Remembering Satan

by Lawrence Wright

  Then why was Rabie so ambivalent when he was first questioned about his involvement in the case? He claimed that the detectives had never hinted at the extent of the charges; he thought they were talking about a sexual molestation, such as inappropriate touching, that might even have been unintentional or have taken place while he was intoxicated. “They’re talking about a molest that occurred in the seventies, and they’re not very specific; they’re telling some things about a picture and [being] nude, but they’re not saying what I’m doing, exactly.… I do start doubting my own memory if you’ve got a whole string of people telling that I’ve been doing this, and you’ve got photographs.” Since he learned the nature of the charges and the span of time they were supposed to have covered, he no longer believed that he could have blocked the events out of his mind.

  At this point, Midthun began preparing the four questions that would make up the heart of the test. He reviewed some of the charges that Ericka and Julie had made against Rabie, which were clearly not accidental touching or incidental molestations but savage, chronic abuse. He would ask a question concerning each of the girls to determine whether Rabie had ever had sexual contact with them. Another question would be whether Rabie had threatened the Ingram children. “For the sake of the test, we don’t care about Paul and we don’t care about Sandy, because they’re adults,” said Midthun; in any case, Rabie had not been charged with any crimes concerning the parents. A final question, which Midthun said would enhance the reliability of the test, would be whether Rabie intended to respond truthfully. Midthun then took a bathroom break and came back to wire the suspect to the polygraph machine.

  The lie detector is both a crude and a fragile instrument. It has been used by police departments since 1924 and has changed little since that time. Midthun strapped two corrugated rubber tubes around Rabie’s midsection, one across his upper chest and one just above his stomach, over his diaphragm. These pneumatic tubes led to a bellows that recorded the expansion of the lungs with each breath. He then placed a cardiac cuff, such as medical technicians use to take blood pressure, around Rabie’s upper right arm, and inflated it to more than eighty pounds of pressure—somewhat higher than normal, to account for Rabie’s moderate corpulence. Finally, he attached metal plates around Rabie’s left index and ring fingers with Velcro straps. These tiny plates measured the galvanic skin response (GSR), which is, essentially, the reaction of the sweat glands to the minuscule amount of electric current running through the plates. Moisture coming into contact with the current would produce a measurable response.

  The information gathered by these devices is recorded on a continuously moving graph. Normal breathing appears as a wavy line of gentle hills and valleys. The blood pressure is represented by a series of spikes reflecting the constrictions of the heart. The GSR is a narrower, undulating line. In each case, there is a commonsense understanding of the reaction that is being gauged: a person says, “I caught my breath,” or “My heart pounded,” or “I broke out in a cold sweat.” It is exactly these kinds of stress responses that the polygraph records. Of the three, the GSR demonstrates the most dramatic reaction, sometimes producing wild swings across the graph that look like angry scribbles, but respiration is thought to be the most significant indicator. People who are trying to cheat the polygraph will sometimes hold their breath or take drugs that suppress their reactions. In fact, people can be trained to beat the polygraph through rather minute actions such as flexing one’s toes or biting one’s tongue. Coughing, sighing, or simply shifting one’s weight in the chair can produce reactions, which is why the polygraph operator must constantly observe the subject and note on the chart each time the person swallows or takes a deep breath. The startled reaction to a ringing telephone looks like an earthquake on the graph.

  What is actually being detected is not deception but anxiety. The philosophy behind the machine is that lying is inherently conflictual. That’s not true for everyone, however; sociopaths who don’t appear to suffer the ordinary pangs of conscience may lie without registering measurable stress on the polygraph. Moreover, people who are genuinely deluded will appear to be telling the truth even if what they are saying is beyond possibility. Some studies have shown that polygraphs are accurate only 64 to 71 percent of the time when used in criminal investigations. The most common error is to mistake innocent subjects as guilty, rather than vice versa. For all of these reasons, polygraphs are generally not allowed in court, and limitations have been placed on their use by private employers.

