Remembering Satan

by Lawrence Wright

  Ericka nodded.

  “Wow. What else?”

  “Sometimes they would drink blood,” Ericka said. The members of the audience looked at her gravely and occasionally shook their heads in dismay. “One time, when I was sixteen, they gave me an abortion. I was five months pregnant. And the baby was still alive when they took it out. And they put it on top of me and then they cut it up. And then, when it was—when it was dead, then people in the group ate parts of it.” A gasp arose from the thrilled audience. Later Ericka asserted, “I spent most of my life in the hospital. And that is true. And, I mean, doctors were just, like, looking at my body, just going—ugh!”

  Raphaël introduced Jim Rabie, who was there trying to reclaim some of his reputation in the only forum available. “He says, even though he is innocent, his life, and that of his family, has been permanently damaged,” Raphaël said.

  “It destroyed a business that I had,” Rabie explained, his voice cracking. “It has caused my family untold heartache.”

  But the audience wasn’t interested in Rabie’s problems. “Ericka, I feel so sorry for you,” one woman in the audience said. “I have no idea why she would ever bring up this guy if he was not guilty.”

  Richard Ofshe was also on the show, matched against Bob Larson, a radio evangelist who has built his ministry by spreading satanic hysteria. “What is this whole thing about satanism, Dr. Ofshe?” Raphaël asked.

  “Right now, there is an epidemic of these kinds of allegations in the country,” Ofshe said. “They are totally unproven.”

  “There’s an epidemic of satanism in the country, not allegations,” Larson interjected.

  “Why would you say there is this epidemic, as a sociologist?” Raphaël asked.

  “In part because it’s a way of reasserting the coherence and authority of fundamentalist perspectives in society,” Ofshe said.

  “All right, let’s talk to Bob,” said Raphaël, turning to the evangelist, who has thinning reddish-blond hair and a beard. “Bob, you’ve got a man here saying that in no case—and there have been one hundred court cases, I believe, maybe even more, involving satanic rituals in our country—in no case has there ever been any evidence, hard-core evidence, nor has anyone, except Ericka’s father, ever said that they’ve done that. In other words, there’s never been a confession.”

  “He’s only technically correct,” Larson said.

  “Technically correct,” Raphaël repeated flatly. When Larson cited the enormous number of people in therapy who have complained of satanic abuse, Raphaël asked again, “Why, if there are all these people under care, why isn’t there one shred of evidence?”

  “The difficulty is that the evidentiary basis of the justice system is not commensurate with what you deal with in a therapeutic process,” Larson said. “When are we going to start believing people who come forward like this, instead of putting them through some type of legal litmus test?” One supposes that the “legal litmus test” he was referring to was the need for Ericka to provide credible testimony in order to convict Rabie of the crimes she accuses him of. Larson’s voice rose in indignation. “These are people who suffered the most incredible abuse!” he cried. “My God! This woman has been defecated on, urinated on—”

  “By him!” Ericka cried, pointing at the hapless Rabie.

  “She’s experienced bestiality and group sex by this man!” Larson said as he laid a pastoral hand on Ericka’s knee. “When are we going to start believing the victims?”

  “Believe us!” Ericka cried.

  *Ingram’s motion to withdraw his guilty plea was rejected by the appellate court in January of 1992, and by the Washington State Supreme Court in September of that same year. At this writing, the case is in federal court, but Ingram’s chances there would appear to be slim, since the courts have shown little interest in granting an appeal to anyone who has pleaded guilty.

  †The suit was still pending as this was written, in September 1993.

  *It was before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals at this writing.

  Epilogue

  Four and a half years after his arrest, Paul Ingram, grayer now than he was during his legal hearings, lives in a prison in a state far from Washington. He is in protective custody, presumably for his own safety as a former police officer, but he has made no secret of his identity. Most of his fellow inmates know him as an editor of the prison newspaper. He also works as a clerk in the prison law library. He has always been drawn to the simple, regimented life, and prison is peculiarly agreeable to him. In certain respects, it resembles the cloistered life he might have chosen if he had followed his mother’s wishes and become a priest. He says that he has found a deeper peace now than at any other point in his life.

