Remembering Satan (9 page)

“Mm-hm.”

“Because they have—they—I say ‘they’ because I believe that there’s a ‘they’ who have done this to you.”

“Mm-hm.”

At moments, the conversation lurched into therapy or instant psychoanalysis, as Chad was urged to reveal his thoughts about his family and his rather limited sexual experience. Eventually, the interrogators prodded the young man into talking about his mental problems. He admitted that he had heard voices inside his head. Then, in a painfully halting manner that reminded the detectives of his father’s interminable pauses, Chad described vivid dreams he had had as a child: “People outside my window, looking in, but I knew that wasn’t possible, because … we were on two floors and I would … I would have dreams of, uh, little people … short people coming and walking on me … walking on my bed … uh, I would look outside and … out of my door.” The little people reminded him of the Seven Dwarfs, he said.

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

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

“Of being violated, trapped in an inescapable situation,” Peterson said, interpreting. “What happened to you was so horrible.”

“Right.”

“You want to believe it’s dreams,” Schoening said. “You don’t want to believe it’s real. It was real. It was real, Chad.”

“No, this was outside my window, though,” Chad protested,
pointing out that his bedroom had been on the second floor. Also, his older brother had slept in the same room—why hadn’t he ever seen anything?

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

“Were you shaking in your boots or did you pee on the floor? Were you that scared?” asked Peterson.

“No, no,” said Chad. He claimed he had no strong feelings about the dream, just a leaden sensation, as if he were stuck in concrete. “I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t move except to close the curtain,” Chad went on. “The only thing I could feel was pressure on my chest.”

“What was on your chest?” Peterson asked.

“Well, this is a different dream,” Chad said, recalling a recurring nightmare of his adolescence. “Every time a train came by, a whistle would blow and a witch would come in my window.… I would wake up, but I couldn’t move. It was like the blankets were tucked under and … I couldn’t move my arms.”

“You were being restrained?” Peterson asked.

“Right, and there was somebody on top of me.”

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

“Chad, these things happened to you,” Peterson insisted. “They assaulted your ability to know what was real.”

“O.K.”

“Pretty hard to remember this?”

“No, it was like it was yesterday.” Chad then recalled that when the train whistle blew, he would find himself on the floor, and a fat witch with long black hair and a black robe would be sitting on top of him.

“Look at her face,” Schoening said. “Who is this person? Somebody who is a friend of your family’s?”

“It was usually dark,” said Chad. He said the witch’s visits
occurred once or twice a week, lasting for half an hour, until they moved out of the old house. “I would hear the whistle; I would feel the pressure on my chest; I would be on the floor; but I would never feel myself getting out of bed, moving to the floor, and then I would be on the floor and then I would be back in bed, but never feel myself going from the floor back to the bed.” As for his brother, Chad recalled that when the witch was in the room, Paul Ross would be gone, “but then when I would wake up, I would look and he would be there.”

“Who does this person remind you of?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t want to know or you don’t know?” Peterson asked.

“Probably I don’t want to know.”

“Somebody you respect?”

“Right.”

“Is there something there physically to keep your mouth from making noise?” Schoening asked.

“No, because I remember breathing.”

“What’s in your mouth?”

“I don’t know. A cloth, maybe.”

“It’s very important, Chad. What’s it feel like in your mouth?”

“Uh, it’s not hard.”

“Just let the memory come,” Peterson advised. “It’s not what you think about, it’s what you’re trying
not
to think about.” When Chad resisted being steered any further, Peterson and Schoening told him that he had been programmed not to remember anything. “Why’d you have to run away from it?” Peterson demanded.

And Schoening added, “You wanted to go somewhere safe, right?”

“No, it was safe here,” said Chad. “I always felt safe.”

“Even when all this was going on?” Schoening asked.

“Except for the dreams,” Chad said, obviously bewildered. “I—Because I thought they were—I put them off as dreams.”

“Destruction of his sense of reality,” Peterson said authoritatively. “Destruction of any ability to feel. Total, absolute obedience and subservience to the group.”

A few minutes later, Schoening said, “Let’s go back to when you were fourteen to sixteen and this person’s sitting on you.” How much room did Chad think there had been between the witch’s pelvic area and Chad’s chin? Chad supposed there had been a foot or so. “They would sit there real high,” Schoening reminded him. “And you got something in your mouth.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s not cloth.”

“Right.”

“It’s not hard, like a piece of wood.”

“Right.”

“What is it?”

Chad thought a moment about this riddle and then began to laugh nervously. “You just made me think—oh, golly.”

“What is it?” Schoening insisted.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“What were you thinkin’? C’mon.”

“I thought it was a penis, O.K.? I—it could be.”

“O.K., don’t be embarrassed. It could be,” Schoening said. “Let it out. It’s O.K.”

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

Once the interrogators had been able to translate the nightmares into reality, the rest followed easily. The witch underwent a sex change, and Chad’s initial certainty that he had never been abused was completely overturned. The little people of Chad’s first dream, who had reminded him of the Seven Dwarfs, were reinterpreted as being members of a cult who
regularly abused him over most of his life. But Chad had forgotten all of it, the interrogators told him. He had been conditioned to accept the abuse and then to repress the memories.

“By God, those who’ve done this to you ought to pay for what they’ve done,” Peterson said. “And I’ll tell you something—you have the right to sue those fuckers and get as much as you want from them.”

“That’d be nice,” Chad said.

