“I DON’T DO SATAN,” I TOLD THE EAGER young man from the Texas governor’s office. He was trying to enlist my help with a complex case involving a group of children who reportedly had been ritually abused by members of a Satanic cult. The boys and girls were in foster care at this point, safe from their supposedly devil-worshipping parents and their coven of friends, but the state attorney general’s office had become worried that local Child Protective Services (CPS) workers had taken these children out of Beelzebub’s frying pan and into hell on earth.
IT WAS LATE 1993, AND I HAD BEEN trying to stay out of the contentious “memory wars” then raging over whether previously unrecalled incidents of severe abuse “remembered” by adults during therapy were true. There was also debate about whether children’s accounts of recent abuse or molestation were accurate. I knew for sure that there was an awful lot of genuine child abuse going on: every day I saw wrenching, concrete evidence of it.
But I also knew from my training in neuroscience and my clinical work with traumatized children that narrative memory is not simply a videotape of experiences that can be replayed with photographic accuracy. We make memories, but memories make us, too, and it is a dynamic, constantly changing process subject to bias and influence from many sources other than the actual event we are “storing.” What we experience first filters what comes afterwards—just as Tina’s early sexual abuse shaped her perception of men and Leon and Connor’s neglect altered their respective worldviews. However, this process works both ways: what we feel now can also influence how we look back and what we recall from the past. As a result, what we remember can shift with our emotional state or mood. For example, if we are depressed we tend to filter all our recollections through the haze of our sadness.
We know today that, just like when you open a Microsoft Word file on your computer, when you retrieve a memory from where it is stored in the brain, you automatically open it to “edit.” You may not be aware that your current mood and environment can influence the emotional tone of your recall, your interpretation of events and even your beliefs about which events actually took place. But when you “save” the memory again and place it back into storage, you can inadvertently modify it. When you discuss your memory of an experience, the interpretation you hear from a friend, family member, or a therapist can bias how and what you recall the next time you pull up that “file.” Over time, incremental changes can even lead to the creation of memories that did not take place. In the lab, researchers have been able to encourage test subjects to create memories of childhood events that didn’t happen: some as common as being lost in a mall, others as extreme as seeing someone possessed by a demon.
Back in 1993, however, the nature of memory and its incredible malleability weren’t as well researched and what was known about traumatic memory had not been widely taught to clinicians or other professionals working with children. Survivors of incest were bravely speaking out about their experience for the first time and no one wanted to question their stories or the reality of their pain. Children’s claims of being abused were also being taken much more seriously than they had been in the past. People didn’t want to go back to the bad old days when abusive adults could count on a child’s accounts of mistreatment being met with disbelief. Unfortunately, this desire to give the benefit of the doubt to victims, the naïveté of some therapists and their ignorance of how coercion can affect memory combined to cause serious harm.
Perhaps nowhere was that more evident than in the Satanic panic that swept Gilmer, Texas, in the early 1990s. The governor’s aide explained to me what he knew of the situation.
A seven-year-old boy, Bobby Vernon, Jr., was lying in a hospital in an irreversible coma, having been pushed down a flight of stairs by his recently adoptive father. Both this adoptive father and his wife had then committed suicide after their other adopted and foster children were taken away following Bobby’s hospitalization; the father by shooting himself in the head the next day and the mother by an overdose a day after that.
The seven-year-old’s skull had been fractured and he had severe brain damage. Little Bobby had refused to continue running up and down the stairs, which he had been being forced to do by his “parents.” According to siblings who witnessed the assault, either one or both of the adults had smashed his head on a wooden floor until the back of his head “was mushy.” To make matters worse, when the adults finally stopped the beating long enough to realize that the boy was unconscious, instead of immediately calling 911 they waited for an hour to get help, trying bizarre things like spraying Windex in the child’s face in an unsuccessful attempt to revive him.
EMS (Emergency Medical Services) workers were appalled by how these foster/adoptive parents appeared to be disciplining the ten children in their care. The children described being starved, isolated and repeatedly beaten. The paramedics told the parents, James and Marie Lappe, that they were required to call CPS, whereupon they were informed that the couple was actually employed by CPS. Theirs was a “therapeutic” foster home. The children, according to the Lappes, had been victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) by their parents; what looked like harsh discipline was actually “therapy” for these children. Surprisingly, the family’s CPS caseworkers in east Texas backed them up, insisting that the children had been in good hands at the Lappe home. The Lappes, however, were no longer in east Texas. They had moved to a west Texas community “in secret” to get away from what they believed was an active and dangerous Satanic cult, which wanted its children back and was prepared to do anything to get them. The local CPS workers in west Texas knew nothing about this “therapeutic” home in their community or about this alleged cult. It was at this point that higher-level state CPS officials were notified about the situation.
