by Richard Beck
Social hysteria is born of an unmanageable surplus of anxiety and fear, and as a result panics themselves behave in excessive ways, improvising a series of crises and fabrications that build until the whole process breaks down under the weight of its own internal contradictions. But Ed Jagels was a talented politician and manager, and the investigative apparatus he built to pursue sex offenders could bear a lot of weight. Soon after the Pitts ring convictions, things escalated dramatically.
Brad Darling was a Kern County police lieutenant. He worked extensively on the ring cases, and in addition to believing all of the children’s allegations, he believed much worse. In a multi-issue Bakersfield Californian series on the sex rings, Darling claimed the defendants were exporting the child pornography they made to Europe.55 His wife, Carol Darling, was a social worker and sexual abuse coordinator for the district attorney’s office, and she interviewed many of the alleged victims involved with the ring cases. As a California Justice Department investigation would later document, Brad Darling came to believe that Satanism played a role in the abuse taking place in Kern County and that people working within Child Protective Services, the sheriff’s office, and other official agencies were involved in the satanic conspiracy.56 In the spring of 1985, with interviews still occurring on a regular basis, a number of social workers attended a training seminar at which copies of Michelle Remembers were made available to supplement a discussion of the role devil worship played in child molestation.57 One of these social workers was employed at Shalimar, a residence for suspected victims of abuse that had become home to many of the children Kern County police had removed from their homes. Soon after the social worker’s return from the training seminar, Darling received a call from Shalimar reporting that multiple children had been made to worship the devil. Darling drew up reports and asked the district attorney to bring charges against eleven people.58
The first child to make allegations of satanic abuse originally came to the attention of police during the investigation of a sex ring supposedly centering around the Nokes family. The girl said that while being molested she had been made to drink the blood of sacrificed animals in a “bad” church.59 Other children claimed their abusers wore black robes and brandished inverted crosses, that they had been forced to stab “little bears, little wolves, and little birds.”60 On their own these claims were not unprecedented—detectives had previously heard of abusers harming animals in order to frighten their victims into silence. But the satanic stories also introduced allegations of homicide, and these were new. Therapists reported accounts of women giving birth on dark altars so that their newborn infants could be eviscerated and thrown into pits. Sixteen babies had been murdered and eaten in a single night, according to one child, and police eventually calculated that they needed to find dozens of small corpses in and around Kern County. The search began with the formation of an official Ritual Abuse Task Force led by Brad Darling.
“You’ve got to realize how crazy this thing got,” John Stoll said. “Here they are digging up this land, with a backhoe, doing infrared, looking for bodies.”61 Darling’s task force took their investigation all over Kern County, and they felt the urgency of their task very keenly. Three times police sent men with construction equipment to excavate grounds where Satanists were believed to have disposed of their sacrifices, and each time they found nothing. They also sent divers into two lakes, with similar results.62 Even worse, from the investigation’s point of view, were the discoveries that, first, none of the alleged sacrifices’ names matched any missing persons reports and that, second, a number of the supposed victims were found to be perfectly alive. These disappointments only reinforced the task force’s belief in the magnitude of the threat Kern County now faced. Having dismissed defense accusations of child “brainwashing” by social workers and therapists for months, police now advanced brainwashing theories of their own, with one officer speculating that cult members had either “set up and programmed” the children to provide implausible stories or else tricked them with fake, staged murders.63
Programming may have also explained why some of the children began to accuse even members of the Ritual Abuse Task Force of participating in the satanic cult, although there was some internal disagreement on the subject. Brad Darling thought it plausible that cult members might have infiltrated Kern County law enforcement. When he traveled to Los Angeles to meet with investigators working on the McMartin case, he said that police suspected doctors, deputy sheriffs, a mortuary owner, and two ministers of cult involvement. He thought an enormous cover-up was under way.64
Ed Jagels was furious with the paranoid theories being advanced by members of the task force. A number of ring cases were coming to trial in the next few months, and Jagels believed that tales of mass baby slaughter without any dead babies to back them up would turn both the local media and the public against his office’s efforts. Since March the task force had managed to avoid attracting any media attention while carrying out its investigation, and according to a prosecutor who worked on the sex ring cases, Jagels worried that if the satanic allegations became public it would do significant damage to his political reputation around the state. To work around this problem and keep satanic abuse out of the newspapers, the district attorney’s office devised a neat trick. Prosecutors created an imaginary suspect, made up a file folder for him, and then put all documents pertaining to satanic activity in that folder. Because this imaginary person was completely unknown to anybody outside the prosecutor’s office, defense attorneys filing discovery requests on behalf of actual suspects never knew to file the one request that would have produced documents pertaining to Satanism.65 This prevented defendants, their lawyers, and—perhaps most importantly—juries from understanding the full extent of Kern County law enforcement’s overreach and suspension of disbelief.
