We took one last look, then went inside.
27
A strong storm moved in Sunday afternoon. Nichole Jaspers and I were scheduled to meet at four o’clock, but I didn’t want her to wait in the driving rain for me to open the south entrance door of the sheriff’s department, so I advised her to come in the jail lobby entrance. It was open for inmate visiting hours. I said she could either lock her purse in her car or in a small property locker in the lobby. If she brought it in with her, I’d have to search it.
Corrections officer Matt called the squad room a few minutes before four and told me Nichole had arrived. I secured my weapon in a gun locker then pushed the intercom button.
“Can I help you?” Matt asked.
“Sergeant Aleckson to meet one in the lobby.”
“Is your weapon secured?”
“It is.”
The lock turned, and I pulled the first door open. It took two sets of sally port doors to reach her, the first from the sheriff’s department to the inmate side of the jail visiting area hallway, and the second from the hallway to the lobby where the visitors gathered.
If she hadn’t been announced, if I hadn’t been looking for her, I might not have seen Nichole. She was nearly invisible. I had read a fair amount about the victims of satanic ritual abuse, and it made me wonder, was that a protective device? Used consciously? Subconsciously? If people don’t see you, they can’t hurt you? How many other people were out there, people I passed but didn’t notice?
Nichole was slender, with brown hair that hung limply past her shoulders. She had a pale complexion and no prominent facial features. She could have been very pretty, but chose to be plain.
Nichole spotted me when I stepped out of the sally port into the lobby and walked toward me carrying a dripping raincoat. “It’s really coming down out there.”
I reached for the raincoat. “Yes it is. Thanks for coming. Anything sharp in the pockets?”
“Just my car keys.”
I did a quick search and confirmed that. “Okay. Follow me.” I grabbed the sally port door handle, and the corrections officer opened it electronically. A number of inmates and visitors watched us with interest, most likely assuming Nichole was turning herself in on a warrant and I was taking her into custody.
When the first door secured behind us, the second door opened in front of us, then closed with a loud click when we were in the hallway. “I have to do a quick pat down before we go into the sheriff’s department.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Just procedure to keep us all safe.”
Her face brightened at the word safe. Nichole’s tee shirt and jeans were form-fitting on her small body, and there were no unusual lumps. No contraband. As I’d expected. I waved at Matt to open the sheriff’s department sally door. Again, when the door closed, the second one opened. I asked Nichole to take a few steps back while I got my Glock out of the locker.
“You sure have to go through a lot, don’t you?” she said.
“No weapons allowed in the jail.”
“Why is that?”
“So they don’t fall in the wrong hands,” I said.
“For safety’s sake.”
“Right. We’re big on that around here. Safety and security.”
A little of the tension visibly left Nichole’s body. Her shoulders dropped from a modified shrug to a more natural position. She opened her fisted hands and wiggled her fingers. She smiled, and it changed her appearance from plain to pretty.
“Detective Dawes gave me permission to use his desk and his cubicle. Or we can go into an interview room. Your choice. Where would you feel more comfortable?”
She considered before she answered. “Doctor Fischer mentioned the detective’s name. He was at her office with you.” I nodded. “He’s not here?”
“No, he’s at a family function. The detectives’ cubicles are deserted today, if that helps you make up your mind.”
“Sure. I think I’d like to go there.”
“Nichole, I have another sergeant covering my calls, so take your time. I’ll take notes, but I won’t record our conversation. This isn’t an interview—you’ll remain anonymous. You’re very gracious to talk to me, to help me understand a subculture I know very little about. Start whenever you’re ready.”
Nichole shifted in her chair, moved back, then stood. “Okay if I stand?” I nodded. “What happened to me . . . and to Collin, should never happen to anyone.”
She stopped, and I waited.
“We are from another state. I can’t say where, because they still might be looking for us.”
“Why?”
“We escaped. And we took something they wanted with us,” she said.
“What was that?”
“My baby. They used my first baby as a sacrifice, and I couldn’t let them do it again.”
My heart dropped into my lower abdomen. Gregory Trippen had said they drank the water they drowned babies in.
“You had another baby? I didn’t notice any signs of one at your home.”
“No, after we got to Minnesota, and after my son was born, we gave him up for adoption. So if they found us, they couldn’t get him.”
“That must have been very difficult.”
“Yes, in many ways. I was impregnated during a ritual. I don’t know who his father is. There were many men who raped me that night.” She silently stared at her hands, and I wasn’t sure she’d continue. Finally, she looked at me. “He will never know the circumstances of his conception, and there is no record of his birth.”
“What do you mean?”
“We delivered him at home. He was so beautiful. I wanted to keep him, but I loved him too much to take that risk.” Her eyes filled with tears, and they spilled down her cheeks. There was a box of tissues on Smoke’s desk, and I pushed it closer to Nichole. She pulled out a couple and wiped her face.
