by Richard Beck
Paul Ingram was a man who lived out Nixon’s ideal at home, where he was the church-going figurehead of a large, close-knit family, and at work, where he was a cop. He lived in Olympia, Washington, with his wife, Sandy, and five children, and he was forty-three years old in 1988. He was chairman of the local Republican Party. With his family, Ingram’s authority was nearly absolute, both as a disciplinarian and as the final word on group decisions, which Sandy claimed not to mind, as she almost always agreed with him. Residents of Olympia and the surrounding communities had a pronounced streak of enthusiasm for self-sufficiency. Paul and Sandy built, painted, and wired their home from the ground up, and they raised all kinds of animals on their ten acres of land. Sandy made stews and roasts out of some of these animals, rounding out big meals with produce from the large vegetable garden she kept.27 She also tended to small children, running a day care out of the house to supplement her husband’s income.
The day care kids would become objects of resentment for the Ingrams’s biological children, who felt their mother and father were distant and withholding of affection. Paul knew this was a problem, and he worried about it. His own parents, especially his father, had been similarly distant. It frustrated Paul to be visiting the same emotional difficulties on his own children, but he had trouble softening his authoritarianism. Things got worse after he and Sandy underwent a religious transformation in the 1970s. Though devout Catholics when they met and married, the Ingrams converted to evangelical Protestantism after a few months of attending services at a local Pentecostal congregation. The church emphasized the importance of family life, and people spoke in tongues at its services. Paul stopped allowing the boys to participate in sports at school, and this was especially upsetting to his athletic son, Chad. Rock music was also banned. “The old man didn’t give a shit about anybody as long as you did your chores,” his oldest son said.28
Paul also loved authority at work, but in a different way—conforming to the codes and procedures of a career in law enforcement gave his life meaning. After a long tour of unsatisfying jobs in his youth, Paul began working traffic and domestic disputes with a small-town police department in 1969. By the 1980s he was third in command at the Thurston County Sheriff’s Department. Police work suited him tremendously. He wore the mustache that appears in caricatures of police officers, and he relished traffic patrol even as he rose through the professional ranks. Social life revolved around work too. He talked about religion with a colleague named Neil McClanahan as the pair cruised around in a squad car.29 He joined a poker game that took place in a different cop’s basement or living room every week. It was a close-knit department.
A complicated and murky set of circumstances preceded what happened to Paul and Sandy’s family in 1988. Others saw the Ingrams as such an attractive model of domestic happiness that friends and acquaintances from church consciously imitated them, but like the families in mid-twentieth-century American novels, the idealized exterior concealed different kinds of unhappiness. The oldest son, Paul Ross, had a difficult late adolescence. He wrecked his car a few times, bucked college plans his father had laid out for him, and left home one day in 1984 at the age of eighteen, leaving behind a note explaining that he would soon be in South America with his friends—his parents had no idea who these friends were. Chad also moved into an apartment of his own as a teenager, then moved back home. Then he went to Bible school, dropped out, and came home again. These are familiar if somewhat extreme teenage responses to a strict upbringing. Both boys remembered an incident in which their father, standing on a deck that looked down over the yard, became angry that the brothers had allowed the blade of an axe to become dull. Paul later said he only meant to toss the axe down to his sons, but he put too much muscle behind the throw, and if Paul Ross hadn’t stepped to the side, the axe would have hit him. Paul regretted the incident. His oldest son, at least, did not forgive him for it.30
Ericka Ingram was four years older than her sister, Julie, but the two shared a room growing up and spent much of their time together. Though introspective and moody, Ericka was the dominant sibling, her stylishness marking a sharp contrast with Julie’s deference and plain clothes, similar to those her mother wore. In 1983, when she was seventeen, Ericka attended one of her church’s annual Heart to Heart retreats for girls and told a counselor that a married man had tried to rape her. One of Paul’s colleagues investigated the allegation and concluded that the man had put his hand on Ericka’s knee while giving her a ride—harassment, perhaps, or quite plausibly a prelude to something else the man was hoping for, but not attempted rape in itself.31 That was that for the investigation. Then, two years later, Julie attended the same retreat and said a neighbor had sexually abused her; Ericka alleged abuse by the same person. Paul helped his younger daughter file a complaint with the prosecutor’s office, but Julie became reluctant and then unable to talk about what happened. Investigators began to find inconsistencies in her account, and charges were not pursued. In 1987 Ericka had to be hospitalized on the way to California with a friend named Paula. A doctor diagnosed her with pelvic inflammatory disease, and when Ericka asked how one gets pelvic inflammatory disease, the doctor said through sexual intercourse. But this explanation made no sense to Ericka, who said she was a virgin. What the doctor didn’t say was that the disease can also be caused by an ovarian cyst, which Ericka had.32 The hospitalization shook her.