Much of this eventually came undone. The media learned about and began to report on the Ritual Abuse Task Force in the summer of 1985. The Kern County grand jury, which coordinated oversight of local government, initiated its own investigation of prosecutorial misconduct in connection with the ring cases. John Van de Kamp, attorney general for the state of California, produced a report on the child abuse investigations that, despite its pointed criticisms of the task force’s conduct, made only tepid recommendations for improvement and reform, including increased supervision and training. Jagels dismissed charges against a small number of people following the report’s publication. Despite these setbacks, it is hard to view the early stages of Jagels’s twenty-seven-year tenure as district attorney as anything other than a massive prosecutorial success. More than fifty people were charged as ring participants or satanic ritual abusers, and twelve others who avoided prosecution were still determined to be sufficiently suspicious for their children to be taken away. At least twenty-eight people were sent to prison, and despite public doubts about many of their convictions, most of them remained there for many years.
As Kathleen Morris prepared to take her cases to trial in a Scott County courthouse, her investigators continued to struggle to find physical evidence to corroborate their child victims’ stories. This was a problem also faced by prosecutors working on the other two earliest major day care and sex ring abuse cases in Bakersfield and Manhattan Beach. But then, in 1984, an adult witness came forward in Jordan, Minnesota, and said he was prepared to make a full confession.
The witness, James Rud, was also the case’s central defendant. Over the course of four days, he provided a lengthy statement to three investigating officers describing the sex parties he had attended over the previous two years, identifying the adult participants and the children they brought with them and explaining the “rules” by which various sexual games were governed. In exchange for this statement and an agreement to testify against other defendants, Morris dismissed 98 of the 108 charges pending against Rud, who pled guilty to the remaining 10. “This is the best thing that could happen to children,” Morris said. “I
think so many would like to believe children would lie, and now we have an adult saying they didn’t lie at all.”66
Rud’s interviewers began by asking about the crimes he had committed before coming to Scott County, and his answers to these questions were short, simple, direct, and also characterized by the little uncertainties and memory gaps that would be expected of any account of events that had transpired years in the past. When the conversation turned to his more recent involvement in Jordan’s sex rings, however, Rud’s speaking style underwent a dramatic change. He described his sexual encounters with children as well as those he had witnessed in florid, extremely specific detail, and he seemed to adopt what he saw as a law-enforcement register and vocabulary. Describing an episode in which he had taken Marlene Germundson and her children to his parents’ home, he said, “During this time I assumed that Marlene met my mom and she was already in the house and they were having a conversation. I don’t know what it was about.” Describing a sexual encounter he subsequently had with Marlene’s daughter inside the house, he said, “Ten minutes or so into the game or so I had unbuttoned VK’s pants. During this time I started fondling her inside her clothes on the outside of her vaginal area. . . . My feelings toward that was I was turned on by it.”67 Then he described coming out of the bedroom to find that his parents had also, without any prior planning or discussion, embarked on an encounter of their own with Marlene and her other children:
When I got toward the kitchen area, I saw that my parents were sitting on the couch and Marlene was on the floor. The way it looked to me was that dad was coming on real heavy with my mom and if I recall, the twins were sitting with Marlene on the floor, both of them. I couldn’t exactly see what Marlene was up to at this point. She was in sort of a blind spot for me. I went a little further in and I noticed Marlene had the twins on the floor. The twins had their pants down. I want to correct myself. When I came out of the bedroom, my dad was on the couch with Marlene and my mother was on the floor with the twin girls. What I saw when I come out of there was Marlene had her panties on and her bra and my mom, all I saw was her back but to what I saw she was still dressed. I couldn’t see her front at this time.
How did Rud react to this spontaneous bout of group sex between his parents and Marlene, who had met just fifteen minutes before, and the two girls? “I sort of acted a little bewildered but not too surprised,” Rud said. “I didn’t think my mom and dad and Marlene would get along this well.”68 Rud wanted to be as helpful as he possibly could. When asked to define a “blowjob,” Rud said, “It’s when another person either of the same sex or opposite sex puts their mouth around my penis and sort of masturbates with his or her mouth.”69 His constant hedges and qualifications—“about this time,” “sort of a blind spot,” “maybe five minutes, maybe a little longer”—seem designed to guard against any inconsistencies that might emerge as a result of too-direct speaking over the course of four days of mostly fabricated testimony. When Rud did make mistakes, however, he was happy to fix them as quickly as possible. Toward the end of the first day Rud was asked whether he had seen his father “involved in any of the sexual contact” with any of the children he had been discussing; Rud said that he hadn’t. The interviewer asked Rud whether he was sure, and Rud said that he was. Then the following exchange took place:
Q: Jim, I’d like to refresh your memory just a little bit. . . . In this incident as you described to them earlier, I believe you make some mention of one of the children, I believe one of the girls, being involved with your father just prior to you folks leaving the trailer that day. Do you recall that incident?