The east Texas caseworkers said, based upon testimony that they and the Lappes had elicited from these children, that a murderous Satanic cult had finally been exposed. There were reports of ritual killings, dead babies, blood drinking and cannibalism. Eight cult members were now in prison awaiting trial, not only for child abuse, but also for the gang rape and ritual murder of a seventeen-year-old high school cheerleader. One of those arrested and incarcerated was the police officer who had originally been in charge of investigating the cheerleader’s disappearance. Two experts on Satanism and a special prosecutor were on the case, seeking further indictments.
But now CPS officials in the state office began to wonder about the integrity of these investigations. They asked the state attorney general to get involved. The caseworkers’ immediate supervisor feared that she was about to be arrested in retaliation for voicing doubts about the investigation. Her fears seemed well founded: the police officer who’d been accused of being a murderous cult member and subsequently arrested had incurred scrutiny and ultimately an indictment himself after he’d expressed similar doubts. Prior to that he’d had an impeccable record and had won numerous law enforcement awards and plaudits. Indictments were being planned for other police officers, sheriff ’s deputies, an animal control officer and even an FBI agent, as well as the Gilmer police chief. Sixteen children had already been taken from their parents during the investigation and no one knew where it would go next.
Could it all have been a terrible mistake? Had innocent parents lost their children to a bout of Satanic hysteria propelled by poor investigative techniques? What had really happened in Gilmer, Texas? As soon as I had learned what had been done to those sixteen children—then aged from two to ten—in foster care, I felt obliged to get involved.
The main thing the state wanted me to do was to help CPS determine which of the children currently in foster care had genuinely been the victims of parental abuse and which had been taken from their parents as the result of false accusations made by other children who’d been led to “remember” incidents of abuse during the course of the investigation. To do this I would need to reconstruct each child’s history. Fortunately there were boxes upon boxes of old records and hours of audio and videotape of interviews with some of the children and their “cult member” parents. Our clinical team started to put together a detailed chronology of the case. The chronology document would soon run to dozens of pages.
It had all started in 1989, in a tar-paper house surrounded by a collection of dilapidated trailers on Cherokee Trace Road, on the periphery of Gilmer. Gilmer is a small, east Texas town of 5,000 located near where the Lone Star state meets Louisiana and Arkansas. It is the county seat of Upshur County, an unremarkable Bible Belt community but for one fact: it has one of the nation’s highest illiteracy rates. One in four adult residents cannot read. At that time, Bette Vernon* reported to the police that her then-husband, Ward Vernon,* had been sexually abusing their two daughters, aged five and six. Both parents were soon implicated in the child abuse, and all four of their offspring were taken into foster care. As a result of the abuse investigation, Ward Vernon was convicted of child sex abuse. Incredibly, he was sentenced to probation.
While on probation, Ward Vernon set up house with a woman named Helen Karr Hill,* who had five children of her own. When CPS discovered this liaison, they removed those children as well and Helen, who ultimately married Ward, gave up her parental rights. During the course of the child abuse investigation initiated by Bette Vernon’s call, the children also accused their grandparents and their uncle (Ward’s brother, Bobby Vernon*) of molestation, and his five children were taken into care. Later, two children of family friends would join them in foster homes, based on the accusations of the children who had preceded them.
In the course of my work with maltreated children, I have come across a number of extended families in which abuse is this pervasive; families that have harmful multigenerational “traditions” of pansexuality and insularity, in which sexual and physical abuse and ignorance are handed down almost the way other families pass on heirlooms and Christmas recipes. At this point I didn’t see any “red flags” to suggest that child welfare caseworkers were acting incorrectly or overzealously. Physical evidence of sexual abuse—anal and genital scarring, in some cases—had been found. Corporal punishment had also left marks on the bodies of some of the sixteen children.
But the choice of foster placements was where things started to go terribly wrong. The children were placed in two fundamentalist Christian “therapeutic” foster homes, where two seemingly incongruous cultural trends of the late 1980s and early 1990s would merge, with appalling results.
America had discovered an epidemic of child abuse, much of which was real and deserved genuine exposure and attention. One of the reasons abuse was being discussed in the news and on talk shows was the popularity of the “recovery movement,” which had encouraged Americans to find their “inner child,” and help it recover from wounds inflicted on it by negligent or abusive parents. At this time it was hard to read a newspaper or turn on the TV without coming across some celebrity discussing her (or, occasionally, his) history of being sexually abused as a child. Some self-help gurus claimed that more than 90 percent of families were dysfunctional. Some therapists eagerly propagated the idea that most of their clients’ problems could be traced back to childhood abuse, and then set about helping them dig through their memories to discover it, even if they originally claimed no recollection of maltreatment. As some people searched their memories with the aid of certain poorly trained and overly confident therapists, they began to recall ugly perversions that had been perpetrated upon them, even as these “memories” became increasingly divorced from any plausible reality.
