It took just one minute, on a Thursday morning in the middle of July. One minute, on a grey humdrum day in a small Manchester office. One minute, for the safety and safe memories of a family to be breached.
There were two men in separate rooms, each working quietly at their computers. At 09:02, the phone rang. The elder man, who had been checking his emails, lifted the receiver.
‘Hello, this is Richard Felstead.’
‘Is this the brother of Carole?’ asked the caller.
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘I’m calling from the coroner’s office in Battersea. I’m very sorry to tell you that your sister Carole was found dead in her flat on the twenty-ninth of June. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for us to get in touch. Carole’s next of kin – she told us there was no family. But a letter was found, in her flat. It was from you. So I thought I’d let you know.’
It was 09:03. Richard was breathless with crying.
‘I’ll …’ said the coroner’s assistant. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll call back later.’
Richard walked to the next-door office, where his brother David was entering addresses on a database. When he told him the news, David didn’t turn around. He stopped typing, he leaned his head all the way back and he said, very quietly, ‘Oh.’
The telephone rang again. It was a different caller – a woman, but this one was speaking in a strange voice.
‘Are you Richard?’
‘Yes.’
‘I know you’re not one of the ones that harmed Carole.’
‘Who is this?’ said Richard.
She sounded slow, drawn out, modulated.
‘I’m Carole’s next of kin.’
She sounded weird.
‘Yes, but who are you?’
‘That’s not important.’
‘Do you know how Carole died?’ said Richard.
‘She had a very difficult childhood.’
‘What was wrong with her? Was she sick?’
‘As I said, she had a very difficult childhood.’
‘No, no, hang on a minute. That’s a lie. Carole had a great childhood. Who is this?’
‘I’ve already told you. I’m Carole’s next of kin.’
She was patronising now, like she was admonishing a naughty child.
‘But – give me your name.’
‘My name is not important. I just wanted to tell you that it’s Carole’s funeral tomorrow. She’s being cremated. People have taken time off work. It’s very important that the cremation goes ahead.’
Richard became furious.
The phone went dead.
Richard and David drove to Cheadle to collect their father, Joseph, from the factory where he was employed as an engineer. They knew many of the men that Joseph worked with. As they walked past their tool-strewn benches, his colleagues tried to say hello, all right?, mornin’ boys but it quickly became obvious that something was wrong. They watched the brothers approaching Joseph’s bay, where he was busy welding. When he saw his sons, he smiled and wiped his hands clean. His face fell when he registered their expressions. And then they had to tell him that his daughter was gone.
When the three men arrived at the family home in Davenport, half an hour later, their mother was delighted to see her husband. ‘Oh, Joseph!’ she beamed. ‘Have you come to take me shopping?’ The other two Felstead brothers soon joined them – first Anthony and then Kevin, whose lasting memory of that morning is the sight of his mother: ‘Finished. On the floor. Drained. Shattered. Gone.’
The family began talking. Nothing made sense. Who was the mysterious caller who said she was Carole’s ‘next of kin’? Why did she talk of a ‘difficult childhood’ when Carole was happy, popular – spoiled, if anything? And how could Carole die? She was in the midst of a successful nursing career down in London. She was only forty-one. Why had it taken two weeks for the family to be informed? And how could there be a funeral taking place tomorrow?
Joseph stood up.
‘She’s not getting cremated tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll put a stop to it.’
‘You can’t stop a funeral, Dad!’ said Kevin. ‘How do you stop a funeral? What, are you going to march in there and take the coffin?’
Joseph telephoned the coroner’s assistant. She brusquely informed him that now the family had been discovered, the funeral would be halted regardless. But instead of relief, Joseph felt troubled. Why was her tone so short? So angry? The coroner told him: ‘We’ve been handed a life assessment that your daughter wrote. It’s very upsetting.’ It was six pages, typed. It said: ‘My parents were abusive in every way imaginable: sexually, physically and emotionally. I grew up in constant terror. At three years of age, my mother smothered my sister. She sat me on top of her and then set the house on fire.’
Joseph was astonished.
‘No, no, hang on a minute,’ he said. ‘Had she been ill or something? Had she been sectioned?’
The coroner’s assistant said, ‘Yes.’
Throughout the coming weeks, there came more questions. Officials dealing with Carole’s death kept mentioning a ‘psychiatrist friend’ who accompanied her to many of her medical appointments and seemed to have some role in the cancelled funeral. And then there was this mysterious ‘next of kin’, who, to the family’s fury, emptied Carole’s flat of her possessions. On 6 August, Joseph was in conversation with the police inspector who was involved in the case when something occurred to him. ‘This psychiatrist and this next of kin,’ he asked. ‘Are they the same person?’
‘That’s right,’ said the inspector. ‘Dr Fleur Fisher.’
Shortly after the call, Joseph searched the Internet for her name.
Most recently (1991–96) she has been the Head of Ethics Science and Information for the British Medical Association.
