Remembering Satan

  The two older boys were rebellious and showed a disturbing tendency to live secret lives. In 1984, at the age of eighteen, Paul Ross turned down an appointment to West Point which his father had arranged, and then abruptly left home after wrecking his car for the third time in three months. He parked the car in a cemetery and left behind a note to Sandy saying that he had fallen in with a dangerous crowd. He warned his parents not to try to find him. “When you get this letter I’ll probably be somewhere in South America,” he wrote. Investigators later found the note in Sandy’s desk. Their second son, Chad, whom Paul and Sandy considered the quietest and most even-tempered of their children, moved into an apartment in downtown Olympia for a short time during high school, and was arrested for shoplifting candy. Later, he went to Bible school in Tulsa, dropped out, and came back home to live.

  Ericka and Julie, who shared a bedroom throughout their childhood, were often considered a pair, although Ericka was four years older than Julie and by far the more assertive. One can see a family resemblance: they inherited dark brown hair and eyes from both sides of the family, and have full, rounded faces, such as one might find in a portrait by Vermeer. What struck most people, however, was how different their personalities were. Ericka was moody and self-absorbed, Julie bubbly and outgoing, if somewhat in the shadow of her sister. Certainly Ericka was the beauty of the family, although she held herself apart and looked at life through eyes of cautious reserve. Her most striking feature was her mouth, which was small and sensual, with unusually high peaks on the arches of her upper lip; it was like the mouth of a Kewpie doll. She was still living at home when she turned twenty-two. Working as a tour guide at the capitol and intermittently attending college (she studied sign language and sometimes served as an interpreter for the deaf), Ericka always had her eye on the larger world. She bought stylish clothes and loved to travel. She had been to Greece, and in August of 1988 she had just returned from attending the Olympics in South Korea. Julie, on the other hand, was a homebody, like her mother. People thought she was the image of Sandy, and she dressed like her mother, in jeans and sweatshirts. Two years in a row, Julie had won the state championship in the Future Homemakers of America contest and had gone on to the nationals; that constituted most of her travel experience, except for the family vacations. The two girls were alike in one respect, though: they rarely went on dates—Ericka had been out only twice in the previous three years—and they were extremely shy around boys.

  The Ingrams became a part of the extraordinary growth of Pentecostalism in America during the seventies and eighties. When the Evergreen Christian Center grew too large for the family’s taste, they transferred to the Church of Living Water, an affiliate of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which had been founded by the well-known evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1920s. The Church of Living Water was also growing quickly and soon moved from its modest quarters into an expansive campus with eight buildings that take up most of a city block. Like many congregations that once endured the stigma of being “Holy Rollers” on the poor side of town, the church projects an atmosphere that is intended to be informal and inviting. The sanctuary is a windowless theater called the Living Room, where the pastoral staff sit on a dais in easy chairs beside an artificial fireplace. It has the ambiance of the set of a daytime television talk show. There is a small gospel choir and a band.

  Unlike the Catholic tradition that Paul and Sandy grew up in, the Pentecostal teachings of the Church of Living Water emphasized the truth of personal revelation, which sometimes appeared in dramatic forms. Here the congregation was often on its feet, waving its hands, shouting praise, instead of sitting in pews or kneeling silently at the altar rail. There was nothing rabid or fanatical about the services, as so many people still believed, but there was a powerful current of energy that could be shocking or thrilling, depending on what one thought about the message: that the Bible is the infallible word of God; that Jesus is His Son and will return to rapture the church and judge the world; that the only means of being cleansed from sin is through repentance and faith in Jesus; and that the gifts of the Holy Spirit—prophecy, healing, discernment, speaking or understanding strange tongues—are essential for personal salvation and available to all who believe.

  The Ingrams were regulars at the church every Sunday morning and night and every Wednesday evening, and they also participated in the countless socials and study groups and retreats. Sandy started a food-and-clothing charity called Twelve Baskets, which became an important part of the church’s community service. Frequently, Ericka would interpret sermons for deaf members of the congregation. She also persuaded her parents to take in two deaf girls as foster children, which proved to be an awkward arrangement for Paul and Sandy, because communication was so difficult.

  The Church of Living Water sponsored an annual retreat for teenage girls called Heart to Heart, held at a camp on nearby Black Lake. Julie and Ericka had attended for several years. Although she was really too old for the camp, Ericka returned in August of 1988 as a counselor. Five years earlier, during a fellowship discussion, Ericka had related an incident of what she characterized as attempted rape by a man she knew. The subject of sexual abuse sometimes arose during these sessions, and counselors took such revelations seriously. The authorities were alerted, and Jim Rabie, the sex-crime detective from the sheriff’s office, followed up on Ericka’s charge. He determined that there wasn’t much substance to it—a married man had given Ericka a ride and put his hand on her knee—and the investigation was not pursued. Then, in 1985, during another Heart to Heart retreat, Julie said she had been sexually abused by a neighbor who lived on the Ingram property. When word of that charge got back to Paul, he took Julie to the county prosecutor and helped her file a complaint. Eventually, Ericka also accused the neighbor of improper sexual contact. Julie, however, became less and less able to speak about the alleged incident, to the point of becoming completely mute on the subject. Inconsistencies in her story began to surface, and the county prosecutor finally dropped the charges. Julie seemed relieved.

