Free Remembering Satan by Lawrence Wright

the bed and cowering. He went over and ripped his pants off and made him kneel on the floor and I was powerless to do anything.… He forced Chad down and had anal sex with him.” Chad was thirteen or fourteen at the time. “When Jim was done, he got up, put his pants back on. He said he’d do that any time he wanted to,”Ingram related. “He’d kill us if we said anything. He had control.”
    That afternoon, Detective Loreli Thompson interviewed Chad, then twenty years old. The young man said that he had never been abused, sexually or in any other physical manner, by his father or anyone else. “He said he had never really talked with Rabie beyond a casual hello,” Thompson noted. Chad admitted that his father sometimes lost control and yelled at the children, but otherwise their relationship was “O.K.” The young man was beginning to have doubts about the veracity of his own recollections, though. Recently, he and his mother had been looking through family photographs and other household items in an effort to prompt their memories. So far, neither of them was able to remember anything extraordinary.
    Paul’s memory, however, was becoming more and more active and intricately detailed, aided by the visualizations that Peterson and the detectives encouraged and by constant prayer and assurances from Pastor Bratun that God would not allow thoughts other than those which were true to come into his memory. Ingram began seeing people in robes kneeling around a fire. He thought he saw a corpse. There was a person on his left in a red robe who was wearing a helmet of cloth. “Maybe the Devil,” he suggested. People were wailing. Ingram remembered standing on a platform and looking down into the fire. He had been given a large knife and was expected to sacrifice a live black cat. He cut out the beating heart and held it aloft on the tip of the knife. “At one point, Ingram said that the cat might have been a human doll,” Schoening wrote in his report. “This was related by Ingram as a third party looking at the scenario, i.e., I see; I feel; reminds me of; I hear, etc.” Ingram also produced a memory of himself and Jim Rabie murdering a prostitute in Seattle in 1983, thereby implicating both of them in an infamous unsolved murder spree known as the Green River killings. The bodies of at least forty women hadbeen found in Washington and Oregon between 1982 and 1984, and the authorities believed it was the work of a serial killer. At Schoening’s request, the Green River task force looked into Ingram’s memories of the slaying but could find nothing that corresponded with any of the victims.
    Where were all these memories coming from? Were they real or were they fantasies? If they were real, why couldn’t any two people agree on them? The Ingram daughters had said nothing about satanic rituals, but through the church grapevine they were getting the gist of their father’s latest revelations, which Pastor Bratun often knew about before the detectives heard them. Ericka confided to a friend that her father was talking too much and giving too many details—that he was saying things she didn’t want to remember, and she wished he would just be quiet.
    Ericka herself was now saying that her father had sexually abused her on almost every night of the last week she lived at home. Detective Thompson interviewed one of the deaf girls who had been living with the Ingrams (and had since moved to another foster home). The girl said that the Ingram house was full of hate. “I don’t want—angry—ignore—don’t talk with me anymore,” she said through her interpreter. She remembered that Sandy and Ericka had bickered because Ericka wanted to leave, and that Ericka had been grounded. That was the most dramatic incident she could recall. She told Thompson that she had not observed any abuse.
    On December 8, Chad went to see his father in jail. It was a shattering experience for him. Paul, who had always been so aloof