12

CASTING OUT DEMONS

There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respects and ancient friendships. I have seen too many frightful proofs in court—the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!

—Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

I became involved in Paul Ingram’s case after his conviction and sentencing, when a Seattle television producer called my office. She explained that she was working on a documentary about the case and had just reviewed some disturbing police-department transcripts.

“I can’t escape the conclusion that Mr. Ingram was pressured by the investigators in this case,” she said. “Would you be willing to review these transcripts and offer an expert’s opinion?”

After reading several hundred pages of transcriptions of the tape-recorded police interrogations, I began to understand the significance of this bizarre case. In a mid-sized, modern American city, a law-abiding citizen was persuaded by honest civil servants to confess to crimes he had never committed. It was a modern-day Salem, and it had taken place in my own backyard.

As I attempted to unravel the story of what happened to Paul Ingram, I had the privilege of getting to know many of the major characters, including Ingram’s lawyers; his former friends and colleagues Ray Risch and Jim Rabie, who were implicated by his testimony; cult expert Richard Ofshe; and journalist Lawrence Wright, who created a media sensation with his brilliant two-part article in The New Yorker and his book on the Ingram case, Remembering Satan (Knopf, 1994).

I also began a correspondence with Paul Ingram, inmate number 261446, who is incarcerated in an East Coast prison. In his most recent letter, Ingram described the “abundant blessings” in his life, including visits with his brothers and sisters and a move to an air-conditioned jail cell with a view encompassing four water towers and the new highway bypass.

When Paul Ingram looks back at the past, he engages in a bit of mind control, glossing over the traumas and focusing instead on the lessons learned. He calls the recent past “the time of my mental confusion.” Others, refusing the euphemism, would call it hell. For five months, from November 1988 until April 1989, detectives from the sheriff’s department in Thurston County, Washington, frequently accompanied by a psychologist and a minister, interrograted Ingram. Seeking truth, they manipulated Ingram’s self-perception, inducing anxiety and guilt and undermining his self-confidence, until he confessed to sexually abusing his two daughters over a period of seventeen years.

In the beginning Ingram’s confessions matched the details he had been given about the incestuous acts he had allegedly committed. But then something strange happened. Taking off from a suggestion of satanism offered by his interrogators, Ingram began to confess to increasingly bizarre and bloody deeds. In a trancelike state, with eyes closed and head in hands, he mumbled about devils and fires, blood-drinking, and infanticide. Paul Ingram, chief civil deputy of the sheriff’s department, chairman of the local Republican party, churchgoing father of five children, confessed that he was a high priest in a satanic cult, a sodomizer of children, and a willing participant in the murder, dismemberment, and cannibalization of infants.

The Ingram investigation, which began as a moderately shocking case of incest involving one of the town’s leading citizens, became engorged with dark passions and a blinding pursuit of the “truth.” The investigation rapidly spiraled into hysteria, evoking memories of an earier time when God-fearing citizens, gripped by fear, superstition, and religious fervor, cried witch, and a forest of stakes was pounded into the very heart of the community. The fear of evil, then as now, creates its own breed of malevolence, and the all-consuming attempt to cast out the devil from human society reveals the demons resting within our own souls.

*   *   *

The Church of Living Water, a fundamentalist Christian denomination located in Olympia, Washington, is an affiliate of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel founded by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in 1927. The Foursquare sect teaches that the Bible is the literal word of God and that the devil is a physical presence with extensive dark powers. The fallen angel can create mental and physical illness and contribute to spiritual collapse. He can control a vulnerable person’s mind, inspiring sinful thoughts and wicked deeds. Most remarkable of all, the devil can render his victims completely unaware of his pernicious influence through a method called “satanic deception.” Only constant vigilance, prayer, and knowledge of God’s word as expressed in the Bible can protect the human soul in the spiritual battle being waged at all times and in all ages between good and evil.

Paul Ingram and his family were “born again” into the Church of Living Water in 1975 and immediately became active members of the congregation. In the early 1980s the Ingram girls, Ericka and Julie, began attending the annual two-day “Heart to Heart” retreat sponsored by the church. Teenagers accompanied by peer counselors boarded buses and traveled to the Black Lake Bible Camp where for two days they discussed problems relating to their self-esteem, sexuality, and family problems. The group sessions were emotional and cathartic as tearful adolescents confessed the secrets of their confused souls.

Ericka and Julie Ingram were familiar with the confessional atmosphere. During a fellowship discussion held during the 1983 retreat, Ericka revealed that she had been the victim of an attempted rape. The sheriff’s office was notified but dropped the investigation when it was discovered that the incident consisted of a married man offering Ericka a ride and putting his hand on her knee. Two years later Julie disclosed that a neighbor had sexually abused her; Ericka joined in the accusation, claiming that she had been abused by the same man. A complaint was filed with the country prosecutor but when Julie experienced difficulty discussing the alleged incident and inconsistencies surfaced, all charges were dropped.

The 1988 retreat, attended by sixty teenagers, was studded with shocking revelations. Karla Franko, a charismatic Christian from California, held the group in thrall with her clairvoyant visions. At one point Franko told the group that she could “see” a girl hiding in a dark closet; she could “hear” footsteps approaching and a key being inserted in the lock. Suddenly one of the teenagers in the audience called out that she was the child hiding in the closet; as counselors crowded around to comfort her, she broke down in loud, mournful sobs.

Franko was soon visited by another vision of abuse. Someone in the audience, she revealed, had been molested by a relative. A teenager stood up and raced out of the room. Counselors found her in the bathroom, where she was trying to drown herself by submerging her head in the toilet.

Twenty-two-year-old Ericka Ingram was a counselor at that retreat. After most of the participants boarded buses to return to Olympia, Ericka tearfully announced to the remaining counselors that she, too, had been abused. According to the police investigator’s report, Ericka’s sudden insight occurred spontaneously as she sat on the floor surrounded by a group of counselors.

But Karla Franko remembers the scene somewhat differently. At the end of the retreat, a counselor approached her and asked if she would pray over Ericka. Franko agreed, and began to pray aloud as Ericka sat on the floor at her feet. With a sudden flash of insight, Franko knew the “truth.”

“You were abused as a child,” she announced, her voice filled with conviction. Ericka wept bitterly but did not speak. When another vision came to Franko, she quickly translated it into words. The abuser, she said, was Ericka’s father, and the abuse had taken place over a period of many years.

Ericka became hysterical, and Franko continued praying over her until the sobbing subsided. When Ericka finally calmed down, Franko urged her to seek counseling in order to uncover the traumatic memories. Ericka was so overcome with emotion that she could only nod in agreement.

After the retreat Paul Ingram and his wife, Sandy Ingram, noticed a change in their daughter’s behavior. For some reason they did not understand, Ericka and Julie were withdrawn and uncommunicative. The Ingrams were concerned, but whenever Sandy tried to talk to her daughters, they avoided her with statements such as “You don’t want to know.” For fear of upsetting the girls and driving them even further away, Sandy and Paul decided to wait things out, reasoning that they were probably just going through a “stage.”

But at the end of September Ericka abruptly announced that she was moving out of the house. Two months later Julie, a senior in high school, left home and moved in with friends. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, after evening church services, Ericka asked her mother to meet her at a Denny’s restaurant. With a friend providing support, Ericka revealed that she had been repeatedly abused by her father and her two older brothers. The abuse stopped in 1975, Ericka said, when she was nine years old and her father was born again in the Church of Living Water.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sandy Ingram asked her daughter.

“I tried to tell you, Mom, but you wouldn’t listen,” Ericka responded.

Later that night when Sandy confronted her husband with Ericka’s accusations, he denied that he had ever touched his children in an indecent way.

“But why would Ericka make up these accusations if they weren’t true?” Sandy asked.

“I don’t know,” Ingram answered. They looked at each other for a moment and then he added, “I don’t think I have a dark side.”

The next morning Sandy picked up Julie at her friend’s house and drove her to school. In the car Julie told her mother that she had been molested by her father and older brother. Her abuse, she said, had stopped five years earlier, in 1983, when she was thirteen.

That same afternoon, November 21, 1988, a counselor from the rape crisis center accompanied Julie to the police station, where she gave investigators a more detailed story. The abuse began in fifth grade, she said, when her father would sneak into the bedroom she shared with Ericka and have vaginal and anal sex with one sister or the other. Her father had last raped her, she continued, amending the story she told her mother just hours earlier, three years ago, when she was fifteen.

Ericka, interviewed by police investigators that evening, also modified her story, claiming that she had caught a disease from her father just a year earlier. A few days later Ericka remembered an even more recent episode of abuse. Just before she moved out of her parents’ house in late September, she awoke to find her father kneeling beside her bed, touching her vagina.

*   *   *

Paul Ingram woke up on Monday morning, November 28, 1988, took a shower, shaved, ate breakfast, and promptly vomited. He knew that his day of reckoning was at hand. Although his nerves were playing havoc with his intestinal tract, he went to his office at the sheriff’s department, mentally if not physically prepared to deal with his daughters’ accusations. Approximately fifteen minutes after he arrived at work he was called into Sheriff Gary Edwards’s office. Edwards and Under-Sheriff Neil McLanahan confronted him with Ericka and Julie’s accusations and read him his rights.

“I hope you are going to cooperate and not make the girls go through a trial,” Sheriff Edwards said.

“I did not abuse those girls,” said Ingram, immediately amending his denial with the strange reference to evil and unseen forces. “I don’t think I have a dark side in me.” To this day, Ingram doesn’t know where the idea of a “dark side” came from; maybe he had heard those words on television, or recalled the idea from something he had read or overheard. But as a faithful member of a fundamentalist church, he was certainly well versed in the the idea that Satan inspires evil deeds in the weak and godless and then blocks all memories of such malevolent actions from conscious awareness. A primitive force of pure evil, Satan is anachronistically capable of the high-tech scrambling of human minds and memories.

