Remembering Satan (16 page)

            
T
he trial date for Jim Rabie and Ray Risch had been set for February 1989, just a couple of weeks away. Although they had made statements that the investigators found equivocal, both men maintained their innocence. As the prosecution prepared its case, Gary Tabor continued to have doubts about whether Ericka and Julie could testify. Only recently had Sandy come forward to make statements implicating the defendants, but these had concerned her, not her daughters. The statement of Paul Ross might do more harm than good to the prosecution’s case, since he was unable to verify the abuse to his sisters. Schoening and Vukich went back to Reno to try to talk to the eldest Ingram child again. After nearly two hours of pleading, the detectives thought they had persuaded him to give them another statement, but the young man didn’t show up the next morning as promised. The detectives went to his apartment several times and left notes on his door. No one appeared to be home. The next day they went again. This time they heard the stereo playing inside the apartment and the sound of laughing. They knocked and called through the door, but no one would answer. Finally, they flew back to Washington State—only to find that Chad had begun to recant. He was now declaring that the entire scenario he had given to investigators was only a bad dream.

That left Paul Ingram as the sole reliable witness in the case. He had pleaded not guilty in his first court hearing, in December, but Tabor saw that as a routine plea. Ingram had always indicated his willingness to testify, although such testimony almost invariably comes about in exchange for a plea bargain; in fact, the prosecution had put together a deal in which Ingram would plead guilty to nine counts of third-degree rape, with the sentences to run concurrently. In return, the prison time would be minimal. There was even a chance that Ingram could walk out of the courtroom a free man once he had testified against his friends.

Ingram confounded everyone by agreeing to testify without making any deals. G. Saxon Rodgers, who was Jim Rabie’s attorney, was incredulous—and dismayed. The situation had been a prosecutor’s dream, since a jury will usually discount testimony that has been purchased with a plea bargain. Until then Rodgers’s theory about the case was that Ingram really had abused his daughters, but in order to mitigate his sentence he had implicated Rabie and Risch, two innocent men. Again and again Ingram had described himself as being a helpless onlooker to the crimes of his friends. He thereby created a conspiracy case in which he would play the role of the key state witness. All this would fit in with the portrait of the cunning, politically sophisticated former deputy sheriff which Rodgers had intended to paint in court. In this rendering, Ingram had controlled the case from the beginning. But when Ingram agreed to testify for nothing, he took the brush out of Rodgers’s hand.

On January 30, Sax Rodgers and Richard Cordes, who represented Ray Risch, were permitted to meet with one of the prosecution witnesses. It was Julie. The meeting took place at the Lacey Police Department. Once again, Julie said she hadn’t slept in days, and she looked it. She cuddled a stuffed bear that Loreli Thompson had given her, and often didn’t
respond to questions from the attorneys about the abuse. She seemed to be in a fog. At one point, she crawled under the desk and hid there for ten minutes. When the questioning resumed, Rodgers took a more indirect tack. He asked Julie about Ericka’s deceased twin, Andrea. Although they were not identical, they had looked very much alike, except for Andrea’s swollen head and the cramped limbs that had confined her to a wheelchair. Julie remembered visiting her at the state institution in Spokane. Sometimes the family would pick up Andrea and take her on vacation to Deer Lake; she wasn’t so retarded that she didn’t know who they were. Julie remembered her singing the alphabet song and “Jesus Loves Me.” Sometimes she had a pointer strapped to her forehead and would pick out tunes on the keyboard. Andrea had died in 1984, just before the twins’ eighteenth birthday. Ericka had taken the news very hard; she shut herself up in her room for a month. “A part of me has died,” Julie said Ericka had told her.

When the attorneys tried to resume talking about the case, Julie retreated to one-word replies. She spun the stuffed bear in the air. She described Jim Rabie as “Fat. Short. Dark hair. Ugly.” She did not know if he had any marks or tattoos. (As it happens, Rabie’s chest bears a ropelike, three-inch keloidal scar which was the result of a near-fatal electrocution two decades before. Neither Ingram nor any of the alleged victims had noticed it.) Finally, Cordes asked if Julie would just tell him what his client had done to her. She shrugged.