  Many law-enforcement officers, however, believe that in the hands of an experienced operator, such as Maynard Midthun, the polygraph is close to being infallible. Jim Rabie believed this when he was a cop. Midthun offered the example of two men accused of a bank robbery. One is guilty, the other innocent. Each has been identified by an eyewitness. Each convincingly denies his involvement. “We don’t know if they’re telling the truth,” said Midthun. There is a difference between the two suspects, however. “The guy who really did it,” Midthun explains, offering a commonplace understanding of the nature of memory, “he experiences distinct physiological changes that take place when he walks through the front door of that bank, and he pulls out that weapon and sticks it in the face of that teller.… It’s as though somebody has turned on a video camera in his mind.… There is a permanent record there of the words spoken, the deeds done, the emotions felt—it’s all there, recorded.” The innocent man, on the other hand, hasn’t had the experience. There’s no tape playing in his head. Three years after the bank robbery, both men come in for polygraphs. The innocent man denies he robbed the bank. “What I see on the polygraph charts is general nervous tension, and it’s that way throughout the entire chart. One question does not mean any more to him than any of the others, because it’s the same. He has no frame of reference. He never spoke those words. He never did that deed.” When the guilty man takes the same test, however, “at that point, the video camera clicks on. The camera’s been off for three years, except when he wanted to reflect back on how fun it was and how cool he was for getting away with it. But when we go into the polygraph test, he cannot push the off switch. He cannot turn that son of a gun off.… I ask the question, ‘Did you rob the bank?’ The camera is playing and he sees an instant replay of himself entering the bank, sticking his nose in the teller’s face, and watching her just totally lose control. He’ll never forget that.… There’s that adrenaline rush. Then he flunks the test.”

  Because of his experience in the use of the polygraph, Rabie may have realized that harboring secret guilty thoughts about one’s past actions can cause false reactions; for instance, the innocent person who is accused of robbing the bank might register a highly anxious reaction if he had done something similar in the past. That’s why polygraph operators spend several hours before the test trying to determine areas of conflict; it’s also why the questions must be made as specific as possible. In any case, as he was being wired to the machine Rabie suddenly felt the need to clear his conscience. It turned out that his sexual life had not been unblemished, after all; he admitted to several indiscretions, the most serious being an incident that happened when he was thirteen and he was playing with a four-year-old girl. “I don’t remember exactly the circumstances,” Rabie said, fumbling over his words, “but I ended up—I know I had my penis between her legs—didn’t try to enter her in any manner, but between her legs.”

  “Let’s chalk that one up to one of life’s experiences,” Midthun said forgivingly. “What I would be interested in is if you went back for seconds, because that would begin to make a pattern, right? One time does not make a pattern. The true pedophile, the person who would do the horrible things that the Ingram family has complained about, has a pattern of unnatural acts.”

  To establish a controlled lie as a base for measurement, Midthun had Rabie write the numeral 7 on a piece of paper. He then instructed him to respond “No” when asked if he had written the numerals 4, 5, or 6, which was an hone
st response; then say “No” for 7, which was a lie; then “No” again for 8 and 9. Midthun would then have what he called “a perfect picture of a lie, much like the bank robber tells, surrounded by nervous truthful responses, much like the innocent person.” Rabie’s GSR barely registered when he lied about the 7, but his heartbeat jumped off the chart. Midthun had to adjust the pen to keep it on the graph.

  Midthun then began the test, mixing in irrelevant questions with the four key questions that were designed to determine whether Rabie was guilty or innocent.

  “Is your first name James?”

  “Yes,” said Rabie.

  “You were born in the month of May?”

  “Yes.”

  “Regarding sexual contact with the Ingram children, do you intend to answer truthfully?” This was Midthun’s first key question.

  “Yes!” Rabie said loudly.

  “Is today Friday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever had any sexual contact with Julie?” This was the second key question.

  “No.”

