Briere and Conte also found, along with Herman and Schatzow, that the abuse recalled by those who claimed to have been amnesiac was far more violent than the abuse that had never been forgotten. But wouldn’t more violent experiences also be more memorable? The theory that many have used to explain this paradox is that violence increases the level of repression; that subjects “dissociate” during the experience—that is, they mentally go away in order to protect themselves, then bury the pain in another part of their psyche, even in another personality. But if that is so, why don’t children who experience other extreme forms of cruelty, such as life in a concentration camp, repress those memories or turn into multiple personalities? In one study, not a single child aged five to ten who had witnessed a parental murder had forgotten it. Why is it specifically sexual memories that are so often forgotten?
People often do forget details of traumatic events, especially when they are physically injured. Prosecutor Gary Tabor was in a traffic accident in college, but he can’t remember a thing about it, except what people have told him. Sheriff Gary Edwards fell out of a tree he was pruning and lost the memory of the experience for ten years, until he was persuaded to take a bungee jump for a charitable event. Just before he jumped, the whole awful memory returned. In both cases, however, they knew something terrible had happened to them. Traumatic amnesia often accompanies combat or savage rapes, but the people who have suffered those experiences know what they’ve been through. It’s the details that escape them.
Despite the common acceptance of the concept of repression, some clinical researchers, such as Loftus, make the point that repression has never been demonstrated experimentally. David S. Holmes of the University of Kansas has reviewed sixty years of attempts at proving the existence of repression. Early tests concentrated on subjects’ ability to recall pleasant versus unpleasant memories. Unpleasant memories were less available, and this was taken as evidence of repression; but the same data also demonstrated that the more intense the memory, the more likely it was to be remembered, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant. Holmes himself conducted a study demonstrating that emotional intensity attached to unpleasant experiences declined over time at a greater rate than was the case with pleasant ones, thereby making unpleasant memories less memorable. Learning experiments were conducted in stressful versus nonstressful environments; when subjects were less able to remember the materials that they studied under stress, that, too, was taken as evidence of repression. However, those tests are better understood in terms of the difficulty of learning under stress. Other experiments presented insoluble problems to various personality types, with the hypothesis that certain individuals would be more likely to repress their failures. “The only consistent finding in this line of research was that subjects with a high need for achievement recalled more incompletions under high stress than low stress,” Holmes reported. “They persisted in working on or thinking about their failures rather than repressing them. Not only do these findings fail to provide support for the concept of repression, but they are the opposite to what would be predicted on the basis of repression.” Holmes concluded that it might be time to abandon the theory of repression. Of course, without the concept of repression, the edifice of psychoanalysis collapses.
Even if repression does function in the way that therapists who work with recovered memory suppose, is it possible to repress repeated, long-term abuses, some of which began in infancy and lasted well into adult years? This certainly goes far beyond what Freud had in mind. Richard Ofshe terms this new, aggrandized version “robust repression.” The awkwardness of explaining this mechanism is evident in the answers that members of the Ingram family gave to investigators and defense attorneys. After Ingram had described a mass rape of his family by Rabie and Risch, Schoening asked, “They leave; then what—you as a family do what?”
“As I recall, I lock up the house and, uh, I don’t recall any conversation,” Ingram said. “It’s kind of like, once the situation’s over, we go into a different memory.… We’re back to normal, if that’s a way to put it.”
Again, explaining how he would forget, as he drove home, that he had taken part in a satanic ritual, Ingram theorized, “At some point you block the memory and your conscious memory takes over. It’s like I couldn’t function up here on a day-to-day basis knowing what I had done.”
Frequently, the victims remember being told not to remember. Sandy explained how she forgot having been raped on the kitchen floor by Rabie in August of 1988 this way: “Then he said … that I wouldn’t remember anything and for me to finish washing the dishes.” Ericka related that after a satanic ritual “my father would carry me back to my room and he would always say, ‘You will not remember. You will not remember. This is a dream.’ ”
These theories were supported all along by the police officers and mental-health professionals who had been brought in to counsel the Ingrams and who often reassured the victims and the investigators alike that such wholesale, instant repression is completely normal.
“Tell me why it is that you wouldn’t leave,” Sax Rodgers asked Sandy after she described newly recalled incidents of abuse.
“Well, what they’ve explained to me is that because of what happened to me, that I repressed everything as a defense or a survival mechanism, and that’s why it’s hard for me to remember. That it’s all there and that I will remember it all, but it’s …” She trailed off hopelessly. Her psychiatrist had provided her with this explanation.
One can see the handiwork of five different psychologists and counselors who talked to Ingram during six months of interrogations. “Two guys just anally rape you against your will, you say,” Rodgers observed, referring to one of Ingram’s accusations against Rabie and Risch. “You have been a police officer since 1972…. Why didn’t you go report them?”
“I have also been a victim since I was five years old, and I learned very early that the easiest way to handle this was to hide it in unconscious memory, and then you don’t have to deal with it,” Ingram replied.
