Although Thurston County authorities looked upon this frenzied hunt for bodies with official dismay, the truth is that they felt somewhat relieved, for the county had exhausted its own budget on the Ingram case and on the additional expense of conducting nighttime aircraft patrols that were intended to spot the bonfires of satanic cults. (Several fraternity beer busts had been raided.) Governor Booth Gardner now approved a $50,000 grant to continue the investigation, and the sheriff’s office went to the state legislature seeking $750,000 for bulletproof vests, night-viewing scopes, and electronic surveillance equipment. (That request was denied.) The sheriff’s office also petitioned the county commissioners for $180,000. McClanahan showed the commissioners a short video about satanic-ritual abuse, in which a number of therapists spoke of the need for greater public support of its victims. “We are now hearing these reports from literally hundreds of therapists in every part of the United States that have amazing parallels,” Dr. D. Corydon Hammond, a mild-faced professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said on the video. “What we are talking about here goes beyond child abuse or beyond the brainwashing of Patty Hearst or Korean War veterans. We’re talking about people in some cases who … were raised in satanic cults from the time they were born—often cults that have come over from Europe, that have roots in the S.S. and death-camp squads, in some cases.” The full extrapolation of Hammond’s theory, not included on the video, goes on to postulate that the mind-control techniques used in such cults were developed by satanic Nazi scientists, who were captured by the CIA after the war and brought to the United States. The main figure was a Hasidic Jew, Dr. Green (an alias for Greenbaum), who saved himself from the gas chambers by assisting his Nazi captors and instructing them in the secrets of the cabala. Thus a note of anti-Semitism, which is almost always present in demonology, was sounded.* “The observations of experienced therapists leave little doubt that children in our society are at risk of being ritually abused,” the narrator of the video concluded. “An appropriate response on the part of professionals requires that we be willing to suspend disbelief and begin to watch for the telltale indicators of this most severe and destructive form of child abuse.” The commissioners granted the request, at a time when schoolteachers were unable to get a scheduled pay raise because of budget restrictions. Eventually, the Ingram investigation would cost three-quarters of a million dollars.
For weeks, Schoening and Vukich had pressured Ingram to come up with names of cult members to match the additional names that Julie had produced for Ofshe. Ingram had been praying and visualizing with Pastor Bratun, and when he was alone he fasted and spent much of his time speaking in tongues. On April 13, he began four days of disclosures, which produced ten names of past and present employees of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. He also named members of the canine unit—the actual dogs, not their handlers—and described a scene in which the animals raped Sandy.
That was too much, even for investigators who had been willing to believe everything so far. A parade of outraged employees of the sheriff’s office took lie detector tests. All passed except one, and no one paid any attention to the man who failed. The common wisdom in the department now was that Paul Ingram had controlled the investigation from the beginning. This latest series of disclosures was his masterstroke, the thinking went; he had been protecting the cult all along, and by discrediting himself in this fashion he would ensure that his testimony was completely worthless. Even so, the demoralized detectives had to reconsider their case against Rabie and Risch. The possibility that the two were innocent apparently never arose in the discussion. The question was simply: Is there any way left to prosecute them—any evidence at all? As the case was falling apart, Ericka and Julie finally consented to allow Loreli Thompson to examine them for scars, the idea being that perhaps she could see something the doctor in Seattle could not. Thompson found nothing. Earlier, Ericka had told of being cut with a knife on her torso and had said she had a three-inch scar; but when she exposed her stomach and pointed to the area, Thompson couldn’t see anything. Paula Davis thought she could see a slight line, but Thompson stretched the skin to make sure, and she still couldn’t make it out. A family doctor finally said she had discovered a tiny, L-shaped scar, but no one else could discern it.
