by Richard Beck
LaVey’s combination of media savvy and anti-Christian provocation was attractive to those who took him seriously and absolutely irresistible to those who did not. Hollywood took up Satanism in 1968 with Rosemary’s Baby and then again with The Exorcist in 1973. Satanism also became a regular feature of evangelical cautionary tales about the dangers of a pleasure-seeking life. Mike Warnke, who became one of the country’s most popular “Christian comedians” in the 1970s, got his start with The Satan Seller, a sensational memoir of the young Warnke’s descent into Satanism, group sex, alcohol, and drugs.70 As Satanism became a more prominent feature of the country’s secular and religious entertainments, a number of Schreiber’s prose decisions in Sybil took on increased significance. Mason’s nighttime walk with her pooping mother “began as a casual stroll” but ended as “a demonic ritual.” Hattie carried out her acts with “ritualistic deliberateness.”71 The abuse with enemas and the wooden spoon—that was another “favorite ritual.”72
Schreiber’s book never said these rituals were specifically satanic, but in the same year that Sybil was published, a psychiatrist working in British Columbia began seeing a new patient. Dr. Lawrence Pazder was in his early forties, a married Catholic with children, when he embarked on a course of intensive psychotherapy with a twenty-seven-year-old patient named Michelle Proby. He ran his psychiatric practice out of the Fort Royal Medical Centre in downtown Victoria, British Columbia, and he shared facilities with four other psychiatrists.73 In 1980, having left their respective spouses and married each other after seven years of off-and-on treatment, Pazder and Proby, the latter using the pseudonym Michelle Smith, published their coauthored account of what they had discovered together. It was called Michelle Remembers.
The book is a tour-de-force of un-self-awareness. It is, on the one hand, an unwittingly faithful document of the sequence of therapeutic disasters whereby doctor and patient came to believe that Michelle had not only been abused as a child by her psychotic mother but also that she had been handed over to an organized and secretive satanic cult whose leader was named Malachi. On the other hand, the book also fails to avoid documenting the doctor-patient love affair that grew out of therapy and served as that therapy’s true motivation and substance. Their descriptions of each other read like classroom love notes passed from one desk to another. Michelle, when she makes her first appearance in the book, is described as possessing “a heart-shaped face, a delicate mouth, and bountiful brown curls.”74 Pazder, when he makes his, is “warm, manly, soft-spoken—what people who live elsewhere consider the typical Westerner.”75 (He is also “tall, blue-eyed, and tanned even in February.”)76 When the two sit down for their first psychiatric consultation, the book records that Michelle “liked him immediately, partly because he looked nothing like her idea of a psychiatrist.” “His style was slacks and a sweater,” she writes (or he writes, or they write), “his manner open and friendly, in contrast to the pinstripes and wingtips and careful reserve that characterized many in his profession.”77
The therapy Dr. Pazder conducted with Proby in many respects mirrored that conducted by Cornelia Wilbur with Shirley Mason. Both cases involved an initial therapeutic encounter that proceeded without incident and ended successfully. For four years Pazder and Proby diligently combed through Michelle’s unhappy childhood and identified the symptoms expressed in Proby’s adult life. Her father, after drinking, had sometimes beaten her mother, which terrified Michelle. And although Michelle’s mother would usually show affection and tenderness in the wake of these rages, she was otherwise irritable and cold and had a quick temper. As an adult, Proby had also endured three miscarriages, which understandably produced their own collection of psychic difficulties. None of these events are in dispute, and the therapy that addressed them was conducted carefully and professionally. A short while after this analysis had reached its end, however, Proby returned to Dr. Pazder with a terrifying dream. “I dreamed that I had an itchy place on my hand,” she told Pazder. “And when I scratched it, all these bugs came out of where I was scratching it! Little spiders, just pouring out of the skin on my hand. It was just—I can’t even tell you how it was. It was so terrible.”78