The second trend was a rise in evangelical Christianity. Converts and adherents warned that the devil must be behind these widespread sexual atrocities. How else to explain the soul sickness that could lead so many people to perform such violent and profane acts on innocent children? Soon moral entrepreneurs made a business of the problem, selling workshops on how to identify children who were survivors of what came to be known as Satanic Ritual Abuse. As unlikely an ally of the Christian right as the feminist flagship Ms. magazine would feature on its front page a first person account by a “survivor” of such abuse in January 1993. The cover declared “Believe It—Child Ritual Abuse Exists,” and inside, the magazine told the story of a woman who claimed she’d been raped with crucifixes by her parents and forced to eat the flesh of her decapitated infant sister.
The CPS caseworkers and foster parents involved with the Vernon case were immersed in this cultural confluence at its peak. Around the time these children were taken into care in 1990, the foster parents and the caseworkers who supervised them had attended a seminar on “Satanic Ritual Abuse.” When the local DA recused himself from these cases because he had previously represented one of the defendants, the CPS caseworkers convinced a local judge to appoint a special prosecutor. This special prosecutor ultimately brought on board two special “Satanic investigators” to help make their case for the existence of a devil-worshipping cult, led by the Vernon family, operating in Gilmer, and practicing child sex abuse and human sacrifice. These “investigators” were reputed to be experts in uncovering cult crimes. One was a former Baptist minister from Louisiana; the other was a gym instructor for the Texas Department of Public Safety. Neither had experience with police investigations.
None of the material related to Satanic Ritual Abuse or “recovered memory” therapies had been scientifically tested before it became widely popularized. The “recovered memory” therapists and workshop trainers taught that children never lie about sexual abuse, even though there was no empirical evidence on which to base such a claim. They also told adult patients who weren’t sure whether they’d been abused that “if you think it happened, it probably did,” and that the presence of conditions like eating disorders and addictions, even without any memories of abuse, could prove that it had happened. The checklists for determining the presence of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” were based upon even flimsier evidence, yet they were propounded as diagnostic tools during hundreds of workshops conducted for therapists, social workers and child welfare officials.
If these methods had been tested, as they were later, the studies would have found that memories recalled under hypnosis, and even during ordinary therapy, can easily be influenced by the therapist, and that while many people have strong feelings about their childhoods, this does not necessarily mean that they were abused or that all of the events they recall are literally true. While children rarely lie spontaneously about sexual abuse (although this, too, can happen), they can readily be led to concoct tales by adults who may not be aware that the child is simply telling them what they want to hear. Overt coercion is not needed, though, as we shall see, it can certainly make matters worse. The “Satanic” checklists, like similar checklists that circulated around the same time for incest survivors and for “codependents” who had addicted loved ones, were so vague and over-inclusive that any adolescent with even the most minor interest in sex, drugs and rock-n-roll—in other words, any normal teenager—could qualify as a victim. And any younger child with nightmares, fears of monsters and bedwetting could as well.
Another dangerous form of quackery was also being widely touted at this time and was unfortunately inflicted on these foster children. It came in various forms and had a number of different names, but was most commonly known as “holding therapy,” or “attachment therapy.” During this “treatment,” adults would tightly restrain children in their arms and force them to look into the eyes of their caregivers and “open up” about their memories and fears. If the child did not produce a convincing story of early abuse, he would be verbally and physically assaulted until he did. Frequently practiced on adopted or foster children, this was supposed to create a parental bond between the child and his new family. One form, invented in the early 1970s by a California psychologist named Robert Zaslow, involved several “holders,” one assigned to immobilize the child’s head, while the others held down their limbs and dug their knuckles into the child’s ribcage, moving the knuckles roughly back and forth. This was supposed to be done with enough force to cause bruising. Zaslow’s “technique” was picked up and elaborated on by a group of therapists originally based in Evergreen, Colorado. Zaslow, however, lost his professional license after being charged with abuse. Evergreen-associated therapists, too, would ultimately be charged in several child abuse deaths associated with their “therapy.”
“Holding” therapy was intended to go on for hours, with no breaks to eat or use the bathroom. Meanwhile, the adults were supposed to verbally taunt the child to enrage him, as if the torture being performed on the small body wasn’t enough. “Releasing” his anger in this way was supposed to prevent future explosions of rage, as if the brain stored rage like a boiler and could be emptied of it by “expressing” it. The session would end only when the child was calm, no longer reacting to the taunts and seemingly in thrall to his caregivers. To end the assault he would have to declare his love for his tormentors, address his foster or adoptive parents as his “real” parents and display complete submission. The Lappes and a woman named Barbara Bass who housed the Vernon children used this version, improvising their own additions, such as making the kids run up and down stairs until they were exhausted and crying before beginning a “holding” session.
This is one of the many cases where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Supporters of “holding” believe (unfortunately, some are still around) that traumatized children’s problems result from poor attachment to their caregivers due to early childhood abuse and/or neglect. In many cases, this is probably true. As we’ve discovered, early deprivation of love and affection can make some children manipulative and lacking in empathy, as in Leon’s case. “Holding therapy” advocates also believe, in my view appropriately, that this missing or damaging early experience can interfere with the development of the brain’s capacity to form healthy relationships.