*
When he was discussing the notion of sexual abuse causing people to hear voices, Dr Trevor Turner said something that – even after learning all that I have – managed to stagger me. ‘Thirty per cent of our memories are false memories anyway. It doesn’t matter who we are.’
If Turner is correct it suggests that all of us are far closer to that fuzzy, imaginary line than I could have imagined. I used to think of creationists as existing on one distant end of the continuum, with the bland massed-army of the scientists on the other. Now, in my mind at least, they have all shuffled a little closer. I am sure that the doctors Nick Mann and Anne Oaklander are correct, in that many Morgellons patients have been incorrectly diagnosed as suffering from DOP. Those sorry souls are victims of the kind of binary, dismissive thinking that I worry is evident among some Skeptics. In their haste to dismiss the ranting, scratching dispossessed, subtler truths are being missed. The itch might not be caused by tiny wasps, but in many cases, it does appear to be caused by something. Just because they are wrong about one thing, it hasn’t necessarily followed that they are wrong about it all. And yet they are crucified for making one mistake. They are denounced as crazy and crazy is what many have become.
Ron Coleman’s long battle against the scientific establishment is brilliantly illustrated in his observation that, ‘In 1994, the Royal College of Psychiatry called the Hearing Voices Network “the most dangerous organisation in psychiatry.” In 2000, they described us as “one of the most important.”’ Just because he was mad and biased by his own experiences and fighting against senior scientists and years of consensus and orthodoxy, it didn’t mean that he was wrong. Indeed, what consensus there is among experts in schizophrenia these days says that both extremes have a point – that environmental and disease causes are probably involved in ways that have not yet been precisely fathomed. The psychiatric establishment have felt the lunatic’s embrace and, over the last twenty years, have slowly yielded.
Most humans, not least myself, are an incoherent mess of madness and sanity. It is not as simple as I had once believed, judging who is rational and who is not. And what I am to learn over the many weeks that I will spend investigating the strange death and even stranger life of Carole Myers is that, when everyone believes they are telling the truth, and yet you are submerged in a milieu of dangerous delusion, it can be especially hard to tell.
The Felstead family’s search for answers to the many mysteries surrounding Carole’s decline is now in its sixth year. Endless letters, phone calls, hours of legal research and long nights on the Internet have resulted in the collection of hundreds of documents and the generation of yet more questions: angry ones about individuals they believe to have been malign presences in her life; strange ones about startling and little-known corners of human psychology; sad ones about the life and death of the kind and sparky woman that they still miss every day.
When I first contact the Felsteads, to ask if I can write about Carole, they pass me a telephone number. Discovered in Carole’s phone records, it belongs to the woman whose role in the tale is, they are convinced, central: that of the ‘next of kin’, Dr Fleur Fisher. The day before I travel to Stockport to meet them, I dial it, nervously. A confident-sounding woman answers.
‘Is that Dr Fleur Fisher?’ I ask.
‘Yes?’
I tell her that I want to talk to her about Carole.
‘I’m very leery about putting my head above the parapet on that subject. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, it’s not wise for you to be involving yourself in this story either. That family, they’re bloody terrifying.’
‘You’re frightened of them?’
‘Of course I’m frightened. They’re frightening people. And the things they’ve been saying about me!’ she says, adding confusingly, ‘I’m not a psychiatrist! I’m not a therapist!’ She rings off, warning me darkly: ‘Tread carefully.’
*
The building in which Joseph Felstead lives is a red-brick terrace, whose heavy net curtains, draped in low, funereal arcs across its front windows, block the gaze of strangers, as well as most of the light. The rooms inside are painted mauve and dark-red and are tall and shadow-struck and quiet. They are decorated with golden candlestick holders, old family portraits, strange urns and statues of dogs, birds and deer. Walking in from the street, the change is sudden and enveloping. The atmosphere has a halting, crowding quality.
Today Joseph sits glowering in the lounge, his muscular patriarch’s hands gripping his armchair. Kevin – a softer presence – informs me that Richard’s at work, and Anthony’s too distraught to speak. Their mother, Joan, passed away last year. David is here, though, friendly yet possessed of an anxious, wiry tension. Over the coming hours, he will answer questions with flumes of facts and furious analysis, fossicking in boxes for the relevant document to illustrate his point.
For these men, Carole’s life is as much of a mystery as her death. She had been a friendly, bolshie and academically successful teenager who loved watching M*A*S*H and wearing the tartan shorts beloved of her favourite band, the Bay City Rollers. She was popular at school and had a noted instinct for caring, going out of her way to play with Michael, the neighbour with Down’s syndrome, and spending long hours with a lonely old man down the road. At fifteen she got a weekend job in a home for the disabled. At twenty-one she qualified as a nurse at Stockport College and rented a nearby flat, making frequent visits back to Mum and Dad to borrow milk and money, and sunbathe in the garden. And then, in the mid-1980s, there began a silent drift away from the family.
‘Her attitude became hostile,’ says Joseph.
‘What did she say was the problem?’ I ask.
‘We didn’t have any conversations about it,’ he says.
‘But you must have been worried?’
