Remembering Satan

  Rabie and Risch didn’t know at the time that either of them was under suspicion; but even as they were talking, Ingram was across the street in the interview room producing new memories of their having molested his children. That very morning, Julie had picked their faces out of a photo lineup and had described an incident in which, during one of the poker games, Rabie came into her room, raped her, and cut her with a knife.

  When they finished chatting at the deli, Rabie went to another of his Kiwanis meetings and then drove across the street to return a slide projector to the sheriff’s office; he had borrowed it from the crime-prevention department, which Paul Ingram headed. Since no one had ever asked Rabie to return his office key when he retired, he simply unlocked the back door and walked in. It was after seven. Rabie was wearing his red Kiwanis blazer. In the hallway, he saw Tom Lynch walking into the small room that Schoening and Vukich shared. Rabie stuck his head in to say hello. The detectives looked startled.

  “What are you doing here?” Lynch asked.

  “Returning this,” said Rabie. “I’m a little surprised to see you here this late.”

  He wasn’t nearly as surprised as they were.

  “Can I ask a question?” Rabie continued earnestly, taking a seat in the same chair that many suspects had sat in when Jim Rabie was a detective in this very office. “I know that possibly you guys can’t answer it, but has Paul been honest? I mean totally honest, because unless he is he will not be amenable to treatment.” Obviously, Rabie was presuming Ingram’s guilt. According to Lynch’s notes, Rabie then said, “Paul and I have been very close for a long time, and maybe it would help if I talked to him.”

  There was a long, awkward pause. It was so bizarre, having a suspect breeze right into the sheriff’s office, although weirdness had been a part of this case from the very beginning. The sense of unreality was heightened because Ingram and Rabie were so well known in the department. An unsettling feeling of identity tied the detectives to the suspects. Indeed, if Rabie had not retired, he would have been in charge of the case, so there was an odd, mirrored quality of investigators investigating the investigators. Finally, Schoening broke the silence and told Rabie, “You’ve been named.”

  Instead of immediately and adamantly denying the charge, Rabie undid his tie and sat back in the chair with an immense sigh. Vukich and Schoening exchanged a look. They identified this as the “Oh, no, I’ve been caught” reaction.

  Rabie’s initial response seemed to them eerily similar to Ingram’s. He said that he couldn’t remember the events he was being charged with, and he speculated that perhaps he had a “dark side.” Also like Ingram, Rabie asked several times to take a polygraph exam. At nine-thirty that evening, Schoening turned on a tape and read Rabie his rights. Rabie also agreed to talk without a lawyer present. “I am completely baffled by what in the devil is going on,” Rabie said.

  “Jim, you’re doin’ the same exact thing to us tonight that you have seen with probably hundreds of pedophiles,” Schoening said impatiently. “They want to minimize; they want to deny.”

  “I agree,” said Vukich.

  “Individual people, separately, have corroborated that you masturbated in front of and on Julie. Julie tells us that; so does Paul Ingram tell us that,” Schoening continued, selecting one of various conflicting stories. “Don’t you think you’re in a denial stage?”

  “I must be, because I honestly do not have any recollection of that happening, and I do not believe that I could’ve done it and blocked it out.”

  “How do you feel right now?”

  “In a daze,” said Rabie. “Scared.”

  “What’re you scared of?”

  “Because I know from your end of it that if you’ve got what you tell me you have, that I’m not leaving here. I’m gonna be in custody. And I have a firm belief that any cop that’s charged is guilty until proven otherwise.”

  Vukich asked what Rabie would think if he were sitting on the other side of the desk with the same information. “What would be your honest evaluation?”

  “Same things you’re thinking,” Rabie admitted. “That I must be guilty, and that I must be in a denial state.” The significance of his plight swiftly settled in on him. “An ex-cop in prison is almost a sign of death,” he observed. Even if he got off, the mere fact that he had been charged would mean that his reputation was destroyed, his lobbying career was finished, his Kiwanis work was over, his marriage was placed in peril, and he might not be allowed ever to see his granddaughters again, because suspicion that he was a child molester would always hover around him. In short, his life was ruined.