“Will you ever?” he asked.

“Maybe I will,” she responded.

That was the end of the interview. It had taken three and a half hours, and she had said virtually nothing.

A week later, Rodgers and Cordes met with Ericka and the investigators at the sheriff’s office. Ericka was far more talkative. She didn’t know exactly what happened to Julie or her brothers; in fact, she said that she hadn’t known about Julie’s
abuse or her pregnancy until learning of it from the detectives. She described severe sexual and physical abuse that she herself had suffered, but admitted that she had no permanent scars or marks. She said her mother had been sexually abusing her since she was ten years old; sometimes her father watched, and he would also do things to her when her mother was finished. The last time her mother abused her was in September 1988, when Sandy stuck a closet pole in her vagina. In response to the obvious question of why Ericka would need to reveal the abuse to her mother two months later, if Sandy had been a regular participant in the abuse for more than a decade, Ericka said that everyone had told her this was something she needed to do.

Rodgers finally asked about his client’s involvement in these acts, and Ericka told him that Jim Rabie had assaulted her eight times in September alone, and many more times before that—perhaps fifty or a hundred, going back to when she was thirteen. The last time she was assaulted, her father began it, then it was Rabie, then her mother; afterward, each of them defecated on her. As for Risch, she couldn’t remember him doing anything sexual to her, except for taking photographs. Usually he just came along to watch.

The prosecutor’s attempts to keep the case simple vanished as Ericka elaborated on the satanic rituals before the amazed defense attorneys. She described orgies in the woods, in which babies were sacrificed and buried behind the Ingram house. Rabie and Risch were there, she said. Once, when she was a sophomore in high school, they held her down and tied her to a table. She was pregnant, she said, and someone aborted her baby with a coat hanger. That was very painful. Then the baby was cut up and rubbed all over her body. She had seen approximately twenty-five babies sacrificed over the years.

The defense attorneys could sense panic on the opposing side. The satanic-abuse accusations hadn’t hit the press yet,
but it was easy to imagine the public outcry when they did, and the pressure that the prosecution would be under to produce convictions. Perhaps all this could be avoided or, at least, contained. The prosecutor, Tabor, might be persuaded to drop the charges against Rabie and Risch if Ingram would quietly plead guilty and get treatment.

Before Tabor would agree to a deal, however, he would have to be persuaded that Rabie and Risch were really innocent men caught up in some kind of familial hysteria. Rabie was still asking for a polygraph test. He knew that polygraphs were not infallible and could not be admitted as evidence, but he had used them repeatedly in his own investigations. He also knew Tabor and the detectives: if Rabie had been in their place, he would have had to think very hard about continuing a prosecution against a man who had willingly taken a lie detector test and passed it.

Early on the morning of February 3, Rabie was taken from his cell in Mason County in chains. He was loaded into a police car and driven to the Olympia Police Department, where Maynard Midthun, an officer Rabie knew, administered the test. It lasted into the afternoon. Several of the investigators watched the procedure on a monitor in another room. They could not forget that Rabie was a former colleague, and that he had been in their place many times. Once again there was that sense of the universe being inverted, as if the entire situation would be revealed as a case of mistaken identity, or a folly of absurdly massive dimensions. It was exactly that rotten odor of comedy that made the Ingram investigation so gruesome, that drew everyone—the detectives, the suspects, the victims—deeper into the macabre.

“Here are the things that will happen here today,” Midthun told Rabie. “Initially we’re gonna talk about you.… Then we’ll get into a discussion of the case. Following that, we’ll work up some questions that you and I agree are valid
questions that will resolve the issue.” After that, Rabie would be hooked up to the polygraph and take the test. “This is just another workday for me,” Midthun said. “It’s your test. Perhaps one of the biggest days in your life.”

“Could be,” Rabie agreed. He was feeling anxious but confident.

Midthun asked whether Rabie was experiencing any discomfort, and Rabie said he had a toothache and had been suffering constant back pain since he was put in jail. He had taken a sinus pill and something for his digestion the night before, but nothing that should affect the test. The object of this portion of the examination was to put the subject at ease, so Midthun asked Rabie to tell him about his life, particularly his formative years.