Joseph shifts in his seat. ‘I was more cross than anything,’ he says, glancing away. ‘It just seemed indifferent, that’s all. Nothing sinister. She was our daughter. We’d spoiled her. And then to being almost anti-social? It was ill mannered.’
In 1986 the family discovered that Carole had moved to Macclesfield. She would still send Christmas cards and ring occasionally, assuring them that her career was going well. But by 1992 she had moved to London and changed her name from Carol Felstead to Carole Myers. They had to accept that, for some reason, she had chosen to stay away.
After her death, they began searching. It was slow, at first, but the family fought. Angry letters were written, court orders were threatened, freedom of information requests were made. They discovered that Carole had become mentally ill. Her medical records were a grim, broken history, told in photocopied doctors’ letters and psychologists’ reports, of self-harm, alcohol abuse and stretches in psychiatric wards. She had frequently been suicidal. Over the years, she had been seen by a series of mental health professionals and had, in 1992, been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.
The family were informed that Dr Fleur Fisher had no legal right to claim to be Carole’s ‘next of kin’. They also learned that a strange call had been made from Carole’s flat, eight days after her death, to a company called Diamond Insurance. They requested a recording of it and today, they gather around an old boxy portable hifi to play me the cassette. It turns out to be a woman, getting herself insured on Carole’s car – the one that went missing: ‘I’m dealing with her flat and possessions,’ says the caller. ‘I need to drive down to Plymouth … She was the survivor of brutal family abuse over many years … I’m a consultant in healthcare ethics … My name? It’s Dr Fleur Fisher.’
The family’s fury and suspicion towards Dr Fisher grew, like roots, through their sadness and their outrage at the claims Carole had made in her life assessment. She said that she had been abused by Joseph and his wife, who were the high priest and priestess of a satanic cult, and that during her teens she had given birth to six children – some fathered by Joseph – that she had been forced to kill. She also said that a childhood friend that she had confided in had been murdered in front of her.
The most extreme of Carole’s charges are easily proved to be false. The sister, whose murder she had apparently witnessed, actually died of a heart condition two years before Carole was born. The house fire, too, predated her birth. And yet Carole’s medical records showed that the mental health professionals involved in her case rarely challenged the grotesque visions of her memory. Most concluded that Carole’s psychological problems came as a result of family abuse. But the Felsteads point the blaming finger straight back at the clinicians.
They believe that Carole came to have these recollections only after receiving treatment known as recovered-memory therapy. RMT is predicated on the Freudian notion that traumatic experiences are somehow repressed by the brain and that these festering, forgotten memories can cause psychological and physical problems later in life. They can only be treated, says the theory, if they are brought to the surface with the aid of techniques such as dream interpretation and hypnosis, which critics believe can sometimes create false memories. The Felsteads think that blame for Carole’s psychological downfall lies with satanist-obsessed therapists who implanted these ideas in Carole’s head and helped her black fantasies to flower. After all, they point out, something similar has happened before – most famously in Orkney in 1991, when nine children were forcibly removed from their homes following interviews with social workers, who were led by an individual who has subsequently been accused of being ‘fixated on finding satanic abuse.’
I ask the Felsteads when the first mention of mental health problems appear in Carole’s medical records. A letter of December 1986 refers to his referral for therapy, in August 1985, for insomnia and nightmares related to ‘family abuse.’ A letter written in November 1986 mentions further ‘psycho-sexual counselling’ by someone whose name sends a cold stun of recognition through me. It is her: the next of kin; the woman who baffled me by insisting, ‘I’m not a therapist!’ It is Dr Fleur Fisher.
But despite all this evidence, as I leave the Felsteads’ home, I remain troubled. Can what they are saying be true? Can it really be possible for someone to develop memories that are entirely false, and yet overwhelmingly rich, dramatic and powerful – so much so that they caused a bright young woman to separate from her family and be slowly driven mad?
*
As part of an assignment set by Professor Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of Washington, a cognitive-psychology student named Jim Coan asked his fourteen-year-old brother Chris to describe the occasion when he became lost in the University City shopping mall in Spokane, Washington. Chris did as he was told. ‘I went over to look at the toy store – Kay-Bee toys,’ he remembered. ‘And I thought, Uh-oh. I’m in trouble now.’ He became scared – ‘I thought I was never going to see my family again’ – but luckily, a ‘really cool’ elderly, balding man wearing spectacles and a blue flannel shirt arrived, and helped him to find his parents. The strange thing was that Chris had never been lost in that mall. He had never been rescued. The cool old man in the blue flannel shirt did not exist. His brother Jim had simply told him that he had once gone missing, on the instructions of Professor Loftus.
For the study, Jim had asked his brother to recollect, in as much detail as he could manage, four events from his childhood – and one of them was an invention. Over five days, as he was asked to provide more and more information about these events, Chris’s false memory became richer. Weeks later, when asked to guess which one of the occasions was false, Chris picked a real one.
