Remembering Satan, A Case of Recovered Memory and the Shattering of an American Family
Lawrence Wright
I lived in Olympia during the "capture", interrogation, and conviction of Paul Ingram. I was working at the Cooper Point Journal with another fellow, Chris Bader, who was writing a regular column then called "Weird Washington" about various supernatural and unexplained events in and around Washington. Imagine our amazement when right under our noses, there seemed to be this hugely secret Satanic ritual abuse cult!
As the case moved along, however, Chris devoted his entire column, week after week, to the new developments. It quickly and appallingly became apparant that Thurston County seemed to be either fabricating this whole thing out of whole cloth, or encouraging Paul Ingram to fabricate it out of whole cloth. I would read transcripts of the "interviews". They were astonishing. At one point, Ingram's "interviewer" basically promised the man his own fancy car if he would just sign the confession!
Remembering Satan digs deeply into this warped, freaky retarded case, this throwback to the Inquisition, and this demonstration that only the thinnest veil stands between "modern man" and "monkey-scared-of-the-dark". Or maybe it reveals just how ugly people can be when they combine fear with power. Or maybe all of that plus more. Regardless, it pretty convincingly reports what most everybody who had half a brain realized all along -- that this was absolute complete bogosity personified and paraded around as if it were real "news", when in fact the only real "news" is that it went on longer than about, oh, three hours and a beer! The local newspaper (which won't be named to confound search engines), reported each piece of the confession and the "crime" in sucessively more salacious detail, in the kind of hungry slavering tones normally reserved for drunken half-naked celebrities. Last I heard, the Ingram case was supposedly the only case in the history of the United States of "Ritual Satanic Abuse" with even so much as a shred of evidence. Yet, all the evidence turned out to hinge on Ingram's coerced confessions (which were shown by the Prosecution's own erstwhile advisor Dr. Richard Ofshe to be almost certainly confabulated), combined with the discovery of a single old cow bone on what was supposed to be a mass grave of aborted babies.
What I want to know is this: Where are those goddamn meddling kids and their goddamn dog and mystery van when you desperately need 'em?!
In April of 2003, Ingram was released from prison. It would be nice if it was because someone somewhere grew a brain, but that was not the case. The same local newspaper that oozed pustulance at the lurid tales of Ritual Satanic Abuse (or "bullshit") made nary a peep when they announced his release, instead referring to his confesion that he had sexually abused his daughters (they have to refer to his confession, since there's no actual "evidence"). I think they should practice what they preach.
Here, read some more about this at The Ingram Organization.
