Remembering Satan (13 page)

Sandy was knitting at the dining room table, trying to stay calm as the detectives turned her house upside down. Accusation hung in the air. One of the men remarked that either Sandy knew what was going on and ignored it, or else she must have participated.

“I haven’t done either,” Sandy said. “I didn’t know anything.”

The detective responded by saying that Sandy should have known through her sex life with Paul that he had been fooling around with the kids and other people. But in Sandy’s opinion, there had never been anything forced or weird in her sex life. It was “very normal, very fun, very dear, and very satisfying.” She was completely stunned when one of the detectives told her that Paul had been a homosexual for most of his life.

The search uncovered nothing incriminating, although several items were collected for evidence. There were four plastic boxes containing old datebooks; the letter Paul Ross had written to Sandy when he left home; and two books,
The Pleasure Bond
and
Devil’s Gamble.
The detectives also took a broken lock from Julie’s door. Julie had stated that she had installed the lock to keep her father from coming into her room and raping her. She said he had broken in anyway. At the time, however, Julie had told her mother that she had put a new doorknob on her door while she was baby-sitting, but she had installed it incorrectly and managed to get locked into her own room with the little children. Finally Chad had kicked the door open to rescue them. Sandy had been sympathetic. She remembered telling Julie, “It’s all right, we’ll fix it. If you need a new doorknob, Dad’ll be happy to put it on.” Now Paul was remembering that, indeed, he had been the one to break the lock in order to get to Julie. Sandy didn’t know what to believe anymore.

“Who are you most afraid of, Rabie or Risch?” one of the detectives demanded.

“I’m not afraid of anybody,” Sandy said boldly, although at that moment she was close to panic. The detectives finally left when Sandy decided to call a lawyer.

Everything in Sandy’s life was flying to pieces. The marriage that she had once considered secure and happy had been publicly exposed as a sham. Now her own daughters were accusing her of sexual abuse. Could such things really have happened without her remembering them? Was there a “dark side” to Sandy, as there must have been to Paul?

What terrified Sandy most was the likelihood that she would lose Mark. Someone had called the state’s Child Protective Services and said that Mark had to be taken away from Sandy before the same things happened to him. The police knew that the anonymous caller was Ericka; she had been demanding custody of Mark. Sandy was afraid that unless she
admitted that abuse had taken place in her home, she would be declared to be “in denial” and therefore an unfit parent. When Sandy spoke to Paul about her dilemma, in early December, he said that maybe it was a good idea to surrender Mark. At that moment, Sandy stopped defending her husband. “The house is very cold—and my heart is broken over & over,” she wrote on a scrap of paper. “Things will not ever be the same.”

On December 16, Sandy went to see Pastor John Bratun in his office at the Church of Living Water. Bratun was a kind-looking man, forty-three years old, with a long face and a mustache; he reminded Sandy of Tennessee Ernie Ford. He had been in Olympia for a little over three years; before that, he had served as assistant pastor for several Foursquare churches in Southern California. From the night of Paul’s arrest, when Bratun went with Pastor Ron Long to comfort Sandy at the house, and then visited Paul in his cell, Bratun had been intensely involved in the Ingram case. Another church member, Paula Davis, who was Ericka’s advocate, was present at most of her interviews. Information passed freely among the police, the church, and the victims.

Sandy would later say that she had always felt she could trust Pastor John, as she called him; and so she felt stung when he told her now that she was “eighty percent evil.” He reiterated the speech that she had heard from the detectives: either she had known what was going on in her house and ignored it, or she had participated in it. She was probably going to go to jail unless she made a confession. Sandy bridled at the threat. “That may work with some people, but it won’t work with me,” she said defiantly. Still, she left Bratun’s office feeling hurt and confused and even more afraid.