Professor Loftus was interested to see whether it was possible for a therapist to generate a memory of an event simply by suggesting it. In a further study, she gave twenty-four adults a brief description of four past events that they were told had been supplied by a close family member and asked to write about them. Unbeknown to them, one of these events was false. Six of them – 25 per cent of the group – actually remembered the false event. When asked to choose which of their memories was fiction, five got it wrong.
Professor Loftus tells me that she began studying memory in 1970. ‘I decided to study the process by which I believe therapists are leading people into these very rich false memories,’ she tells me. ‘Since the “lost in the mall” study was published, I and many others have planted more bizarre and unusual false memories: of accidents, of being attacked by an animal, of nearly drowning, of witnessing demonic possession. What we have found is absolutely stunning. These memories can be very detailed, and people can be very emotional about them. A lot of these therapists say, “I believe she was abused because every time she talks about it she cries,” as if somehow the emotion is proof that it’s true. It’s not.’ False accusations are typical, she says, in people who unconsciously seek to blame shortcomings in their life on others. ‘Abuse is a much more palatable explanation for the problems in your life,’ she says, ‘and that’s why it’s so appealing.’
Just like the myriad healthy biases in our brains, the memories Loftus speaks of tend to serve us in one direction: to bolster our sense of self; to tell a better story about ourselves. It is curious, when you consider the different genus of false memory that I heard about in the counselling room of Vered Kilstein: all those past-lifers who had been brave knights and Cleopatras and principal members of the Beatles. All that twisting, weaving brain-work creating all those heroes.
When I tell Professor Loftus the Felsteads’ theory of what happened to Carole, she does not react with any great expression of surprise. In her experience, as an expert witness in US courtrooms, she has come across many instances of this kind of thing: false memories of ritual abuse, false memories of incest, false memories of rape. They have led to untold numbers of miscarriages of justice; shattered countless families and friendships. And they come about by surprisingly easy means. They don’t even require a therapist. Any trusted source – a book, a friend, a TV personality – can suggest the possibility of abuse. Your mind might then produce a fragment – an image of something bad happening. What was that? You recall it again. You fill in the details. ‘Repetition makes it more vivid and familiar,’ Kimberley Wade, Associate Professor of Psychology at Warwick University, tells me. ‘It’ll start to feel like a memory.’
I mention to Professor Wade the suggestion in Carole’s medical notes that she had been treated by therapists known to have a belief in satanic cults, and who practised various relaxation techniques. ‘Using hypnotherapy encourages you to imagine,’ she says. ‘And did her therapist encourage her to not have contact with her family?’
‘It’s impossible to say,’ I tell her. ‘But she did cut them off almost entirely, at around the same time that she was being treated.’
‘That’s interesting,’ she says. ‘When we do studies implanting false memories, we tell our participants they can’t talk to family members about their past. We think it contributes to the process if they’ve got no one to counter the suggestions.’
In conversation with these academics, I am struck by the understanding that everybody, to some extent, has untrustworthy memories. ‘Every time you recall something from your past, it’s reconstructed,’ explains Wade. Just as the schizophrenia expert Dr Trevor Turner implied, the people studied by these scientists are not ‘crazy’. ‘These are healthy people without any mental impairments or psychological issues,’ she says. But Dr Turner seemed to make an interesting mistake with his numbers. Professor Wade is famous in academic circles for generating false memories by giving people childhood photos that have been doctored, so that they show them in a hot-air balloon that they never rode in, for example. When asked to describe the memory in her fake pictures, she has found that ‘On average 35 per cent of participants develop a rich memory of their fake event. They describe how it happened, where they were, how they were feeling.’
This, it seems to me, is the most likely source of the number that Dr Turner was referring to when we spoke. But I think he made a subtle error – not a third of our memories are false, as he had claimed, but a third of the population are susceptible to easily developing rich false memories. Although I have no doubt that Dr Turner made this apparent mistake in all innocence, it is interesting to note how it tended in the direction of the argument he was seeking to make – that people who hear voices may be recovering false memories of abuse during therapy. Having learned what I have about the sly operations of the brain and its treatment of evidence that might bolster or threaten our beliefs, I wonder if some unconscious mechanism might have fooled him.
To accept that a true recollection of satanic abuse could emerge during RMT, we would first have to know whether or not it is possible for memories to be ‘repressed’ at all. Professor Chris French – the Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at the University of London, and the former editor of The Skeptic magazine that I last met at the Manchester conference – tells me that this idea is extremely controversial. ‘There’s quite a schism on this in psychology,’ he says. ‘Experimentalists and the neuro people tend to be quite sceptical, while the clinicians are more accepting of it. There’s quite a clear divide. The people who appear to recover these memories relive the traumatic experiences, and the emotion that they go through is very, very real. And that can be extremely compelling. The typical human reaction would be to think that this is true. But the same methods are used in the context of alien-abduction claims and past-life regression. So, logically, if you’re going to accept that these recovered memories of childhood abuse are true then you should also accept the alien claims.’
French goes on to tell me that the British False Memory Society’s files are ‘full of cases’ in which people have been wrongly accused of rape or abuse. ‘A lot of people will go to their graves never being reconciled with their friends or family members,’ he says. ‘I think it’s tragic.’