Sexual abuse often came up at Heart to Heart. The retreat undoubtedly provided an environment in which kids and adolescents could ask questions and talk about experiences they couldn’t bring up at home, but adult organizers also raised the topic of abuse whether children asked them to or not. In 1988 a charismatic Christian speaker named Karla Franko addressed the retreat’s girl attendees. A kind of motivational speaker slash performing psychic, Franko believed she was endowed with special biblical capabilities, that the Lord provided her with insight into the lives of those in her audience. Standing in front of a rapt audience, Franko said she had a vision of a little girl hiding in a closet while heavy male footsteps drew near. A girl in the audience called out that she had been that girl, and then she rushed out. By the end of the weekend, other girls also came forward to say they had been abused. The emotional atmosphere was extraordinarily charged.
That fascination with abuse—especially the sexual abuse of girls—was characteristic of fundamentalism as a whole. Ericka Ingram was at the 1988 Heart to Heart, interpreting Franko’s talk for the deaf girls in attendance. Already that summer she had read Satan’s Underground, Lauren Stratford’s purported memoir of her upbringing among and subsequent escape from abusive Satanists. The book was eventually discredited by a Christian magazine and withdrawn from publication, but evangelical readers in 1988 were drawn to its vivid depictions of hidden depravity and redemption through Christ.33 The book’s opening pages described a façade of domestic perfection that Ericka may well have recognized: “My adoptive parents were both professionals. We lived in an upper-class neighborhood. I was always dressed well. The house was beautifully decorated, and the kitchen looked like it was right out of Good Housekeeping magazine. By all outward appearances I had every advantage that a kid could want. Why, I was even taken to church!”34
Beneath the surface, of course, lay a hell of parental abuse, child pornography, and infant sacrifice, all orchestrated by a shadowy cult leader named Victor. “To keep her from even thinking about telling the police or anyone else,” Stratford wrote, “the high priest calls upon demonic spirits to do something of such a diabolical nature that she will be frightened into silence. . . . And well might she take that threat to heart, for it is not just an empty threat. Those spirits are real!”35
That was one of the things in Ericka Ingram’s mental atmosphere as the Heart to Heart kids boarded the bus back home at the end of the retreat’s final day. What she was thinking about specifically as she sat down on the stage and began to sob uncontrollably is impossible to know. Counse
lors gathered around the twenty-one-year-old and offered consoling pats on the shoulder, and then one of them went to find Franko and asked whether she would pray over Ericka. According to a report subsequently filed by police, Ericka then announced that her father had sexually abused her. But this is not what Franko said happened when she spoke to a journalist later. She said she began to pray over Ericka’s huddled body, and then she thought, “molestation,” and then she spoke. “You have been abused as a child, sexually abused,” Franko said. “It’s by her father, and it’s been happening for years.”36 Ericka continued to sob, unable to speak; Franko specified that at no time did Ericka utter a word confirming or disputing the allegations of abuse. A few weeks later, in September 1988, Ericka moved out of her parents’ house, and Julie followed six weeks after that. Ericka was twenty-two and Julie was eighteen.