“The next day, we took him to a Catholic hospital. I went in alone with him and gave him to a nurse and said I couldn’t keep my baby and was taking advantage of the baby safe haven law. I knew they couldn’t ask who I was as long as the baby was unharmed. I gave her a note giving the date and time of his birth, what we got for his height and weight numbers, and asking that he be placed with a Christian family.”
Nichole had done her homework. In Minnesota, as in most states, a mother, or another person with the approval of the mother, could leave a baby up to three days old with a hospital employee at any licensed hospital in the state.
“Collin and I were in the same cult. Coven. Raised in farm families in a state with miles and miles of privately owned fields and pastures. It’s very easy to hide what you’re doing from authorities in the middle of all that.” Nichole nodded, emphasizing her words.
“My parents said Satan had been enlightening The Family—that’s what they called the cult. That he had been enlightening and giving us power for generations. The Family could trace its roots back to the thirteen hundreds, to England.”
Nichole sank onto the chair and spoke quietly, almost in a monotone. “I don’t know when my torture and abuse began. It was part of my life for as long as I remember. Same with Collin. He was being groomed to one day take over as the high priest, so he was forced to do more things than most of us. If he didn’t, they would have killed him.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It was all part of the rituals. Blood rituals involving animals and people. More than once, when they thought he was resisting, they buried him in a box they had in the ground. For up to three days, without food or water. It was meant to produce great terror in us, and of course it did. Some died in there.”
I squirmed in my seat as an imaginary claustrophobic blanket settled around me, like it had when Gregory Trippen had told Smoke and me about the same horror.
“There were many methods they used to make us do their will. Rape, sexual orgies, torture, sacrifice, electrical shock, being hung upside down for long periods, choking, near-drowning, being
fed drugs, witnessing what they did to others, being forced to do those horrendous things to others. Most of what happened to us we repressed out of self-preservation, I found out later.”
I listened to her voice and watched her expressions and body language when she talked about the horrendous abuse. There was little emotion displayed. Like it was someone else’s story. Another survival technique, I imagined.
“As I started to explain earlier, the leaders decided Collin would become the high priest someday. And me? I was a favored one, a bride of Satan. I carried one baby that was given to him in sacrifice. They gave me drugs to make me go into labor, and he was born during a ritual. I saw the knife the high priest held over his little body, but everything is black after that. Collin wouldn’t tell me what happened, but I had seen other infant sacrifices, so I could imagine.” Tears spilled out of her eyes and landed on the tissues in her folded hands.
I shuddered. “I can’t imagine anything so awful. Why would they do that?”
“To offer a gift to the Prince, and to capture the energy when the soul leaves the body.”
Gregory had said the same thing. “How is that possible?”
She shook her head. There was no answer. “Then I was impregnated again. But they didn’t get him.”
“How did you and Collin manage to get out?”
Nichole smiled. “It was a God thing. I was expecting my little baby and terrified about what they would do to him. I even thought for a while about killing myself so they couldn’t have him. So they couldn’t hurt him.”
I reached over and patted Nichole’s arm. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
She nodded. “I wasn’t allowed to socialize with anyone outside The Family, except when I went to school, and then I was only allowed to say certain things. We lived two miles outside of a small town. One evening, I snuck out and walked into town. It was a Wednesday night. People were going into this church. Families laughing and smiling. It made me curious. Here were a bunch of people, out in public, going into a church. I had always been taught God was evil. We had to denounce Jesus of Nazareth and pledge our lives and loyalty to Satan.”
I thought of the inverted crosses on Gregory Trippen’s feet.
“I was drawn into that building with those people. I went in the front door and heard the most glorious sound coming from the choir loft. Voices, men’s and women’s, singing a joyful song. I was alone in the sanctuary. The others had gone to other rooms.
“I sat down on a pew in the back of the church and listened to the choir practice. My whole body broke out in goose bumps. There were Bibles in the pews, and I picked one up. I had never seen a Holy Bible before and randomly opened to what turned out to be the book of Matthew, chapter eleven, verses twenty-eight to thirty. I memorized them. ‘Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’”
Nichole’s eyes filled with tears once more. “Oh, how I wanted rest for my soul and for my burden to be light. Here was this church with Bibles anyone could read. In The Family, only the leaders had access to the Black Book, their book of worship and rituals. I was afraid someone might ask why I was there, and then The Family would find out, so I grabbed the Bible and went back home.
“I hid that Bible and read it whenever I could. I finally told Collin about it and the positive impact it was having on my life and thinking. Collin and I were good friends. We loved each other. We learned from the awful lessons very early in our lives that we had to keep our love secret or it would be used against us.”
“How?”
“Threats. Real threats. If Collin didn’t comply with an order, they might torture me. And vice versa. How we managed to keep our friendship from the leaders, I don’t know. At first I wasn’t going to tell Collin I was planning to leave. Then I realized he would think they had killed me. When I told him my plans, he started crying and said I could never escape. They would hunt me down.