When I mention one of the therapists that appears in Carole’s medical records, his reaction surprises me.
‘Valerie Sinason?’ he says.
‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘Do you know her?’
He lets out a deep sigh.
‘Oh, God,’ he says. ‘She’s got such a huge influence. Valerie Sinason is a dangerous woman.’
*
If the Felsteads’ theory is correct, Carole must have received recovered-memory therapy in the mid-1980s, around the time that her relationship with her family began to pall. One letter in their cache comes tantalisingly close, noting that in 1985 ‘she was unable to describe the abuse in anything other than superficial terms’ and that she subsequently underwent ‘a number of sessions concentrating on relaxation training and thought stopping procedures …’ But the only person I know who might have witnessed, first hand, what happened back then is Dr Fisher. But since our last conversation, she has vanished. She has changed her mobile number and has ignored several emails. Instead, I arrange an interview with Valerie Sinason, who, according to the records, saw Carole for psychotherapy every two weeks for eight months in 1992. I want to know if she will fit the description that Professor Loftus gave of the therapists she has come across in legal cases – that of an individual who is highly credulous of satanic abuse and has a tendency to believe ritual damage in patients. I am curious to know, do the individuals that she treats come to her with all their memories firmly in place? Or do their recollections arrive suddenly – suspiciously – during the therapeutic process? Will she see ‘warning signs’ of satanism everywhere? Or will she turn out to be soberly minded and rigorously sceptical, conceding that it happens only when there is evidence that compels it, and even then in rare, isolated cases?
*
There are two glass heads wearing sunglasses in Dr Valerie Sinason’s lobby, and a basking lizard, and a statue of Sigmund Freud, a geisha, a large wooden eagle flexing its wings and a single bongo, on the floor, next to a tribal carving. On the wall, framed in wood, a topless woman arcs her back in lascivious, fleshy pastels. The consulting room contains two deep and squashily inviting sofas and many hundreds of books – a confusing library that ranges over a vast coven of subjects, including mind, language, conspiracy, reality, radar: Steven Pinker, Opus Dei, cybernetics, social cognition, Understanding Radar, Radar Principles. There is a small television with a selection of children’s DVDs, steel bowls filled with plastic toy figures and a chaise-longue with a crowd of teddies resting in its crook. On the floor, shoved beneath a table, a large cloth boy gazes sadly into space.
This is Dr Sinason’s NHS-funded ‘Clinic for Dissociative Studies’, which she runs from a large house in Golders Green, North London. Dr Sinason is well known in mental health circles: she has written and edited books, is an in-demand speaker at international conferences, has co-authored a study about abuse for the Department of Health and is a frequently cited spokesperson in the broadsheet newspapers on issues as wide-ranging as the Bulger killings, Chris Langham and, of course, the controversial condition known as multiple-personality disorder or ‘DID’.
She arrives tanned and relaxed in a loose smock, dark leggings and light trainers. We are joined by her husband David, who takes notes throughout our talk and interjects every now and then. I will discover later that she has brought him in for backup, as she is suspicious of my motives. This might be because I have been deliberately vague about my reasons for being here. Concerned that mention of Carole’s name might cause Dr Sinason to become guarded, I have told her only that I am investigating allegations of ritual abuse in the north of England.
Over mugs of tea and a bowl of vegetable crisps, she begins by explaining that ordinary child abuse was once thought to be extremely rare. ‘Back in the early 1980s, there was something like four hundred and eighty-six children on the child protection list,’ she says, noting that she was one of the first clinicians to realise that incest was a bigger issue and to agitate for it to be taken more seriously. ‘Thousands of reasonable professionals had something staring them in their face and didn’t recognise it. But then the problem comes. If you start recognising abuse by the stepfather when the rest of the population is still thinking that maybe a stranger might do this to a tiny number of people – when they’re on stepfather you’re on father. When they get to father, you’re on mother. When they get on to mother, you’re on siblings. When they get on to siblings, you’re on organised abuse. When they’re on that, you’re on dogs and animals and, then, ritual abuse.’
‘So you’ve always been one step ahead of the curve?’ I say.
She nods. ‘And that’s horrible. Because you know you’re going to get bashed up.’
Dr Sinason’s father was Stanley S. Segal, a campaigner on behalf of children with learning difficulties. His influential book No Child is Ineducable is, she proudly tells me, ‘the reason why disabled children go to school today, instead of hospital. His motto, which I put to treating survivors of satanist abuse, was “I shall not pass them by, nor throw them crumbs.” If you know something’s true, you can’t turn your back. You’re a witness.’
‘So the great lesson of your family is: listen to people,’ I say.
‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘Absolutely. Everybody can say something of their history. We must bear witness.’
Carole’s medical records contain a letter, written by Sinason, that says she was ‘the first patient Rob Hale and I worked with who had experienced chronic sadistic abuse’. Without mentioning Carole’s name, I ask her about her ‘first patient’. She describes a visit by two medical professionals – one a nurse with a limp, the other a psychologist.