Paul and Sandy were initially bewildered by their daughters’ sudden departure, but not for long. Ericka met with her mother at a Denny’s to relay her allegations, also accusing her brothers, Chad and Paul Ross, of molesting her. Julie also accused her father of abuse in a letter she wrote to a teacher. “I can remember when I was 4 yr old he would have poker game at our house,” she wrote, “and a lot of men would come over and play poker w/ my dad, and they would all get drunk and one or two at a time would come in to my room and have sex with me they would be in and out all night laughing and cursing.”37 Word got around to friends at the Church of Living Water. Paul denied everything. The sisters’ stories began to change almost as soon as they began to tell them—the abuse had stopped five years ago, one said, and then that changed to three years. Eventually both would claim that the rapes had continued through the end of September, after Heart to Heart and after Ericka moved out. Each also insisted their father had mostly left the other sister alone, competing claims that were hard to reconcile with the fact of their shared bedroom. In October, shortly before Halloween, the Ingram family watched Geraldo’s Satanism special. Then Paul was arrested by his coworkers and brought in for an interview.
The allegations trapped Paul between the two systems of authority he loved best. Ingram often talked about wanting to be a good father, and surely one part of being a good father involved not subjecting your children to years of abuse. Sitting in the police station’s interrogation room, though, Ingram also wanted to be a good cop. Even though he was the one being interrogated, his friends across the table were just doing a job he loved, and he wanted to help them. “If this did happen, we need to take care of it,” Ingram said. “I can’t see myself doing this.”38
“If this did happen.” In 1988 Ingram and his colleagues all subscribed to what was then common wisdom among many police officers about child sexual abuse: victims could repress and forget their trauma for long periods of time and, crucially, so could perpetrators.39 Ingram himself had attended a statewide crime prevention meeting focused almost entirely on repressed memories, and he thought the presentation he heard there was very convincing.40 Ingram was interviewed for two hours in the police station before detectives turned on a recording device, and by the time they did start recording, Ingram was willing to believe in a guilt he could not recall:
Ingram: I really believe that the allegations did occur and that I did violate them and abuse them and probably for a long period of time. I’ve repressed it, probably very successfully from myself, and now I’m trying to bring it all out. I know from what they’re saying that the incidents had to occur, that I had to have done these things.
Q: And why do you say you had to have done these things?
A: Well, number one, my girls know me. They wouldn’t lie about something like this, and there’s other evidence that would point out to me that these things occurred.
Q: And what in your mind would that evidence be?
A: Well, the way they’ve been acting for the last couple of years and the fact that I’ve not been able to be affectionate with them even though I want to be. I have a hard time hugging them or even telling them that I love them, and I just know that’s not natural. . . .
Q: You don’t remember going into that room and touching Ericka?
A: No.41
Ingram’s affect began to change as the detectives encouraged him to dredge his memories up out of the depths. While maintaining his weird solicitousness, he closed his eyes, lowered his head, and slowed his breathing. He punctuated his utterances with long, frustrating silences that sometimes ran to ten minutes. He appeared to be hypnotized or at least in some kind of trance. Among psychologists working on child sexual abuse, hypnosis was becoming a popular therapeutic technique. Hypnotizing their adult patients, these therapists believed, allowed them to access repressed memories of childhood trauma. Ingram already believed in traumatic repression, and his susceptibility to hypnosis—by definition, a state of heightened suggestibility—was high. He discovered recovered memory techniques on his own, by accident, and he administered the therapy himself.
He began to narrate. On November 28 he described abusing Ericka when she was as young as five years old. The next day, speaking out of the same trance-like state, he described abusing Julie, and he also recounted scenes confirming the allegations about poker games and late-night group abuse, implicating two of his colleagues in the department. During that same interview Ingram was asked whether he had been involved in black magic—“the Satan cult kind of thing”—before his conversion to evangelical Christianity. For a time all Ingram could recall was having occasionally read his horoscope in the paper, but further reflection produced visions of shadows and tombstones. Within a week Ingram was worried that he was possessed by a demon, and he invited his pastor to join his interview sessions with the detectives. The pastor assured Ingram that God would only allow him to recall memories and scenes that had actually taken place. “Boy, it’s almost like I’m making it up,” Ingram interrupted himself to say at one point. “But I’m not.”