“You’re damn right it’d be nice. Pay for a college education.”

“Yeah.”

“Pay for a nice car. Get you started in life.”

“Well, I’ve already got a nice car.”

“Yeah, but do you have a BMW?”

When he came to the interview, Chad had been threatened with arrest. Now that he had accepted his status as victim, he was being offered a view of the rewards he might claim. Peterson urged him to “go public” with his new discovery. “Wouldn’t it feel great to say this was real—it’s not a dream?” said Peterson.

“That’s why I want to see the faces, so I can … say these are the ones that did it to me,” Chad concluded. “I have to put a face to it.”

At this point the detectives turned off the tape.

Earlier, Chad had examined the same photo lineup that his sisters had seen, including some twenty driver’s-license pictures, mostly of former employees of the sheriff’s office. Of those pictured, Rabie and Risch had been the closest friends of Paul Ingram and the ones most likely to be recognized by the children. Chad knew both men well; in fact, he had done odd jobs for them on several occasions. But when he was first presented with the lineup, he couldn’t identify any abusers. During the interval while the tape was off, Chad examined the pictures again.

“Who’s the face in the dream?” asked Vukich, when the tape was turned back on.

“Jim Rabie,” Chad answered.

The following day, Chad produced a memory of being assaulted by Ray Risch in the basement of the Ingrams’ house when he was ten or twelve years old. At this point, Chad leaned forward and stared at the floor “in a trance-like state,” Schoening’s notes record. “Sometimes he would go for 5–10 minutes without saying anything and at one point, drool came out of his mouth and onto the floor.”

6
 

            
L
oreli Thompson has a playful manner, but she hides her eyes behind dark, silver-rimmed aviator glasses. As a young girl, growing up in Olympia, Thompson had been drawn to puzzles of every kind—codes, crosswords, mysteries—and by junior high she had decided she wanted to be a detective. When she finally achieved her goal, in November of 1984, she was the first female detective in the county. While she was still a rookie, she encountered her first pedophile, a man who had molested several young girls in an apartment complex. Thompson persuaded him to confess. She discovered that she had an instinct for sex crimes, one of the most puzzling departments of criminal behavior. In order to better understand the motivations of sexual offenders, Thompson got a master’s degree in clinical psychology, which was added to her master’s in criminal justice. Her reports are full of telling psychological observations.

She saw every kind of sexual offender, from sadistic rapists to exhibitionists and voyeurs. In many cases she found that an understanding pat on the hand would help lead the perpetrator to her ultimate goal, which was to persuade him to confess. Thompson tries to keep her cases out of the courtroom. It was often difficult for juries to make sense of sex crimes or sometimes even to believe that crimes had taken place, especially
when there was little evidence other than an accusation. When the accusation came from a child, juries tended to be even more skeptical. Thompson had seen how easily confused children could become in the presence of a forceful defense attorney; moreover, most sexual offenses against very young children are digital or oral, which means that there is characteristically very little evidence, no sperm or scarring. In Washington State, there are three categories of what is still informally called statutory rape. First-degree rape or molestation of a child pertains to children under twelve and a perpetrator who is more than twenty-four months older than the victim—for example, an eleven-year-old girl who engages in sex with a fourteen-year-old boy. Second-degree rape involves children who are twelve and thirteen. Third-degree rape (the offense Paul Ingram was charged with, because these alleged offenses are ones that took place within the statute of limitations) occurs in the case of an underaged victim and a perpetrator who is more than four years older; a fifteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old cannot legally have sex in Washington, although two fifteen-year-olds can.

After Jim Rabie’s retirement, Loreli Thompson came to be regarded as the best sex-crimes investigator in the county. Other departments would sometimes consult her, especially in crimes against children, and by the time the Ingram case came into her life, she had already seen perhaps three hundred child victims in Thurston County. Some were as young as two years old. Many had been repeatedly molested for years. Because of her reputation and skill, Thompson was given the delicate task of interviewing Julie. In her experience, there was nothing very unusual about two little girls growing up in a house with a pedophile. She witnessed the effects of child abuse every day. Paul Ingram’s emerging satanic memories did sound a jarring note to Thompson, but then what else could explain the wreck of a girl who sat in her office, practically mute, idly shredding her clothing and pulling her hair? Julie was the most traumatized
victim that Thompson had ever seen. She had more success in getting statements out of four-year-old children who had been raped and beaten. Julie would sometimes write about the abuse in her upright, legible script, but she simply could not speak about it aloud. Early on, Thompson came to believe that Julie had been tortured.

All the familiar road signs of a typical police investigation had been turned about. The detectives were groping to understand what was going on in their community—and, indeed, in their own department. The alleged central perpetrator was admitting to more depraved crimes than the victims were charging (until this point, neither of the Ingram daughters had said anything about satanic abuse). It seemed nearly impossible to coordinate all the accusations into a coherent set of charges. The investigators realized that they were probing into strange and unsettling territory. Jaded cops who regularly visited the worst precincts of the human psyche were thoroughly shaken by the emerging revelations of the Ingram case. The memories that Paul Ingram was producing were at once disjointed and intricately detailed, like shards of a shattered vase. Ingram could describe the ornate fragments, but he seemed to have no way of piecing them back together. Even more disquieting to the investigators was a growing conviction that the Ingram case was, as they frequently said to each other, “the tip of the iceberg”—the iceberg being the nationwide satanic conspiracy.