‘I just had that nasty feeling,’ she recalls. ‘It’s her. It’s her, and she’s been hurt by them.’
‘You could tell that from the limp?’ I ask.
‘Yep.’
Dr Sinason insists that she does not practise recovered-memory techniques. ‘I don’t use direct questions,’ she says. ‘I’m an analytic therapist. The idea of that is someone showing, through their words or behaviour, that all sorts of things might have happened to them – things that there might not initially be logical words for.’
For Dr Sinason, signifiers that a patient has suffered at the hands of a satanist might include flinching at green or purple, because those are the colours of the robes of the high priest and priestess. Another is when patients say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What they really mean is, “I can’t bear to say.”’ Dr Sinason also goes on high alert when she judges that a patient is praising their family with too much enthusiasm. ‘The more insecure you are, the more you praise. “Oh, my family were wonderful! I can’t remember any of it!”’
‘And that’s a sign?’ I say.
‘Absolutely.’
I tell her that campaigning organisations, such as the British False Memory Society, deny that satanist abuse even exists.
‘You’ve got to remember that it’s allegedly “innocent” parents that join false memory societies,’ she says. ‘Among the groups that very loudly say “this isn’t true” there are, of course, a certain percentage of abusers. They’re in all the professions as well.’
‘Which professions?’
‘Every profession.’
As well as ritual abuse, Dr Sinason is an expert in people who claim to possess multiple independent personalities which they apparently switch between helplessly, with each personality often being unaware of the others. Known as ‘dissociative identity disorder’, it is a condition which many mainstream psychologists, such as Professors Chris French and Elizabeth Loftus, insist doesn’t actually exist, but from which Carole supposedly suffered. At first, I am unsure if multiple personalities are even relevant to the allegations of satanism. I begin to detect a link, though, when I ask Dr Sinason what happens when she reports her clients’ claims to the police.
‘The problem with going to the police is that if somebody has a dissociative disorder, it’s no good if one person comes to you and says, “I want to go the police because this has happened,” because you don’t know if there are other personalities that will then contradict the evidence.’
‘So when the police arrive to take evidence, another personality emerges?’ I clarify.
‘And says, “It’s all lies,” and the police give up,’ she nods.
Dr Sinason admits that some of her patients initially have no memory of satanist abuse. This, she says, is because ‘Someone’s main personality can be functioning perfectly. They can go to therapy for years and all the trauma is buried in other states of mind.’
‘So you might have one personality with no memory of ritual abuse and another with all the memories?’
‘Exactly. Exactly.’
I ask Dr Sinason about patients who make impossible claims, such as being raped by world-famous individuals. ‘It could be misinformation,’ she says, and offers an example of a patient of hers who insisted that she had been raped by Margaret Thatcher. ‘From the way she described it, I could see this had been deliberately done,’ she says. ‘She’d been drugged and people used Spitting Image masks. Just like some of the children I saw who had been abused by people wearing Mickey Mouse masks.’
Suddenly recalling ‘lost’ memories of satanic abuse, claiming to have been raped by Margaret Thatcher, confessions to the police that ‘it’s all lies’ – it all might lead the dispassionate observer to conclude that the patient is unreliable: lying or delusional or developing false memories. Not for Dr Sinason. For her, with DID fully inveigled into the story’s plotline, it comes to represent powerful evidence that they have multiple personalities and that satanists are canny.
I have no doubt that Dr Sinason believes what she is telling me. But everything I have learned so far about the brain’s capacity to embrace evidence that reinforces its precious models, and dismiss everything that doesn’t, makes me suspicious of all this. I am fascinated, too, by what I can sense of her personal mission. Her father, a hero – responsible for saving a generation of children with learning difficulties from hellish hospital lives. And so, the family quest: to serve those who have historically been dismissed by the mental-health establishment. To ‘bear witness’. To defend the dispossessed. To believe them.
But perhaps sceptical voices are too quick to dismiss the reality of ritual abuse. It is known, after all, that paedophiles occasionally meddle with pagan rites and symbolism. Satanic threats could feasibly be used to scare victims into silence. Perhaps Dr Sinason’s description of what exactly goes on at these events will actually turn out to be sober, realistic and credible.
When I ask her to describe some, she tells me that children are stitched inside the bellies of dying animals and are then ‘reborn to Satan.’ ‘Another one is being passed around the room and anally raped by everybody,’ she says. On other occasions, they are ‘made to eat faeces, menstrual blood, semen, urine, babies being cannibalised.’
‘So the cannibalism – that’s foetuses?’ I ask.
‘Foetuses and bits of bodies.’
‘Raw or cooked?’
‘The foetuses are raw.’
‘Not even salt and pepper?’ I ask.
‘Raw. And handed round.’
‘For everyone to have a nibble on? Like a cob of corn?’
‘Like communion,’ she says. ‘On one major festival, the babies are barbecued. I can still remember one survivor saying how easy it is to pull apart the ribs on a baby. But adults were tougher to eat.’