According to Michelle Remembers, Pazder immediately recognized this dream as “blatantly symbolic,” as connecting “subconsciously to something very important.” He asked that the two begin to see one another again, but within a few weeks Pazder, like Cornelia Wilbur before him, believed that an unorthodox approach was required: “all the normal ways they had worked together were of no value now.”79 Michelle began to lie on Pazder’s couch, whereas she had previously sat upright in a chair. She lay motionless for twenty minutes at a time, unable to speak. She asked Dr. Pazder to sit closer. Then the pair decided it might be good for them to have some kind of physical contact during particularly difficult moments. And one Saturday, in the middle of a special weekend appointment they had arranged, Michelle, with Dr. Pazder’s hand resting on her head, screamed in terror for twenty-five minutes. Then she began to speak: “It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s all black. Black. It’s black! It’s all black. No! Oh, please help me. Help me! Oh, help me! Help me! [More screaming, which eventually dissolved into agonizing tears.] Oh, God help me! Oh, God help! I don’t know what to do. I feel so sick. I feel like my heart’s going to stop. . . . Oh, I hate this. I’m on this bed. . . . I’m in the air. I’m in the air, and I’m upside down. . . . There’s this man and he’s turning me around and around.”80
Michelle told Dr. Pazder that the man’s name was Malachi, and she told him not as an adult woman but in the frightened voice of a five-year-old girl. This little girl, Pazder came to believe, lived inside Michelle’s unconscious and functioned as a kind of mental black box, storing up memories of trauma and keeping them away from the fragile woman Michelle had become. Pazder thought that if he could comfort that inner child—in part by snuggling with Michelle on the couch during therapy—if he could gain her trust, then he and Michelle, who had no recollection of Malachi until her episode on the couch, would be able to learn what had taken place years ago. In subsequent therapy sessions, Michelle’s child personality revealed that Malachi and his cult members had forced Michelle to watch and participate in ritual sex. She said she had been placed in a car with a woman’s corpse and that the car had been set on fire and then pushed down an embankment into a ravine, landing her in the hospital. She said the satanic cult maintained an operating room and that doctors had once surgically implanted horns and a tail into Michelle’s tiny body. At home, Pazder took phone calls from Michelle and sat in comforting silence as she cried on the other end of the line. At the office both doctor and patient wound up crying together at the end of marathon sessions that lasted for as many as six hours. “In her depths, Michelle was like a child, and like a child she needed contact,” Pazder recalled thinking. “Sometimes she would have her head on his shoulder. But he was careful about the way he touched her.”81 He also told his patient, “I’m always moved at how your innocence has been your only ally.”82 For both, the experience was clearly powerful and consuming.
Michelle’s child alter saved the most awful revelation for last. For weeks Michelle was held captive by cult members in a round room with a dirt floor; the cult wanted to summon Satan himself, and Michelle was clearly to play some crucial role in the ritual. At certain points Satan’s voice would become audible, reciting bad poetry: “I can do much to destroy and then / Replace with words of hate and despair / Words as stupid as love and care.”83 When Satan finally did emerge out of the fire at the center of the ritual, he grabbed Michelle around the waist by his tail and began dragging her away. It was only the intercession of a mystical figure Michelle called “Ma Mère”—clearly the Virgin Mary—that saved the little girl. With this spectacular climax, Michelle’s memories came to an end. Proby converted to Catholicism, and she and Pazder began to bring their story to various Catholic authorities, who treated it with varying degrees of seriousness. T
hey recorded one priest as citing Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil”—originally designed to explain the actions of prominent Nazi Adolf Eichmann during the Holocaust—as a means of explaining the satanic poems Michelle claimed to have heard. “It would be a great mistake to underrate these rhymes,” the priest said. “The very mistake Satan wants you to make.”84