Ingram’s reference to a “dark side” was an acknowledgment of Satan’s potential treachery and a possible explanation for the inexplicable reality that was threatening him and his family. If his daughters were telling the truth—and he had always taught them to tell the truth—then Satan must have driven him to evildoing and erased his memory.

Ingram was taken to the interrogation room, where Joe Vukich and Brian Schoenig, the detectives in charge of sex offenses, were waiting for him. Both men knew Ingram well, and both were shocked that this seemingly decent, happily married, hardworking, churchgoing man had repeatedly raped and sodomized his daughters and insisted that he had no memory of his actions. Either he was lying through his teeth, or he was one sick son of a bitch.

The first four hours of the interrogation were not recorded but, as Ingram remembers it, the detectives asked him over and over again why Ericka and Julie would make such allegations if they weren’t true. Although he couldn’t find answers to their questions, Ingram was willing to admit that there were problems in his family. He tried to articulate his anguished confusion through questions he couldn’t answer: Why won’t the girls let Sandy and me hug them? Why do I have such a hard time communicating with my children? Why did Ericka and Julie suddenly move out of the house?

The detectives gradually focused in on the specifics, asking pointed questions. They accused Ingram of raping Ericka in the middle of the night just two months earlier, days before she moved out of the family home. What was he wearing that night? Ingram answered that he usually wore a maroon bathrobe when he got up in the middle of the night. What did he say to Ericka? What did he do to her? Ingram responded that he had no memory of walking into Ericka’s room in the middle of the night and raping her—not in September, not ever.

The detectives told Ingram that he was burying his memories because he couldn’t face the fact that he had sexually abused his own children. They continued to offer him bits and pieces of information from his daughters’ statements, hoping to stimulate his memory, and Ingram began to pray, calling out to Jesus to help him. As he prayed, the detectives hit him hard with the reality of his situation, working on his guilt and his love for his children. Over and over again, according to Ingram, the detectives said, Help us. Help your daughters. You are the only one that can help them. You were there. You gotta help us. We know you know. You’re not being honest. You’re holding on to it. You need to let it out. Tell us what happened.

But Ingram couldn’t remember abusing his children, and how could he tell them what had happened if he didn’t have any memories? The detectives met his denials by repeating three truths.

First truth: His daughters were decent and responsible human beings who would not lie about something as momentous and consequential as sexual abuse and incest. Ingram fervently agreed with this assessment. “My kids are honest,” he kept repeating. “My kids always tell the truth.”

Second truth: Sex offenders, unable to face the horror of their own deeds, often repress memories of their crimes. Ingram was in partial agreement with that truth, having personally witnessed denials and claims of memory loss by rapists and pedophiles and, for that matter, most people accused of brutal crimes. But, Ingram protested, he desired the truth more than he feared the horror of anything he had done, and he was ready and willing to confess his crimes … if only he could remember them.

Third truth: The only way to get to the facts was to admit that he had molested his daughters. If he confessed, his memories would return automatically.

The repression theory, enumerated in truths two and three, made sense to Ingram. It was simply a secular version of the church’s doctrine of satanic deception: Satan attempts to destroy our memories of evil deeds so that he can continue to exert his malevolent influence. But if the afflicted can summon up the courage to confess, they will be blessed with insight into their actions and guided toward grace by the sure hand of God.

Ingram wanted desperately to be graced with the truth; he was sick with fear. Fear knotted his stomach, tied up his bowels, clouded his mind. This fear felt suspiciously like a physical presence that had lodged within him, taking root, creating a hardness that seemed to swell and grow at the very core of his being. Through his fear, he thought he could hear God’s voice trying to break through. Confess! Confess! It was almost as if he could hear God talking to him.

After four hours of interrogation Ingram agreed to make an official statement. At 2:46 p.m. the tape recorder was turned on.

“Paul, I’ve talked to both Ericka and Julie,” one of the investigators said, “and they have told me about specific incidences which involve inappropriate sexual contact by you with each of them. Can you tell me how you remember touching them? In what ways you think were inappropriate?”

“Well, it’s, it’s been hard for me to, uhm, to acknowledge this,” Ingram stammered, “but I, I really believe that the, the allegations did occur and that I did violate them and abuse them and probably for a long period of time. I’ve repressed it. Uh, probably very successfully from myself and, and now I’m trying to bring it all out. Uh, I, I know from what they’re saying that the, the incidences had to occur, that I had to have done those things.”

“And why,” one of the detectives interjected, “do you say you had to have done those things?”

“Well, number one, my girls know me,” Ingram answered. “Uh, they wouldn’t lie about something like this and, uh, there’s other evidence, uh, that would point out to me that these things occurred.”

“And what in your mind would that evidence be?” the detective queried.

“Well, the way they’ve been acting for at least the last couple years and, and the fact that I’ve not been able to be affectionate with them, uh, even though I want to be. I, I have a hard time hugging them or, or even telling them that I love them and, uh, I just know that that’s not natural.”

“If I asked you if you, and this is a yes or no answer, touched Julie inappropriately sexually, what would you say?”

“I’d have to say yes,” Ingram answered.

“And how about Ericka?”

“Again I would have to say yes.”

“Would this be, uh, occurrences over a long term?”

“Whew, yes.”

“What would you think the age of Ericka would’ve been when these things first started happening between you and her?”

“I can’t recall myself, but I know that the age of five has come up in a couple conversations.”

“What do you remember?”

“I don’t remember anything.”

*   *   *

It was a strange sort of confession. Ingram admitted that because his daughters wouldn’t lie, he must have abused them, even though he didn’t have any memories of the abuse. Without the memories, Ingram was simply parroting what the detectives told him he had done to his children, and his statement could not be considered a legally sufficient confession. The detectives turned up the heat. They wanted to know about the most recent abusive episode, just before Ericka moved out of the house. Did Paul remember that incident?

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

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

“Whew,” Ingram sighed deeply. “I’m still having trouble getting a clear picture of what happened. I know in my own mind that these things had to happen and I’m still having trouble getting a clear picture to say that’s exactly what happened.”

The tape recorder was shut off at Ingram’s request. Dectective Schoenig took notes indicating that Ingram frequently called out to Jesus, asking for his help. Schoenig also noted that Ingram went into “a trance type thing” and in this fugue state began to describe graphic scenes of abuse. But he discussed what he “would have done” with little or no emotion, as if he were a detached observer rather than the central character in the drama.

When the tape recorder was turned back on, the detectives asked Ingram to think back to that night when he entered Ericka’s room and took his bathrobe off and put it on the end of his daughter’s bed.

“Did that wake her up?” one of the detectives asked.

“Um, I don’t remember.”

“After you laid down the bathrobe what did you do?”

“Uh, I, I would’ve removed her clothing, uh, at least the underpants or bottoms to the nightgown.”

“Okay, you say you would’ve,” one of the detectives interrupted. “Now, do you mean you would’ve or did you?”

“I did,” Ingram answered the question.

“After you pulled down her bottom, where did you touch her?”

“I touched her on her breasts and I touched her on her vagina.…”

“What did you say to her when she woke up?”

“I would’ve told her to be quiet and, uh, not saying anything to anybody and threatened her to say that I would kill her if she told anybody about this.”

“Okay, you say you would’ve.” The detectives were clearly getting frustrated with Ingram’s evasive language. “Is that ‘would’ve’ or did you?”

“Uh, I did.”

“What did you do when you finished? Did you do something to her clothing?”

“I, I don’t remember.”

“Do you remember pulling them back up?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Did you put your robe on, uh, when you finished?”

“Yes, I put my robe on.”

“And where did you go when you left her room?”

“I would’ve gone back to bed with my wife.”

*   *   *

When the interview ended late that afternoon, Paul Ingram had confessed to sexually molesting his daughters on numerous occasions. Among the specifics, Ingram claimed that he began raping Ericka when she was just five years old, and he recalled sexually abusing Julie for at least ten years. He also remembered impregnating Julie when she was fifteen years old, and arranging for an abortion.

But toward the end of his confession, Ingram once again claimed no memory. “I can’t recall anything specific,” Ingram said, responding to a question about what he did to Ericka after he entered her room. “I can’t recall anything.”

“You don’t remember going into the room and touching Ericka?”

“No.”

“If she says that happened, what does that mean to you?”

“It means to me that it happened. My kids don’t lie. They tell the truth, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”

*   *   *

Ingram was placed in medical cell M-1, subject to a suicide watch, and given permission to call his wife. Over the phone Paul and Sandy agreed to pray for guidance, and Sandy said she would bring Paul’s Bible and some underwear to the jail. That evening the pastor of his church, John Bratun, visited the county jail and prayed with Ingram in his cell.

Early the next morning, Tuesday, November 29, psychologist Richard Peterson visited Ingram. Peterson explained that he had been hired by the prosecutor’s office to assess Ingram’s mental state and make a “safe-to-be-at-large” recommendation. Ingram asked the psychologist to explain to him why he could not remember the events described in such detail by his daughters. Was it really possible, as the detectives kept suggesting, to completely block out the memory of such brutal and sordid events that spanned a period of nearly seventeen years?

Peterson confirmed that it is not unusual for sex offenders to repress the memories of their crimes; they can’t bear to think about the horror of what they did to their victims. The more vicious and brutal the crime, the more likely it will be repressed. The psychologist then added a new layer of intrigue to the strange and twisted plot. Many sex offenders, he said, have been sexually abused themselves; thus, there was a strong likelihood that Ingram had been abused as a child—most likely around the age of five years, because that was Ericka’s age when he started abusing her. If Paul had been abused as a child, Peterson continued, he probably learned to repress those memories as well. Did he have any memory whatsoever of being molested by his father, or perhaps an uncle?

Ingram carefully considered the question, but the only remotely sexual memory he could dredge up from his childhood was his mother’s whispered injunction, when he was four or five years old, to stop scratching his private parts in public. “You’re acting like your uncle Gerald,” she said, mentioning an uncle who was visiting them at the time.