  “Other than what you’ve told me about, between the ages of twelve and thirty, did you ever take part in an unnatural sex act?”

  “No.”

  “Do you sometimes watch television?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have any sexual contact with Ericka?” The third key question.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever threatened any of the Ingram children?” The fourth key question.

  “No.”

  “Before the age of thirty, did you ever intentionally hurt anyone?”

  “No.”

  Midthun performed the test three times to make certain of Rabie’s responses. In each of the four relevant questions, the graph showed that Rabie had lied.

  11

  Detective Brian Schoening was waiting at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on the morning of February 2 to pick up Dr. Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist from the University of California at Berkeley. Ofshe had been recommended to the prosecution as an expert on cults and mind control. With his dark, owlish eyes and a luxuriant gray-white beard that lent him an air of Zeus-like authority, Ofshe certainly looked the part of a distinguished professor. Brainy, arrogant, long-winded, precise, insightful, prickly, and self-promoting, the forty-seven-year-old Ofshe had all the faults and virtues of the academic genius, as well as a taste for fine food, fast cars, and heated controversy. His credentials included a Pulitzer Prize, which he shared in 1979, for research and reporting on the Synanon cult in Southern California. He had written extensively about how the thought-control techniques developed in Communist China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea had come to be employed and refined by various religious cults in the United States. His research had caused him to become involved in a number of lawsuits against the Unification Church, the Church of Scientology, and est, to name a few. His critics called him an anti-cult extremist; they believed that his campaign against cults could as easily be turned against organized, established religions. But few cared to take on Richard Ofshe directly; his appetite for intellectual combat was matched only by his stubbornness.

  Gary Tabor had been looking for some expert who could explain what appeared to be the mind-controlled behavior of virtually everyone in the Ingram case, suspects and victims alike. He had called Ofshe and asked if he had much experience with satanic cults. Ofshe had told him candidly that no one could really claim to be an expert, because so far such allegations were largely unproved. This is real, Tabor had assured him. Then I’m interested, Ofshe had replied.

  As they drove to Olympia, Schoening briefed the professor on the case. Practically nothing that anyone was saying could be verified. All the stories were at war with each other. People weren’t even talking normally, Schoening complained. Ofshe asked what he meant by that, and Schoening described Ingram’s third-person confessions in which Ingram saw himself from the outside, as if the Ingram who was watching and the Ingram who was acting were two different people. He mentioned the “would’ve”s and “must have”s that characterized Ingram’s language. As for the daughters, they talked little, if at all.

  The problem everyone had was Paul’s continuing inability to remember clearly. That struck a familiar chord with Ofshe. In addition to his work with cults, he had interested himself in coercive police interrogations. At that moment, he had a paper in press with the Cultic Studies Journal concerning innocent people who became convinced of their guilt and confessed. In each case that Ofshe had studied, the confession had come about when the police succeeded in persuading the suspect that the evidence against him was overwhelming and that if he couldn’t remember committing the crime, there was a valid reason for his lack of memory, such as his having blocked it out or fallen into some kind of fugue state.

  In the Ingram case, Ofshe was told, the reason the suspect couldn’t remember raping his children repeatedly over seventeen years was that he had repressed the memories as soon as the abuse occurred. Even the prosecution was uncomfortable with that theory, and the notion of mind control had arisen as an alternative to it. Perhaps the cult had interfered with the ordinary process of memory formation, through drugs or chronic abuse. Perhaps the reputedly brilliant Dr. Ofshe could unlock the programming that had scrambled the circuitry of nearly everyone in the Ingram family.

