Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

INVESTIGATOR (IN): Is Sam your best friend?

SARAH: Yes.

IN: Is Sam an honest boy?

SARAH: Yes, sure.

IN: He wouldn’t tell a lie?

SARAH: No.

IN: Then I don’t understand—Sam told us that Mr. Soandso did that thing to you. Is Sam lying to us?

In fact, Sam had said no such thing—but Sarah has no way to know this and is way too young to consider that a friendly adult authority figure might be blatantly lying to her. This obviously put Sarah in a bad position! Most adults (although not all!) would easily see through this ploy, but few three-, four-, or five-year-old children would be able to. So, Sarah has to choose between saying her best friend is a liar and agreeing that Mr. Soandso did something to her that she probably doesn’t really understand. Usually, it is clear what the friendly adult authority figures wants her to say—and that she’ll be rewarded for saying it by, as above, going home to her folks, or through other praise and rewards. It doesn’t take much of such pressure to get children to tell some pretty fantastic stories.

And in the McMartin case, tell them they did. They told of being sexually abused in hot air balloons. Of being taken on airplane rides and photographed naked, then being flown back to the school. Of a great network of tunnels under the school in which abuse took place. Of seeing a horse killed with a baseball bat. Of going to graveyards and digging up corpses, where one child saw a teacher flying (Cockburn 1990). And of numerous instances of disgusting sexual abuse. But there was no physical evidence in this case. No balloons were found. No reports of anyone seeing balloons going to and from the school. No tunnels under the school. The case against all seven of the McMartin defendants rested on the uncorroborated testimony of the children. Such testimony was given after months and, as the trial dragged on, years of interviews and coaching that reinforced the children’s beliefs that they truly had been abused. Obviously the parents believed that their children had been abused, so that belief was strongly reinforced in the children’s homes as well.

The trial dragged on for seven years. It remains the longest criminal trial in American history and was, when it ended, the most expensive. At the end of the first trial, the defendants were found not guilty on a great majority of the charges. The jury hung on the remaining charges. When two defendants were retried on the charges on which the original jury could not reach a verdict, they were found not guilty on most and the jury hung on the rest. These charges were dropped within a few months. Of course, during this time, the defendants had been in prison: some for five years, some for seven. By the time the trial ended, the children were now teenagers. They had become, as noted above, absolutely convinced that they had been horribly abused when they were youngsters. They went on local TV shows with their parents to rail against the outcomes of the trials (Cockburn 1990). And, in a very sad way, they’re right. They had been horribly abused. But not by anyone at the McMartin Preschool. They had been abused by the very people who should have been least likely to abuse them: the police, the child protection workers, and the social workers. It was this group that had carefully, albeit in ignorance, created, maintained, and reinforced the false memories of abuse that these young individuals will probably carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Very sadly, the McMartin case was not unique. Following this case, similar cases sprang up around the country. As usual, there was no physical evidence of abuse. Teachers, school workers, and sometimes parents were convicted on the basis of the testimony of children—testimony elicited by the same tactics used on the McMartin children. How could such things happen in a modern, presumably sophisticated America? The sociologist Jeffrey Victor (1993) notes in his definitive coverage of the “Satanic Panic” that rumor and the mass media played major roles. He says “the ritual abuse scare is the social creation of a late twentieth-century witch hunt. There is no verifiable evidence for claims about a satanic cult ritual abuse conspiracy. However, there is abundant evidence that an increasing number of moral crusaders are creating a form of deviant behavior, which exists only in their preconceptions” (p. 117). Victor also notes that media sensationalism played a major role. The Los Angeles Times—after the McMartin trials were over, of course—was highly critical of its own reporting, noting “Pack journalism. Laziness. Superficiality” and “A competitive zeal that sends reporters off in a frantic search to be the first with the latest shocking allegation, responsible journalism be damned” (quoted in Victor 1993, p. 116). Of course, much “credit” for keeping the general “Satanism in America” panic going in the late 1980s belongs to that paragon of journalistic integrity, Geraldo Rivera, whose special on NBC titled Devil Worship : Exposing Satan’s Underground , aired on October 25, 1980 (just before Haloween!), was “watched by more people than any other television documentary in history—and “was distinguished by its almost total lack of credible information ; it substituted sensationalism and hype for accurate investigation” (Alexander 1990, p. 10).

In the annals of the repressed memory horrors, the case of Paul Ingram is one of the most bizarre and telling. Ofshe and Watters describe the case in detail in Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (1994), their excellent book on repressed memory claims. In 1988 one of Ingram’s daughters charged that she had been repeatedly raped by her father and some of his friends during her childhood. These accusations started when the daughter was at a religious camp and was told by a faith healer that she had been sexually abused by her father. Before this, she had no memories whatsoever of any abuse. The accusations grew to include claims that her father and mother were part of a satanic group responsible for the ritual killing of hundreds of babies.

Ingram was arrested and confessed to the abuse charges made against him, now by both his daughters. One might think that such a confession was proof positive that the abuse had taken place, but in fact, false confessions are rather common. In this case, however, the confessions included great detail about the crimes. Ingram was told, incorrectly, by the interrogating police officers that people often did not remember committing horrible crimes such as the ones he was charged with. A law enforcement officer himself, Ingram was very cooperative with his interrogators. They first got him to agree that his daughters wouldn’t lie about such events. This, combined with his belief in repressed memories, allowed Ingram to believe that he had committed crimes of which he had no memory. He was then instructed in the process of visualization in order to “retrieve” his repressed memories. It is not surprising that this process led to very detailed and graphic memories of the abuse his daughters charged him with. Again, it might seem that such detail would be further evidence of the reality of his memories. But the memories were too detailed. In one instance Ingram claimed to remember the time on the watch he had seen during one of the episodes, which had purportedly taken place several years earlier.

As the investigation progressed, the local prosecutor’s office called in psychologist Ofshe to consult on the case. As Ofshe (Ofshe and Watters 1994) says, he “began to suspect that Paul was not confessing to crimes he had actually committed but was self-inducing trance and imagining crimes suggested to him” (p. 172). To verify this suspicion, Ofshe conducted a clever experiment. He made up an incident of abuse (forcing the daughter and her brother to have sex while Ingram watched) that Ingram’s daughters had never alleged. He told Ingram that his daughter had made the charge. At first Ingram said he had no memory of such an event. But the next day, having used the same technique he had used to “recover” other memories, Ingram had a detailed, graphic description of the event that had never taken place.