“I’m writing this to you to maybe help fill in the blank in your investigation,” Julie stated in a letter to Tabor on April 26. She maintained that she really did have a scar on her left arm, from a time when her father had nailed her to the floor. She told of other scars from ceremonial incisions. Then she described a scene in which she had been tortured by her father, Rabie, and Risch with a pair of pliers. Paul had visualized such a scene months before, and on several previous occasions Julie had denied that it had occurred. She also wrote: “One time, I was about 11, my mom open my private area w/them and put a piece of a died baby inside me. I did remove it after she left it was an arm.” Apparently, Julie was now remembering Brian Schoening’s dream.
“On May 1, 1989, the trials of Jim Rabie, Ray Risch and Paul Ingram are scheduled to begin,” wrote McClanahan in an effort to buoy his depressed investigators. “This office has done a remarkable job in uncovering the first ritualistic abuse investigation that has been confirmed by an adult offender involved directly with the offenses in the nation’s history.… Clearly we are on the cutting edge of knowledge being gained from ritual abuse.” At the bottom of the letter, he appended the names of four therapists who were available to counsel the officers.
McClanahan had taken the trouble to put together a chart titled “The Formal Investigation of Ritual Abuse,” which might be a model for similar investigations around the world. He was trained in “link analysis,” and the chart attempted to place all the elements of the case into a display of associations. The centerpiece was a square, which McClanahan labeled “Ritual Abuse.” Inside this box were four rectangles, titled “History,” “Control,” “Abuse,” and “Organization,” as well as two ovals, “Criminal” and “Non-Criminal.” These were linked by tangents, forming a kind of web; and from each of these, other lines branched out to other rectangles and ovals outside the central square. From the “Abuse” rectangle, for instance, there were lines leading to “Physical,” “Emotional,” “Sexual,” “Spiritual,” and “Psychological” ovals. Each of those ovals, in turn, became a hub for new spokes radiating from it. From the “Psychological” oval, for instance, there were spokes labeled “Killing Babies,” “Sacrifices,” “Eating Urine/Feces,” “Sex with Animals,” “Self Pleasure,” “Who Will Believe,” “Tricked Humans/Animals Buried-Later Moved,” “It’s Victim’s Fault Others Die,” “Killing/Eating Pets.” A spoke from “Psychological” made a connection to yet another oval, “Concealment,” which had its own sunburst of spokes, and each of them had subspokes: the “Victims Conditioning” spoke, for instance, branched into “Others Will Die If You Remember,” “You Will Die If You Remember,” and “Satan Can Read Your Mind.” McClanahan was proud of his chart, which he hung prominently on his wall. It seemed to capture the multiplying complexity of the Ingram case and arrange it all into a single, comprehensible, if awe-inspiring, graphic display. The detectives, however, were mortified. “It looks like a schizophrenic’s brain exploded on him,” one of them remarked sourly.
Actually, the Ingram case was no longer a ritual-abuse investigation. All charges of satanic abuse had faded away as prosecutors worked to salvage something. Ingram spared them any further embarrassment by deciding to plead guilty to six counts of third-degree rape. On Bratun’s advice, he had not read Ofshe’s report, because it might confuse him. Both Ericka and Julie had written him, however, saying that he owed them a confession. Sandy, who had initiated divorce proceedings, also urged him to plead guilty. The judge delayed the sentencing when it was learned that Julie had been sent a threatening letter. “Hows my very special little girl?” the letter read. “Do you realize how much trouble you caused our family? You’ve really blow this one and to
tell you the true you’ve broke us up forever you’ll never be a part of our family again. You’ve hurt you mom so bad you’ve destroy her she wants to die … you do realize that there are many people that would like to see you dead and a few that are hunting for you.” It was signed, “Your ex Father, Paul.” As soon as Detective Thompson saw the letter, she recognized the handwriting: Julie had written it to herself. Undersheriff McClanahan explained the forgery as behavior typical of ritual-abuse victims, who have been conditioned to exaggerate. “She just wanted us to believe her,” he said.
On May 3, 1989, two days after Ingram pleaded guilty, the prosecutor dropped the charges against Rabie and Risch. They had been in custody a hundred and fifty-eight days.