  Ofshe’s first interview was with Paul Ingram, in the presence of Schoening and Vukich. He was impressed by Ingram’s eagerness to help and his longing to understand his own confused state of mind. As Ofshe tried to get Ingram to lead him through the case, however, he decided that there was clearly something wrong. In Ofshe’s opinion, it wasn’t possible for the human memory to operate in the fashion that Ingram was describing. Either he was lying or he was deluded. When Ofshe asked him to describe more routine episodes in his life, Ingram demonstrated perfectly ordinary recall. Then where were those other memories coming from? Ingram described the manner in which he would get an image and then pray on it. He told Ofshe he had been practicing a relaxation technique he had read about in a magazine, in which he would imagine going into a warm white fog. Minutes would pass and then more images would come, he said, and he felt confident that they were real memories because Pastor Bratun had assured him that God would bring him only the truth. After a while, he would write his memories down. Ofshe wondered if Ingram was possibly taking a daydream and recoding it as a memory. He made a spontaneous decision to run what he later referred to as a “little experiment” to determine whether Ingram was lying or believed that what he was relating was genuine.

  “I was talking to one of your sons and one of your daughters, and they told me about something that happened,” Ofshe said to Ingram, giving a wink to Schoening and Vukich. The two detectives looked at him in complete dumbfounded surprise, since Ofshe had not yet met any other members of the Ingram family. “It was about a time when you made them have sex with each other while you watched. Do you remember that?”

  No, Ingram didn’t remember that. In fact, the detectives had posed a similar scenario to him in his first round of interviews, when he was confessing to a number of crimes, and he had not remembered it then, either. But Ofshe was not deterred. “This really did happen,” he insisted. “Your children were there—they both remember it. Why can’t you?”

  Ingram wanted to know where it had happened.

  “It happened in the new house,” Schoening said, playing along.

  Ingram closed his eyes and put his head in his hands, a familiar posture to the detectives. Several minutes passed.

  “I can kind of see Ericka and Paul Ross,” Ingram said.

  Ofshe told him not to say any more. Go back to your cell and pray on it, he said.

  When Ingram left the interview room, the detectives jumped down Ofshe’s throat. What was he up to? Ofshe explained that he was simply testing the validity of Ingram’s memories. In that case, they asked, why couldn’t he have picked something a little further out of the realm of possibil
ity? None of the investigators would have been surprised if Ingram had orchestrated sex among his children—that wasn’t any more bizarre or depraved than the stories they had already heard.

  Later that afternoon, Ofshe met Julie at the sheriff’s office, in the company of Detective Thompson, Gary Tabor, and Julie’s advocate from a local rape crisis center. Julie turned her chair around and faced the wall, communicating mainly through nods of her head.

  Despite this awkward arrangement, Ofshe thought he detected a certain playfulness in Julie. He hoped he could use it to draw her out. For the first time, Julie produced cult memories of her own. She wrote a brief description of people in robes and a doll hanging from a tree. Ofshe asked if the members of the cult had told her they had magic powers. “No, they didn’t,” Julie said. Did anyone ever tell her that the cult knew what she was doing all the time? There was no answer. Was that a question she didn’t want to answer? The back of Julie’s head nodded. “That means it’s true, then,” Ofshe said. He asked Julie to write down how they were able to spy on her. Julie wrote, “They said that a high and mighty man spoke to them and would tell them ever thing I said, or did. The high & mighty man spoke to them threw other people.” Was that high and mighty man the Devil? Julie shrugged. Had she ever seen any bad things done to animals? She shook her head no. To babies? No. Dolls? Yes, Julie indicated, and wrote: “They would hang dolls with blood on the trees and say the white lady would kill them and who kill you if you told.” She didn’t know who the white lady was, but she wrote that the woman wore “a long white dress like a costume.” Julie talked of having gone to church frequently when she was a child and having liked it “some.” She believed in Satan but did not know why. She described herself as being a weird and nervous person. Ofshe asked her to write the names of any other children in the cult. She wrote down “Ericka, Chad, Paul,” and the names of three other children—names that had not previously come up. Then she listed the adults, again mentioning new names. For the first time, the membership of the cult was taking shape. As far as the investigators were concerned, it was a highly productive interview. They were amazed at how much information Ofshe had been able to get out of Julie.