She was now almost completely alone; even her church had turned against her, and she could sense the relentless mechanism of the investigation bearing down upon her, ready to
snatch her youngest child out of her hands and to grind away the small core of dignity that was left her in this sensational scandal. When she got home, she bundled Mark into the car and fled, forgetting to turn off the television in her haste. In a way, she felt, the escape was exhilarating. She had never driven even the short distance to Tacoma on her own, and now she was driving all the way across the state, through a snowstorm, to take refuge with relatives. She had never driven in snow before.

Paul, meanwhile, had produced another memory, this one involving Sandy. “It was late 1975 or early 1976,” he told Schoening and Vukich. “I was at home with Paul Jr. and Chad while Sandy had gone shopping with the girls. It was about seven or eight at night. It was dark out and Jim Rabie, Ray Risch, and [another man] came over to the house.… Knowing that Sandy was gone, they wanted to have sex with the boys. We all went up to the main floor of the house to the first bedroom on the right and the boys undressed. I don’t remember if they undressed themselves or we undressed them, but they did get undressed. Ray had on work clothes—clean coveralls and work boots. He and Jim undressed. I don’t remember what Jim had on. Ray knelt on the floor and Paul Jr. sat on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed and leaned over and orally stimulated Ray’s penis. At the same time, Ray was fondling Paul Jr. Jim Rabie also undressed and had laid Chad on the floor on his stomach, so that he could have anal intercourse with him.… Chad would have been seven to eight and Paul would have been eleven to twelve.…

“At this time, Sandy came home. All of a sudden. I don’t know if the dog barked or whatever, but she came home.… I think she was early.… She had on a coat and she was carrying a package or a sack and the girls were behind her and our little dachshund came in with them. She kinda said hi as she came up and then when she saw what was happening, uh,
I suppose she dropped the sack and, you know, got very angry. I don’t recall the words that were said. I do recall that she was very upset and very angry. Jim Rabie grabbed her by the hair and very forceful, very angrily, almost vicious, said, ‘You can’t do anything to us. If you say anything, Paul will go to prison and your family will be embarrassed.’ And then he told her, he said: ‘I’ll kill the kids.’ ” This was a side of Rabie that Ingram had never seen before. Until now Rabie had always seemed a very gentle person.

“How were the boys reacting while all this was going on?” asked Schoening.

“I don’t recall,” said Ingram. “I can kinda see the girls running when they saw what was happening, when they saw the viciousness with which Jim grabbed Sandy by the hair and started screaming at her. They ran into the living room and hid. I believe I was kind of outside the room when all this was going on, and I don’t know what the boys did.”

Rabie and Risch and the other man took Sandy downstairs, Ingram said. They stripped her and ripped up a sheet and tied her to the bed frame. “She was spread-eagle on the bed,” said Ingram. “Jim Rabie raped her first, and I recall it was vicious—you know, he wasn’t nice at all about it. And then Ray Risch raped her.” Rabie again threatened to kill the children if Sandy told.

“After they left, I untied her and she put something over her and sat on the end of the bed,” said Ingram. “She said, ‘Why?’ ” Ingram had told her that he had gotten involved in a witchcraft ritual. “I signed a contract with them where I promised secrecy and said I wouldn’t reveal anything about the group or what they did.” It was hopeless to resist, he believed. The only way out of the cult was by death.

“My memory is becoming clearer as I go through all this,” Ingram said at the end of the session. “It’s getting clearer as more things come out.”

As Paul was giving his statement to detectives, Sandy was writing in her diary. “It is now Dec. 17th—I am in Spokane. Brought Mark here in case I get arrested,” she wrote. “So much has happened I don’t know if I can say it all—Jesus you know me better than I know myself—You know if all this is true. You know the truth—Please Jesus answer my hearts cry. Help me to get in touch with the truth with reality. I am afraid Jesus. I am afraid. Sometimes I am numb—sometimes I am excited about a new future.… Where have my children gone, my precious babies that I love—Forgive me Forgive me for not seeing—Oh Lord I do not understand. Help me to understand. Help! I took off my wedding ring Dec. 16th in Ellenburg.”