Although the text of Michelle Remembers refutes itself, external evidence refutes it as well. No newspaper articles from anywhere in the Victoria area reported a car crash like the one Michelle claimed to have been involved in when she was five. A pediatrician did tell Dr. Pazder that he had a vague recollection of treating Michelle for some burn, at some point, in her childhood, but there are no records of any hospital visits by Michelle. Proby also attended the first grade and was photographed for the school yearbook during a period when she should have been locked in the basement confronting the devil.85 Finally, it turned out that although Proby had not mentioned them at all in the book, she had two sisters, Tertia and Charyl, and in interviews these sisters would eventually state that their middle sibling had never taken part in any satanic or abusive rituals. But this did nothing to stand in the way of the book’s publication. Proby and Pazder received a $100,000 hardcover advance for Michelle Remembers, with an additional $242,000 to follow when the book went into a paperback edition. Proby made a formal conversion to Catholicism and went on a thirty-nine-day publicity tour to promote the book, which, helped along by full-page newspaper ads and reviews that ranged from bemused to horrified to bewildered, sold well. For his part, Dr. Pazder gave a presentation on the book at the 1980 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in which he coined a term that would come into wide circulation over the next ten years: “ritual abuse.”86 In interviews Dr. Pazder insisted that Michelle’s experiences had taken place, that her memories were too consistent and too detailed to be written off to some internal fantasy or therapeutic error. “In the beginning I wondered if she had made things up,” he told a reporter. “But if this is a hoax, it would be the most incredible hoax ever.”87 The meaning of Pazder’s appeal to the consistency and precision of Michelle’s memories was clear: she had to be believed.
Even in these earliest documents of recovered memory and ritual abuse, however, the therapist’s belief seems to depend on the patient providing a particular kind of story. Nearly four years after she had begun to see Cornelia Wilbur in her Manhattan office, Shirley Mason decided to write her therapist a letter. During the previous year, Dr. Wilbur, realizing that Mason had become addicted to Pentothal, refused to continue providing the drug. Then she rather optimistically declared Mason cured, or “integrated,” and then she watched as Mason sprouted a host of completely new personalities. By the time Shirley wrote the letter, she had no life outside of therapy, her friendship with Dr. Wilbur, meandering walks through New York, and a lesbian roommate who sometimes tried to get into bed with her. The letter was written as a four-page entry in a therapy diary that Mason maintained and allowed Dr. Wilbur to read. It began with a kind of forensic analysis of the doctor-patient relationship in which Mason found herself:
At various times over the years you have told me you thought I was more than average in intelligence, or that I was clever, or that I was sensitive, imaginative, creative, original, etc. Well, I am. And, you see, I am also egotistical. . . . But I have played on it long enough now. It isn’t getting me anywhere, so this time I will be honest. . . . I have tried to tell you this before, but I couldn’t hold out very long when you showed doubts. . . . A person likes to be admired, and so I let it slide rather than to disappoint you or risk your anger if you should become convinced. I felt I couldn’t lose you again.
After three paragraphs building up in this way, Mason came out with it, writing, “I do not have any multiple personalities. I don’t even have a ‘double’ to help me out. I am all of them. I have been essentially lying in my pretense of them, I know. I had not meant to lie in the beginning. I sort of fell into a pattern, found it worked, and continued to build on it.” While Mason thought it possible that there were real cases of Multiple Personality out there, she suspected that others diagnosed with the disorder could be cases “just like mine, hysterics with nothing better to do than ‘act a part’ and put off onto ‘another personality’ the things they cannot quite dare to pretend themselves, and then act as if they had forgotten in order to avoid punishment or feeling some sort of guilt or shame for the lie.”
