Looking for Satan in All the Wrong Places

The memories of sexual depravity were “recovered” with the help of a stand-up comic/sitcom actress-turned-charismatic Christian healer, and those memories made it all the way to the Sally Jessy Raphael show.

The accusations sent one man to prison and triggered the disintegration of at least two families.

Those who believe the charges that surfaced in Olympia, Wash.--that sheriff’s deputy Paul Ingram subjected his daughters to satanic-ritual abuse (SRA)--see the case as yet another thread in an international web of devil worship crimes.

Skeptics see it as a modern witch hunt and a fabulous window into the fragile and malleable human psyche.

Author Lawrence Wright leaves little doubt which side he comes down on in his brilliant two-part article that wraps up in the May 24 New Yorker.

As Wright tells the story, Paul and Sandy Ingram and their five children were a hard-working Christian family that others in Olympia used as a model.

Then in 1988, while two Ingram daughters attended a retreat sponsored by the evangelical Church of the Living Waters, supposedly repressed memories of molestation by their father and others began surfacing.

When his law enforcement peers confronted him with his daughters’ allegations, Paul Ingram began tentative confessions based on nebulous “recovered memories.”

”. . . No one realized then,” Wright says, “where the hole in Ingram’s memory would lead.”

With prompting by detectives and therapists, the man’s void filled with a plot and characters that Lewis Carroll might find curious.

Other officers, family members and citizens were caught up in the Ingram family’s charges of satanic sexual abuse--charges echoed in a national explosion of such reports that in part stemmed from Los Angeles’ own McMartin case.

Even before the Ingram case, the word at police workshops was that cults were sacrificing 50,000 to 60,000 people a year in the United States.

The Olympia detectives’ devotion to the Ingram case was almost certainly magnified when they realized its importance. For as the FBI’s national expert on child sexual abuse explained, despite all the hysteria, the bureau had been unable to find a single documented example of the alleged satanic abuse phenomenon. Not one.

Wright’s story weaves theoretical analysis into the fascinating fabric of the investigation.

Could it be, some psychologists wonder, that SRA “survivors” suffer from a dissociative disorder characterized by suggestibility and great vulnerability to autohypnotic trances?

Are their memories similar to those of folks who seem to believe they’ve been abducted by UFOs or experienced past lives?

Is it possible that the wild satanic stories merely screen less dramatic but tragic cases of actual abuse? Are even mundane “recovered memories” also suspect? Did Ingram confess to satanic abuse when common guilt about his attentiveness as a father festered?

Wright’s story also suggests the possibility that detectives and therapists who interviewed the Ingram family unwittingly subjected them to the same sort of “mind control” that destructive cults often use to keep members in line.

Some observers speculate that the SRA phenomenon has rushed in to supplant the threat of communism in America’s collective unconscious.

Richard Ofshe, a sociologist specializing in cults, says, “It’s a way of reasserting coherence and authority of fundamentalist perspectives in society.”

Wright shows how media fixation on such accusations feeds the frenzy, possibly planting scenarios deep in minds that are unable to differentiate fantasy from memory.

Gripping though it is, Wright’s story is not as accessible as “Geraldo,” which has featured a number of shows on the subject. It is also probably not as accessible as such popular “true story” accounts as “Satan’s Underground,” which one of Ingram’s daughters read just before making her first accusations.

Still, therapists of every stripe, police detectives, judges and journalists would be well-advised to read Wright’s stories.

After all, if his reportage is accurate, some of the most suggestible folks around are within those ranks.

Required Reading

In 1990, several civil rights-oriented groups accused environmental groups of racism. It was only a matter of time before the latter latched onto new buzzwords coined by the former.

The words are environmental justice, and the May/June Sierra magazine explores their meaning.

Sierra’s round table includes representatives of each group. Despite excessive use of the term communities, this is a ground-breaking discussion that makes clear that all people are connected in their dependence on the planet and that the environment is Watts as well as Aspen.

Newsstand News

* Time is at it again, fidgeting in its ostensible timelessness.

With this week’s issue, the so-called “front of the book” has been revamped. The five pages of factoids, graphs, news bites and graphics offer fun aplenty.

“The Morning Line” offers a quirky take on a news item. “Winners and Losers” measures the fickle winds of status, and “Milestones” charts the tides of fate with obituaries, weddings and the like.

A chart showing the sales growth of the top 100 black-owned businesses from 1972 to 1992 is telling, and many of the quotes blown up and slapped into boxes are also interesting.

Still, Time has some final polishing to do before it matches that which it has apparently imitated: Newsweek’s edgier Perspectives and Periscope departments.

For example. Time charts the 10 most heavily fined NBA players. Newsweek shows why American government is dysfunctional, listing the 10 top-spending Political Action Committees.

* Folio: First Day (The Electronic News Service for the Magazine Industry) reports that David Letterman’s mug has been appearing on lots of magazines lately.

Not People or TV Guide or Time.

Rather, he has appeared or will on Heavy Duty Trucking, Dog World, Cats, Beverage World and Convenience Store News. The Letterman show videotaped the shoots.