In time, Peterson assured him, he would recover a memory of his father, an uncle, or some close family friend abusing him. Peterson also reinforced the detectives’ assurances that once Ingram confessed to the crimes, his memories would come flooding back. But Ingram disagreed, for that particular theory was not working out as promised. He had confessed the day before and the memories hadn’t come back in either a trickle or a flood. Ingram was relieved to hear that Dr. Peterson was planning to attend the afternoon interrogation; maybe he could figure out how to remove the mental obstacles blocking the return of the repressed memories.

In the booking area, a police officer advised Ingram to hire an attorney, suggesting that he call Ed Schaller, a former prosecutor reputed to be one of the best criminal attorneys in the area. Ingram resisted the suggestion and explained his reasons in a diary he kept from the fifth day of his arrest. “My thinking was that Ed would … be more interested in getting me off the hook than in getting the truth out.” More then anything, Ingram desired the truth. Because he firmly believed that the truth could come only from God, he decided to ask a devout fundamentalist Christian attorney to represent him.

*   *   *

When Paul Ingram walked into the interrogation room around 1:30 p.m. on November 29, he did not know that the detectives had just received two letters from Julie, in which she revealed that she was still being abused. “Being a Christian I supose [sic] to forgive him for what he did to me and still does to me,” Julie wrote. Even more shocking, Julie claimed that the abuse involved not only her father but some of his poker buddies, most of whom worked with Ingram in the sheriff’s office. When she was four years old, she remembered, the poker players would come into her room “one or two at a time” and rape her. “I was so scared I didn’t know what to say or who to talk to,” Julie wrote.

The detectives told Ingram they had some additional information from Julie, but they would not reveal the specifics. “What happened with Julie happened just last month,” Joe Vukich said. “It’s very real, it’s very recent. Granted it’s very hard to talk about.”

“I believe it’s there for you to talk about,” Schoenig added.

“I, no, I can’t see it,” Ingram said. “I can’t visualize it in my own mind. I haven’t gotten to the point that I can—and I don’t know any other way to say it, but I can’t see it yet.”

Ingram continued talking out loud, trying to figure out how he could access his lost memories. “I think it’s just a matter of me getting into that part of my brain or whatever and, and give me the pieces, but they’re just not there yet.”

A few minutes later Ingram recalled an incident in which he had been sexually abused by an uncle when he was just four or five years old. It was just as Dr. Peterson had predicted. “When I thought about it this morning,” Ingram began, “what I could see was an uncle, I believe it was Glen, coulda been Gerald, and me giving him oral sex, uh, I can’t see any emotion, uh, whew, it’s just, that, that came to my mind.”

The detectives asked a few perfunctory questions, but they were more interested in what Ingram had done in the recent past than in what had been done to him in the distant past. They quickly zoomed ahead several decades, focusing in on the poker parties that took place in the Ingram house. Who was there? they asked. Were they friends from the department? Did they drink too much, get intoxicated, make a mess? Any raunchy conversation or loose talk about women? Where was his wife during the poker parties? Did anybody happen to go upstairs to see the kids?

“I, boy”—Ingram frantically searched his memory—“I just can’t think of anything where anybody—”

“The reason I ask, Paul,” Vukich interrupted, “is because Julie told me about a time or two where when there was a poker party she was molested.”

“And what we’re talking about, Paul, is she was molested by somebody other than you at that time, too,” Schoenig elaborated. “She even remembers being—somebody tying her up on the bed and two people, at least, taking turns with her while somebody else watched, probably you.”

“I just don’t see anything,” Ingram said, as if he were able to see the past scrolling by in his mind. “Let me think about this for a minute. Let me see if I can get in there. Assuming it happened, she would’ve had to have had a bed, bedroom, by herself I would think … uh…”

“I’m going to ask you to not beat around the bush about this,” Schoenig put in. “This is really important. Who do you think was sexually molesting your daughter besides yourself?”

“I’m, I’m just trying to think, I’m tryin’ to get into that part of…”

“Yeah, and she’s real intimidated and she’s in real fear right now because that person is still out on the street.” Schoenig kept up the pressure, playing on a father’s love for his child and his fears for her safety. “That person is some friend of yours that worked or works for this department.”

A weak “whew” was all Ingram could manage.

“She’s terrified, Paul.… Apparently it’s somebody that’s still close to you, Paul,” Schoenig said.

“She’s in utter fear of this person,” Vukich said, “and we need to do something to protect her.… You need to help us protect her.”

“I’m thinking,” Ingram said.

“Think hard,” Vukich said.

“I, I can’t, I, I, I am.” Ingram was getting frantic. “I can’t think of anybody that I’m really close to now in the department, uh…”

“See, Paul, she remembers this,” Vukich said.

“Well, just, just hang on a minute.” Ingram scanned his mind for familiar poker buddy faces. “Jim, Jim Rabie played poker with us. Jim and I have been fairly close.”

“Is Jim the person she’s talking about?” Vukich asked.

“Just, just don’t put words in my mouth,” Ingram said in an uncharacteristic show of resistance. “Uh, I don’t know … I’m, I’m thinkin’. I’m trying to get—to bring something up here. Uh, Uh, Jim’s the only one that comes to mind.… I’m just trying to put some faces together. Think of anybody else…”

Joe Vukich gave Ingram a new mental image to consider. “In this picture you have, Paul, do you see ropes?”

“Uh, you’ve, you put the ropes there,” Ingram said, “and, and I’m trying to figure out what I’ve got, uh, whew, I, I can kind of visualize a bottom bunk or even the floor, uh … It kind of looks to me like she’d be lying face down like she’s hog-tied—maybe laying on a sheet on the floor. Uh, oh…”

“What else do you see? Who else do you see?” Vukich urged him on.

“I just, uh, I maybe—boy, maybe one other person, but I don’t see a face, but Jim Rabie stands out, boy, for some reason.”

*   *   *

From this tape-recorded exchange it’s obvious that Paul Ingram was trying hard to produce something, anything, that might help the detectives in their search for the man who raped Julie and made her fear for her life. He trusted his interrogators, who were also his friends and colleagues, and he believed they were telling him the truth. Guilt and anxiety corroded his self-confidence, while religious fervor and fear for the state of his soul stoked his imagination.

Dr. Peterson asked Ingram if he had ever been involved in any kind of occult activities. “Before your conversion to Christianity, were you ever involved in any kind of black magic?”

“Uh, at one time I read a little bit of astrology but, you know, like in the paper, read your, what do you call that?”

“Horoscope,” Vukich offered.

“Horoscope,” Ingram confirmed. “Uh, nothing other than that.”

Had he ever been involved in sacrilegious activities or participated in animal sacrifices?

“I don’t know what you’re driving at,” Ingram said.

“The Satan cult kind of thing,” Schoenig said.

Ingram denied any recollections of such activities, but inside something clicked. Maybe Satan and his demonic forces had some hold on him. Maybe the Prince of Darkness was struggling for control of his soul. Wouldn’t that help to explain why a Christian man who loved his family and wanted only to do what was right was suddenly and inexplicably cast into the role of rapist and pedophile? If Satan had engineered these evil deeds and taken control of Ingram’s mind and soul, he could also have erased Ingram’s memory. Wouldn’t that explain the strange sensations and sudden fleeting images that entered his mind like distant radio static, almost as if God were trying to get through and make known the truth? Satanic deception made sense. It was the only thing that did.

While the thought of Satan as the controlling force in this increasingly horrifying situation gave Ingram some solace, the parallel idea, that Satan might have chosen him as a likely target and at this very moment might be guiding his destiny, filled him with terror. Was he in the claws of the demon? Ingram’s emotional stability cracked and swayed. Praying, sobbing, crying out in anguish, closing his eyes and rocking back and forth, he appeared to be close to a breakdown. Sensing Ingram’s weakness and playing on his deep religious convictions, Peterson counseled Ingram to choose between God and the devil.

“If there’s ever been a time that you’ve been offered a choice between the devil and God it’s right now,” Peterson said.

“Right. Oh, dear Jesus, Lord just help me…” Ingram’s voice trailed off.

“So that you don’t sacrifice—” Peterson began.

“You’d sacrifice your daughter,” Schoenig interrupted. “I can’t believe that, Paul.”

“You can’t come back from this, Paul, if you don’t meet it and get over it,” Vukich said.

“I know, I know.” Ingram began to cry.

“You want somethin’ to, uh, to wipe your eyes with?” Vukich asked.

“No, just keep talking, just keep talking,” Ingram said.

“You need to cry and you need to let it out,” Peterson counseled.

“It goes back to the poker games, Paul,” Vukich said. “You’re the man with the answers.”

“You’re not going to fall apart,” Peterson said.

“Oh, dear God,” Ingram said.

“Choose life over living death. A living hell,” Peterson said.

“That’s your responsiblity as a father,” Vukich said.

“Dear God, dear God … Dear God help me.”

“It’s a clear choice between adherence to that living hell that you’ve been living,” Peterson said, “and cleansing absolution of honesty. You have to make that decision. No one can make it for you.… It’s your decision. You are as alone as Jesus was in the desert when he was comforted.”

The detectives, recognizing that Ingram was profoundly affected by the religious references, saw the wisdom of Peterson’s strategy. “God’s given you the tools to do this, Paul,” Vukich said.

“Oh, Jesus, merciful Jesus, help me.”

“And now he’s left it up to you to make the decision,” Vukich continued. “You’ve got to show him by what you do and what you say as to whether or not you’re worthy of his love and redemption and salvation.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Ingram suddenly cried out. “Help me, Lord! Help me, Lord!”

Peterson took over, abandoning his formerly aggressive stance and speaking in a soft, soothing tone. “One of the things that would help you, Paul, is if you’d stop asking for help and just let yourself sit back, not try to think about anything,” he said soothingly. “Just let yourself go and relax. No one’s going to hurt you. We want to help. Just relax. Try not to think about anything, and ask yourself what it is you need to do. An answer will come.…”

Paul Ingram’s eyes closed, his body went limp, and once again he appeared to enter a kind of trance. Sensing that the time was right, the detectives immediately focused in on the poker-party rape scene that Julie had described in her letter.

