Remembering Satan

by Lawrence Wright

  A fourth group to become concerned with the SRA phenomenon was the police detectives charged with looking into the crimes of the alleged cults. Joe Vukich recalls going to a homicide seminar in Portland, Oregon, where a detective from Boise, Idaho, gave a presentation on cult crimes. “Folks, I’m here to tell you this stuff is going on!” the detective said. Vukich turned to an officer sitting next to him and remarked, “Not in my department. I’d know about it.” Soon dozens of police workshops around the country were discussing the phenomenon. Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder were often featured speakers, along with specialist “cult cops,” who were likely to be fundamentalist Christians.

  On the Ingram investigative team, only Neil McClanahan, who had come from a mainstream Protestant tradition but had converted to Catholicism, would describe himself as a devout Christian. All three of the detectives—Brian Schoening, Joe Vukich, and Loreli Thompson—were born and raised Catholic, although Schoening and Thompson were no longer practicing.

  During the investigation Schoening and Vukich traveled to Canada to participate in an SRA workshop. They listened to speakers discuss teen satanism and role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. They were given an overview of the history of satanism, from the “magic theater” of eighth-century Greece to its sway in Hitler’s Third Reich. They were presented with the modern occult teachings of Anton LaVey, the author of The Satanic Bible and founder of the Church of Satan. They were instructed in such esoterica as cult holidays and the protocols of a black mass. They were shown magical symbols, runes, and glyphs. It was an amazing experience for the two detectives, but most shocking to them was the fact that they were greeted as experts on the subject. Before long, Schoening and Vukich and other Olympia detectives were besieged by calls from police officers around the country who were also engaged in investigating recovered memories of satanic-ritual abuse.

  Early in the Ingram case, Undersheriff McClanahan telephoned Supervisory Special Agent Kenneth V. Lanning at the behavioral-sciences unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Lanning, the FBI’s research expert on the sexual victimization of children, had been hearing stories of sexual abuse with occult overtones since 1983. At first he had tended to believe the stories; but as the number of alleged cases skyrocketed, he had grown skeptical. Soon hundreds of victims were accusing thousands of offenders. By the mid-eighties, the annual number of alleged satanic murders had reached the tens of thousands. As a result of information provided by a prison official in Utah, word circulated in the police workshops that satanic cults were sacrificing between fifty and sixty thousand people every year in the United States, although the annual national total of homicides averaged less than twenty-five thousand. Believers contend that no bodies are found because satanists often eat their victims and have access to sophisticated methods of disposal. It amazed Lanning that police officers, who regularly complained about inaccuracies in the media and often joked about tabloid-television accounts of “true” crimes, were susceptible to such material when it involved satanism. Yes, there were psychotic killers who heard the voice of Satan, just as there were psychotic killers who heard the voice of Jesus, but that didn’t mean that they were members of an organized religious cult, Lanning argued. If satanic-ritual murder was defined simply as a killing that was committed by two or more people whose primary motive was to fulfill a prescribed satanic ritual, then Lanning could not find a single documented case of the phenomenon in the United States. He worried that many officers were allowing their personal religious beliefs to affect their judgment.

  Lanning told McClanahan that after looking into hundreds of similar stories, he had come to the conclusion that they were merely a symptom of modern hysteria. McClanahan replied that the Ingram case was different: he had a perpetrator who was confessing to the crimes and implicating other members of the cult, and there was a likelihood that he would obtain other evidence, such as scars and photographs. “Well, you’ve got more than anybody else,” Lanning conceded. When McClanahan hung up, it struck him that the Ingram case was much more important than anyone had realized—that it was the one case in America that could prove, finally, that satanic-ritual abuse was real.

  *Ganaway has since become more circumspect in asserting that real abuse occurred. “I was perhaps being charitable and even overprotective of colleagues who were claiming to be uncovering spontaneous, allegedly uncontaminated cult-related material,” he wrote in 1992. “Whereas the screen memory hypothesis has proven to be a likely possibility in a small number of cases I have seen since then, regrettably the most common likely cause of cult-related memories may very well turn out to be a mutual deception between the patient and the therapist.… Once reinforced by the therapist, this belief system may become fixed and highly elaborated, sometimes with tragic consequences. In these cases the common denominator in the satanic ritual abuse phenomenon may very well turn out to be the therapists themselves.” (Ganaway, “On the Nature of Memories: Response to ‘A Reply to Ganaway,’ ” Dissociation 5, no. 2 [June 1992].)

  7

  Questions to Ask God,” Sandy Ingram wrote on a scratch pad next to a grocery list in December 1988. “Has my life been a lie—Have I hidden or suppressed things bad things that have happened in the past.… Have I been brainwashed, oppressed, depressed—controlled—without knowing it.” What had once seemed to her a happy, normal life was no longer recognizable. Her husband and three of her five children were describing an existence she could hardly imagine. The police were still trying to find and interview Paul Ross, and how could she guess any longer what he might say? Her day-care license had been suspended, so she couldn’t reopen her center even if she chose to. How was she going to support herself and the one child still at home, her nine-year-old son, Mark? “What I would like to do for a job,” she wrote. “Chore work, go to school, pediatrick nurse, art teacher.”