“The more severe the incident the deeper the repression and the more difficult it is to disclose,” argues Undersheriff McClanahan. Like several of the other officers in this investigation, McClanahan sees himself as a psychological authority. He has written several papers on the Ingram case and has counseled with Olympia’s survivor groups. Many members of these groups claim to have been ritually abused and have received diagnoses of multiple-personality disorder. McClanahan has also lectured on satanic-ritual abuse in survivor workshops. “Just to hear the words ‘I believe you’ can make all the difference in the world to a ritual-abuse survivor and oftentimes begins the process of trust, hope, and healing,” McClanahan says. Those are words he has often spoken to Julie and Ericka Ingram.
These two hypotheses form the intellectual framework of the Ingram investigation: first, that the depth of the repression is a function of the intensity of the trauma; and, second, that victims must be believed. Once a victim’s account is believed, however, the evidence must be stretched to fit it. Often, it’s a big stretch. McClanahan accounts for the absence of scars on the Ingram daughters by saying that it is not uncommon for survivors to believe there are scars, because they’ve been conditioned to believe things that aren’t true. He also explains why the sisters couldn’t be given lie detector tests: “Our survivors are very traumatized. To question their credibility would cause them to be retraumatized. They’re so fragile.” In response to the fact that teams of officers and an anthropologist from the local college dug up the Ingram property looking for the burial ground of murdered babies and turned up only a single elk-bone fragment, McClanahan says that the ground was so acidic that the bones disintegrated. Months of the most extensive investigation in the county’s history produced no physical evidence that any crimes or rituals ever took place, but Joe Vukich explains this by saying, “We shouldn’t have found any. These guys were police officers. We expected to find a lot or nothing. We did find a couple piec
es of bone. Obviously, something had happened.”
In a paper that Elizabeth Loftus presented to the American Psychological Association in 1992, she asked, “Is it fair to compare the current growth of cases of repressed memory of child abuse to the witch crazes of several centuries ago?” Posing that question has caused her to become an object of scorn to many victims’ advocates and to some other researchers who believe that her research is part of a social backlash against abused women and children. Loftus wrote about the “great fear” of witches that caused the witch-hunts to occur:
There are some parallels but the differences are just as striking. In terms of similarities, some of the stories today are actually similar to stories of earlier times (e.g., witches flying into bedrooms). In terms of differences, take a look at the accused and the accusers. In the most infamous witch-hunt in North America, 300 years ago in Salem, Massachusetts, three-fourths of the accused were women. Today, they are predominately (but not all) men. Witches in New England were mostly poor women over 40 who were misfits.… Today, the accused are often men of power and success. The witch accusations of past times were more often leveled by men, but today the accusations are predominately leveled by women. Today’s phenomenon is more than anything a movement of the weak against the strong. There is today a “great fear” that grips our society, and that is fear of child abuse.
*For an insightful account of this fascinating case, see Once Upon a Time by Harry N. MacLean (HarperCollins, 1993).
†Initial reports suggested that 20 percent of the Father Porter victims had repressed their memories of the event; however, Dr. Stuart Grassion, a psychiatrist who evaluated the victims, says that the figure is closer to 5 percent.
*Washington was the first state to allow recovered memory claims under the crime victims’ compensation program, in 1991. Since then, recovered memory claims have grown faster than any other kind of claim; moreover, the average recovered memory claim costs $9,127, compared with $1,997 for family sexual assault and $1,552 for a nonfamily sexual assault. See the series “Buried Memories, Broken Families,” by Stephanie Salter and Carol Ness, in the San Francisco Examiner, April 4-9, 1993.
*Freud may have been referring to his early enthusiasm for hypnosis.
*A more recent study, by Linda Meyer Williams at the Family Research Laboratory of the University of New Hampshire, located one hundred women who had reported abuse in 1973, 1974-, or 1975 at a major northeastern hospital. The abuse ranged from fondling to intercourse, and the age of the females at the time they reported the abuse ranged from “infancy” to age twelve. In 1990 and 1991 the women were asked about childhood sexual experiences in order to elicit the memory of the reported abuse. Thirty-eight percent either forgot the abuse or chose not to report it. However, Williams does not say what percentage of them were infants when the offenses occurred. Those who were younger than four at the time could not be expected to remember much, if anything; nor is it likely that very young children would have been the primary reporters of abuse-presumably they had been taken to the hospital by a parent or caretaker who did the actual reporting.
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In February 1989, Jim Rabie and Ray Risch waived their right to a speedy trial in exchange for limited freedom: they were fitted with electronic bracelets and confined to their homes. It was just as well that they couldn’t go out in public, for the satanic-ritual abuse allegations had surfaced in the pretrial hearings, and the county was in shock.