  “To be real honest, I have more questions about this than I have answers,” he says of what happened to his family. His theory about why he “remembered” sexual and satanic abuse is that it helped him explain to himself why a man who was ostensibly a good Christian and a loving parent could have mistreated his children. “I wasn’t a good father, I know,” he admits. “I wasn’t there for the kids. I wasn’t able to communicate with them as I should have. I never sexually abused anybody. But emotional abuse—you don’t like to admit it, but somebody has to. A child is a pretty delicate creature. I did a lot of hollering as a father, and I think that must have intimidated the kids. One time, Julie ran a bath that was too hot and she scalded Mark. I slapped her. Another time, she tried to run away. I saw her running down the driveway and Sandy chasing her. She was about sixteen. I ran out and caught her and pulled her hair and said she was coming back home. I remember hitting Paul Ross once on the back of the head, and I kicked him. But I never beat my children. When I got angry, that’s when I hollered. There was a lack of affection they should get from a father figure.”

  Is that all? Certainly that would be the most frightening conclusion of the Ingram case, that the bonds of family life are so intricately framed that such appalling perversions of memory can arise from ordinary rotten behavior.

  Were there real acts of sexual abuse in the Ingram household? The testimony of the family members about this is as contradictory as it is for the ritual abuse. Despite the months of intense, unrelenting interrogation of Paul Ingram, and dozens of conflicting episodes remembered by Ingram and his wife and children, the six counts of third-degree rape that Ingram was charged with were all based on confessions elicited in the two days immediately after his arrest; they emerged in sessions with Schoening and Vukich—and, in part, with psychologist Richard Peterson and Pastor John Bratun—during which, Ingram says, he was repeatedly assured that he would remember the abuse once he had confessed to it. Here, for instance, is the text of his confession to one of the rapes he was eventually charged with:

  Q: Let’s try to talk about the most recent time, Paul. Ericka tells me that it was toward the end of September, just before she moved out. Do you remember that?

  A: Well, I keep trying to, to recollect it, and I’m still kind of looking at it as a third party, but, uh, the evidence, and I am trying to put this in the first person, it’s not comin’ very well, but, uh, I would’ve gotten out of bed, put on a bathrobe, gone into her room, taken the robe off and at least partially disrobing her and then fondling, uh, her breasts and her vagina and, uh, also telling her that if she ever told anybody that, that I would, uh, kill her.…

  Q: Now you’ve talked about this in the third party. I’m going to ask you directly, is this what happened?

  A: Whew, I’m still having trouble gettin’ a clear picture of what happened. I—I know in my own mind that these things had to have happened.

  The fact that all the memories of the family members became less believable over time caused the prosecution to return to these early statements as the “core truth” of the Ingram case. The fundamental premise of the investigation was that something must have happened. At no time did the detectives ever consider the possibility that the source of the memories was the inv
estigation itself—there was no other reality. In the end, all that was salvageable was Ingram’s experimental attempt to find the memories in his mind by confessing to them.

  There was another possibility that the detectives did not pursue. From the beginning, both of the Ingram daughters had said that they had sex with their brothers. Julie wrote in one of her statements to Loreli Thompson that when she was thirteen Paul Ross had taken her into his room and they had intercourse on his bed. In Joe Vukich’s sole interview with Paula Davis, Davis recalled Ericka’s first disclosure to her, in the summer of 1988, before the Heart to Heart camp. Ericka had been sitting for Davis’s children, and when Davis got home she had sat down with Ericka on the couch, “and she told me.”

  Q. What did she tell you?

  A. First she told me about her brother. She told me that Chad had had sex—her brothers both, but mostly she was talking about Chad—that her brothers had had sex with her for a lot of years since she was little.

  Q. That’s Chad and Paul Jr.?

  A. Yes …

  Q. Did she say anything about her father on this particular occasion?

  A. No, she did not. In fact, I asked her, and she looked at me really strange and shook her head no.

  The detectives chose to believe that even if there was sexual acting out among the siblings, such behavior must have been learned—presumably through abuse by the parents.