The danger lies in their solution to the problem. Using force or any type of coercion on traumatized, abused or neglected children is counterproductive: it simply retraumatizes them. Trauma involves an overwhelming and terrifying loss of control, putting people back into situations over which they have no control recapitulates this and impedes recovery. This should go without saying, but holding a child down and hurting him until he says what you want to hear does not create bonds of affection but, rather, induces obedience through fear. Unfortunately, the resulting “good behavior” that follows may look like positive change and these youth may even appear to be more spontaneously loving toward their caregivers afterwards. This “trauma bond” is also known as Stockholm Syndrome: children who have been tortured into submission “love” their foster parents the way kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst “believed in” the cause of her Symbionese Liberation Army captors. Incidentally, children’s “love” and obedience also tend to fade over time if the abuse is not continually repeated, as did Hearst’s commitment to the radical politics of the group once she was freed.
The east Texas foster parents apparently knew nothing about the potential for harm inherent in “holding therapy,” nor did the CPS caseworkers who monitored their care and sometimes participated in the holding sessions of the Vernon children. The ideology of “holding” fit easily into the families’ religious beliefs that children who were spared the rod would be spoiled and that children’s wills must be broken in order for them to learn to avoid sin and temptation. The foster families and caseworkers were convinced that the widespread abuse and incest in the children’s biological families could only have resulted from involvement in a Satanic cult. Besides, the children had all the symptoms they’d been told to look for at the Satanic Ritual Abuse workshop. One of them even reportedly told a caseworker that “Daddy said that if we go into the woods, the devil would get us.” Of course, the same warning could have come from a parent who practiced almost any religion, but no one considered this alternate explanation.
So, in order to “help” the children “process” their trauma and to bond with them, both the Lappes and Barbara Bass began “holding.” It was here that another pernicious belief came into play, one that unfortunately is still widely held in the mental health field. I call it the “psychic pus” theory. This is the idea that, like a boil that needs to be lanced, certain memories are toxic and must be excavated and discussed in order for people to recover from trauma. Many people still spend hours in therapy searching for the “Rosetta stones” of their personal histories, trying to find the one memory that will help their lives make sense and instantly resolve their current problems.
In fact, memory doesn’t work this way. The problem with traumatic memories tends to be their intrusion into the present, not an inability to recall them. When they intrude, discussing them and understanding how they may unconsciously influence our behavior can be extraordinarily helpful. For example, if a child avoids water because of a near drowning experience, talking it through when he is about to go to the beach may help him safely begin to swim again. At the same time, some people heal by fighting their fears and never discussing or explicitly recalling their painful memories at all. For people whose memories don’t negatively affect them in the present, pressuring them to focus on them may actually do harm.
It’s especially important to be sensitive to a child’s own coping mechanisms if they have a strong support system. In one study we conducted in the mid-1990s, we found that children with supportive families who were assigned to therapy to discuss trauma were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder than those whose parents were told to bring them in only if they observed specific symptoms. The hour per week that the children assigned to therapy spent focusing on their symptoms exacerbated them, rather than exorcised them. Each week, in the days prior to their therapy session, these children would begin thinking about their trauma; each week the children would have to leave school or extracurricular activities to travel to the clinic for therapy. In some cases children became hyperaware of their normal stress reactions, keeping tabs of every blip so they’d have something to say to the therapist. This disrupted their lives and increased rather than decreased their distress. Interestingly, however, if the child did not have a strong social network, therapy was beneficial. It probably gave them somewhere to turn that they did not have ordinarily. The bottom line is that people’s individual needs vary, and no one should be pushed to discuss trauma if they do not wish to do so. If a child is surrounded by sensitive, caring adults, the timing, duration, and intensity of small therapeutic moments can be titrated by the child. We observed this in practice with the Branch Davidian children and we feel the same principles hold for all children dealing with loss and trauma living in a healthy social support system.
Believing that you cannot recover unless you remember the precise details of a past trauma can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It can keep you focused on the past rather than dealing with the present. For example, some studies have found that depression can be exacerbated by ruminating on past negative events. Because of how memory works, such rumination can also lead you to recall old, ambiguous memories in a new light, one that, over time, becomes darker and darker until it eventually becomes a trauma that never actually occurred. Add the coercive, physically assaultive practice of “holding” to the malleability of the memories of young children, and you have a recipe for disaster.