Richard Ofshe sent a report to the prosecutor outlining his concerns about the truthfulness of the alleged victims’ stories. He pointed to the many inconsistencies in Ericka’s accounts and her inability to recall anything about the ordinary life of the cult beyond the fact that “they chant.” After his first interview with Ericka, she began to claim traumatic amnesia in order to explain the new information she was providing. No one had been able to confirm her stories. When Ofshe had asked Ericka why she hadn’t moved out of her house sooner, if her life was so awful, she suggested that she didn’t want to take a cut in her standard of living. “If she is capable of lying about numerous infant and adult murders and the other heinous acts of the group, one must seriously consider the possibility that all of her accusations are fabrications,” Ofshe wrote. As for Julie, Ofshe believed that many of her accusations were false as well. “The timing with which she reveals information about the group is strangely similar to the timing with which her sister reveals information,” he noted. “Even with her sister in the lead, Julie Ingram did little more than concur with her sister’s report that a group existed.” Ofshe discounted Paul’s confessions because of the apparent ease with which he was persuaded to fantasize events and confess to imagined crimes, as he did in Ofshe’s “little experiment.” Sandy’s statements were the result of a process of influence rather than real recollections based on memories of events, Ofshe wrote. “It is my opinion that Mrs. Ingram is not aware that she is inventing the scenes she came upon during the sessions with Reverend Bratun. I believe that she does not realize that the images are the result of her compliance to the demands of the situation. If she is permitted to continue to retell these stories over and over again her confidence in their validity will increase.” Ofshe assured Tabor that there was no known technology available to Ingram, Rabie, and Risch that would induce Sandy’s amnesia. “The implications of my opinions should be clear to anyone who reads this report,” Ofshe concluded. “They are clear to me. I fear that my conscience would trouble me greatly were I not to communicate these conclusions to you in the most forceful and direct manner available. If I am correct in my judgment about the general truthfulness of Ericka and Julie Ingram and the extreme degree of suggestibility of Paul and Sandy Ingram there is a substantial danger that innocent people will be made to undergo a trial and a danger that they might be convicted.”
When Tabor refused to turn the report over to the defense as exculpatory evidence—on the ground that, in his opinion, it was not real evidence—Ofshe complained to the presiding judge of the court. The judge agreed to make the report available to the defense attorneys. The report landed a shattering blow to the prosecution’s already shaky case.
When Rabie and Risch were offered deals that would slash their jail time if they confessed, neither man would agree. In addition, other people who had been named by the daughters as members of the cult maintained their innocence, and there was no evidence to dispute their word. Beyond that, the months and months of work around the clock had taken an immense personal toll on the detectives. One marriage had ended. Tom Lynch had been a pal and fishing buddy of Sax Rodgers’s, but their friendship broke apart over this case. Brian Schoening had begun dreaming about Ericka’s abortion. He saw her lying on a table in a satanic ritual as her baby was being chopped up. At the end of the dream, the baby’s little severed arm was forced into Ericka’s vagina. Joe Vukich noticed that other officers were shying away from him in the hallway; he could only imagine how zombielike he must look to them. The fact that the investigation was consistently thwarted by a total lack of evidence added to the explosive pressures. The defense attorneys worried that Vukich, especially, was lurching out of control. During one court hearing, they stationed a private detective in a chair directly behind him because they were concerned that he might draw his gun and shoot the defendants.
What set this tinderbox ablaze was a discovery made thousands of miles away, in the Mexican border town of Matamoros, in April 1989. Police uncovered a ritual slaughterhouse on a ranch operated by a gang of drug smugglers. Thirteen mutilated corpses were exhumed, including that of twenty-one-year-old University of Texas student Mark Kilroy, who had been kidnapped as he walked across the international bridge toward Brownsville, Texas, a month before. The cult blended elements of witchcraft and Afro-Caribbean religions, but the main influence seems to have been a 1987 John Schlesinger film about devil worship called The Believers. The Matamoros cult lent an air of reality to the satanic hysteria that had taken root in the media. Agents for G
eraldo Rivera and Oprah Winfrey were quickly on the scene.
“The discovery sent a shock wave through this part of Mexico and Texas and throughout the rest of the world,” Rivera said on his show a couple of weeks later. “But, unbelievably bizarre as the Brownsville incident is, it is nothing viewers of this program haven’t heard before.” Rivera had on his show a former FBI agent named Ted Gunderson, who identified himself as a satanic-cult investigator. “I’d like to tell you right now, the next burial ground that we will learn about will be in Mason County, Washington,” Gunderson announced, naming the county next door to Thurston County. “We’ve located a number of burial grounds in Mason County, and they can’t possibly go out and dig them all up, because there’s too many of them,” he added.
Gunderson’s announcement rocked the state of Washington. Soon he arrived and led a search team of private aircraft and television-news helicopters through the river valleys in the Olympic National Forest. Heat-seeking devices scanned the terrain, searching for the warmth of decomposing bodies. One of the helicopters landed on property belonging to Undersheriff McClanahan’s parents. The searchers informed them that there was a satanic burial ground close by.
Remembering Satan Page 17