“I was raised on a farm,” Rabie said. It was a fifty-acre farm in the Yakima Valley, on which Rabie’s father raised sugar beets, corn, and hops. The only notable feature of his ancestry was a grandfather who had been hanged for stealing sheep. “I was the eldest child and I had a sister that was eleven months younger than I, and when I was five and she was four we were in an auto wreck. My dad was driving and my sister was killed. My mother was permanently crippled from it. I had a broken leg and a concussion and some head injuries.” The cast on the broken leg kept it from growing at the same rate as his good leg, so that limb remained an inch and a half shorter. For the next five years, Rabie was an only child, until his parents adopted another little girl, who was thirteen months old at the time.

It was a rather lonely childhood. The farm was two miles out of town, and there was little to do outside of chores and schoolwork. “I was always overweight and very self-conscious and had no real girlfriends or anything,” he recalled. “I’d go to the library. That, to me, was the best thing I could do, and like I said, I didn’t socialize much.” He was once arrested for
driving a car without a license when he was fifteen, but other than that he had never gotten into trouble.

“I really think I had a good childhood,” Rabie said, somewhat defensively. He admitted that he didn’t really get along with his father, who had a quick temper and had slapped his son on several occasions. The summer Jim graduated from high school, they had a falling out. Jim had complained about his father’s coarse eating habits. “He said, ‘If you don’t like the way I do things, you can move out,’ ” Rabie recalled. Since he was going away to college anyway, that’s exactly what he did.

For the next three and a half years, Jim studied economics and tried to support himself in school. He finally dropped out and began driving a tour bus in Seattle, which he found very satisfying. At the age of twenty-three, he married for the first time, to a schoolteacher. In the meantime, Jim’s father had traded the family farm for a general store, which turned out to be a disaster. His father was never cut out for commerce. “It was killing my mother psychologically. She just couldn’t stand it,” Rabie said. “And so I took over the store and dad got out and I ran it for five years on a shoestring.” Jim did everything from the meat cutting to the bookkeeping. Meanwhile, he was commuting forty-five miles every day, each way. “Probably that’s what busted up my first marriage,” he said. “I was never around.”

It was while he was running the store that he electrocuted himself. “I was working on one of the compressor units,” he said. He rolled over on an exposed 220-volt wire. He couldn’t move off the wire; he couldn’t breathe or call out. His body went into convulsions. He remembered hoping that the clerks would know to turn off the power before they touched his body. Then suddenly “it was like a hand picked me up off of there and I went and I passed out in back.” In his opinion, it was the hand of God. “I’m not a Bible-pounder by any
means,” he said, but he did feel that he had been spared, although he didn’t know why.

After that experience, Jim sold the store and applied to be in the sheriff’s reserves. “I always thought I was too small to be a cop.” He happened to be just tall enough. Unexpectedly, he had entered into what he soon decided was his life’s calling, law enforcement.

He divorced his first wife in 1977 and started dating Ruth. They had a solid relationship, in his opinion. He depicted his life as being happy and fulfilled—until the Ingram case came along.

“You’ve painted the model pictures,” Midthun said. “I’m challenging you, ’cause I’m also looking for the human side of Jim Rabie, and I’m gonna tell you why. A very important part of this test is ‘Who is Jim Rabie?’ In fact, it may make up about one-half of our conversation prior to the charts. The other half will be about the case. There, we’re gonna talk about some allegations that are very serious, and they could only be accomplished by somebody who is, let us say, a victim himself.” The paradigm he was referring to was the common assumption that children who were abused often grow up to be abusers themselves. Rabie would know all the symptoms from his police training, Midthun conceded. One would expect to see a person who has difficulty controlling his anger and who had been abusing other people since childhood. “I’m not doing this for any reason other than to make sure you’re painting an accurate picture,” said Midthun. “Now, I want the truth, O.K.? That model child was a model child, perhaps—very bright, very good grade point, good anger control—but we all have our transgressions. Tell me some of the dirt, Jim.”