NIGHTMARES ON MAIN STREET

As a startling number of women come forward claiming childhood memories of satanic cults and horrifying ritual abuse, mental-health and law-enforcement professionals are left stunned and divided. What sort of epidemic are they facing?

LESLIE BENNETTS

Dispatches

Flat as a washboard under the vast, empty sky, the cornfields stretch to the horizon in every direction, studded with bams and silos and the usual prosaic detritus of farm life. The road is straight as a ruler until it runs into a quiet Illinois town where small wooden homes line the streets in evenly spaced rows, neat as toy houses in a game of Monopoly.

Inside Aubrey's living room, sunlight streams through immaculate white lace curtains, and the walls are hung with sentimental Jessie Willcox Smith pictures of children at the seashore. Smiling angelically, the children's faces present a surreal contrast to the stories Aubrey, a 34-year-old businesswoman, is telling me about her childhood in a big red brick farmhouse not far away.

Some of her memories involve the routine rhythms of plowing, sowing, and harvesting the land where her family has lived since the 1860s. Other memories, however, are different—memories of the secret satanic rituals practiced by Aubrey's family on the long dark nights when her parents, grandparents, and neighbors wore robes and carried torches. These are the memories of being raped by her father and grandfather and the boy she was "married" to in a cult ceremony when she was two years old, memories of being deliberately impregnated over and over again, of premature labors artificially induced after only four or five or six months of pregnancy, and of being forced to deliver her babies in the barnyard.

These are the memories of seeing her babies sacrificed by her own family after the celebrants had drunk their blood and eaten their flesh.

Twenty years later, Aubrey still calls her babies by name: her first was Victoria Ann, bom on June 19, 1972, when Aubrey was only 13. Then there were the twins, Stephen Daniel and Jessica Marie, followed by Nicholas Steven and finally Elizabeth May. Aubrey still recalls the blue baby-doll pajamas she was wearing when her parents woke her in the middle of the night and took her down to the barn to induce labor with the twins. "They had to tie me down with ropes," she says grimly, "because 1 knew what they were going to do."

"I had an identical twin sister who was sacrificed she says in a soft voice

Aubrey says she has always remembered some things that happened in the cult, but the more horrific recollections of infanticide and ritual torture emerged only in the last couple of years, seemingly spontaneously. "1 remember a ritual that took place in our barn; I was five, and it was summer," she says. "I was wearing this little fluffy white-and-blue dress. My grandfather beckoned me to come in. He said he wanted me to lay down and he was going to make it so the babies wouldn't come out. I think I must have been given a shot or some kind of drug; something was wrong, and 1 couldn't move my legs. 1 couldn't resist. It was dark, and all of a sudden all these people stood up with torches. They were chanting something, and my grandfather was leading what appeared to be a ceremony. He took out this ornate knife from the cabinet on the wall. He held the knife up in the air. He was saying something to do with consecrating me to Satan. There was all this noise from the chanting. He held the knife up and brought it down and put it right in my vagina, like you would thrust something in. Then he pulled it out. Blood was spattering all over my stomach. This woman came over and they started putting gauze inside me. They had to carry me out of there."

As an adult, Aubrey felt an urgent need to know whether she could still have children. After performing some tests, her gynecologist told her she probably could. Aubrey says the doctor also confirmed physical evidence that she had delivered in the past. Still, although she and her husband have been married for nine years, they remain childless. "Pregnancy is connected for me with such terrible things that I can't imagine going through that again," she says.

I have already spent hours on the telephone with Aubrey; she was unfailingly logical and rational, but the stories she told me were so horrendous I have come halfway across the country to meet her, almost hoping she will betray some sign of psychosis or delusion I failed to detect on the phone. Instead, she answers my questions patiently and consistently, hour after hour. With her tasteful makeup and sensible shoes, her prim, matronly outfit given extra voltage by a bright purple blazer, she seems every bit the modem executive, lucid and well-organized. Even when I repeat questions I asked days or weeks earlier, her recollections never contradict each other, despite the immense volume of material we have discussed.

And yet the stories are so awful they virtually defy belief. At one point, Aubrey tells me about the time a young couple happened onto her family's farm when their car broke down and they were invited in for lemonade. Her mother spiked their drinks, the young man and his pregnant wife were drugged and hog-tied, and that night there was a ritual. It was May Day, and according to the satanic calendar, someone had to die.

Ordinarily articulate and extroverted, Aubrey speaks of these times with difficulty, her voice low and halting, as if she has to wrest the words out one by one. "The man was tied in the manger and stabbed many times, in the chest and other parts of the body," she says reluctantly. "The May Day ritual has a fertility dimension, and one of the things they did before he died was to cut off his penis. They did the woman the next day. We were in the shed; people were gathered around wearing white robes. My dad was in charge of the ritual. They called her Holy Mary and jeered at her, as if she were the Virgin Mary. I remember her being brutally kicked in the face. They cut her open and removed the fetus; she was only about three months along. They cut off her breasts, and they cut little slits in the comers of her eyes, by her nose, and said, 'See—she's really crying blood!' At the end my dad shot her in the head with a rifle."