During “holding” sessions the foster parents and sometimes their caseworkers and the “Satan investigators” would interrogate the youth about their devil-worshipping parents. They would ask lengthy, leading questions and dig their knuckles into the child’s side until he agreed with their version of events. The children soon learned that the “holding” would stop a lot sooner if they “disclosed” their parents’ cult involvement and described its rituals. Rapidly, they confirmed the tales of sacrificed babies, cannibalism, devil masks, hooded figures circling fires in the woods and Satanic altars, all originating from the questions and prompts of the interviewers, confirming the foster parents’ ritual abuse “diagnosis.” Soon, the children were saying that they had been videotaped for child pornography in a warehouse and had witnessed numerous murders. When the foster parents began to ask about whether other children were being abused by the cult, in desperation to escape the “holding,” they began to give up the names of their friends. As a result, two other children were taken from their parents, and many more were named as possible abuse victims.
Fortunately, many of these “holding sessions” and related “interviews” were audio or videotaped. As awful as they were to watch and hear, they allowed some incredible facts to emerge as we tried to figure out which children had actually been victimized by their parents, and whose parents had been accused because the Vernon children needed to name new names to please their interrogators. One thing became clear right away: if the caseworkers knew and liked the families who were accused (remember, this was a very small town, so most people knew each other), they would dismiss the Vernon siblings’ accusations and ask for other names. If they didn’t like the family, however, the parents would be investigated and their children taken.
That was how Brian came to be among the sixteen children in “therapeutic” foster care. Brian was a bright second-grader with a crew cut and a conscientious nature. He enjoyed watching the news, so before the sheriffs came to arrest his parents for sexually abusing him and his younger brother, he’d heard about the Vernon case on TV. The Vernons lived across the street from him and he was also friends with their children, so he had heard plenty of local gossip as well. From the media and from what neighbors were saying, Brian’s parents figured out that they were likely to be the next family targeted as Satanic sexual abusers. On the day CPS came to take him away, Brian was playing outside and saw the sheriff’s cars approaching, so he ran in and warned his parents. Unfortunately, he could do nothing but watch as caseworkers jolted his one-year-old brother awake from his nap and his parents were taken away in handcuffs. Brian was permitted to take one beloved item from home with him; that he chose a Bible and not a toy should have been an early clue that he was not a being raised in a Satanic cult.
Unfortunately, from the news, Brian had also learned about another horrifying local crime. Seventeen-year-old Kelly Wilson, a wide-eyed, blonde cheerleader out of central casting, had abruptly disappeared on January 5, 1992. She was last seen leaving work at a Gilmer video store. Today, neither her remains nor any signs of her continued existence have been found. The officer on duty when her parents called about her disappearance, Sergeant James York Brown, was assigned the case.
By all accounts, Sergeant Brown worked it diligently, placing posters about the missing girl all over town, even working through the following Thanksgiving when a report (later found to be false) came in that her body might be in a local field. He convinced a local business to fund and erect a billboard requesting any information the public might have about Wilson’s whereabouts. Brown rapidly identified the most likely suspect: a young man whom the cheerleader had dated and who had a prior conviction for an assault with a knife. That man’s car had mysteriously been sold days after the girl’s disappearance. Even more suspiciously, when the vehicle was finally located, a giant piece of its interior carpeting was missing. But the car had been washed thoroughly, inside and out, and no definitive physical evidence could be found.
That suspect, however, wasn’t of interest to the social workers and the special prosecutor in the Vernon case. The ex-boyfriend had no connection to the Vernons. If he had killed Kelly, it would be just another case of a teenage love affair gone wrong, not a body that could be linked to the tales of human sacrifice the Vernon children were telling. The Vernons and their Satanic followers, the investigators were sure, must be guilty of more than beating and raping a few children and sacrificing some animals. But no one could find any bodies, nor had any local people been reported missing. Until Kelly Wilson.
The caseworkers and “cult crimes” investigators became convinced that there must be a connection between the Vernons and the young girl’s disappearance. They subjected seven-year-old Brian to an entire day of “holding” to find it. Brian’s intelligence meant the stories he was forced to produce were far more coherent than those of the others. When nine adults surrounded him, held him down and shouted at him until he was so terrified that he soiled himself, he came up with the story that would lead to Sergeant Brown’s indictment. He reported seeing Wilson victimized at the Vernon’s Satanic rites. He said that “a man in a blue uniform” was there, and he made remarks about police officers being “bad.”
One of these “bad” cops became James Brown when the investigators and the prosecutor conducted a ten-hour taped interrogation of a woman with a reported IQ of seventy. Patty Clark* was the common-law wife of one of the Vernon brothers. She had a long history of abusive relationships and had herself been raised in foster care. She was facing child abuse charges related to the Vernon children, which she was told she could mitigate if she told the “truth” about Kelly Wilson’s murder and James Brown’s involvement in it. She later said that her testimony had literally been scripted on a white board because her interrogators had become so frustrated by her inability to reliably repeat what they told her to say. The transcripts of her interrogation vividly show the coercion used to get her statements, with interrogators repeatedly telling her that they knew that Brown was at the scene of the crime and threatening her with the consequences of “not telling the truth.” If you read them, it is hard to tell who is displaying less intelligence: the interrogators who try to make the mentally subnormal woman use the same terms for anal sex that were used by the children during their “holding” sessions, or poor Patty Clark who tries at least seven different phrases before finally being prompted by investigators with the right term.