“Why don’t you tell us what happened to Julie, Paul,” Vukich said. “What happened at that poker game?”

“I see Julie lying on the floor on a sheet,” Ingram said, his voice strange and faraway. “Her hands are tied to her feet, she’s on her stomach. I’m standing there looking at her. Somebody else is on my left.”

“Who is that?”

“But I, the, the only person that keeps coming back is Jim Rabie. He just…”

“Turn around and look at that person,” Schoenig suggested. “Who is it? Who’s standing right there?”

“What’s he smell like?” Peterson asked.

“Yeah, what’s he smell like?” Schoenig repeated.

“He’s standing right next to you, Paul, all you have to do is just look to your left and there he is,” Vukich said.

“He, he’s standing up,” Ingram said. “I see his penis sticking up in the air, uh…”

“Does he have any clothes on?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What’s he doing to your daughter?”

“Getting down on his knees.”

“Okay. Now he’s there, he’s in front of you on his knees?” Schoenig prompted. “Look at him. What’s he doing to her? Is his penis touching her?”

“Just, just let me, uh, it’s leaving.” The picture in Ingram’s mind was fading.

“No it’s not, it’s there, Paul,” Vukich encouraged him.

“Come on, we have to get back there,” Schoenig said, somewhat frantically. “What’s he doing to your daughter? He’s on his knees. Is he in front of your daughter or behind your daughter?”

“He’s behind my daughter.”

“Okay, is he putting his penis in her?”

“Uh, her legs are close together, but maybe she’s being rolled over onto her side,” Ingram said, responding to the suggestion.

“Is she clothed or unclothed?” Peterson asked.

“Uh, she, unclothed I believe, uh…”

“What’s this person doing?”

“He’s kneeling. His penis is by her stomach. Uh, he’s big. Uh, I mean, broad-shouldered, big person.”

“Does he have any jewelry on?”

“May have a watch on his right hand.”

“What time does it say?”

“Uh, two o’clock, and I don’t know why I say that, uh, I can’t see him, I see his chest.”

The questions keep coming, fast and furious: How close are you? Are you dressed? Are you touching her? Is anyone else touching her? Do you remember ejaculating? Are you guys intoxicated?

“Is somebody taking pictures?” Vukich asked out of the blue.

“Uh, pictures, is there somebody off to the right of me, uh, it’s possible, let me look. I see, I see a camera.”

“Who’s taking the pictures?”

“I don’t know. I don’t see a person behind the camera.”

“That person’s very important. He’s the one that holds the key,” Peterson jumped in.

“Well, the person that I think I see is Ray Risch,” Ingram said. Risch, a mechanic who worked for the Washington State Patrol, was a good friend of Ingram’s and a regular at the weekend poker games.

“Is he saying anything?” Vukich asked.

“I don’t know. Uh, I, I, I don’t know … oh boy, where am I at, where am I at?”

*   *   *

At the end of that second day, after more than five hours of interrogation, Paul Ingram seemed to emerge from his trance and take stock of what had happened. “Boy, it’s almost like I’m making it up, but I’m not … trying not to. What do I have here. What do I have here. Who am I seeing here. It doesn’t make sense.… It’s like I’m watching a movie,” he concluded. “Uh, oh, it’s like a horror movie.”

“Paul, I’m not sure that you should go on at this point,” Dr. Peterson said, expressing concern about Ingram’s state of mind.

But Ingram rambled on. He was no longer talking to his interrogators; he was communing with God. “I don’t have a clear picture. I … I’m not sure what I’m seeing. I … I don’t know what I’ve got in my mind here. Doesn’t make any sense to me. Uh, Lord help me. Give me … figure out what this is. I don’t want to see things that aren’t right, Lord. I mean, things that aren’t true. Get me through this Lord.… I don’t know where I’m at now. Let me just relax. Let me relax. Lord, give me a picture. Give me a picture.”

*   *   *

When Jim Rabie and Ray Risch were confronted with the fact that their friend and colleague Paul Ingram had identified them as sexual abusers, they employed the same denials and claims of memory loss initially used by Ingram.

“I wasn’t present that I know of, unless I blocked it out of my head,” Risch told detectives.

Rabie insisted that he had no memory of the events and, in an eerie echo of Ingram’s initial reaction, mentioned the possibility of a “dark side.” When one of the detectives suggested he might be in denial, Rabie responded, “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.”

Detective Schoenig, in an obvious attempt to tease out a confession, stretched the facts. “Paul said you guys bullied him and you made him do this and he didn’t want to do this,” Schoenig told Rabie. “Ray [Risch] 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.”

The idea of his two good friends offering testimony against him, possibly in an attempt to secure immunity from prosecution and save themselves, was too much for Rabie. He caved in under the pressure. “Give me the responsibility, because I’ve blocked it out enough—I must be the worst one,” Rabie confessed. “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.”

*   *   *

“I know I have a demon in me,” Paul Ingram told Pastor John Bratun, begging the minister to deliver him from his “demon possession.” Bratun assured Ingram that he was not possessed by demons, although he would have to be delivered of evil spirits. After the two men prayed together, Bratun told Ingram to kneel on the floor, lean over a wastebasket, and try to retch up the spirits residing deep within him. Ingram’s dry heaves produced some phlegm, but not the dark mass that he felt as a massive physical presence at the center of his very being.

After this ritual, Ingram was visited by a vivid memory featuring his son Chad and his friend Jim Rabie. In his mind Ingram could see Rabie, angry and intent on his goal, pushing him down the stairs. “He wanted to do something that I didn’t want him to do,” Ingram said. “He said he wanted Chad.… Rabie shoved his way into Chad’s room and ripped the boy’s pants off.… I was powerless to do anything. He forced Chad down and had anal sex with him.”

*   *   *

Chad was interviewed less than a week later by Detective Schoenig and psychologist Richard Peterson. At first he couldn’t remember being sexually abused by Jim Rabie or anyone else, although he did recall slashing his wrists in a suicide attempt three years earlier when he was seventeen years old.

“What upset you so badly?” Peterson asked.

“Uh, probably something my dad said,” Chad responded. “I can’t remember … I can’t remember specifics.”

“Maybe this is the key,” Schoenig suggested. “Why don’t you think about it. It was something like the doctor [Peterson] said, it was something very traumatic to you that your dad said that really hurt you. Maybe it hurt your manhood … some abandonment reason or something … a put-down or something. What was it, Chad? Think about it.”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” Chad said.

“Maybe this is the key,” Schoenig repeated.

“Uh, I can remember he yelled at me for something, but I can’t remember what it was for.”

“The memories,” Peterson said. “You remember.”

“Well, all I felt … I felt angry,” Chad said.

“But you can remember what happened,” Peterson coaxed. “You need to remember what happened. You can choose to remember that if you want to.”

“Like what?” Chad was bewildered. “What do you mean, remember?”

“Instead of saying I think this might have happened, but I don’t know if it did or not. I can’t remember,” Schoenig said.

“Oh,” Chad said, clearly confused by the detective’s “explanation.”

“The memories are there,” Schoenig said. “We’re trying to help you, Chad.”

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

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

Chad responded to this rather insidious suggestion with an interested but noncommittal “Mm-hm.”

“And I think something happened to you that made you not want to remember,” Peterson said. “I just have to ask myself just what kind of crap have you been exposed to that you can’t feel…”

“This may go back to what I earlier talked to you about,” Schoenig said, “about something that happened to you in the fear of real death or fear for somebody else’s families or death, and maybe I’m even going to suggest that it may have to do with something your dad said to you because you had said you were going to tell.”

Chad was quiet for a few moments as the detective and the psychologist traded theories about his lack of memory. When asked a direct question, he answered with short, one- or two-word phrases or simply parroted back what was said to him.

“Had you been drinking?”

“No.”

“Smoking pot or anything?”

“No.”

“Just feeling miserable.”

“Just feeling miserable.”

“And alone.”

“And alone.”

“How about humiliated?”

“Probably.”

“Come on, Chad, it’s there,” Schoenig said impatiently.

“I know it’s there. I just can’t … it’s just not … it’s like…”

“You can deal with this and you can learn,” Peterson interjected. “You can choose to deal with the memories. You can choose to live. That’s what it is. It’s a funny little place between not feeling and learning to live with the feelings that you’ve got, but you’ve got to get them.”

“Right,” Chad agreed.

“You can make the choice, but you got to get them,” Peterson repeated.

“Right,” Chad said again.

“You can make the choice and nobody’s going to destroy you because you have those feelings.”

“Right.”

The conversation eventually drifted toward a discussion of Chad’s dreams. He described one particularly vivid dream involving “little people” who came into his bedroom and walked around on his bed. The little people’s faces were painted with black, white, and red streaks of jagged lightning, like the members of the rock group Kiss.

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

“Yeah, I would look out my door and I would see—”

“And unprotected?”

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

“Of being violated, trapped in an unescapable situation.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Those dreams have a key … being crazy at the time.”

“Mm-hm.”

“What happened to you was so horrible.”

“Right.”

“What happened to you was terrible.”

“You don’t want to accept what really happened to you and that’s why you’re seeing the ways of no escape and you want to believe it’s dreams,” Schoenig said, adding his two-bit analysis. “You don’t want to believe it’s real. It was real. It was real, Chad.”

“What you saw was real, Chad,” Peterson repeated.

“We know that, Chad,” Schoenig said. “You weren’t dreaming.”

“It’s no dream,” Peterson said.

“No,” Chad protested weakly, “this was outside my window, though.”

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

“Okay,” Chad said.

“So let’s get into it,” Schoenig said.

They “got into” another dream, in which a train went by, a whistle blew, and a witch came into Chad’s window. When he woke up, Chad explained, he couldn’t move his arms. It was as if somebody was on top of him.

“That’s exactly real,” Schoenig said. “That’s the key, Chad. That’s what was really going on.”

“Chad, these things happened to you,” Peterson chimed in.

“Okay,” Chad said somewhat dubiously.

“They assaulted your ability to know what was real.”