Detectives found the style of Ingram’s confessions almost as unnerving as their content. Paul didn’t talk in the past tense about acts he remembered committing. He seemed instead to be narrating events as though seeing them for the first time, and he used the conditional to an alarming extent, talking about what he “would have” done or where Ericka “would have” been when he found her. “I can kinda see the girls running when they saw what was happening,” Ingram said of a memory in which a police colleague raped Sandy, “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.”42
Ingram’s way with detail also frustrated detectives. Though perfectly willing to supply memories that conformed to his daughters’ allegations, he could not—or, as the detectives sometimes believed, would not—elaborate. “You just keep copping out!” one interviewer eventually said. “It’s kinda like you’re saying, ‘I’ll agree to whatever my daughters say and I’ll give you that information, but I’m not gonna tell you anything more.’”43 The details Ingram did manage to provide should not have been reassuring to his interrogators. In one interview Paul described seeing another man abusing one of his daughters, and a detective asked whether the man had any jewelry on. “May have a watch on his right hand,” Ingram said. “A gold watch.” The detective asked him to read the time off the man’s watch. “Uh, two o’ clock,” he said.44 This was not, for Ingram, a Proustian recollection of the sensory detail that animates a chain of associated memories; rather, the scenes he produced had a cinematic quality. Ingram did not “know” the time on the watch until he read it off of the screen playing across his mind. The alleged scene from which Ingram drew this extraordinarily fine and specific detail had taken place seventeen years earlier.
The detectives continued to solicit information from Ericka and Julie, with Ericka usually leading the way. (Julie, who may not have expected that her allegations woul
d lead as far as they did, eventually became almost completely unable to talk during interviews.) One of the investigators became so emotionally invested in Ericka’s plight—so enamored of her vulnerability and so disgusted by what Paul had done to her—that other officers in the department began to joke that he was in love with her.45 The information gathered at these interviews with the daughters was then taken back to Paul and used to fuel his imaginative trances. Unable to recall a particular allegation, he would go back to his cell, pray on it, and return to the interrogation room the next day with a written confession, of which he always seemed to be proud.
Detectives encouraged Paul in person as well, overlapping his prayers to Christ with exhortations to admit his guilt. These encouragements gave the interrogation room some of the atmosphere of Living Water, where parishioners often spoke in tongues. “It’s your responsibility as a father,” they said to him in one interview. “It’s important. It’s got to come out.” Paul felt he needed to be berated in this way. When his interrogators stopped he said, “Just keep talking. Just keep talking, please.”46 Paul’s stories transitioned from the bizarre to the completely implausible—at one point he tried to implicate himself in the unsolved murders of dozens of prostitutes near Seattle and Tacoma, known as the “Green River Killings,” but the investigators were too energized to notice. Two attended a law enforcement conference on satanic cults in Canada and were delighted to find other cops asking them for advice. In their excitement they called up Ken Lanning at the FBI. They told him they were working on the first verifiable satanic ritual abuse investigation in the country’s history.
In February 1989 Thurston County police invited Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, to visit Olympia and have a look at Ingram’s case. During the first two decades of his successful academic career, Ofshe had spent a lot of time researching groups referred to by many people as cults: the Church of Scientology, the Unification Church, and the Santa Monica–based Synanon organization, a drug rehabilitation program that developed into a religious movement.47 Among other things, Ofshe was interested in mind control. He wrote about thought-reform techniques used in Soviet Russia and North Korea, and he argued that the more dangerous groups among the post-1960s explosion of new American religious movements had adopted these techniques as their own.48 The Ingram investigators wanted to talk to Ofshe because they were still worried about Paul’s trances and because Sandy and some of the Ingram children had also behaved strangely in police interviews. Maybe the satanic cult to which Paul had belonged subjected its members to some kind of psychic programming.