  Two days after Paul’s arrest, Sandy had gone to see him in jail. She sat facing a milky sheet of Plexiglas. Paul came into the room beyond, wearing orange coveralls and looking pale and thin. He picked up the phone on his side of the divider. She realized that they would never touch each other again. It was as if Paul were in some other, unreachable realm of reality. They talked in generalities about the case, awkwardly trying to keep the conversation alive. Paul reminded Sandy to get her driver’s license renewed. Then he said that Pastor John Bratun had instructed him to make a confession to her that had nothing to do with his arrest: he told Sandy about the affair he had had, which had been over for thirteen years. Sandy was devastated. If she hadn’t known about the affair, she found herself thinking, then what else might she not have known about?

  The house on Fir Tree Road was so empty. During the day, Mark was in school, and for the first time in her life Sandy was alone: no day-care children, no husband coming home for lunch, no enormous loads of laundry to be done, no family dinners. There was so much silence and time. Sandy went to the mall and got her ears pierced.

  That empty period was about to change, however. During the first couple of weeks in December, concerns arose on the part of the investigators about Sandy’s role in the abuse. Both Ericka and Julie had initially denied that their mother was involved, but as the investigators and others repeatedly questioned how so many dreadful things could have been going on in the house without Sandy’s knowledge, her daughters began making small disclosures.

  Ericka told a friend about the poker games, when the men came into her room. Her mother would sit on the bed and watch, Ericka said.

  “Your mother was a cheering section?” the friend asked.

  “Well, she wouldn’t do anything,” Ericka explained. “She wouldn’t say anything. She’d just watch.”

  “We’re talking about your mother!” exclaimed her friend, who was a mother herself and simply couldn’t imagine such a scene.

  “It was strange,” Ericka agreed.

  The troubled friend reported the conversation to the police.

&nb
sp; Detective Vukich interviewed another friend of Ericka’s, who had heard a similar account. Sandy would come in before the men arrived and “get her ready,” the woman told Vukich. “She said that her mother would be touching her vagina at times.”

  “Did she say if that was strictly for the purpose of getting her ready or her mother was, in fact, sexually abusing her?”

  “She used the words ‘sexually abused.’ ”

  “And how recent was that?” Vukich asked.

  “She said it happened two times in the month of September,” the woman answered.

  The woman also related that Ericka had wondered whether her parents had given her drugs that affected her memory. “She said sometimes she had a hard time remembering what happened, and then all of a sudden it’d come back to her, but she didn’t realize why she couldn’t remember in the first place.”

  Vukich and Thompson met with Ericka on December 8. She was cheerful and talkative, according to Thompson’s notes, until they asked again about her mother’s role; then she became withdrawn and communicated only with a few words or by shakes of the head. She recalled an evening, when she was nine or ten years old, on which her mother had entered her room, followed by her father, Rabie, and Risch. Rabie had stripped her and made her pose while he took photographs. Risch had held a gun. There had been many other photo sessions. Her mother had watched while this happened but had not participated.

  Loreli Thompson left in the middle of the interview to meet with Ericka’s younger sister. One of the discordant features of the investigation was that each girl’s story tended to leave out the other, although they had been roommates for most of their lives. There were other discrepancies. Julie had never mentioned anything about Sandy’s being involved, nor had she spoken about pornographic photographs taken by Rabie or Risch. Unlike Ericka, Julie had not been able to say the names of these two men; whenever either Julie or Detective Thompson referred to them, Rabie was called Number Twelve and Risch Number Fourteen, which is the way they were identified in the photo lineup.

  When Thompson asked Julie if her mother knew about the abuse, Julie responded, “I do. I think she does.” Had Sandy ever been in the room when “bad things” happened? Julie replied, “I don’t think so.” Thompson then asked when the last time had been that Twelve or Fourteen had photographed her. Julie slumped in her chair, drew her knees up to her chest, and wrote on a piece of paper, “Six years old.” Where? “My bedroom,” she wrote. Where was Ericka while this was happening? Julie shrugged. Where was her mother? No response. Then Julie wrote that Twelve and Fourteen had put their hands all over her body and told her she was special. Was anybody else in the room? Thompson asked again. Finally, Julie wrote, “My mom.” She began to shake. Thompson asked if her mother had said anything to her. “She told me to be a good girl and that no one was hurting me.” Then Julie began sobbing. Thompson ended the interview.

  That Sunday Julie went to church, and while she was praying at the altar her mother came and knelt beside her. The eyes of everyone in the church were on them. Sandy had not seen either of her daughters for a month, since this catastrophe in their family began to unfurl itself in such a frightfully public manner. This was the only way she could arrange to see Julie, so she leaned over and whispered that she loved her and that she would not have let anyone hurt her. She said that she did not know what had been going on. Julie got up and left without a word.