“Okay,” Chad repeated. He obligingly described the witch in his dream. She was fat, and she wore a black robe like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. Four guys outside the window were skinny and had long curly black hair. He remembered biting someone’s thigh. The witch was on top of him.

“Look at her face.” Schoenig suggested. “Who does she look like to you? Somebody you know … it is somebody you know. Who is this person? Somebody who is a friend of your family’s?”

Chad said he couldn’t see the witch’s face because it was dark. All he could remember was being pinned down and not being able to move or talk.

“You’ve got to find it inside yourself to see who this person is and what they’re doing to you, Chad,” Schoenig said. “You don’t want to remember ‘cause it’s horrible and so devastating … something you never wanted to believe happened to you, but it did. We can stop it, Chad. We can help it from ever happening again.…”

“Can you breathe?” Peterson asked.

“Is there something that’s keeping you from talking?” asked Schoenig. “What’s in your mouth?”

“Just let the memory come,” Peterson enjoined. “It’s not what you think about; it’s what you’re trying not to think about.”

The suggestive questioning and pressure to remember continued, hour after hour. At one point Chad insisted that he felt safe in his home. “I felt safe. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t safe, but I did feel safe. I’ve always felt safe.”

“Even when all this was going on,” Schoenig said disbelievingly.

“Except for the dreams, because I thought they were, I put them off as dreams.”

When Chad kept insisting that he couldn’t remember anything, and that he thought his dreams were just that, dreams and not reality, Peterson proposed that he was suffering from a “destruction of his sense of reality,” a “destruction of the sense of self,” a “destruction of any ability to feel.” “Total, absolute obedience and subservience to the group,” he added somewhat mysteriously.

Schoenig brought the conversation back to the person sitting on Chad’s chest. The detective reminded Chad that he had something in his mouth.

“And it’s not cloth,” he prompted.

“Right.”

“It’s not hard like a piece of wood.”

“Right.”

“What is it?”

Chad was laughing. “You just made me think, oh golly.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“What were you just thinking, come on.”

“I thought it was a penis, okay. I, it could be.”

“Okay, don’t be embarrassed,” Schoenig consoled. “It could be. Then what’s happening to you? Let it out. It’s okay.”

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Chad said wretchedly.

Several minutes later Detective Schoenig chastised Chad for continuing to mistake his reality for dreams. “They were real. You know that. You’ve already told us that many times today you know it’s not a dream. So quit trying to push it off as a dream.”

“No, but it’s kind of hard,” Chad protested feebly. “Twenty years you been pushing off as a dream and then one day you’ve got to take it all as reality. You don’t know what to take as reality.”

“But remember, you’ve had time to think about it for the last couple weeks…”

“No, well … I didn’t know I was a victim until I talked to you the last time.”

“And what I’m saying to you, Chad, you’ve had time to think about it now and I’m going to believe that part of your mind is still trying to—”

“Block it out, right, right.” By this time Chad knew all about the theory of repressed memories.

“Block it out because you don’t want to believe it really happened to you,” Schoenig continued.

“Right.”

“Wouldn’t it feel great to say this was real. It’s not a dream,” Peterson said.

“That’s why I want to see faces so I can pin it on the faces,” Chad agreed. “So I can say these are the ones that did it to me. I’ve seen the faces, I remember who you are, and go on with it from there. I’ve got to put a face to it.”

The tape recorder was turned off, and during that time Chad found his memory. When the tape started again, Chad said that he remembered a man sitting on top of him; the man’s knees were pinning down Chad’s arms so he couldn’t move. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, and his penis was in Chad’s mouth.

The dream had become reality; the witch had metamorphosed from a faceless woman into his father’s good friend and poker buddy Jim Rabie.

“How certain are you that it’s Jim Rabie?” Schoenig asked.

“Oh, eighty percent sure. Seventy percent. Not…”

“What’s the part of you that feels like it isn’t Jim Rabie?”

“Well, kind of the feeling that it was a dream.”

“We’ve eliminated that it wasn’t a dream, right?”

“Okay, okay. Still, confusion, uh, I don’t know. It just doesn’t … I don’t know.”

At the end of the seven-hour interview, Chad complained of a headache.

“It’s the memories coming back,” Peterson reassured him.

*   *   *

The next day, under intense questioning, Chad reported that he had recovered another memory. Now he recalled that when he was ten or eleven years old, he had been sodomized in his basement by another friend and poker buddy of his father’s—Ray Risch.

*   *   *

On December 16, not quite three weeks after her husband was arrested and booked in the Thurston County jail, Sandy Ingram drove to the Church of Living Water to talk to her minister. Pastor Bratun explained to Sandy, just as he had explained to her husband in his jail cell, that she was eighty percent evil and twenty percent good. The good portion controlled conscious memory, while the evil portion controlled her unconscious mind. Bratun expressed his opinion that either Sandy knew about the brutalities that went on in her own house but stayed on the sidelines, or she had been a willing participant. If she didn’t confess, he counseled her, she would probably go to jail. Sandy Ingram angrily refused Bratun’s suggestion that she confess. “That may work with some people, but not with me,” she said in an obvious reference to her husband. After this conversation, Sandy went home, packed a few necessities, and with her youngest son Mark, drove five hours across the state in a blinding snowstorm. The next day she wrote in her diary, appealing for divine guidance. “I am afraid Jesus … Where have my children gone, my precious babies that I love…”

Three days later Sandy Ingram returned to Olympia and immediately sought out her pastor, who tried to console her with the reminder that she was still twenty percent good. The evil part—he elaborated on his earlier explanation—was trying to cover up the past and repress the memories, while the good part was bravely attempting to bring the truth to light. Bratun told her about the new, even more shocking events being recalled by her husband, involving satanism, barnyard rituals, blood oaths, and high priests and priestesses. In one of these memories Paul visualized his wife having sex with Ray Risch. Sandy began to cry.

Soon afterward, buoyed by Pastor Bratun’s assurances that the remaining twenty percent good in her was struggling to remember, Sandy recovered a memory of being tied up on her living room floor with Jim Rabie. Then, in one of those strange illogical leaps so common to dreams, she recalled being in the closet with her husband, who was hitting her with a piece of wood while Risch and Rabie laughed at her. When Paul finally let her out of the closet, Risch and Rabie pinned her down and forced her to have anal intercourse.

The day after Christmas Sandy wrote a letter to her husband in which she confessed her fears and her struggle to remember the terrible events that had apparently taken place in their home. Although she had already recovered some memories with the help of her pastor, she told Paul she still could not remember what happened and was frightened because she did not know the truth. “I am not remembering anything,” she wrote, “but with God’s help I will remember.”

The letter abruptly shifted from the recent past, with its locked storehouse of repressed memories, to the easily accessed memories of the distant past, when the children were little and life was good and filled with promise. Sandy asked Paul if he remembered the children when they were babies. They were so good and so smart, she remembered, so beautiful and so tiny. When they cried, she would try to soothe them, but as soon as Paul came home and held them, they stopped crying—did he remember that? Did he remember when they met, and how shy he was? Did he remember the drive-in movie (but not, she added coyly, the movie)?

With those final appeals to her husband’s happier memories, Sandy Ingram ended her letter.

*   *   *

On December 30, 1988, Ericka Ingram gave police and prosecutors a written statement, detailing for the first time her memories of satanic ritual abuse. “From the time I was about 5 yrs. old until the time I was bout 12 years old … I remember being carried from my bed, by my father, in the middle of the night,” her statement began. A group of men and women, including her mother, Jim Rabie, Ray Risch, and a High Priestess dressed in a robe, waited for them by the barn. Ericka was dressed only in a nightgown, and her father wore a “gown and hat resembling viking hat with horns.”

Inside the barn the group crowded around the table, and everyone took turns stabbing a six- to eight-month-old baby with a knife, continuing the bloody rite even after the infant was dead. The high priestess dressed the corpse in “something white” and then buried it in a pit in the ground. “They would tell me this is what would happen to me, also,” Ericka ended her statement. “They also would say you will not remember this. They would say it over and over again like a chant.”

Julie also began to remember some “satanic stuff,” although her memory was not nearly so vivid or detailed as her sister’s. She remembered burying animals but couldn’t say for sure if the animals had been sacrificed or had died a natural death. In response to detectives’ questions she said she couldn’t remember attending any ceremonies other than church services. When asked if she had any scars from the abuse she suffered, she emphatically nodded her head yes, explaining that she had scars from the knife wounds inflicted by her father and Jim Rabie. But she would not permit anyone to look at the scars because, she said, they made her self-conscious … so self-conscious that she refused to change her clothes in the high school locker room and never wore a bathing suit without a T-shirt.

Eventually, under pressure from Jim Rabie’s and Ray Risch’s attorneys, both Julie and Ericka agreed to be examined by a female doctor who specialized in the treatment of sexual abuse. Although the doctor searched their bodies thoroughly, she could find no unusual marks or scars.

*   *   *

Less than a month after his session with Dr. Peterson and Detectives Vukich and Schoenig, Chad Ingram retracted his statement. The whole scene with the witch and the penis and the recovered memories of Jim Rabie and Ray Risch abusing him were just bad dreams. Nothing more.

*   *   *

Ericka’s stories became increasingly bizarre and lurid. She claimed that her father had forced her to have sex with goats and dogs. Her mother also had sex with the animals, while her father took pictures. Ericka said she had been assaulted by Jim Rabie many times, perhaps as many as a hundred; after one of the assaults, she claimed that Rabie, her mother, and her father took turns defecating on her. She described satanic orgies, infant sacrifices, and gruesome abortions. She said she personally witnessed the sacrifice of twenty-five or more babies, whose tiny, mutilated bodies were buried in the woods behind the Ingram house. And once, Ericka recalled, cult members aborted her baby with a coat hanger and rubbed the fetus’s bloody, dismembered body all over her naked torso.

*   *   *

The increasingly bizarre accusations of satanic ritual abuse and human sacrifices led the prosecution to Richard Ofshe, an expert on cults and mind control and professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley.