  All of these scenarios of abuse are confounded by the Ingram daughters’ frequent claims that they were actually virgins. The medical evidence placed into the records does not specify whether they were or were not. If it was true that Ericka was a virgin, then Karla Franko’s pronouncement at the church camp (that God had revealed to her that Ericka had been sexually abused) would answer what may have been an irreconcilable dilemma for her. In 1987, Ericka had driven to California with her friend Paula Davis. On the way Ericka became so ill that she had to check into a hospital. The examining doctor said she was suffering from pelvic inflammatory disease. When Davis asked the doctor how Ericka might have contracted such an infection, he told her that it is spread through sexual intercourse. Later, when Ericka was trying to bolster her case with the detectives, she pointed to the infection as proof of her abuse. The doctor had failed to mention, however, that pelvic inflammatory disease can also be caused by an ovarian cyst, which in fact Ericka did have, although it had not been diagnosed on that visit.

  The sexual content of the memories that Paul Ingram and his daughters produced was on its face a tragic courtship of buried longings forced into public view. Neither daughter ever visualized the other in these fantasies, although in real life they were almost constantly together. One can read them as competitive bids for their father’s favor. Each memory began by seeing him enter their room and choose now Julie, now Ericka, at the expense of the other. The unchosen daughter is either mysteriously absent or so deeply asleep as to be completely unconscious. One can appreciate in these richly envisioned fantasies the sexual power that underlies the dynamics of the family, and the anger that accumulates and gradually replaces the unrequited love of a needy child for an unavailable parent. Seen in this manner, the Ingram case becomes a vivid illustration of exactly why Freud abandoned the seduction theory in favor of the Oedipus complex. If the memories of the Ingram family are not of real events, then perhaps they arise from repressed wishes.

  Ritual abuse cases have much in common; indeed, this is often taken as proof of the existence of a single, all-powerful satanic network. It can also be interpreted as evidence of the common fantasy life that has been a feature of our culture for centuries. The myth of ritual murder arose in Europe in the twelfth century, and by the fifteenth century the blood libel attached to the Jews had reached a frenzy. It began to die out only as the Reformation approached. By then, of course, the Inquisition had turned its implacable eye on witches. One of the fascinating details of the European witch-hunts, which didn’t end until 1700, is that frequently the witches’ confessions—like Paul Ingram’s—were voluntary and apparently deeply believed in. The elements of sodomy, incest, pedophilia, cannibalism, and the ritual use of human blood appear to be universal elements of demonology in all cultures.* They correspond to inherent human fears and taboos.

  As for why the satanic-ritual hysteria would appear again in our century, one can point to the rise of fundamentalist religions, the social anxiety about the loss of traditional values, and political uncertainty following the collapse of international communism. In addition, one can’t help noticing the repeated theme of abortion. Both Ericka and Julie talked about receiving abortions and having their babies cut up and rubbed on them. This seems to be an element of nearly every SRA account. The imagery of babies being cut up and sacrificed is also a prominent feature of antiabortion protest. It is only a theory, but perhaps the psychic damage done by the abortion debate is reflected in the anguished fantasies of so many young women.

  Religion certainly played a guiding role in the Ingram case. Every member of the Ingram family was primed to believe in the existence of satanic cults. Still, their belief had as much to do with popular culture and tabloid television as it did with their church. The doctrine of the Church of Living Water is that Satan is real and walks the earth, which is similar to the beliefs of many more widely recognized Protestant denominations. The rigid nature of the Ingrams’ personal beliefs may have made them particularly susceptible to the notion that the family had lived two opposing lives—one as prominent Christians in their church and their community, the other as covert practicing satanists—and also that the good and aboveboard public life of the family was entirely unaware of its furtive, monstrous underlife. One must also acknowledge that the religious beliefs of some of the investigators may have figured into their pursuing the case well past the point of logical inconsistency. The bending of all evidence to support the absurdity of an insupportable proposition is the very nature of a witch-hunt.