  During the 1988 Heart to Heart, a woman from California named Karla Franko came to speak to the sixty girls in attendance. Franko is a charismatic Christian who believes she has been given the biblical gifts of healing and spiritual discernment. Before going to Bible college, she had been a dancer and a stand-up comic as well as an actress, and had parts in several sitcoms and TV commercials, which added a note of celebrity in the minds of the young girls in the audience. Often in speaking to youth groups such as this one, Franko would feel herself filled with the Holy Spirit and would make pronouncements that the Spirit urged upon her. Many extraordinary events took place at the 1988 retreat. At one point, Franko told the mesmerized group that she had a mental picture of a little girl hiding in a coat closet, and saw a crack of light under the door. Footsteps were approaching. There was the sound of a key locking the door. At that, a girl in the audience stood up, heaving with sobs, and cried out that she had been that little girl. Franko then had another vision. She said that someone in the audience had been molested as a young girl by a relative. Suddenly, a deaf girl rushed out of the room. A woman named Paula Davis, who, along with Ericka, was interpreting for the deaf campers, went after the girl and found her in the bathroom with her head in the toilet, trying to drown herself. In this charged atmosphere, a number of other girls came forward to say that they, too, had been abused. The counselors had their hands full.

  Late in the afternoon of the last day of the retreat, the campers boarded buses to return to the church. Ericka remained in the conference center, sobbing disconsolately. She sat cross-legged on the floor of the stage with her head hanging between her knees. It was a dramatic, heartbreaking sight, but Ericka would not say what was wrong. The other counselors gave up trying to talk to her. They just gathered around her quietly to show their support. Finally, according to one of the counselors, she declared, “I have been abused sexually by my father.”

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nbsp; “She seemed to be devastated just by having said those words,” the counselor later told police.

  Actually, that was only one version of the event—the version that the detectives placed in their files and later made available to defense attorneys. Another witness to the scene was Karla Franko, and she had a different account of what happened, which she claims she told investigators (there is no record of her statement in the files). Franko recalls that as she was getting ready to leave for the airport, a counselor came to her and asked her to pray over Ericka. “What does she need prayer for?” Franko asked. The counselor shrugged. Franko went back to the stage, where Ericka was sitting Indian-style, a portrait in dejection. Franko stood over her and began praying aloud. Almost immediately, she felt the Lord prompting her with information. She stepped back and was silent as she listened to the Lord’s urgings. The word “molestation” presented itself to her.

  “You have been abused as a child, sexually abused,” Franko announced. Ericka sat quietly weeping, unable to respond. Franko received another divine prompting, which told her, “It’s by her father, and it’s been happening for years.” When Franko said this aloud, Ericka began to sob hysterically. Franko prayed for the Lord to heal her. When Ericka’s weeping eventually began to subside, Franko urged her to seek counseling, in order to get to the memories that were causing her so much pain. At no time, says Franko, did Ericka utter a word; she was so scathed and devastated by Franko’s revelation that she could do little more than nod in acknowledgment.

  Not long after the church retreat, both daughters abruptly moved out of the house. Ericka departed during the last week of September. She left the two deaf girls behind, in her parents’ care. Julie left six weeks later. Both eventually moved in with friends, although Julie actually spent some nights sleeping in her car. Neither would say where they were or give any explanation for their actions. Paul and Sandy were distraught, especially about Julie. It was becoming a pattern in the Ingram household for the children to suddenly flee and hide, although Ericka, at twenty-two, had remained in the house longer than any of the others.

  Ericka arranged to meet her mother after the evening church services the Sunday before Thanksgiving. That night there was an open house to dedicate the new sanctuary. Julie was there, and Paul took the opportunity to ask her to lunch. He said he wanted to talk about why she had moved out. Julie seemed to be in a cheerful mood and readily agreed. Paul then took ten-year-old Mark home, and Sandy went to meet Ericka at a nearby Denny’s restaurant. She got there first, and sat at a table and ordered a cup of tea. For months, Sandy had sensed that Ericka was unhappy; but whenever she asked what was wrong, the only response Ericka had been able to give was a cryptic “You don’t want to know.” Now Ericka arrived in the company of her best friend, Paula Davis, who was to be her advocate in all that followed. Over the next two hours, Ericka talked of having been repeatedly molested by her father when she was young. In the last several years, she said, her brothers Paul Ross and Chad had molested her as well. Ericka linked her father’s abuse to the poker parties in their old house. She said that the abuse had stopped when Paul was born again in the Pentecostal church, in 1975. As Ericka spoke, Sandy stared into her teacup. Finally she asked Ericka why she had never spoken about this before. “Mom, I did tell you,” Ericka replied. “I tried to tell you, and you wouldn’t listen.”

  “You’re the only one in the family who didn’t know,” Davis added.