“Do you have any experience with satanic cults?” Gary Tabor, the chief prosecutor on the Ingram case, asked Ofshe in their first telephone conversation. Tabor related the basic details of the case, including the stories of satanic ritual abuse. He clearly wanted a serious answer, and Richard Ofshe had one for him.

“No,” said Ofshe, “and if anyone tells you they do, they’re lying, because there’s no proof that baby-killing satanic cults even exist.”

Ofshe knew all about the satanic ritual abuse rumors that were igniting people’s imaginations in little towns and big cities all over the country. He was familiar with the theory that satanic cults “programmed” their members, a feat allegedly accomplished by secret technology known only to the high priests and priestesses of the cult. Some therapists were trying to link this devilish scrambling of minds with the creation of multiple personalities, a disorder that, if it actually appeared, Ofshe liked to quip, it did so as frequently as Siamese twins joined at the head.

Ofshe doubted if multiple personality even existed as a separate and identifiable diagnostic category; he believed it was much more likely that highly suggestible people began to display the symptoms that their therapists unwittingly suggested. And yet swarms of therapists and law enforcement officials were now claiming that repeated abuse, particularly satanic ritual abuse, caused the personality to fracture into numerous pieces. Memories of abuse then supposedly gravitated toward the alter personalities, where they were quickly buried beneath consciousness; this allowed the “host” personality to carry on with the duties and responsibilities of a normal life.

Ofshe kept close track of the burgeoning claims concerning MPD and post-traumatic stress disorder (another fad diagnosis, in his opinion), and he had a thick collection of satanic ritual abuse stories alleging blood-drinking, cannibalism, ritual abortions, sadistic tortures, and murder. He was well acquainted with the bizarre theories offered to explain why no scars, corpses, bones, or other concrete evidence could be found. Theory one: The cult is so skillfully organized that no outsider can penetrate its highest levels (some MPD experts compare the cult structure to that of the Communist party). Theory two: Talented plastic surgeons (who are also dedicated cult members) work their magic to cover up the wounds inflicted during various tortures and rituals. Theory three: Aborted babies and the bones of sacrificed victims are incinerated in mini-crematoria in the basements of the cult leaders’ mansions. Theory four: Cult members’ minds are emptied of all knowledge through secret, highly effective brainwashing techniques. Theory five: Police officers and other law enforcement personnel charged with finding the bodies never turn up any evidence because they are satanists themselves.

But where was the proof to support these outlandish theories? Ofshe wondered. Any scientist worth his salt would demand proof before he permitted himself to accept something that couldn’t be seen. Science demands facts; science requires a hypothesis that can be disproven (many scientists believe in God, Ofshe reminded himself, but that was a personal matter); and no one, to his knowledge, had uncovered a real, practicing, baby-murdering satanic cult, just as no one had ever produced in the flesh an angel or an alien.

Ofshe had witnessed some bizarre goings-on in his work with cults and cult-inspired individuals, and there was no disputing the fact that atrocities and abominations were committed by “normal” human beings committed to bizarre ideologies. Look at Patty Hearst, a decent human being whose mind was so effectively manipulated that she identified with her captors, even protecting them in a bank holdup. But the Symbionese Liberation Army—Hearst’s kidnappers—existed; the firestorm in which they died was filmed on TV; the tapes, messages, and kidnapping were all documented facts. So far there was no evidence whatsoever confirming the existence of an elusive conspiracy of blood-drinking, infant-murdering, cannibalistic satanists.

“This is real,” the prosecutor was saying. “Ingram was accused by his two grown daughters, and he confessed not once, not twice, but many, many times.”

Confessions didn’t impress Ofshe. He had just completed a scholarly paper detailing several cases in which people caved in to police pressure, confessing to crimes they could not remember committing. In Europe three hundred years ago, tens of thousands of people confessed that they were witches, and were summarily burned at the stake for their dastardly but unproven deeds. Many of the so-called witches confessed under brutal and relentless torture, but many more spontaneously admitted their evildoings—and willingly pointed their fingers at relatives, friends, and neighbors.

For centuries a passionate belief in God and the devil contributed to the bizarre mythology of witches, just as, in modern times, a belief in the possibility of life on other planets was sending scores of people into psychiatrist’s offices with tales of being abducted by aliens who experimented with their sexual organs. How many people—like Shirley MacLaine, whose books were gobbled up like popcorn—believed that they had lived before, as princesses, or pirates, or personal witnesses to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? Were those memories real, too?

Still, Ofshe wasn’t willing to automatically dismiss the possibility of an organized network of satanists. Something was happening out there, and he wanted to understand what it was and where it was coming from. If Paul Ingram really was a high priest in a satanic cult, and if the facts could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, Ofshe wanted to be part of that investigation. If Paul Ingram confessed because he’d been influenced by coercive and suggestive tactics of a police department committed to uncovering the crime of the century, then he wanted to be part of that, too.

“What can I do for you?” he asked the prosecutor.

*   *   *

Paul Ingram knew that Richard Ofshe had been retained by the prosecutor’s office, but he was more than willing to tell the gray-and-white-bearded professor with the dark, soulful eyes anything he wanted to know about his memories and his methods of retrieving them. By that time, early in February 1989, Ingram had endured more than two months of intensive interrogations, and his attempts to access his lost memories had developed into a regularly practiced step-by-step process.

His first step was to pray. His minister had assured him that God would fill his mind with true images if he was diligent about prayer before he began the memory recovery process. After a good long talk with God, he would sit on his bed, close his eyes, breathe deeply, and try to relax. This was easier at night when the other prisoners had settled down and the jail was relatively quiet, but Ingram tried to practice his relaxation exercises many times throughout the day.

The next stage in the process was “mind-emptying.” Ingram would try to imagine that he was drifting into a warm, white fog, a visualization exercise he had stumbled across in a magazine article. Pastor Bratun also encouraged him to use his imagination in the mind-emptying process. In fact, Bratun suggested that Ingram spend a full eight hours a day trying to see with the mind’s eye. “Think of it,” Bratun told him, “as your full-time job.” The pastor discouraged Ingram from reading Westerns or other novels and even pointed out that his Bible study should not interfere with these forays into his inner mind.

Once Ingram succeeded in entering the warm white fog, he tried to float around in there for several minutes, patiently waiting for the images to come into his mind. After a while fragments of memories would drift back into consciousness. He had little or no control over these fleeting images, and sometimes they were completely unrelated to the particular memories he was trying to reconstruct.

As Ingram described the bizarre, splintered nature of these highly visual memories, Ofshe became suspicious. Was Ingram confusing fantasy and reality? The phrase “influence machine” kept running through Ofshe’s mind. Paul Ingram had a problem, a big problem, and anyone with a problem is vulnerable to people who claim to have solutions. The more uncertain and unstable the person is, the more easily influenced. And Paul Ingram was a quaking mass of uncertainty and instability. He was anxious to please, concerned about his family’s safety, eager to believe in scriptural injunctions and therapeutic prescriptions, and desperate for an end to his torment.

Ofshe had no doubt that Ingram was visualizing events and that those visualizations were real experiences to him. But a “real” visualization, daydream, or hallucination is not the same thing as a memory of a real, verifiable, objective event. Ingram had been given certain facts about the abuse and encouraged to “pray on” those alleged events. Once he agreed to the basic paradigm—Your daughters say you raped them; you must have repressed the memory; if you try hard enough you can find the memories; confess and ye shall be free—he was on the road to confirming its existence. Once the folklore was established, it generated its own evidence. Ingram’s confabulations became the foundation for his “memories”: The more he confabulated, the more confident he became that he was guilty, and as his confidence increased, he was driven inexorably toward confession. Imagining that these events might have happened, he became increasingly sure that they actually did happen, and to account for his continuing lack of memory he invoked the mysterious mechanism that had been carefully explained to him: repression.

Sigmund Freud would turn over in his grave, Ofshe thought. All these psychotherapists spouting off about repression borrowed their ideas from some loose theoretical concepts offered by Freud nearly a hundred years earlier. Childhood trauma is the root of our problems, therapists claim (that’s early Freud); traumatized children often repress their memories in order to avoid psychic pain (that’s Freud stretched thin); and the primary goal of therapy is to draw out repressed memories and bring the traumas out into the light of day where their dark power can be dissipated (that’s dime-store Freud). Repression had become a magical cure, and only those therapists perceptive and compassionate enough to recognize its presence could, through skillful and long-term techniques, tap into a patient’s abcessed memory and allow the aching pain of a lifetime to drain away.

That was the theory, anyway. But with such oversimplification and distortion of Freud’s complex theories taking place in a culture supremely sensitized to incest and sexual abuse, people were walking into therapists’ offices and being asked outright if they had ever been physically, sexually or emotionally abused in childhood. If no memories came to mind, they were told not to worry: Many people who were abused don’t remember what happened to them. And then began the process of excavating the buried memories through numerous invasive techniques such as age-regression, guided visualization, trance writing, dream work, body work, on and on, you name it.

Freud believed it was theoretically possible for a person to repress a traumatic event—and, particularly, the emotional associations connected to that event—but he’d have torn out whole chunks of his beard at these cowboy versions of his spare, elegant theories. Even if he surmised that a patient was employing the defense mechanism of repression, Freud would never have used such crude bulldozing techniques to dig up the lost material. In fact, Freud stopped hypnotizing his patients when he recognized that hypnosis can elicit wild confabulations bearing no resemblance whatsoever to reality. Ofshe wondered why therapists hadn’t picked up on that penetrating Freudian insight, particularly since present-day experimental techniques consistently verified that formal hypnosis creates a highly suggestible state in which visualizations, hallucinations, and dreams can be confused with real events.

To complicate reality even further, hypnotized patients tend to be extremely confident that such pseudomemories represent real events and experiences. Once a patient has convinced herself that certain events occurred, she’ll believe it so completely that if she took a polygraph she’d pass. All a polygraph measures is a person’s conviction that something may be true or false, not the accuracy or authenticity of the event being described.