*According to Hammond, multiple personalities have been deliberately created in satanic ceremonies. “People say what’s the purpose of it? My best guess is that the purpose of it is that they want an army of Manchurian Candidates, tens of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, do child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, do snuff films-all sorts of very lucrative things—and do their bidding, and eventually, the megalomaniacs at the top believe, create a satanic order that will rule the world.” The logic of SRA hysteria permits no other conelusion. Hammond, incidentally, was instrumental in persuading the governor of Utah to create a ritual-abuse task force. He reports that, largely as a result of this effort, 90 percent of the citizens of the state believe that SRA is real, and that there are two full-time ritual-abuse investigators working through the attorney general’s office. According to the September 13, 1993, Salt Lake Tribune, the investigators spent $250,000 and found nothing to prosecute.
As for the mysterious Dr. Green, Sherrill A. Mulhern, an anthropologist at the University of Paris who has studied the SRA phenomenon, traces him to the 1989 Lisa Steinberg case in New York City. A Dr. Michael Green was supposedly a member of a cult that Joel Steinberg was in. See also Joyce Johnson, What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1990).
14
In May 1989, Richard Ofshe had a telephone conversation with Paul Ingram in which he urged him to try to withdraw his guilty plea before the sentencing. Ingram said that although he had been having doubts himself about the validity of some of his memories, he was still hopeful that he would be able to fill in the blanks with new memories that would explain the many contradictions in his own stories and those of his wife and children.
“I’ll tell you something, Paul—you are never going to get them,” Ofshe said. “There is no way that you are going to be able to remember anything that is going to reconcile all the lies that have been told about this in the last few months.”
“Assuming that you are right, you know I am still not willing to make the girls get up on the stand if there is a chance that I am going to emotionally damage them for the rest of their lives,” Ingram replied. He said both the prosecutor and his own attorney had told them this might happen. Besides, he still believed that he was repressing material that could explain everything. “Let’s even look at the guys that go through, like, Vietnam,” he added. “They hide a lot of those memories.”
“Maybe somebody can blank out one event that was just life-threatening to them, terrifying, disgusting beyond belief,” Ofshe conceded. “Nobody can blank out as many events as you think you blanked out—it has never happened,” Ofshe went on. “Paul, everything that you have told me this evening adds up to one thing. There exists a process that you have learned to use that allows you to invent images that are consistent with what you think should be happening.”
Ingram was unmoved.
Two months later, however, in his prison cell, he reconsidered. He had been keeping a log in which he divided his memories into three categories: “Definitely Happened,” “Not So Definitely Happened,” and “Not Sure.” At the time of his plea, most of his memories had been lodged in the first category, but afterward they began an insidious migration into the other two. On the morning of July 19, 1989, the anxiety that had been building within him reached a crisis. While he was praying, he later related, he heard a murmur, “Let go of the rope.” A deep feeling of peace settled over him. His mind began to clear. Suddenly, he could see that all the visualizations of rituals and abuse had been fantasies, not actual memories. He no longer believed that he was a satanist or a child abuser, or even the victim of child abuse himself. The experience approximated for him a religious conversion. He wrote in his Bible, “PRI DIED TO SELF 7-19-89.”
Ingram got a new lawyer, who filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea on the grounds that he had been coerced in the course of being interrogated and had given incriminating testimony while in a trancelike state. Unfortunately, it was too late to stop the train that Ingram boarded when he pleaded guilty. All the lawyer could do was to petition for leniency at the sentencing hearing, which took place in April of 1990.
“I’m Ericka Ingram. I was the daughter of Paul Ingram,” Ericka stated in a surprise appearance at the hearing. Ericka wore a simple, pale dress, and she looked wan and stricken. She asked the judge to impose the greatest possible sentence. Otherwise, “I believe he will either kill me or Julie,” she warned. “He destroyed me and Julie’s life and our entire family, and he doesn’t care. He is obviously a very dangerous man.” As she spoke, Schoening and Vukich sat in the back of the court and wept openly.