She also told her therapist that she was “only distraught and desperate the day I acted ‘like Peggy,’” that she was “trying to show you I felt I needed help.” What makes the letter so sad is Mason’s detailed and sophisticated sense of self-awareness. She knew much more about what was wrong with her than she had let on. She explained, in detail, that she didn’t know how to handle success, whether in “art or teaching or music or whatever.” After a momentary rush of happiness, she would be overwhelmed by the “urge to do some fool thing.” She specified that the fool thing, for a while, had been “to disappear and make people think I had no knowledge of what I had done or where I had been. Quite thrilling. Got me a lot of attention.” As for the elaborate stories of abuse, Mason couldn’t say exactly where they had come from. They “just sort of rolled out from somewhere, and once I had started and found you were interested, I continued.” She said she made up all the stories about fugue states and Philadelphia, and she asked that Dr. Wilbur stop demonizing her mother, Hattie. She may have been anxious and controlling, but she hadn’t been a sadist, and she hadn’t raped Shirley with a flashlight.88
Though the letter had obviously been difficult for Shirley to write—she had no idea what Dr. Wilbur would make of it—the result was clear-headed and comprehensive. Mason seems to have been surprised to find herself in a state of mind where such honesty was possible, and she didn’t want to waste the opportunity—usually she was either high or sleeping. Dr. Wilbur’s response to this letter, which she regarded as “a major defensive maneuver,” was to tell Mason that her confession was a sign of “resistance.” It showed that Mason was frightened of the memories she had yet to uncover, that her mother really had tortured her, and that she needed to prepare for the important work that remained. The implication was that Mason could either agree to have Multiple Personality Disorder or she could stop seeing Dr. Wilbur. Mason went home and composed a second letter. Some irresponsible alter had written the first one, she said. She started seeing Dr. Wilbur five times a week.
Two decades later, in 1981, Lawrence Pazder was asked about the police. In his book and in many interviews, Pazder claimed that a murderous satanic cult was really out there, that it had kidnapped and tortured a five-year-old girl for more than a year, that it had orchestrated a fiery car crash as well as the cover-up. So, given the sophistication of the cult’s organization and the brutality of its actions, was he planning to speak with law enforcement? Pazder said that although some efforts had been made to learn the details of the crash, the records had been destroyed, and in any case, “it is not our desire to go and cause a witch hunt.”89
Chapter 2
McMartin—Allegations
Virginia McMartin opened her preschool in southwest Los Angeles County in September 1966. Her daughter, Peggy, worked as the school’s administrator, and Peggy’s husband, Charles Buckey, built playground equipment for the yard. Peggy and Charles also had two children, Peggy Ann and Raymond, and eventually they began to teach and help out at the school as well. By 1980 a child’s admission to the McMartin Preschool was a coveted social prize for the aerospace and real estate professionals who had moved out to Manhattan Beach during the previous decade. Two videos made by investigators shortly after Ray Buckey was first accused of abusing children at McMartin make it easy to see why.
In the first video a cameraman, trailing a long power cord behind him, tours the McMartin Preschool. The classrooms are painted in different shades of lime green, and they are filled with Ch
arles Buckey’s ingenious handmade furniture. Colorful wooden panels on the wall display the alphabet and single-digit integers. The closet doors make a clown face, and there is a fake wooden refrigerator in which the children keep fake plastic food. Little coats hang on a wooden giraffe. There are chairs, unfinished art projects, little chalkboards. There is clutter and activity everywhere. There are children too, watching the cameraman pass through, and every once in a while he speaks up in a loud voice and asks a child to show him something or open a cabinet. The cameraman looks into each bathroom—they are all tiny—and flips the lights on and off. Out in the playground children are running and shrieking as cars race by along Manhattan Beach Boulevard, but the camera ignores the children, the cars, and the octopus seesaw, and it zooms in on a little boy. He stands quietly to the side and leans against a pole.
The second video replicates the tour, but this time there is a guide. The video is dated January 12, 1984, and the guide is Peggy McMartin Buckey, the school’s administrator. She wears a dark dress with polka dots. She is a big person and moves quickly, with her shoulders thrown back. “This is the stove,” she tells the camera, standing in the kitchen. She looks uneasy, or maybe annoyed. “These are the cupboards where we keep all of the supplies. This is the refrigerator where we keep the juice that we make. And this is where the parents sit when they come in to talk. And this is the other cupboard where we keep other crackers. And this is where we keep our juice and the other things.” In between sentences she looks up at the camera and then looks back down. “This is a drawer where we keep spoons and forks and everything that we need to use.”