Even though most modern-day therapists understand the general idea of hypnotic suggestibility, many invest hypnosis with magical healing powers. Hypnosis is considered to function like a sort of truth serum, permitting lost material to break through the invisible but stubborn barrier between the conscious and unconscious minds. This misconception, coupled with the fact that most therapists have only a rudimentary knowledge of the reconstructive nature of memory, can lead to the creation of false memories within the therapeutic environment.

“I never use hypnosis!” a therapist might object. But as the Paul Ingram case demonstrates, you don’t need formal hypnotic induction techniques to induce a trance state; all you need is a suggestible client with a problem. Ingram clearly described a process of self-hypnosis—relaxation, mind-emptying, mental imagery—and the visual, fragmentary quality of his “memories” strongly suggested that they were pseudomemories induced by his trance state rather than genuine memories accurately recovered from a traumatic past. Through well-rehearsed and studiously practiced relaxation and guided-imagery techniques, Ingram was putting himself into a trance, experiencing dissociation and heightened suggestibility.

Ofshe was aware of the phenomenon known as “the Grade 5 personality,” a collection of psychological traits common to highly hypnotizable individuals. Herb Spiegel, a psychiatrist from New York who worked for a time with the multiple personality disorder patient known as Sybil, coined the phrase “Grade 5 Syndrome” to describe the five to ten percent of the population who are so hypnotizable and suggestible that they can shift instantaneously and almost imperceptibly from normal consciousness into a deep hypnotic trance state. “Grade 5s” are inordinately trusting, exhibiting in Spiegel’s words, “an intense, beguiling expectation of support from others.” They display a firm and steady confidence in the goodwill of their therapists, readily absorbing all suggestions, compulsively filling in the blanks in their memories, and accepting incongruent, unlikely, or even impossible information as real and valid.

Despite their confabulatory and fantastical nature, memories recalled in a hypnotic state will seem utterly real to a Grade 5; even after returning to normal consciousness, a Grade 5 will recall the memories with a compelling emotional quality, fervently affirming the truth and authenticity of the remembered experience. The memory distortions and enhancements that occur in hypnotic states are ignored or minimized by therapists who seek to reconnect their patients with forgotten memories and emotions. Therapists (or, as in the Ingram case, police interrogators) who are not aware of the “trance logic” used by Grade 5s to incorporate illogical or contradictory material into their memory systems can be hooked into believing the memories are real. Through words or gestures they can then offer the client validation and permission to permanently record the images into long-term memory.

The more Ofshe listened to Paul Ingram, the more he was convinced that Ingram was highly suggestible. The only other plausible scenario was that Ingram was lying, but Ofshe couldn’t fathom why the man would purposely and consciously fabricate memories that would tear his family apart, destroy his career and reputation, and send him to jail for the rest of his life. He was confused, no doubt about that, but he was not insane.

Ofshe made a sudden and spontaneous decision to conduct a field “experiment” to test his theories.

“I was talking to one of your sons and one of your daughters,” he said to Ingram, “and they told me about something that happened. It was about a time when you made them have sex with each other while you watched. Do you remember that?”

Ingram looked confused. He told Ofshe he had no memory of that particular incident.

Ofshe assured him that the event had happened; both his children clearly remembered it. Ingram was silent for several minutes, his head in his hands. Where did this happen? he asked. In the house the family currently lived in, he was told.

“Try to think about the scene, try to see it happening,” Ofshe suggested, purposely using the same words and phrases Ingram employed to describe his process of memory reconstruction.

Ingram closed his eyes; after a moment of reflection he said that he was beginning to “get” some images in his mind and could actually “see” himself in the scene that Ofshe had briefly described for him.

Ofshe was struck by Ingram’s use of the present tense. He seemed to be experiencing the “memory” with what Herb Spiegel called the “telescoped time sense” of the Grade 5 syndrome. When Grade 5s are asked to travel back in time to a prior moment in their lives, they typically relate the unfolding narrative in the present tense. For example, rather than saying “I was standing on the street corner when I heard the siren,” a Grade 5 might say, “I am standing on the street corner and I hear a siren.” This subjective experience of actually being part of the memory as it happens enhances the emotional immediacy and believability of the recalled event.

At this point, Ofshe decided to put a temporary halt to the memory retrieval process. Ingram was highly suggestible, no question about that, and Ofshe didn’t want to influence his responses in any way. He asked Ingram to return to his jail cell and try to remember additional details by “praying on” the scene.

The next day Ingram told Ofshe that he could vividly recall what happened between his daughter and his oldest son, who he identified as Ericka and Paul Ross. Before Ingram elaborated any further on his memory, Ofshe asked him to return once again to his jail cell and prepare a written statement. At this point, Ofshe interviewed Ericka. “Did your father ever force you and one of your brothers to have sex while he watched?” Ofshe asked. Ericka assured him that nothing like that had ever happened.

Several hours later Paul Ingram handed Ofshe a three-page handwritten confession, complete with dialogue. Reading through the document, Ofshe was struck once again by Ingram’s use of the present tense. It reads like a movie script, he thought, complete with set description.

In Ericka’s Bedroom on Fir Tree. Bunk Beds set up. Ericka + Julie are sharing the room. I ask or tell Paul Jr. + Ericka to come upstairs.… I tell them to undress. Ericka says “But Dad,” I say “Just get undressed and don’t argue.” From my tone or the way I say it, neither objects and they undress themselves. I’m probably blocking the door so they could not get out.…

I tell Ericka to kneel and to caress Paul’s genitals. When erect I tell her to put the penis into her mouth and to orally stimulate him.…

I have her lie on the floor. I caress her vagina and breasts and probably orally caress her vagina. I have vaginal sex. Paul watches all of this. If she did not have an orgasm I would have stimulated her with my fingers until she did.

I may have told the children that they needed to learn the sex acts and how to do them right. That it is important that each participant have a pleasurable experience.

I may have anal sex with Paul, not real clear.…

The ability to control Paul + Ericka may not come entirely from me. It seems there is a real fear of Jim [Rabie] or someone else. Someone may have told me to do this with the kids. This is a feeling I have.

Paul Ingram had confessed with rich and abundant detail to something that never happened.

Ofshe moved on to the second and final stage in his field experiment. He needed to gauge his subject’s confidence in his memories. Did Ingram believe with one-hundred-percent confidence that his visualizations were memories and not, at least in part, confabulations, hallucinations, or dream-induced imaginations? Was there any chance, for whatever reason, that he had deliberately or consciously fabricated the memories? Was he aware that his 1-2-3-4 steps of “praying on,” relaxation, mind-emptying, and visualization could lead to dissociation and trance induction? And, finally, did he suspect that the detectives’ leading questions and suggestive comments might be influencing and possibly creating the images that flashed into his mind?

A heated confrontation ensued, in which Ofshe told Ingram that he had invented the whole scene. Ofshe accused Ingram of lying and informed him that this was his opportunity to tell the truth and set the record straight.

Ingram became agitated and emotional. The images he had described were real, he insisted, as real as everything else he had remembered. He was telling the truth as he remembered it, and he had not intentionally or consciously padded his statement with fabricated details. No one was influencing him, he was not dissociating, and he was not trying to help the sheriff’s department or protect his daughters by offering a detailed confession of something that never happened. Ingram insisted that his memories were authentic and that the scene had occurred just as he had described it.

Richard Ofshe returned to California with the term “witch-hunt” returning again and again to haunt him. In Salem, Massachusetts, three hundred years earlier, and in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sane and rational people convinced themselves that witches were performing black magic and consorting with the devil. Now, at the close of the twentieth century, sane and rational people were getting hysterical about rumors that a murderous satanic cult had infiltrated their communities, sacrificed hundreds of aborted fetuses and newborn babies, forced young women to have sex with animals, and programmed the minds of normal churchgoing citizens to erase their memories of evildoing.

*   *   *

Satan—a cunning, resourceful enemy who threatened the moral order of an entire society—was alive and well in Olympia, Washington. An elaborate system of myths about the workings of evil had created its own evidence, and a community had gone daft with nonsense. Rumors and fears are often a thin cover for common prejudices. Satanists, witches, Gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, Communists—really, it didn’t matter who the “demon” was as long as he encapsulated the most grotesque and terrifying images of evil. All prejudice begins with this process of stereotyping and then projecting outward onto an individual, a nonconforming group, an imagined entity, a political party, or an entire race the sense, the feeling, or the fear of diabolical malevolence.

Sane and intelligent human beings had been captured and imprisoned, once again, by a metaphor.

Ofshe was horrified at how quickly the moral outrage took fire and how rapidly the conflagration spread. This modern-day witch-hunt had begun at a church retreat, with a young woman’s emotional breakdown and the suggestion by an authority figure that she had been abused. Over time, through contact with therapists and law enforcement officials, her stories solidified into an objective reality, which was enhanced by the fresh horrors offered by a sister and by a pastor’s theories about satanic deception and the power of prayer to call forth God’s truth. A psychologist’s allusions to black magic, rampant speculations about the workings of the unconscious mind, and investigators’ blind pursuit of “the truth” breathed life into the static images, creating a three-dimensional, never-ending horror show.

In the end it was all smoke and mirrors, a mass folly, a moral panic, the rumor mill gone haywire. No cult or conspiracy, no devil or priests, no blood-drinking or murdered babies could be discovered here—and for that matter, neither could the truth be discerned. Buried beneath countless layers of fantasy, smothered by speculaton, the truth had long ago died a peaceful, unremarkable death.

Ofshe sent his report to the prosecutor’s office, detailing his concerns about the investigation and his conclusion that Paul Ingram was not guilty of the crimes to which he had confessed. The prosecutor, arguing that Ofshe’s report did not constitute “exculpatory evidence,” initially refused to hand over the report to Ingram’s defense attorneys. Prodded by Ofshe’s complaints, the presiding judge ordered prosecutors to share the report with Ingram and his attorneys.

