Cut to Chris Edmonds, who demonstrates the “sweet Satan” allegedly hidden in “Stairway to Heaven.”)

  We hear about a grisly murder committed by a teenager who was interested in The Satanic Bible. An assistant attorney general in Maine condemns the book as “dangerous.” We get a brief sketch of the Church of Satan, and the narrator notes that police have never found a link between the religion and Satanic crimes. “However,” Jarriel adds as we see some old documentary footage of a Church of Satan service, “some incidents described to us by witnesses from around the country are strikingly similar to these ritualistic scenes.”

  Finally the show tackles the topic of underground Satanic cults. These, we’re told, are linked to crimes . . . maybe. “Nationwide, police are hearing strikingly similar horror stories,” Jarriel tells us. He acknowledges that “not one has ever been proved,” and then he plunges into the unproved cases, as alleged participants and their relatives describe the murders that the cults supposedly force children to commit. Two boys reenact the reported ritual with a knife and a doll. Jarriel gives us a “checklist” of “Satanic practices to look for,” from sexual abuse to cannibalism to cremation. Cremation could explain why we never actually find the bodies of the sacrifice victims, Jarriel informs us: They’ve been burned. But “so far police have failed to make the connection.”

  At the end of the report, Barbara Walters pronounces the story “terrifying.” It is rather terrifying that Hugh Downs believed the 20/20 team had “been skeptical,” given that the reporters apparently failed to interview a single skeptical voice. If you look past the program’s fearmongering tone to see what the show actually demonstrated, you get this:

  • Certain segments of pop culture like to play around with Satanic imagery.

  • Disturbed people who commit crimes sometimes like to spout Satanic mumbo jumbo.

  • There are many unsolved animal mutilations around the country, and some people think Satanists may have something to do with it.

  • There is a group called the Church of Satan, which no one has ever credibly connected to a ritual crime.

  • Some children claim to have been forced to participate in murderous Satanic rituals.

  The program did not distinguish between pop-culture material that presents itself as pro-Satan, such as LaVey’s bible, and material that denounces the Devil, such as The Exorcist.81 The program did not explore whether it was Satanism that drew those criminals toward homicide or, as seems more likely, someone who already has homicidal tendencies might also to be attracted to the idea of worshipping evil. The program did not mention that scientists had been investigating animal mutilations since the 1970s and consistently concluded that the great majority of the beasts had died of natural causes. The only item on the list that seems to support the conspiracy narrative is the last one, in which kids become cult murderers, and it has the disadvantage of relying on claims that almost certainly were not true. The bodies of the alleged victims were never discovered, and we’ve seen in the McMartin case how children can be guided to level outlandish charges. Indeed, the McMartin case itself eventually degenerated into conspiracy theories about a secret Satanic cult.

  As early as 1974, John Todd had been promoting the idea that Satanists were kidnapping young people for ritual sacrifices.82 Now a widely respected news program on a major television network was broadcasting the legend to an audience far larger than the crowd at the Open Door Church. Many more programs followed: Over the next four years, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, and Sally Jessy Raphael all did shows on the Satanic menace. (Warnke was a repeat guest.) Geraldo Rivera devoted at least three broadcasts to the topic. “Satanic cults!” he announced in one of them. “Every hour, every day, their ranks are growing. Estimates are there are over one million Satanists in this country. The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secret network. . . . The odds are this is happening in your town.”83 Charles Manson, Rivera averred in another show, was “reportedly linked to the Devil-worship underground.”84

  Some cops were getting in on the act, too. In 1989, an FBI agent complained in Police Chief magazine about “a flood of law enforcement seminars and conferences” about occult crimes, where police would hear talks about heavy metal, Dungeons & Dragons, and “satanic groups involved in organized conspiracies, such as taking over day care centers, infiltrating police departments, and trafficking in human sacrifice victims.” Sometimes, he added, the presenters would even invoke the “ ‘Big Conspiracy’ theory, which implies that satanists are responsible for such things as Adolf Hitler, World War II, abortion, pornography, Watergate, and Irangate, and have infiltrated the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, and the White House.”85

  One new fashion in Big Conspiracy circles was “The W.I.C.C.A. Letters,” purportedly the minutes of a meeting of a “Witches International Coven Council Association” in Mexico in 1981. According to the Protocols-like document, “decoded” and circulated by a member of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, the witches’ plans included “infiltrating boys’/girls’ clubs and big sister/brother programs,” “infiltrating schools, having prayers removed, having teachers teach about drugs, sex, freedoms,” “instigating and promoting rebellion against parents and all authority,” and changing the country’s laws to facilitate “removing children from [the] home environment and pl
acing them in our foster homes.”86 In one of Geraldo Rivera’s broadcasts, a California cop invoked the letters’ claims as though they were demonstrably true.

  John Todd continued his sexually aggressive ways. In 1984, living in Louisville, Kentucky, he molested a niece, a crime that led to five years’ probation. In 1987, living in Columbia, South Carolina, he started inviting female college students to work for a publishing company that he claimed to be launching. One applicant was invited to “role-play” different situations with Todd, an activity that ended with him forcing her to perform fellatio. Another woman thought she was applying for a job that paid $50,000 a year. When she met with Todd, he demanded sex, saying, “What do you think the $50,000 is for?”87 He then pulled a knife, forced her to take three pills, and raped her. Before she left, he warned her that a network of men was protecting him. “If you try to hurt me I could have you killed,” he said.88

  With that, Todd was arrested and charged with criminal sexual assault. Two teenagers who had been taking karate lessons from Todd came forward to say he had molested them too; their accusation led to two additional charges of committing lewd acts on children. He attempted suicide twice while awaiting trial, and in January 1988, after he was convicted on the rape charge, he tried to kill himself again. Then he started filing lawsuits against the authorities. In the first suit, he demanded that the government return property it had seized as evidence, including a pair of women’s pink panties.