8
 

            
O
n December 18, Detectives Brian Schoening and Joe Vukich finally located Paul Ross, the eldest of the Ingram children. His flight from home had led him to Reno, Nevada, where he was working in a warehouse. They went by his apartment; he wasn’t home. Schoening left a note on the door asking him to call them at the motel where they were staying. He called at eight-fifteen the next morning. There was a warrant outstanding for him in Thurston County for malicious mischief—he was accused of having battered someone’s car with a baseball bat—and he wanted to know if that was why the officers had come. No, Schoening told him, there was a problem in his family. His father and two other men, whom Schoening didn’t name, were in jail, and his sisters were in protective custody. The rest of his family was safe. Schoening didn’t reveal what the charges were, but when Paul Ross met with the detectives several hours later he guessed that his father had been charged with a sexual offense.

There are no recordings of Schoening and Vukich’s interview with Paul Ross, only notes made by Schoening and the boy’s own statements later. The detectives found Paul Ross to be hostile, bitter, and evasive. “I’d like to shoot my dad,” he admitted. “I’ve always hated him.” He said he wasn’t surprised that his father was in jail, because his father had physically
abused him. Specifically, the young man recalled an incident several years before in which his father had thrown an axe at him. Ingram had been standing on a deck behind the house, and Paul Ross and Chad had been in the backyard, below him. Angry because the blade was dulled, their father had thrown the axe from the deck, and if Paul Ross hadn’t moved it would have struck him. What was significant about this memory was that, unlike so many others the detectives had heard, two other people had remembered it, and remembered it more or less the same way. Chad had said that it was a roofing axe that the boys had lent to a neighbor. It had gotten dull, which upset their father. He wanted the boys to sharpen it. Paul’s account was that he had only meant to toss the axe down to his sons and had been surprised when it landed right at the boys’ feet. He had always felt bad about the incident, he said, and supposed that this was the reason his eldest child had left home. The axe story had the feel of a normal memory; it was practically the only one in the case.

As the one person in the family who had not been exposed to the church grapevine and who claimed not to have heard about his father’s arrest until that morning, Paul Ross was the least contaminated source the detectives had encountered. As they spoke to him, however, a now familiar fixated expression came over his face. He sat in the detectives’ motel room, staring out at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and his voice took on the monotonous quality of a trancelike state. Schoening was incredulous. It seemed as if everyone he talked to on this case fell into a trance. For him, these interviews were an emotional seesaw; whenever one of the Ingrams went robotic, Schoening would start chewing the furniture. What was driving him crazy was the absence of feeling. He was filling in the pain, the outrage, the humiliation, the horror, from his own emotional palette.

Because the interview with Paul Ross was not recorded,
one cannot know how much information the detectives fed to him, or what might have been suggested while the young man was entranced. Vukich asked what he remembered about sexual abuse from his childhood. Nothing came to mind at first. He did recall the poker parties, and he mentioned the names of several of the players, including Rabie and Risch; then he picked out their photographs and those of several others. He said that he hated Rabie. He called Risch “a gay guy.” When the detectives asked him to explain, Paul Ross recalled an evening when he was ten or eleven years old. He heard “a muffled cry, a yelp, almost like somebody stepping on a dog’s tail.” He crept downstairs to investigate. The door to his parents’ bedroom was open just a crack. Peeking in, he saw his mother tied to the bed, “spread eagle,” with belts around her feet and what appeared to be stockings lashing her arms to the posts. “Jim Rabie was ‘screwing’ her,” Schoening’s report related, “and his dad had his ‘dick’ in her mouth.” Ray Risch and another man were “to the left, ‘jacking each other off.’ His dad came over and hit him so hard it almost knocked him out, yelled at him to leave them alone, and closed the door.” Paul Ross then got a fifth of whiskey and retreated to his room. He became an alcoholic that very night, he said.