Because of memories like these, Aubrey asks me not to use her real name; Aubrey is a pseudonym. Her parents are divorced, but both are still alive, and Aubrey remains terrified of her father and other cult members. "After all, they do kill people," she says. She tells me the names of the young couple who were murdered, but asks me not to print those either; it's an unusual surname. She tells me the date they were killed, 20 years ago, and adds that her sister remembers the same events. Within the last couple of years, Aubrey has also tried telling law-enforcement authorities, but to no avail. "I went to the state police; they wanted me to take a psychological test and pay for it myself," she says bitterly. "They said it was too long ago and they had too much else to do to look into it."

"I am willing to admit that a few clever, cunning people might be getting away with this," he says.

It also proves surprisingly difficult for a civilian to check. Back in the early 1970s, when these people were allegedly killed, there was no centralized national listing of missing persons, according to Kenneth Lanning, the F.B.I.'s leading expert on ritual abuse. Since the mid-70s the F.B.I. has maintained a list of missing persons in a computerized file called the National Crime Information Center. However, it can be accessed only by law-enforcement personnel working on an officially sanctioned case, not by journalists or other private citizens. Lanning also points out that adults have the right to disappear if they want to, so law-enforcement agencies need to suspect foul play or some other cause for concern before a missing person is put on the N.C.I.C. list. The young couple Aubrey remembers may never have made the list. Moreover, since Aubrey doesn't know where they were from, one can't simply call their hometown police department to see if anyone by that name disappeared back then.

Given the context for this particular tale of murder, it is hardly surprising that police were skeptical. Indeed, if Aubrey's stories were an isolated event, one might dismiss them despite her apparent credibility. But Aubrey is not the only one with such memories. All over the country, what seems to be an astonishing number of women are coming forward with similar stories of satanic cults and ritual abuse. The reports are being made by all kinds of womI en—different socioeconomic backgrounds, different ethnicities, different religions, even different races. I personally have interviewed dozens of alleged ritual-abuse survivors—in Maine, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Colorado, Wyoming, California—none of whom know each other and all of whom related similarly harrowing accounts. Over and over again, women told me about being forced to kill and eat babies at satanic ceremonies, about seeing children dismembered and boiled and burned, about being drugged, tortured with electric cattle prods, branded with branding irons, raped with crucifixes and animal carcasses. They told me about being buried in coffins with live snakes and dead bodies, about being tied to crosses and hung upside down for days, about being photographed for child pornography and caged by satanic child-prostitution rings that farmed out their tiny victims for further abuse.

By most accounts, tales like these began to emerge in therapists' offices in considerable numbers during the mid1980s. Since then the phenomenon has become so prevalent it has stunned social-service workers of every kind. 1 learned of it nearly two years ago from Dr. Anne Bauer, a New Hampshire psychiatrist who had never heard of ritual abuse when her clients began talking about it during the late 80s. So far, eight of them have claimed they were ritually abused. "You get one patient who starts to tell you about human sacrifices and having been raised as a 'breeder' and seeing her babies killed in these horrendous ceremonies and you think, This patient is psychotic," Dr. Bauer told me. "Then you get another patient from a different community who doesn't know the first patient, and she starts telling you the same kind of stories, and you think, This is a weird coincidence. And then you get a third patient, and a fourth one, and a fifth one—and finally you have to say to yourself, I'd better find out what's going on here."

Would that it were so easy. As a subject for serious scientific inquiry, ritual abuse is a field in its infancy. No one even agrees on its definition; obviously there are many forms of sadistic abuse, or even ritualistic abuse (including some kinds of sadomasochistic sex performed in a ritualistic fashion), that do not constitute what has come to be called ritual abuse, the term most often used to describe the alleged practices of satanic cults. The dimensions of the phenomenon are also impossible to assess; no one is keeping a nationwide tally. But the anecdotal evidence beginning to accumulate is staggering.

Monarch Resources, a California referral service for survivors of sexual abuse, currently receives 20 to 30 calls a day. More than half these callers describe themselves as ritual-abuse survivors; this amounts to more than 5,000 per year. In Maine, Gayle Woodsum founded Looking Up, a support program for incest survivors, in 1983. By the time she left the organization eight years later, it was serving 15,000 people a year, 40 percent of whom reported they were dealing with ritualistic or cult-related abuse. Last year alone, Child Help U.S.A., a national hot line, received 1,741 calls it categorized as ritual-abuse cases (although that figure doesn't include people with other problems like multiple-personality disorder that would be classified differently even if ritual abuse was involved). Dr. Bennett Braun, medical director of the Dissociative Disorders Program and In-Patient Unit at the Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie, Illinois, estimates that he has seen close to 200 alleged ritual-abuse survivors since the mid-1980s. Dr. Walter Young, medical director of the National Treatment Center for Multiple Personality and Dissociation in Torrance, California, has treated or consulted on more than 100 ritual-abuse cases.