*   *   *

On April 20, 1989, Detective Loreli Thompson, of the Lacey Police Department, examined Ericka and Julie Ingram for evidence of scarring, hoping to discover something the doctor had missed. Thompson typed up her conclusions in a memo titled “Supplemental Officer’s Report, Reference: Examination of Ericka Ingram and Julie Ingram for Scars.”

On April 20, 1989, I asked Ericka to show me where she had been cut on her stomach by one of the defendants. She lifted her sweater and pointed to the midline area between her sternum and naval[sic]. I was not able to observe any scarring. I stretched the skin slightly to insure that the scar was not covered by body hair. I still was unable to see any scar. Paula Davis [Ericka’s best friend] was also in the room. She stated that she thought she could observe a slight line. I noted that Ericka’s torso skin was slightly darker than her face. She confirmed that she had been recently visiting a tanning booth.

Later the same date, I checked Julie’s shoulders, clavicle area, and upper arms for scars. I saw no marks or scars. As she was wearing a tank top, I moved the shoulder of the garment so I could see all of the shoulder area. I asked Julie if she thought she had scars in that area. She indicated that she did not.

In an April 26, 1989, letter to the prosecutor, Julie stuck to her story, insisting that she had numerous scars from wounds inflicted during satanic rituals. In one ritual, she wrote, her left arm was nailed to the floor by her father; in another her father, Jim Rabie, and Ray Risch tortured her with a pair of pliers. But these torments paled when compared to a freshly recovered memory involving her mother: “One time, I was about 11, my mom open my private area … and put a piece of a died baby inside me,” Julie wrote. “I did remove it after she left it was an arm.”

*   *   *

Eventually the prosecution dropped all charges of satanic ritual abuse. Despite an investigation that cost taxpayers three quarters of a million dollars, no proof could be discovered to support the allegations of devil-worshipping cults operating in the suburban back yards of Olympia, Washington.

Paul Ingram, urged by his wife and his daughters to admit his guilt and salvage what was left of the family’s dignity, decided to plead guilty to six counts of third-degree rape. Two days after Ingram entered his guilty plea, the prosecutor’s office dropped all charges against Jim Rabie and Ray Risch; the two men had been in custody for one hundred and fifty-eight days.

Ingram’s sentencing was delayed when Julie produced a threatening letter, signed “Your ex Father Paul.” “How’s my very special little girl?” the letter began innocently enough. But the tone soon became sinister. “You’ve broke us up forever … there are many people that would like to see you dead and a few that are hunting for you.”

The handwritten letter, it was soon discovered, was a forgery. Julie had written it herself.

*   *   *

Paul Ingram’s world grew silent and strangely peaceful after he entered his guilty plea. Few visitors interrupted his daily routine, and the constant barrage of questions and insinuations from the detectives, lawyers, and psychologists ceased altogether. But once he was left alone with his memories, Ingram’s confidence in his guilt began to deteriorate. He immersed himself in the Bible and through its teachings and scriptural pronouncements began to piece together his personal theory of what happened to him during the time of his “mental confusion.” Ingram believed he had been caught up in a crisis of doubt and fear; in this state of mortal terror he had been blinded to the truth. As the Bible pronounces in 2 Timothy 1:7: “For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” A spirit of fear had assailed him, and he had lost his sound mind.

From Ephesians 6:10–18, especially 6:12, Ingram understood that a battle had been waged for his very soul. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Because he had not protected himself with thorough knowledge and understanding of God’s word, Ingram had not been prepared to fight that battle. He had tried so hard to hear the voice of God that he actually believed he could hear God talking to him and approving of his efforts to recall his lost and forgotten memories. But now, alone in his jail cell, he realized that God speaks in a “still, small voice” and that everything he says conforms with his word as written in the Bible.

*   *   *

At the April 1990 sentencing hearing held almost a year after he entered his guilty plea, Ingram stood up and announced in a clear, steady voice: “I stand before you, I stand before God. I have never sexually abused my daughters. I am not guilty of these crimes.”

But Ingram had confessed, not once but many times, and the judge was not inclined to take an eleventh-hour change of heart seriously. Ingram was sentenced to twenty years in prison; after twelve years, he will be eligible for parole. All appeals have failed, as might be expected. Confessions, unlike memories, do not fade with time; tape recorded, signed and sealed, they stay on the books, uncontaminated and intact, forever.

*   *   *

Paul Ingram trusts that God will deliver him. He finds a precedent in the story of Joseph, who was sold by his brothers and taken as a captive to Egypt. Falsely accused and imprisoned, Joseph nevertheless prospered because he trusted God in everything he did; eventually he was joyfully reunited with his family.

“I trust God to also deliver me and to vindicate me of all the charges made against me,” Ingram wrote in a letter dated February 16, 1993. With his letter he included a copy of a note from his son Chad, married now and attending graduate school. This is the first time Chad has communicated with his father in more than three years, and the note consists of four cryptic sentences. Referring to his father by his prison ID number, Chad forcefully stated his belief that his father is guilty, and expressed his hope that he will be made to suffer for his deeds. Chad ended with the statement that he never wanted to hear from his father again.

“You can see he still has a lot of bitterness and anger toward me,” Ingram explained, in what can only be termed a massive understatement. He spent several paragraphs describing the activities of the rest of his family. His oldest son, Paul Ross, lives in Oregon, is married, and has a young daughter, Paul’s first grandchild. Julie writes at least once a year and expresses a desire for the family to get back together; she has changed her name and works in a day care center. Ericka lives in California. Sandy, who divorced her husband and changed her name, lives with their youngest son, Mark, in a new town. She writes to Paul in prison but rarely mentions the events of the recent past.

“The entire family is still deeply affected by this situation,” Ingram concludes, once again understating the impact of the trial and its aftermath.

Just before Christmas 1993, I received another typewritten, single-spaced, four-page letter from Paul Ingram. “This year of 1993 has proven to be a banner year with abundant blessings for our families, for our friends, and for the inmates,” he wrote. He had been “blessed” with many visitors, including his two brothers and three sisters, who spent nearly a week with him, visiting six separate times. In October, a “major breakthrough occurred” when his youngest daughter, Julie, visited with his parents. “Julie is a beautiful young woman who seems to be doing quite well. She was reluctant to talk much about what has happened, but she did say that she wants me out of jail.

“I am truly blessed,” Paul Ingram concluded his letter. Admitting that it might be difficult for others to understand how he could feel so content with his life, he explained that under the circumstances he has only two choices. “I can get angry and take it out on others, or I can thank God for all the blessings He gives me and do the best that I can in the situation forced upon me.”

Paul Ingram is doing the best he can. But as I read through his letters and reflect on his situation, I can only wonder: Is it better this way? Was the Ingram family so sick and tormented that it deserved to die such a cruel, public death? It was certainly not the perfect family. Paul Ingram admits that he was not always a “good” father. He sometimes yelled at his children and verbally intimidated them. He recalls hitting Paul Ross on the back of the head and kicking him once, and he remembers slapping Julie’s face when she ran the hot water for too long in Mark’s bath and accidentally scalded him. Another time, when Julie ran down the driveway screaming that she was going to run away from home, Paul remembers running up behind her and pulling her by the hair.

There was also an unfortunate incident involving a roofing ax. Ingram remembers that he was standing on the deck behind their house, yelling at Chad and Paul Ross, who stood below him in the back yard. The boys had loaned the ax to a neighbor, who used it to split wood; when Ingram discovered that the blade was dulled, he became enraged and threw the ax to the ground; it landed right at the boys’ feet. Ingram never intended to hurt his boys, he says; he just reacted without thinking, committing an unforgivable act of frustration that could have ended in tragedy.

Chad also remembers the incident with the ax. “Do you remember an occasion where … your dad got real upset with you and threw an ax at you?” Detective Schoenig asked during one of his interviews.

“Yeah. I remember that, yeah,” Chad said.

“How did you feel when he did that?” Dr. Peterson asked.

“Surprised, I guess,” Chad answered. “I didn’t expect him to throw it.”

“Surprised when somebody throws an ax at you?” Peterson asked, his tone clearly indicating that he expected a more outraged response.

“Well, I don’t think he was trying to hit us,” Chad explained.

Paul Ingram’s memories and his self-confessed defects as a parent leave little doubt that emotional and physical abuse occasionally took place in the Ingram household. Apparently, at times, there was yelling, name-calling, a lack of communication, a dearth of affection; there were slaps, kicks, angry retorts, even an ax thrown by a father at his children.

Was there sexual abuse? Paul Ingram insists now, as he initially claimed when his wife confronted him with the accusatons, that he never touched his children, as he put it, “indecently.” Sandy Ingram, whose first response to her daughters’ accusations was amazement and disbelief, now believes they told the truth. Chad, who initially told investigators that he “always felt safe in his home,” now insists his father is guilty and wants him to pay for his crimes. Paul Ross, who claimed that his father physically abused him but insisted that he had no memories of his father sexually abusing any of his children, refused to cooperate with the investigation; whatever he remembers, he keeps to himself. Ericka and Julie stand by their memories.

Despite the wreckage of his family and the failure of his appeals, Paul Ingram believes that he will be exonerated. “I believe that all the truth will come out and I trust God to totally vindicate me and all the others implicated,” he writes. “Suffice it to say, these crimes never occurred except in the imaginations of myself and others.”

*   *   *

Once again I am reminded of The Crucible’s central character, John Proctor, who realizes too late that a belief in the devil has created its own reality. A sensible man, Proctor has ventured into the Salem meeting house to confront his accusers. He demands proof of the witch-hunters’ claims that his wife has hidden poppets—dolls stabbed with needles—in their house.

“Your Honor,” he appeals to the governor, “my wife never kept no poppets.”

“Why could there not have been poppets hid where no one ever saw them?” asks Reverend Parris, who firmly believes that he is doing his part to save the world from Satan’s diabolical tricks.

Proctor is furious. “There might also be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it,” he protests.

Filled with the self-righteousness of one who does not need to see in order to believe, Parris pronounces the words that seal John Proctor’s fate. “We are here, Your Honor, precisely to discover what no one has ever seen.”