  Sandy was sitting at home when police investigators arrived with a warrant to examine the Ingram house once again. The detectives advised Sandy of her rights and said that they were investigating her involvement in photographing and sexually touching Ericka. They were hoping that their search would uncover the photographs of sexual abuse. Richard Peterson came along for the ride. While the investigators combed through the bedrooms, Peterson poked around. He said he hadn’t noticed any family pictures in the house, so Sandy took him to the hallway, where they kept framed photos on the wall. Some of the trim was missing from the doorways, he observed. That seemed odd, although Peterson didn’t realize that the Ingrams had done much of the work on the house themselves, and it was still partly unfinished. Indeed, their way of living seemed foreign to him. Sandy’s canning closet was full of vegetables and fruits from her garden. She was so proud to be able to provide for her family; she even entered her canning into competitions at the county fair. But to Peterson, the fruit jellies and pickled okra and tomato sauces were evidence that the Ingrams were on the edge of destitution. Otherwise, why couldn’t they buy their food at the grocery store? They even slaughtered rabbits, although, as one of the detectives noted in his report, it wasn’t Paul who did the butchering, it was Sandy. She enjoyed it, she said.

  Sandy was knitting at the dining room table, trying to stay calm as the detectives turned her house upside down. Accusation hung in the air. One of the men remarked that either Sandy knew what was going on and ignored it, or else she must have participated.

  “I haven’t done either,” Sandy said. “I didn’t know anything.”

  The detective responded by saying that Sandy should have known through her sex life with Paul that he had been fooling around with the kids and other people. But in Sandy’s opinion, there had never been anything forced or weird in her sex life. It was “very normal, very fun, very dear, and very satisfying.” She was completely stunned when one of the detectives told her that Paul had been a homosexual for most of his life.

  The search uncovered nothing incriminating, although several items were collected for evidence. There were four plastic boxes containing old datebooks; the letter Paul Ross had written to Sandy when he left home; and two books, The Pleasure Bond and Devil’s Gamble. The detectives also took a broken lock from Julie’s door. Julie had stated that she had installed the lock to keep her father from coming into her room and raping her. She said he had broken in anyway. At the time, however, Julie had told her mother that she had put a new doorknob on her door while she was baby-sitting, but she had installed it incorrectly and managed to get locked into her own room with the little children. Finally Chad had kicked the door open to rescue them. Sandy had been sympathetic. She remembered telling Julie, “It’s all right, we’ll fix it. If you need a new doorknob, Dad’ll be happy to put it on.” Now Paul was remembering that, indeed, he had been the one to break the lock in order to get to Julie. Sandy didn’t know what to believe anymore.

  “Who are you most afraid of, Rabie or Risch?” one of the detectives demanded.

  “I’m not afraid of anybody,” Sandy said boldly, although at that moment she was close to panic. The detectives finally left when Sandy decided to call a lawyer.

  Everything in Sandy’s life was flying to pieces. The marriage that she had once considered secure and happy had been publicly exposed as a sham. Now her own daughters were accusing her of sexual abuse. Could such things really have happened without her remembering them? Was there a “dark side” to Sandy, as there must have been to Paul?

  What terrified Sandy most was the likelihood that she would lose Mark. Someone had called the state’s Child Protective Services and said that Mark had to be taken away from Sandy before the same things happened to him. The police knew that the anonymous caller was Ericka; she had been demanding custody of Mark. Sandy was afraid that unless she admitted that abuse had taken place in her home, she would be declared to be “in denial” and therefore an unfit parent. When Sandy spoke to Paul about her dilemma, in early December, he said that maybe it was a good idea to surrender Mark. At that moment, Sandy stopped defending her husband. “The house is very cold—and my heart is broken over & over,” she wrote on a scrap of paper. “Things will not ever be the same.”

  On December 16, Sandy went to see Pastor John Bratun in his office at the Church of Living Water. Bratun was a kind-looking man, forty-three years old, with a long face and a mustache; he reminded Sandy of Tennessee Ernie Ford. He had been in Olympia for a little over three years; before that, he had served as assistant pastor for
several Foursquare churches in Southern California. From the night of Paul’s arrest, when Bratun went with Pastor Ron Long to comfort Sandy at the house, and then visited Paul in his cell, Bratun had been intensely involved in the Ingram case. Another church member, Paula Davis, who was Ericka’s advocate, was present at most of her interviews. Information passed freely among the police, the church, and the victims.

  Sandy would later say that she had always felt she could trust Pastor John, as she called him; and so she felt stung when he told her now that she was “eighty percent evil.” He reiterated the speech that she had heard from the detectives: either she had known what was going on in her house and ignored it, or she had participated in it. She was probably going to go to jail unless she made a confession. Sandy bridled at the threat. “That may work with some people, but it won’t work with me,” she said defiantly. Still, she left Bratun’s office feeling hurt and confused and even more afraid.