During the course of an 18-month investigation, I talked to scores of mentalhealth professionals all over the country. It seems that virtually anywhere you go you will hear about ritual abuse, even from those who argue that there is no such thing. "Kansas City is up to its neck in it; I've seen three cases in the last week, ' ' says Jan Larson, a psychiatric social worker at the Menorah Medical Center in Kansas City who doesn't believe any of the reports. "It's an epidemic." Nor is the phenomenon limited to the United States. In Denver, Justus Unlimited, a nonprofit referral and resource service, receives an average of 20 calls a day, virtually all involving some form of alleged ritual abuse—more than 7,000 calls a year. "But we also get mail from ritual-abuse survivors all over the world," reports Teri Todd, the co-founder. "We hear from people from Australia, New Zealand, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Israel, Canada. . ." Harder data is gradually beginning to emerge as well. One Dutch psychologist has just published a study of 71 multiple-personality patients, at least a third of whom appear to have been ritually abused. "Our personal opinion is that this is much more widespread than we would like to believe," says another Dutch psychologist, who asks not to be named but acknowledges having seen ritualabuse patients, as have his associates at a regional mental-health center. "Also, I recently received the first two reports about this from German colleagues," he adds. "They were not looking for it, but they got it. I wish it were not true, but I cannot deny the evidence we get from our patients."

It was May Day, and according to the satanic calendar, someone had to die.

The voices of adult patients are increasingly joined by parents who believe their children have been ritually abused in day-care centers and pre-schools, as in California's infamous McMartin case, which began in 1983. Starting the same year, the University of New Hampshire's Family Research Laboratory did a nationwide study of 270 day-care abuse cases involving more than 1,600 children; 13 percent of the cases included ritual abuse. Believe the Children, a Chicago-based parents' organization, held its first national conference at the beginning of April. The organization's president, Beth Vargo, says Believe the Children receives 2,000 calls a year, approximately 500 of which are from adults claiming to be ritual-abuse survivors.

But it is the children's reports that many people find most compelling. "When you hear a child relating things there's no way a child could have known, no way a therapist could have installed in their mind, then you say, 'Something's wrong here,' " says Jerry Simandl, a Chicago police officer who says he investigates ritual abuse on his own time and has worked with more than 200 adult survivors in the last five years. "How can a child fantasize how a crematory is laid out? When a kid draws it out plain as day and I go and it all checks out—you don't see that in monster movies. How does a four-year-old describe this to you? I'm talking about detail."

r Simandl is one of many law-enforcement authorities, therapists, and socialservice workers who believe f passionately in the existence of ritual abuse, based largely on their judgment that there are too many survivors and their testimony is too compelling to be dismissed. But an equally vocal group argues that the whole phenomenon is a sham, and the result has been an extraordinarily acrimonious controversy affecting a wide range of professional disciplines. Ritual abuse has hit the mentalhealth community like a bomb, prompting bitter debate and polarizing opinions even as it has spawned a whole new therapeutic specialty, along with a burgeoning network of support groups and survivors' services. "I think it's a potential catastrophe, particularly for the child-abuse movement," says Dr. Frank Putnam, chief of the Unit on Dissociative Disorders at the National Institute of Mental Health. "This challenges the credibility of both adult and child abuse victims, which has been hard-won. If the credibility of this is shown to be suspect, the credibility of everything else becomes suspect. They all get tarred by the same brush."

A similar schism has developed in law-enforcement circles; although many police departments scoff at ritual abuse, others hire consultants to give seminars and training programs to help officers deal with reported cases. Even when a cop becomes known as a cult specialist, however, his own police department often treats his work with considerable ambivalence. One Massachusetts state trooper tells me he was originally asked to look into ritual abuse by a local district attorney, and he continues to investigate at every opportunity, often on his own time. His superiors "really don't want to acknowledge that I'm doing this," he says, "but whenever there's a homicide, like the 12-year-old girl who was killed and where the murder suspect was the next-door neighbor who was a deacon in the church, and there was a lot of speculation about satanic involvement—the first thing they say is 'You're going down there.' "

But the bitterest divisions are on the home front. For every adult survivor who says she's been ritually abused, someone is implicated. Afraid to confront their families, many survivors simply cut off contact with no explanation. Parents who have been accused almost always say it's not true; their alleged victims usually perceive them as being "in denial.'' Sometimes siblings corroborate a survivor's memories, but in other cases they react with outrage, siding with their parents and fervently proclaiming the family's innocence.