  “I can’t figure out why, if I did this, I wouldn’t remember it happening,” Rabie said, echoing Paul’s complaint.

  “You can’t admit it to yourself, Jim, that’s the problem,” said Schoening. “You’re like Paul was. You can’t convince yourself that you really could have been part of this.”

  “I can’t even picture someone masturbating on a small child,” said Rabie.

  “There’s photographs of it, Jim,” Schoening said, although he actually did not have such evidence in hand. “How about a picture of you lying on the floor, nude, next to Julie?”

  “If I saw a picture of that I would have to believe it occurred,” Rabie said.

  While Rabie was being interrogated, Detective Paul Johnson and Detective Loreli Thompson had been assigned to question Ray Risch. They drove out to the trailer on a deadend street where he lived with his wife, Jodie. Risch was feeling ill that night; that day he had been painting a car in the shop where he worked, and the fumes always left him feeling like he had the flu. He was lying on the couch watching TV at ten-fifteen when he heard the squad car turn into the dark cul-de-sac. For the detectives, the fact that Risch was looking out the window as they approached the house seemed suspicious, as did his first remark when he answered the door: “Is this about Paul?” Risch immediately agreed to go to the station. He didn’t think it was surprising that he would be questioned, even at this hour at night; but he did notice that when he went to get his jacket and shoes, one of the detectives followed him into the bedroom.

  As they arrived at the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, Risch noticed Rabie’s El Camino in the parking lot. A moment later, Risch was sitting in another interrogation room having his rights read to him. Until this point, he maintains, he still thought the detectives were interested only in Ingram. He never dreamed he was also a suspect.

  “I noted that Risch’s legs were crossed both at the knee and at the ankle,” wrote Detective Thompson in her report. In her opinion, Risch’s body language indicated that he was protecting something. “I also noted that when questioning would become intense at points, his arms would cross tightly across his chest.”

  On being confronted with what appeared to be overwhelming evidence against him, Risch offered the same sort of equivocal statements about memory that both Ingram and Rabie had. “I wasn’t present that I know of, unless I blocked it out of my head,” he said.

  The interrogations went on into the early morning—Rabie in one room, Risch in another, and Peterson, the ubiquitous psychologist, shuttling back and forth. “We’re talking about a situation here, Jim, where you have, if you will, a cult,” Vukich told Rabie, offering what was becoming the official theory. “A cultist-type attraction and activity between these … individuals that has continued over a prolonged period of time.”

  Eventually each man was told that his friend had broken down and was implicating him, although this was not true. “This has gone far enough!” Risch cried.

  “Paul said you guys bullied him and you made him do this and he didn’t want to,” Schoening told Rabie. “Ray is saying basically the same thing. Only, he’s saying that he was the one who was the weakling, and he’s saying you and Paul were the worst two.”

  Rabie realized that this could be a bluff, but he was also aware that in a case like this, which had multiple suspects, one person could be offered a certain
degree of immunity to provide testimony against the others—and that often it was a scramble to pin the ringleader tag on another suspect. “Give me the responsibility, because I’ve blocked it out enough—I must be the worst one,” Rabie said glumly. “The only option is to lock me up, and you’re going to have to throw away the key, because if I can’t remember this, then I am so damn dangerous I do not deserve to be loose.”

  5

  The next day, December 2, Ingram met in Vukich and Schoening’s office with Pastor Bratun. “I know I have a demon in me,” Ingram said, and he asked Bratun to perform an exorcism.