She goes on to describe large gatherings in woodlands and castles, which involve huge cloths being laid out. ‘That’s normally when there’s a sacrifice,’ she notes, ‘and because the rapes are happening all over the place. There’s a small amount of cannon fodder in terms of runaways that are drug addicts, prostitutes, tramps that are used.’
‘Tell me about the sex,’ I say. ‘What happens?’
‘Everything happens. Sex with animals. Horses, dogs, goats. Being hanged upside down. In the woods, on a tree.’
‘How do they get an animal to have sex with a human?’
David thinks for a moment and says, ‘Well, plenty of dogs have a go at people’s legs.’
‘True,’ says Dr Sinason, adding poignantly. ‘However horrible it sounds, the dog, at least, is friendly afterwards.’
‘Because at least the dog has a good time,’ I say.
‘And the child loves the pet,’ Dr Sinason nods. ‘The pet is made to have sex with that child – but the pet, at least, is still their friend.’
*
Having sat in the centre of the Sinasons’ wild kaleidoscope of beliefs, it seems obvious to me that the Felsteads are right in suspecting that Carole’s therapists had some unlikely views. But Sinason doesn’t enter Carole’s story until the early 1990s. Her abuse ‘memories’ – at least the initial ones – cannot be blamed on her. There is only one person that I know of who knew Carole during that period. I am convinced that Dr Fleur Fisher would know if Carole had received recovered-memory therapy. But I have tried and I have tried. She has vanished.
Then David Felstead gives me another lead. In among Carole’s phone records, he finds a possible home number for Dr Fisher. When I try, it goes to the answer-phone of another family. A few days later, in an act of utterly irrational desperation, I dial it again. This time someone picks up. To my astonishment, she says: ‘Oh yes, people call for Fleur Fisher sometimes. I’ll give you her number.’
Dr Fleur Fisher answers the phone with the all the headmistress-like authority you might expect of a former head of ethics at the British Medical Association. Sometimes confident, sometimes wary, sometimes maudlin and resigned, she actually has good reason to fear the Felsteads. After discovering she had taken Carole’s possessions, they reported her to the GMC and the police. Neither found sufficient evidence to act against her.
She admits that she had no legal claim to be Carole’s ‘next of kin’, but denies the Felsteads’ accusations that she stole her belongings. She emptied the flat, she says, because the property managers were demanding it. As she cleared up, she found the letter from Richard. ‘Honourably, I gave it to the police,’ she says. ‘Otherwise the family would never have known. Never, never, never!’ The clear-out happened on 7 July 2005, a date, of course, that became known as 7/7. The terrorist explosions crippled the public-transport network, which is why she needed to take Carole’s car to get home. It was soon returned to London.
I ask why she phoned Richard on the day that the Felsteads were informed of the death. She did so, she says, because the coroner mentioned how crushed he had sounded. It is an act that she now regrets. ‘Concern for somebody else’s distress sometimes overcomes you,’ she says. ‘I was foolish. Unwise.’
Ironically, it was Dr Fisher’s discovery of Richard’s letter that led to the cancellation of the funeral. Was she upset when she heard it had been halted? ‘You can’t even imagine,’ she says. ‘I was giving a talk with the Bishop of Oxford. I just screamed and screamed.’
Finally, we get to the question of whether Carole’s memories of satanic abuse were recovered. Initially Fisher refuses to speak about Carole. ‘I have a duty of confidentiality, even after a patient has died. I was never her psychiatrist or psychotherapist or anything like that.’ She raises her voice. ‘I’m not a psychotherapist, for God’s sake!’
‘According to her medical notes, she saw you for counselling,’ I say.
‘No.’
‘I have the letter here. It’s dated 27 November 1986 and it says: “She required to see Dr Fisher for psychosexual counselling.”’
There is a silence.
‘Psychosexual is the wrong term,’ she says.
‘What’s the correct term?’
‘Uh, I really don’t know. People come and tell you things that have happened to them.’
‘Things like abuse?’
‘Things that have happened to them,’ she repeats, crossly. ‘I’m not saying anything else. It’s not right that this woman’s privacy should be breached in this way.’ She is shouting now. ‘She’s dead! She’s goddamned dead!’
‘Were you ever worried that Carole had lapsed into fantasy?’
‘Never,’ she says.
By 1997, I tell her, Carole was claiming that a former conservative cabinet minister had anally raped her with a claw hammer in the Conservative Central Office.
For a moment, she doesn’t speak.
‘That’s not something I knew about. It may have been fantasy,’ she says, adding darkly, ‘but I couldn’t say.’
‘Are you aware of any evidence that any of Carole’s claims actually happened?’
‘I never looked for any evidence.’
‘Then what made you believe her?’
‘She’s not the only patient I’ve had who told the same kinds of stories.’
‘About ritual abuse?’
‘It turned out to be that, yes. The people didn’t remember at first. They weren’t aware. They were memories they’d had a long time and they just came out.’