Clark’s “testimony” ultimately described a ten-day period of torture endured by the kidnapped cheerleader, capped off by a gang rape, the removal of one of Wilson’s breasts, the hanging of her body to drain its blood for drinking, and cannibalism. It was Clark’s child, Bobby Vernon Jr., whom the Lappes would later beat into a coma.
COERCED CONFESSIONS ARE problematic in many ways. Not least is the potential they have for leading to the convictions of innocent people. Another is that facts unknown to the interrogators may later surface to destroy their witnesses’ credibility and, by extension, their own. Such facts ultimately halted Gilmer’s Satan investigators and its special prosecutor. Sergeant Brown himself uncovered the most damning evidence, which is why, many believe, the special prosecutor and his minions eventually decided that the police officer had to be named as part of the cult. The problems with the evidence were multiple: there was no physical evidence linking the Vernons and the missing cheerleader; the children’s claims that they were taken to warehouses to film child pornography could not be corroborated since no such warehouses (every one in the county was checked), films, photos or videos could be found; the bones found buried in the Vernons’ back yard turned out to be animal, not human; a “devil mask” found in their home turned out to be a cheap Halloween costume that could serve as evidence to make the case that millions of Americans were Satanists.
But the worst piece of evidence for the prosecutor’s case was that on the night of Kelly Wilson’s disappearance cult “leaders” Ward Vernon and his wife Helen, who were reported to have been key perpetrators in the girl’s kidnapping and death, were in New York. There were multiple documents attesting to this: Ward was a truck driver and his employer kept records of his travels, including the bills of lading required to prove delivery of the shipments. Ward even had gas station credit card receipts from New York to prove that he’d been there. When Sergeant Brown insisted that this meant that the Satan investigators had the wrong suspects in Wilson’s death and that their witnesses’ testimony was unreliable, the special prosecutor told him, “If you get into my investigation in any way, I will ruin you personally, professionally, financially and in every other way.”
That prosecutor made good on his threat. The Patty Clark interrogation that turned young Brian’s “man in the blue uniform” into James Brown followed. Brown’s arrest—complete with a brutal takedown by a SWAT team—occurred shortly thereafter.
HOW WAS I GOING TO DETERMINE which abuse allegations were coerced by interrogators and which had really occurred? How were we going to figure out the safest place for these traumatized children? Should they be returned to parents who were possible abusers or should they be placed in new, much more closely scrutinized foster or adoptive homes? I was pretty sure from the chronology that Brian and his little brother had been removed from their home in error, but what if their parents were genuinely abusive and the Vernon children had known about it? Then again, what if the second group, Bobby and Patty’s children, had been removed only because their cousins had been coerced into naming more victims? Our chronology suggested that there was physical evidence to support the allegations of abuse against both Vernon brothers, their wives/partners and the Vernon grandparents, but the investigation was so tainted that it was hard to know what to believe.
Fortunately, I’d discovered a tool that could, in conjunction with other evidence, help us sort through the wreckage. I’d stumbled onto it by accident. Back in Chicago and just after I had moved to Houston in the early 1990s, I’d run a few marathons. While training, I wore a continuous heart rate monitor. One day, right after a practice run, I’d gone to do a home visit with a boy who was in foster care, so I was still wearing the monitor when I arrived at the house. The little boy asked me what it was, and I let him try it out, explaining what it did. When I put it on him, his heart rate was one hundred, quite normal for a boy his age at rest. Then, I realized I’d left some paperwork that I needed in my car, so I asked him if he wanted to come with me to get it. He seemed not to have heard my question, but I could see that his heart rate had shot up to 148. I thought that perhaps my monitor had broken, so I moved closer to take a look. In case I’d mumbled, as I sometimes do, I repeated what I’d said. The boy remained motionless and his heart rate moved even higher. I was perplexed, but I saw no reason to press him to come with me. I went out to get the paperwork, returned and finished the visit.
Before my visit, I hadn’t known this particular child’s history; I was just there to see how he was doing in his current placement. When I got back to my office I looked up his chart. It turned out that he’d been sexually abused by his mother’s boyfriend—in a garage. When this man had said to him, “Let’s go out and work on the car,” what he really meant was, “I’m going to abuse you now.” Inadvertently, I’d given him a traumatic cue by suggesting that he come to the car with me. I decided to see if heart-rate monitoring might help me figure out what cues triggered trauma symptoms in other children.
Frequently, I saw the same reaction: if a child was exposed to a scent, sight, sound, or, as in this case, a verbal suggestion that lead him to recall the trauma, his heart rate would rise dramatically. For some, if cues made them experience dissociative symptoms rather than hyperarousal responses, their heart rates would go down, rather than up. Hyperarousal prepares people for fight and/or flight, which requires an increased heart-rate; dissociation prepares them for inescapable stress, slowing their heart rate, breathing and other functions. Although it doesn’t work in every case and needs further study, heart-rate monitoring has been very useful in my work. Knowing that something or someone provoked traumatic memories in a child could often help us narrow down who or what had harmed them, especially with toddlers who were too young to tell us what had happened.