“I said that might be true, but I had to follow a new path, a path of truth. I wasn’t afraid for myself anymore, and I would find a good life for the baby. That’s when he decided to go with me. Collin was eighteen, I was seventeen. Kids. But kids who had seen as much as seasoned war veterans. Maybe more. Collin’s parents had a lot of money hidden away. He figured they wouldn’t miss a couple of thousand.”
“How did you choose to come to Minnesota?”
“We didn’t, exactly. We were hitchhiking and we landed in Minneapolis. We liked it and thought we’d stay awhile. I found out about the baby safe haven program and decided that would be better than adoption. No questions. I turned eighteen a month before the baby was born.”
Two teenagers on their own, making adult decisions.
“We got jobs and stayed in Minneapolis for a few years. On Collin’s twenty-first birthday, his friends took him out for a drink after work. He hadn’t had alcohol since when he was forced to drink it for certain rituals. After a few drinks, he had a very frightening reaction. His friends called me to pick him up. I was supposed to meet him for dinner, anyway. First he was threatening and combative, then he became very childlike, crying and pleading.
“When I said, ‘Who are you?’ meaning why are you acting like this, he said, ‘Micah.’ He kept talking in this little boy voice, expressing little boy fears. I was scared enough to begin with, and then when he said he was Micah, I could hardly breathe. Micah was his younger brother. He was buried in the box when he was three. He didn’t get out alive.”
My throat partially closed. Where were the authorities when all those crimes were taking place? What about all the missing children?
“He went back to being Collin again a while later and had no memory of what he had done or said. We have both always been afraid of doctors and medical people, so we weren’t sure where to turn for answers. I started doing some research online. I found out it was common for victims of ritual abuse to fragment into separate, different personalities as a protective device. There are a lot of victim support groups out there, and I started chatting with some people. That’s where I heard about Doctor Fischer.”
“Ah.”
“When we went out to Oak Lea for our appointments, we’d drive around the town, then we started exploring the county. Minneapolis was fine, but we liked the rural setting of Winnebago County. We looked until we found a home we could afford, out in Kadoka.”
“It’s a very nice place.”
A small smile. “Thanks. Doctor Fischer has really helped us. Both of us. I can hardly begin to tell you how much. After Collin had that dramatic episode that brought his condition to light, it made me start questioning things about myself and my memory.”
“Like what?”
“Like how I could remember the beginning and end of some rituals, but not what happened in between. You know, like with my baby. We were given drugs sometimes, but not always. And throughout my life I’ve had gaps where I’ve lost time. Sometimes a little, sometimes more. I’d get in trouble at school because of it, get chastised for something I said. And I didn’t know what it was because I couldn’t remember anything about it. I didn’t know dissociative identity disorder existed. I thought it was normal to forget things. Collin did, and I did.
“Doctor Fischer is helping us integrate, and Pastor Trondholm is helping us heal spiritually so we can forgive ourselves for any harm we did to people in the name of Satan.” Nichole stood. “I better get going. I know I couldn’t tell you much, but I hope it helped.”
Not much? That was a decided understatement. I wished Smoke had been there to hear Nichole’s story. I would never be able to convey it as well.
I rose also. “Nichole, before you go, I have a couple of questions. Did you report any of this to your local authorities?”
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t have mattered. The local police chief was the high priest. He knew what to do to hi
de it from the county and state police, I’m sure.”
“But the evidence—”
“There was a crematorium they took the bodies to. I understand bone dust is easy to get rid of.”
Bone dust. After a body was burned and reduced to dust, would there be any DNA left in it?
“And all the blood?”
“Yes, for the rituals conducted in an indoor temple, you’d think there’d be some evidence. I know they cleaned very well. Outside? They cleaned up, and the elements and animals took care of the rest over time.”
Evidence left outside was compromised, and worse.
“What about the people they used in rituals? After a few people go missing in a given area, even if the police chief was in on it, citizens put a lot of pressure on the authorities to find them. It causes a public panic.”
“Most, like the babies and young children, even teenagers, had no birth records. A doctor in The Family had a connection to someone in court records, I’m sure, like if they needed a birth certificate later.
“I don’t know how they chose the ones that went to public school. Very few are allowed to. Most aren’t. Collin and I decided the reason some were sent was because The Family had to present some semblance of normalcy to the surrounding communities. It would raise questions where there are fifteen or twenty working farms, but no one has any children. Or if any kids were spotted by outsiders but didn’t go to school, that might bring the authorities out to check. The Family controlled the information.”
“By keeping secret who was in The Family?”
“Right. When I was chosen to go to school, I felt a little safer. I mean, if I died, my teachers would ask where I was. The Family could lie, of course, say I was ill or that my father was transferred and we had to move.” Nichole shrugged. “You said if someone disappears from an area, people notice. But people—men, women, teens, children—disappear all the time. I bet for each one that is reported, at least one disappears who isn’t reported.”
My mother’s hovering over-protectiveness seemed like a good problem to have growing up after all. “Do you know of anyone who reported the activities of The Family to the authorities?”
An Altar by the River Page 15