A: Yes, I do now.70
The next day, Rud began to describe the sex parties. He said he had attended three large gatherings at which nearly all of Kathleen Morris’s suspects were present. He said these parties began “a little after six—sixish” and that he could remember seeing eleven children there. At a certain point—Rud didn’t remember exactly when—word started going around—Rud didn’t remember exactly how—that it was time for the game to start:
Okay, the rules of the game or at least the way we played it was that the kids were to stay within a boundary around the house, either inside or within this boundary on the outside. They were to hide but not real discreetly, you know, somewhere you know it would be pretty much easy to see them or at least pick them out of someplace. . . . From there the adults go seek whoever, seek in this general area. And whoever they found, male or female—it doesn’t make any difference who the kid was, if it was a relation or not—they had a choice of either taking that person to wherever they felt like. If in a bedroom, bathroom, wherever they could be with another person, another couple in the same room or privately, and between them sexual acts would go on. After the sexual acts it doesn’t make any difference how long, we usually limit it to around between five and ten minutes.71
Rud’s confession takes on a kind of awful, hypnotic quality when read in its entirety. But individually very few of his statements make very much sense. Consider Rud’s description of how the children were supposed to hide, and then imagine a group of adults trying to say the following to a group of very young children: “We need each of you to go outside—or stay inside, it doesn’t matter—and pick a hiding place, but not a hiding place that falls outside this imaginary boundary, if you go outside, and also please be sure not to hide too discreetly. Just pick someplace where we can either already see you or pick you out without too much trouble. Now, get to it.”
According to Rud, the game continued, with children hiding and adults finding them again, until “around the latest eight-thirty, or in that area.” Rud said that although adults could play the game in the nude, most of the adults who played outside kept their clothes on, which explained why nobody had noticed a crowd of naked people chasing kids around in the yard. Rud said that once the game wound down, everybody got dressed. Then one of the adults lit the barbecue. Rud’s interviewer wanted to know who provided the food. “Did you each have to bring something?”72
The scenes Rud described over the next two days read like unsettling dream sequences. Rud almost never remembered anybody saying anything; in his telling, orgies were organized and disbanded spontaneously, by silent general agreement, and children—who were also more or less silent participants—were handed off from one adult to another without so much as a single instance of hesitation, conflict, or logistical wrangling. A number of Rud’s narrative tics also became more apparent as his days with the detectives wore on. When describing someone in a state of undress, he almost always specified that his or her pants were pulled halfway down, just below the knees. The general picture that emerges from Rud’s confession is of a complicated sexual frenzy that proceeds in an oddly methodical and orderly fashion, one stage leading seamlessly to the next until everyone becomes hungry for dinner at exactly the same time. What makes the dreamlike qualities of Rud’s account disturbing is the realization that his interviewers essentially encouraged a convicted child abuser to fantasize into a microphone for nearly a week, used those fantasies as the foundation of their prosecutorial efforts, and then handed Rud a reduced sentence in exchange for his services.
The trial of Robert and Lois Bentz began less than two weeks after Rud made his statement. This was the first of the Scott County sex ring cases to be presented to a jury, and it attracted so much publicity that a judge ordered that proceedings be moved to nearby Carver County. Morris called Rud to the stand on a Monday and asked him to begin by identifying the defendants. Rud identified Lois Bentz. He could not identify Robert. On cross-examination the Bentzes’ defense attorney, a man with the wonderful name Earl Gray, pointed to another attorney and asked Rud, “Is this Bob Bentz?” Rud said it was not. Then Gray asked, “Who is Bob Bentz?” Rud did not know. When Morris, on redirect, asked Rud to describe Robert Bentz’s appearance in September 1983, the period during which many of the alleged crimes took place, Rud said, “I can’t right now.” Speaking to repor
ters later that day, Morris said that Rud’s inability to identify the defendant had not surprised her at all. “You think I don’t know my own case?” she said.73
Many things contributed to the Bentzes’ eventual acquittal, but first among them was the simple fact that Kathleen Morris performed very poorly in court. Soon after the prosecution’s unfortunate debut, the trial judge ruled that all of Rud’s testimony would be thrown out entirely. Morris told reporters that the decision did not weaken her case, that in fact she looked forward to convicting the Bentzes solely on the basis of her child witnesses. “What I’ve been saying all along [is that] it’s time we listen to kids,” she said. “You either believe them or you don’t believe them.”74
In addition, Morris’s aggressiveness in the media and inside her own office—an aggressiveness so pronounced that a state commission would eventually find that Morris had physically and verbally abused a number of her employees75—seemed to disappear inside the courtroom. She declined to cross-examine Ralph Underwager, a psychologist and Lutheran minister whose expert testimony was crucial in undermining the jury’s confidence in the children’s testimony, and then she also declined to cross-examine Robert and Lois Bentz. “This isn’t Perry Mason,” she told reporters after failing to pose a single question to the defendants. “I’m not going to stand up and say something brilliant and get them to break down.”76 The Bentzes’ defense attorneys made some puzzling and morally questionable tactical choices as well. Barry Voss told jurors that as it is in a scorpion’s nature to sting, so it was in one child witness’s nature to lie.77 In another instance, Earl Gray drove a girl to tears on the witness stand when he suggested that she was nervous about having her lies tape-recorded. “You’re just helping Bob and Lois get out of this stuff, this child-abusing stuff,” she replied. “I’m not lying; you guys are. It’s the truth. They hurt us.”78 This outburst did not persuade the jurors, who set the Bentzes free after three days of deliberations.