  Sandy went home and confronted Paul. He said, “I never touched those girls.” Chad was working late at the YMCA, and Sandy waited up for him. “You know I’ve always been a good boy, Mama,” he said when she told him of Ericka’s accusations against him. She called the associate pastor at her church, John Bratun, and learned that he already had heard about the allegations from the retreat counselors. According to Paul, Bratun told Sandy that the charges were probably true, because children didn’t make up those kinds of things. Sandy and Paul had been planning to drive to the Oregon coast the next day for a week’s vacation in a rented condominium, but that was now the last thing on Sandy’s mind. In the morning, Sandy picked up Julie in the house where she was staying and drove her to school. On the way, Julie confirmed that her father and her oldest brother had molested her, too. She said that she had last been molested by her father five years earlier, when she was thirteen.

  Against her better judgment, Sandy agreed to go ahead with the vacation, after her pastor said it would be good to get away. In her heart, Sandy felt that they should stay and deal with the accusations now, before they got out of hand; but Paul wanted to go—he needed to think. As soon as they left town, however, the investigation began in earnest. That very afternoon, a counselor from the local rape-crisis center took Julie to meet with police investigators, one of whom was Joe Vukich. The story she told them was somewhat different from the one she had told her mother that morning, and far more detailed. Julie said that the abuse had begun when she was in the fifth grade; her father was working the graveyard shift then, and sometimes he would sneak into the room where Ericka and Julie slept. He would be either naked or wearing shorts or sweats. He would get into bed with one of the girls and have vaginal or anal sex with her. As Julie told the story, she hid her face behind a curtain of brown hair. Each response came after a lengthy pause. Some questions she refused to answer. Because the investigators were concerned about the statute of limitations, which then extended for seven years in the case of assaults on minors, they concentrated on the most recent events. Julie told them that the last time her father had sexually abused her was three years before, when she was fifteen—not five years before, as she had told her mother. Detective Vukich asked Julie why she had never spoken to anyone about the assaults, and she replied that her mother had never wanted to listen.

  That evening Vukich and Detective Paul Johnson, of the Olympia Police Department, interviewed Ericka at the home of a friend of hers from church. Vukich was immediately struck by how pretty Ericka was, and how vulnerable. She stated that her father had begun sexually abusing her when she was five years old. Vukich asked her to recall the last incident of abuse, and Ericka said she thought that she must have been in the fourth grade—well beyond the statute of limitations. Vukich kept pressing for more details. “Once, I felt like I hurt all over when I woke up—the bed was wet and yucky,” Ericka said. Suddenly she burst into tears and ran into the bathroom. The detectives could hear her sobbing loudly for ten minutes. When she came back into the room, she said, “I caught a disease from my dad about a year ago. The doctor is in California, and also there is a doctor in Olympia who treated me.” She now said that this 1987 incident was the last time she had sex with her father.

  The detectives left at about midnight. With the testimony of two victims in hand, and with the promise of medical evidence, they already had a strong case to give to the county prosecutor.

  Ericka called Karla Franko in California, and Franko expressed surprise at hearing from her. Ericka repeated some of the details she had given to Vukich and then informed Franko, “It is all coming down. They have Julie’s confession.” When Franko asked Ericka what she thought would happen to her father, she said he was going to lose his job. Given the fact that this was still an administrative proceeding, and not yet a criminal one, Ericka may have had reason to believe that the case would go no further than that.

  Vukich interviewed Ericka again, during the Thanksgiving weekend. This time she said that the last incident of abuse had actually occurred during the final week of September, when she awoke to find her father kneeling beside her bed, touching her vagina. Vukich didn’t question why she hadn’t told him of this incident sooner; it’s not unusual for victims of sexual abuse to make partial disclosures. But it was notable that in the space of one week both girls had assigned several different dates to the last incidence of abuse. In Ericka’s case the time frame had moved from a decade earlier to a year earlier and then to just two months earlier.

  Sandy tried to ta
lk to Paul about the allegations while they were on vacation, but he was extremely reticent. He spent a lot of time reading his Bible and walking on the beach, but he had trouble composing his thoughts. He said he felt as if there were a solid mass of fear in his stomach, as dense and impacted as a bowling ball. Sandy stayed in the condo and cried. Paul assured her that nothing had happened, and Sandy believed him, but she was filled with dread. At one point, Paul suggested that the girls were trying to split them up, but neither he nor Sandy could imagine why their daughters would want to do such a thing.

  And so when Sheriff Edwards and Detective Schoening knocked on the Ingrams’ door that afternoon of Monday, November 28, and told Sandy that Paul had confessed, she went into shock. Her knees buckled, and she nearly fainted. She wobbled into the dining room and sat down at the table. Edwards and Schoening were afraid to leave her alone; she was so distraught that they feared that she, too, might consider killing herself. They got in touch with the Ingrams’ pastor, Ron Long, and waited until Long and his associate John Bratun arrived. The last image that Schoening recalls of that night is of Sandy still sitting at that table, pale and stricken, with her pastors standing on either side. His heart went out to her. He was glad that he already had gathered up the weapons in the house.