  “You don’t have a demon, but you’ve got several spirits,” Bratun told him. Bratun had spent some time in Southern California, where he had had some experience with people who were in bondage to spirits. He set a wastebasket in the middle of the floor and called out from Ingram the spirits of sexual immorality and gluttony, among others. As he did, Ingram attempted to regurgitate into the wastebasket, with little success. Still, he felt “delivered,” he said, and when he went back into the interrogation room he produced a new memory. In this memory, Rabie, who is five feet eight inches tall, pushed Ingram, who is six feet two, down the stairs. “He wanted to do something that I didn’t want him to do,” Ingram told the detectives. “He said he wanted Chad.” Rabie shoved his way into Chad’s room. “Chad was on the bed and cowering. He went over and ripped his pants off and made him kneel on the floor and I was powerless to do anything.… He forced Chad down and had anal sex with him.” Chad was thirteen or fourteen at the time. “When Jim was done, he got up, put his pants back on. He said he’d do that any time he wanted to,” Ingram related. “He’d kill us if we said anything. He had control.”

  That afternoon, Detective Loreli Thompson interviewed Chad, then twenty years old. The young man said that he had never been abused, sexually or in any other physical manner, by his father or anyone else. “He said he had never really talked with Rabie beyond a casual hello,” Thompson noted. Chad admitted that his father sometimes lost control and yelled at the children, but otherwise their relationship was “O.K.” The young man was beginning to have doubts about the veracity of his own recollections, though. Recently, he and his mother had been looking through family photographs and other household items in an effort to prompt their memories. So far, neither of them was able to remember anything extraordinary.

  Paul’s memory, however, was becoming more and more active and intricately detailed, aided by the visualizations that Peterson and the detectives encouraged and by constant prayer and assurances from Pastor Bratun that God would not allow thoughts other than those which were true to come into his memory. Ingram began seeing people in robes kneeling around a fire. He thought he saw a corpse. There was a person on his left in a red robe who was wearing a helmet of cloth. “Maybe the Devil,” he suggested. People were wailing. Ingram remembered standing on a platform and looking down into the fire. He had been given a large knife and was expected to sacrifice a live black cat. He cut out the beating heart and held it aloft on the tip of the knife. “At one point, Ingram said that the cat might have been a human doll,” Schoening wrote in his report. “This was related by Ingram as a third party looking at the scenario, i.e., I see; I feel; reminds me of; I hear, etc.” Ingram also produced a memory of himself and Jim Rabie murdering a prostitute in Seattle in 1983, thereby implicating both of them in an infamous unsolved murder spree known as the Green River killings. The bodies of at least forty women had been found in Washington and Oregon between 1982 and 1984, and the authorities believed it was the work of a serial killer. At Schoening’s request, the Green River task force looked into Ingram’s memories of the slaying but could find nothing that corresponded with any of the victims.

  Where were all these memories coming from? Were they real or were they fantasies? If they were real, why couldn’t any two people agree on them? The Ingram daughters had said nothing about satanic rituals, but through the church grapevine they were getting the gist of their father’s latest revelations, which Pastor Bratun often knew about before the detectives heard them. Ericka confided to a friend that her father was talking too much and giving too many details—that he was saying things she didn’t want to remember, and she wished he would just be quiet.

  Ericka herself was now saying that her father had sexually abused her on almost every night of the last week she lived at home. Detective Thompson interviewed one of the deaf girls who had been living with the Ingrams (and had since moved to another foster home). The girl said that the Ingram house was full of hate. “I don’t want—angry—ignore—don’t talk with me anymore,” she said through her interpreter. She remembered that Sandy and Ericka had bickered because Ericka wanted to leave, and that Ericka had been grounded. That was the most dramatic incident she could recall. She told Thompson that she had not observed any abuse.

  On December 8, Chad went to see his father in jail. It was a shattering experience for him. Paul, who had always been so aloof from his children, was sobbing so hard that he could speak only in gasps. He managed to say that Chad had been a victim, and pleaded with him to try to remember the abuse. “You have to get it out,” he cried.