  On the other hand, not all of the investigators were deeply religious people. Their judgment may have been clouded by more common assumptions about the nature of human memory. Memory is not like videotape, as Jim Rabie’s polygraph examiner believes. What we have learned about this miraculous and mysterious capacity is that it is reconstructive, that it continually recreates itself, continually reinvents personal history. Freud anticipated much of modern-day research on this subject when he wrote, in 1899:

  It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves.

  Whatever the true nature of human memory, the Ingram case makes obvious the perils of a fixed idea—in this instance, the fixed idea being that the truth of human behavior, and even of one’s own experience, can be cloaked by a trick of the unconscious mind, which draws a curtain of amnesia over a painful past. Unfortunately, the theory of repression, in its current “robust” form, also permits the construction of imaginary alternative lives, which may contain some symbolic truth but are in other respects damaging counterfeits that corrupt the currency of real experience.

  One could say that the miracle of the Ingram case is that it did not go further than it did. If Ingram’s memories had not finally become too absurd even for the investigators to believe, if Rabie or Risch had accepted the prosecutor’s deals, if the alleged crimes of other people implicated in the investigation had occurred within the statute of limitations—if any of these quite conceivable scenarios had taken place, then the witch-hunt in Olympia would have raged out of control, and one cannot guess how many other lives might have been destroyed. But, unfortunately, what hap
pened to the Ingram family, and to Ray Risch and Jim Rabie, is actually happening to thousands of other people throughout the country who have been accused on the basis of recovered memories. Perhaps some of these memories are real; certainly many are false. Whatever the value of repression as a scientific concept or a therapeutic tool, unquestioning belief in it has become as dangerous as the belief in witches. One idea is modern and the other an artifact of what we like to think of as a credulous age, but the consequences are depressingly the same.

  *Cf. Phillips Stevens, Ir., “Universal Cultural Elements in the Satanic Demonology,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 20, no. 3 (Fall 1992). There are other common elements of folklore involved in the Ingram case-notably, Chad Ingram’s dream of the witch that comes into his window and sits on his chest. This common nightmare is known as an “Old Hag attack” in Newfoundland, where it has been extensively studied. David J. Hufford has written about this fascinating phenomenon, in both Newfoundland and the United States, in The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).

  A Note on Sources and

  a Few Words About Journalism

  The investigative files into the case of Paul Ingram and those of Jim Rabie and Ray Risch occupy many boxes in the Thurston County Courthouse, and they were the primary material for much of this book. Some of these interview sessions were recorded, although only a few such tapes survive. Those that do provide a better understanding of the emotional interactions between the investigators and the victims and the suspects who were caught up in this extraordinary affair.

  Most of the investigators spoke freely to me (I was not able to talk to Tom Lynch or Paul Johnson). All of the detectives I dealt with were helpful and candid. I also interviewed various people in the prosecutor’s office, including Patrick Sutherland, David Klumpp, and in particular Gary Tabor, who gave generously of his time and made many materials available to me. Psychologist Richard Peterson agreed to speak to me on two occasions. In addition, I interviewed Jim Rabie and Ray Risch; their wives, Ruth and Jodie; defense, attorneys G. Saxon Rodgers, Judith Weigand, Wayne Fricke, and Gary Preble; many members of the Church of Living Water (although not Pastor John Bratun, who no longer serves as associate pastor); friends of the Ingram family and teachers of the Ingram children; Kenneth Lanning of the FBI; Karla Franko; Tyra Lindquist and Ann Bridges at Safeplace; Bart Potter, the former Olympian reporter who covered the case; Mark Papworth, an anthropologist at Evergreen State College, who supervised the excavation and search of the Ingram property; Richard Ofshe; psychologist Chris Hatcher, director of the Center for the Study of Trauma at the University of California, who spoke with members of the Ingram family on behalf of the prosecution; and psychiatrist Dr. Alan Traywick, counselor Geri Walter, and therapists Margaret Cain Roberts and Sydney Gienty, all of whom gave me the benefit of their perspectives without compromising their relationships with their clients.