I tried this method with Brian, who by now was living in a group home. He’d been away from his parents for almost two years by this point, and it was obvious that he missed them terribly. I stressed repeatedly that if there was anything he didn’t want to discuss, he should say so, and that no harm would come to him if he admitted to having lied about something in the past. I told him that this would be the chance for him to tell his side of the story. And then I colored with him for a while. Brian had stayed with Barbara Bass. Much of the “holding” therapy and “investigation” involving the Satanic abuse took place at her home.
When I first asked him about her “therapeutic” foster home, he said that it was “kind of fun.” I encouraged him to tell me more, without prompting him about whether I wanted to know good or bad things.
“One thing I didn’t like, we had holding there,” he said immediately.
“Tell me what holding is,” I said.
“She makes you run the stairs till you cry so you’re, like, tired and then we go in the room and get on the bed and she lays down with ya, and she rubs your sides, like your ribs and it hurts and you scream and you get all your anger out and you talk to her about what you’re mad about.”
“When she says, ‘Get your anger out,’ what does she mean by that?”
“Stuff that you’re just mad about. And then she makes you say stuff that you don’t want to say.”
“Like what?”
“Like stuff that your parents did that they didn’t do.”
“She’d want you to say that?”
Brian, who was on the brink of tears, his heart racing, nodded his head.
“Give me an example.”
“Like say that they hurt you or something. And we’d usually always have holding right before we’d come down to see a therapist or something.”
“How many times a week would you have it?”
“Probably once a month, but it depended where we were going. If we were going to testify or see a therapist or something like that, we’d have it like that day or the day before.”
I asked him how Barbara got him to say things that weren’t true. “She’d rub your sides till it hurts and after a while, you know, you’re going to give in. It hurts.”
“What kinds of things did she make you say?”
Brian began to cry openly, tears running down his face and dripping from his nose. “That my parents did stuff that they didn’t do,” he said, weeping. I reassured him, again, that he didn’t have to tell me anything and that I wouldn’t try to make him say anything that he didn’t want to say, or that he didn’t think was true. But he was brave and, after I gave him some tissues, he insisted on telling me the whole story. He described the day when he was taken from his parents, how he knew when his mother began to cry that “I was going,” and how he was allowed to bring “one thing he really liked” with him and chose his Bible. He talked about how he tried to calm his one-year-old brother, saying that “he didn’t know what was going on,” and “was grumpy because they woke him up from his nap.” (The younger child didn’t even recognize his mother by the time he was finally returned home.)
When I questioned Brian about the “Satanic” ritual killing of Kelly Wilson and other atrocities he’d claimed to have witnessed or taken part in, he didn’t cry and his heart rate remained steady. He was very matter-of-fact and said that he’d made up those stories in order to stop from being hurt. He did not express any fear, either verbally or physically, when discussing things like “killing babies,” which was in complete contrast to when he discussed being taken from his home or the “holding” procedure. His compassion for his brother and his distress over being made to lie about his parents made clear that this was a highly sensitive, moral and caring boy. Such a child would have responded to being made to watch or participate in murder and cannibalism with agony and terror; only a sociopath could have reacted unemotionally when recalling such memories if they had been true. Brian simply would not have been able to respond so differently to these two sets of experiences, which was something I had to testify to in great length in order to get the judge who was presiding over the custody cases to allow Brian and his brother to return home.
Figuring out what had really happened to the Vernon children was more complicated. No one wanted to return children with anal and genital scarring to people who had repeatedly raped them. But the false allegations of murder and Satanic rites had so warped their credibility that their parents could now claim, quite believably, that everything the kids had said about who abused them and what had gone on was suspect. I hoped to use heart rate monitoring and other physiological and emotional cues to try to find out who had hurt these children, and find the best permanent placement for them.
I spoke with one little girl who had been a toddler when she was removed from her parents’ home. Annie had had so many conversations with professionals by this time that she could mimic us. At one point in our interview she sat on a swivel chair, swinging herself back and forth, and said, “Tell me about yourself. My name is Annie and I have brown hair and brown eyes and I’ve been in 10,000 foster homes.” She was drinking soda from a can, and very much enjoying burping after each sip. I asked her about where her reports about Satan and killing people had come from.
“It came from my birth dad, he killed all these babies and he made me kill them or I was going to die and the babies were going to die, too,” she said, and smiled, burping up some soda. There was no movement on the heart rate monitor.
“How can you remember that?” I asked.
“I remember because my sister told me,” she said, swinging her legs. When I asked if she could remember any of this herself, she said that she couldn’t, explaining that she couldn’t remember anything much before she was three.