When Ericka finished, the judge asked Paul Ingram if he had anything to say.
Ingram rose and said in a clear voice, “I stand before you, I stand before God. I have never sexually abused my daughters. I am not guilty of these crimes.” The judge showed no interest in this change of heart. Ordinarily, under the worst circumstances, Ingram would serve thirty-three to forty-three months for each count, running concurrently, which meant that he would be in prison for no more than three and a half years. The standards in the state of Washington are such that most first-time sex offenders receive a six-month sentence if they agree to urdergo treatment—a sentence Ingram had already served. The judge agreed with the prosecutor, however, that this was not an ordinary circumstance. Moreover, because Ingram was now saying that the events didn’t happen, the judge believed that treatment would not be helpful. He sentenced Ingram to twenty years in prison, with the possibility of parole after twelve years.*
When the county prosecutor’s office dropped the charges against Rabie and Risch, Ericka asked an attorney named Thomas Olmstead to file a suit against Thurston County for negligence in failing to supervise Ingram and Rabie, † Ericka has asserted that some thirty satanists controlled the county and conspired to derail the case. Undersheriff McClanahan and Detective Schoening are among those Ericka has named as satanists. “How high does this go?” asks Olmstead, who is a fundamentalist Christian and a former FBI agent. “The governor? Who knows?”
Sandy Ingram, now divorced from Paul, has changed her name and lives in another town with Mark. Both Chad and Paul Ross have married and moved away. Ericka is living in California. Julie remains in the Olympia area, but she now uses a different name. The Ingram family, such as it was, has been destroyed. In the end, what had once held them together, their memories, is what blew them apart.
Jim Rabie and Ray Risch still live in Olympia, although they are widely believed to be guilty men who got away with heinous crimes. Risch works in the same automobile repair shop where he worked before, but he is rarely given any supervisory tasks. “There isn’t a day that goes by that it doesn’t get brought up,” he says. “The cloud is still there. It’s not a good memory.” His wife reports that his mind is still scattered, and that it has been hard to keep up payments on their mobile home.
After abandoning his lobbying consultancy, Rabie worked for several months for a friend who owns a carpet shop, until customer complaints about his presence began to hurt business. Now he has a job with a vehicle-transport company. His legal bills, along with Risch’s—which Rabie helped to pay-have exceeded ninety thousand dol
lars. Both men sued the county for false arrest and malicious prosecution, but their suit was dismissed by the United States District Court.* At this reporter’s request, Rabie agreed to take another lie detector test, which covered the same material as the one he had failed earlier. This time, he passed it.
As for the investigators, most of them have not altered their views. Undersheriff McClanahan, despite being denounced himself as a satanist by Ericka, remains unswayed. “Satanic abuse is real,” he contends. “This case proves it.”
Indeed, with Ingram’s conviction, the case has become a primary exhibit in the SRA controversy. On December 2, 1991, many of the principals met in a television studio in New York. “Today, this woman will come face to face with the man that she says sexually tortured her in satanic rituals for seventeen years. A show you don’t want to miss,” said Sally Jessy Raphaël to her television audience. The camera focused on Ericka Ingram, wearing a cobalt-blue sweater and sitting meekly in a chair beside Raphaël. Arguably, it was shows like this one that created the Ingram fantasy in the first place.
“They were people in the community, like policemen,” Ericka said as she described the cult. “There were some judges, doctors, lawyers. Different people in the community that had high political standings.”
“What happened at the rituals?” Raphaël asked, her voice full of prodding compassion. “I know it must be pretty awful, but what happened?”
“First they would start with just, like, chanting,” Ericka said. “Sometimes they would kill a baby.”
“A baby?” Raphaël echoed. “Where would they get babies?”
“Sometimes people in the cult would have them just for this.”
“Did this happen to you?” Raphaël asked. “You remember being on a table and people having sex with you?”