  “I’ve never seen him like that,” Chad later told Schoening. “It’s like it was a different person. It wasn’t my dad there. That wasn’t my dad there. That wasn’t my dad.… It didn’t even feel like him when I hugged him.”

  Chad accompanied Schoening to the interview room, where Dr. Peterson was waiting. Before Peterson turned on the tape, Schoening advised Chad that he might be arrested because of Ericka’s accusations against him, so from the beginning of this interrogation, which stretched over most of two days, there was an incentive for Chad to paint himself as a victim. He began, however, by once again denying that he had ever been molested. His main grievance in the family was that he had to do more chores than the other children. He did admit to attempting suicide three years before, when he was seventeen. “Probably something my dad said. I can’t remember the specifics,” he said. There was a pale trace of a razor cut on his wrist, or seemed to be. “Where is it?” Chad asked himself aloud, as he attempted to point it out to the detectives. “It’s right here, right along the crease.” The detectives did not indicate whether or not the scar was visible to them.

  “It was something very traumatic to you that your dad said that really hurt you,” Schoening said, theorizing. “Maybe it hurt your manhood.”

  Chad tentatively replied that his father might have called him a loser. “But I don’t think he said that. I can’t remember.”

  “You can remember what happened,” Peterson admonished him. “You can choose to remember that if you want to.”

  “Like what?” said Chad, obviously confused. “What do you mean, ‘remember’?”

  “What he’s sayin’ is, it’s there,” said Schoening. “The memories are there. We’re just tryin’ to help you.”

  “I know, I know,” said Chad. “They’re there. I just can’t—I just can’t put the dot on it, though.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised,” Peterson said. “It’s not unusual with kids who’ve been through what you’ve been through to not be able to remember. Number one, they don’t want to remember. Number two, they’ve been programmed not to remember.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  Some time later, Peterson said, “I can tell you that the way to being what you want to become—a healthy adult—is to deal with those memories.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Because they have—they—I say ‘they’ because I believe that there’s a ‘they’ who have done this to you.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  At moments, the conversation lurched into therapy or instant psychoanalysis, as Chad was urged to reveal his thoughts about his family and his rather limited sexual experience. Eventually, the interrogators prodded the young man into talking about his mental problems. He admitted that he had heard voices inside his head. Then, in a painfully halting manner that reminded the d
etectives of his father’s interminable pauses, Chad described vivid dreams he had had as a child: “People outside my window, looking in, but I knew that wasn’t possible, because … we were on two floors and I would … I would have dreams of, uh, little people … short people coming and walking on me … walking on my bed … uh, I would look outside and … out of my door.” The little people reminded him of the Seven Dwarfs, he said.

  “Those are dreams of being invaded,” Peterson declared.

  “Yeah, and I would look out my door and I would see … a house of mirrors and … and no way of getting out.”

  “Of being violated, trapped in an inescapable situation,” Peterson said, interpreting. “What happened to you was so horrible.”

  “Right.”

  “You want to believe it’s dreams,” Schoening said. “You don’t want to believe it’s real. It was real. It was real, Chad.”

  “No, this was outside my window, though,” Chad protested, pointing out that his bedroom had been on the second floor. Also, his older brother had slept in the same room—why hadn’t he ever seen anything?

  “What you saw was real,” Schoening insisted. “This same type of stuff has come out of your dad, too.”

  “Were you shaking in your boots or did you pee on the floor? Were you that scared?” asked Peterson.

  “No, no,” said Chad. He claimed he had no strong feelings about the dream, just a leaden sensation, as if he were stuck in concrete. “I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t move except to close the curtain,” Chad went on. “The only thing I could feel was pressure on my chest.”

  “What was on your chest?” Peterson asked.

  “Well, this is a different dream,” Chad said, recalling a recurring nightmare of his adolescence. “Every time a train came by, a whistle would blow and a witch would come in my window.… I would wake up, but I couldn’t move. It was like the blankets were tucked under and … I couldn’t move my arms.”