And that, I decide, is all that I need to know. Before I ring off, I ask Fisher what Carole was like. ‘She was a feisty, brave, intelligent woman. She was funny. A good laugh.’ And then, softly at first, she starts crying.
*
As delusions and paranoias such as the ones Carole suffered are a common facet of schizophrenia, I seek the counsel of Dr Trevor Turner, the psychiatrist who mentioned false memories to me previously. ‘One of the classic symptoms of schizophrenia is the idea that your body has been interfered with,’ he tells me. ‘And it’s very common for people to develop extraordinary delusional beliefs. If you talk to families of people who have got schizophrenia, the number of them who have been accused of things is huge.’
If Turner’s observations are correct and Carole was schizophrenic, I wonder what effect it might have had on her, having therapists validate her darkest delusions. What would it be like for someone with paranoid fantasies to have it confirmed that, yes, there really are satanists out there, trying to get you? ‘Absolutely terrifying,’ he says. ‘It’s highly likely it would make it worse.’
I want to put this directly to Dr Valerie Sinason. So a week later, I return to her Golders Green sofa. I tell her, for the first time, that I am investigating Carole Myers.
‘Ha ha,’ she says. ‘Ha ha.’ There is a silence. ‘This is very helpful because you’re now truthfully admitting where your position is.’
I ask if Carole was the ‘first patient’ she had described, with the limp. She denies it. Despite what it says in the medical records, she insists that she never treated Carole, admitting only to having seen her as part of a study into ritual abuse for the Department of Health. ‘There is so much I could say about Carole,’ she tells me. ‘But it’s totally against any ethical code to speak about patients.’
‘Talking generally, then – why do you believe your patients are telling the truth, and are not delusional?’
‘I’ve now seen over four hundred survivors that have all given ludicrously similar testimony,’ she says. ‘You know when someone is speaking, and it sends a chill down you – there’s a very big difference between someone who’s got a fantasy and utter terror.’
‘But Carole was delusional,’ I say. ‘She said a cabinet minister anally raped her with a claw hammer.’
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised by misinformation, someone being drugged up and shown newsreels to make them—’
‘But isn’t this the problem?’ I interrupt. ‘All the stories that are obviously nonsensical, you dismiss as planted misinformation. If you can accept that some of it’s not true, how do you know all of it’s not true?’
‘The job of a therapist is not to be judge or jury or police force.’
‘Do you not accept that if a patient is delusional, a therapist who colluded in that delusion – who said, “Yes, there are satanists who are out to get you” – could be causing huge damage?’
‘That would cause real damage,’ she says. ‘But the purpose of therapy is hearing where a patient is.’
By now, I am getting cross.
‘When someone is saying they’ve been anally raped with a claw hammer by a conservative cabinet minister, that, indisputably, is someone suffering from a paranoid delusion.’
David pipes up: ‘Well, have you asked him whether it happened or not? We’ve been shocked by some of the stuff that’s proved to be true.’
I turn to Dr Sinason. ‘So you’re saying, maybe I’m wrong about the minister?’
She looks blankly at me.
‘Maybe.’
I leave the conversation feeling angry yet satisfied. For me, the case is closed. But then I have a conversation that rattles me. I am speaking with Professor Richard Bentall, the madness expert who believes that sexual abuse is a major cause of people hearing voices. When I mention the case in passing, he says, ‘Not Valerie Sinason?’
‘Yes!’
‘I read one of her case accounts and it just seemed amazingly familiar. Obviously, I’ve not met the patient, so couldn’t say for sure. But, to me it sounded like somebody with psychosis.’
I tell him about Carole Myers.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he says. ‘She’s had a paranoid psychosis, that’s what’s happened! I don’t know this person, but I always say, with paranoid patients – you have to bear in mind there’s usually a nugget of truth in their paranoia. I think it’s certainly the case that some therapists with their own agendas are capable of encouraging a distorted memory of events, if you follow what I’m saying.’
I spend a moment struggling to absorb what he has just told me.
‘You’re saying, Carole might have been abused?’
‘You’ve been asking, is this satanic abuse, or is she imagining it? But there is a third option. She got abused – although not satanically – and then had a psychotic interpretation of it.’
‘I’m sure the family are innocent,’ I say.
‘A hell of a lot of abuse is not by family members,’ he says. ‘Maybe she had been abused by somebody outside the family and developed a distorted memory of it. This is one of the horrible cases where we just don’t know what really happened.’
*
On 21 June 2005, after years of silence, Carole unexpectedly phoned her brother Richard. She told him that she was lonely in London and that she had no friends. She had decided, after all this time, that she wanted to move back to Stockport to be with the family. On Wednesday the 29th, the day that Carole mysteriously died, Richard wrote the letter that would be discovered by Dr Fisher and would eventually trigger the family’s search for truth. He recounted the latest news – about his business, his brothers, his dad’s heart attack – and finished with a flourish that, in retrospect, seems haunting and prescient. ‘One shouldn’t maintain too great a distance,’ he wrote, ‘as once the moment is gone, it is gone.’