When I asked her if she remembered “holding,” her mood immediately darkened. She said in a serious tone, “Yes I do and I don’t want to talk about it.” But then she described how her foster parents and caseworkers, “kept on making me talk about my past and saying that I killed babies.”
Later, when I asked her about whether she’d been sexually abused by her father, she was even more reluctant to talk. “He made me touch his privates and I said I didn’t want to and he stuck my hand down there,” she said, and got up out of her chair to look out the window. When I asked if this had happened more than once, she nodded, keeping her eyes down. “He made me rub it and when I said no he said ‘You don’t tell me what to do or I’ll kill you.’”
Now you could see signs of fear, in the dissociative response as she physically tried to escape the question by walking away, and in her heart rate. She later returned to her chair, saying, “I can’t stand the name Ward Vernon.” She bore down on the pencil with which she’d been drawing earlier, scribbling back and forth, as if to blot out his name forever. The little girl responded similarly to discussions about her stepmother, but insisted that her real mother had never harmed her.
When I spoke with one of her older sisters, Linda, she told me that the initial idea that there had been Satanic abuse, “came from Barbara’s mouth. She would say, ‘OK, you’re in the dungeon with Helen, right,’ and she’d press on you until the tears start running, until you say yes. She would put words actually in your mouth.” Linda, too, described sexual abuse by her father and stepmother, detailing how her grandparents were often involved. “They do it almost every day,” she said, and when I pressed her about whether she remembered this or whether she’d been told to say it, she got stern with me and said, “You would remember too if it happened in your life when you were seven years old.” Again, her physiological responses were consistent with having been sexually abused by family members, but not with her having taken part in Satanic rituals and murder. None of the Vernon children were ultimately returned to their biological parents because it was clear that they were at great risk for further abuse in that extended family.
One of the most troubling aspects of the case—and something that is important for parents to keep in mind when dealing with emotionally charged situations—was how the fear sparked by this pathetic investigation spread and caused otherwise rational people to behave in bizarre ways. Once the allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse were made public, they took on a life of their own. Even highly trained professionals in mental health and law enforcement, even some of my own staff, were not immune.
Once the children had been removed from their homes and the accusations of Satanic abuse surfaced, nearly everyone involved in their care became convinced that Satanists were going to kidnap the children and slaughter those who were now trying to help them. Despite the fact that the “cult leaders” and almost everyone else believed to have been involved in the child abuse and murder had already been incarcerated, the Satan investigators, the caseworkers and the foster parents were sure there was a larger conspiracy and that they were all in mortal danger. They began behaving in an extremely paranoid fashion, even moving the children to west Texas (where Bobby Vernon was beaten into a coma) in order to evade what they believed were the still-thriving tentacles of the cult. The Lappes’ suicides were seen as evidence that the cult had somehow “gotten to them.” Once belief in the power of the cult and its evil activities had been established, it was almost impossible for people to acknowledge contrary evidence.
Explaining the Lappes’ suicides would seem straightforward to most people: the couple had just beaten a child they’d presumably cared for so ferociously that they’d smashed his skull, leaving him in a permanent vegetative state. Guilt, shame, sorrow—any one of these motivations would do, no Satanic cult necessary. But rather than reexamine their initial assumptions, those involved with the investigation simply became further and further detached from reality.
The town of Gilmer itself was split. Some believed that a Satanic cult resided there and had killed people and was continuing to wreak havoc, while others thought innocent people had lost their children and had been accused of unspeakable and frankly impossible crimes. Kelly Wilson’s own parents exemplified the divide. Kelly’s mother believed that Sergeant Brown was involved with a Satanic cult that had kidnapped and killed her daughter, while Kelly’s father argued just as strenuously that Brown and the others had been railroaded and his daughter’s true killer has not been found.
The judge who presided over the custody hearings for the children was convinced that Satanic rituals had taken place. The grand jury that had indicted Brown refused to reverse its indictment when the Texas attorney general’s office tried to explain to them why the evidence that had previously been presented to them was unreliable. Ultimately another judge dropped the indictments, but many in Gilmer remained convinced that Satan worshippers had gathered there to abuse and kill children. During the course of my work on this case, I was accused of involvement in the cult, my staff members reported things like dead cats on the road as evidence of “spookiness” in Gilmer, and a general atmosphere of fear predominated. Without any evidence other than the coerced testimony of sixteen children, twentieth-century adults were ready to convict half a dozen people, including a police officer who’d randomly been assigned to investigate the crime and a man whose employer’s records and gas station receipts put him halfway across the country on the day of the crime.
Humans are social animals, highly susceptible to emotional contagion. Training, logic, and intelligence are often no match for the power of groupthink. Early humans who couldn’t quickly pick up on and follow the emotional cues of others would not have been able to survive. Following such cues is a key to social success, and being unable to perceive them is a serious handicap, as we saw in Connor’s case. But the “side effect” of this legacy can lead us to witch hunts like the one in Gilmer, Texas.