Whatever one's opinion on ritual abuse, it involves questions of enormous importance and complexity. The larger issue of ' 'false-memory syndrome,'' which is now being raised in conjunction with all forms of childhood abuse, has become as controversial as ritual abuse itself, and its ramifications strike at the heart of the assumptions underlying the entire field of psychiatry. No one denies the creative, neurotic, and amazingly powerful potential of the human mind, both to suppress traumatic memories and to fabricate. But the task of distinguishing between genuine memories and fantasies that only seem to be based on real-life events has become central to any understanding of sexual, physical, or emotional abuse. And while the child-protection movement has gained in numbers and clout in recent years, a growing backlash has already spawned a national advocacy group called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which was formed last year in Philadelphia to argue that many families are being ripped apart by untrue assertions of ritual and sexual abuse.

According to Pamela Freyd, its executive director, the F.M.S. Foundation received 2,846 calls in its first year, of which 15 percent involved ritual abuse. The organization's first national conference drew nearly 500 family members, professionals, and media representatives to Valley Forge in April for a three-day program called "Memory and Reality: Emerging Crisis.'' The presentations bore titles like "Making Monsters: An American Tragedy" and "Therapist Zeal and Pseudomemories." Many F.M.S. advocates enthusiastically predict a blizzard of lawsuits as parents file charges against the therapists they accuse of having led their adult children into retrieving unreliable or fabricated memories.

A growing contingent of mental-health professionals are also convinced that some of their peers bear a major share of responsibility for the ritual-abuse phenomenon. "It's a national scandal," says Jan Larson. "With all the satanic ritual-abuse cases, there's not a shred of evidence. I don't think it exists. I think it's hysterical contamination, but it's making people sick, making money, and hurting families terribly." Larson is one of many disbelievers who deride ritual abuse as a form of mass hysteria promulgated by sensationalistic tabloid television shows, trashy best-sellers of dubious provenance, and irresponsible therapists out to make a quick buck on the latest "disease of the week" fad. While debunkers observe varying degrees of political correctness, many seem to see ritual abuse as a disgusting fairy tale concocted by a bunch of hysterical women seeking attention.

"It is difficult to avoid exposure to stimulating material that can contaminate the memories."

Most adults claiming to be ritualabuse survivors are indeed female, even though both boys and girls are supposedly abused in pre-schools as well as family cults. The usual explanation offered by psychiatrists is that traumatized women tend to turn up in the mental-health system while men with similar histories act out, often in violent ways, and end up in jail. However, men alleging ritual abuse believe their numbers will grow. "There are more of us out there," attests Daniel Ryder (pseudonym of the social worker who wrote Breaking the Circle of Satanic Ritual Abuse). "I think it's like incest and sexual abuse: women were the first to emerge, and then more and more men's stories started to surface."

The incest analogy comes up often. After Freud repudiated his patients' accounts of incestuous experiences as fantasy, it was nearly a century before the medical profession began to take such reports seriously again. The sexual abuse of children is now acknowledged to be shockingly widespread at every level of society, and many therapists believe there will be a similar evolution in attitudes toward ritual abuse. Domestic violence provides another frequent analogy; a generation ago, it wasn't even identified as a problem.

At the moment, however, any consensus on ritual abuse seems remote, despite intermittent reminders that the fabric of American society is far darker and more complex than many people would like to admit. Americans have always accepted the existence of bizarre religious sects in their midst, most of them representing some form of Christianity. Many cults are known to have practiced some of the brainwashing techniques and forms of child abuse alleged by sataniccult survivors. But in general it is only when a self-appointed messiah leads his flock into mass suicide, as Jim Jones did at Jonestown, or mass murder, as Charles Manson did, or armed defiance of law-enforcement authorities, as David Koresh did in Waco, Texas, that social tolerance evaporates. "Religious insanity is as American as apple pie, Disneyland and the Ku Klux Klan," Newsday remarked recently, citing such historical precedents as the Reverend Thomas Lake Harris, who founded a colony in upstate New York in the 19th century; Harris believed that a race of tiny fairies inhabited women's breasts, with kings and queens in the left breast and priests and priestesses in the right.

Trailblazing thinkers like Reverend Harris notwithstanding, the religious fanatics who proved dangerous generally did so under the aegis of more conventional doctrines. According to Kenneth Lanning, a special agent with the Behavioral Science Unit at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Virginia, "The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus, Muhammed, and other mainstream religion than has ever been committed in the name of Satan.''

The people assembled in a conference room at the Holiday Inn in North Haven, Connecticut, on a sunny day last February could have been any group of professionals listening to a lecture by an earnest man in suit and tie. His slide show, however, was chilling: one drawing after another of sinister hooded figures performing satanic rituals. All the drawings were produced by ritual-abuse survivors in therapy with the speaker, Dr. David Sakheim, a clinical psychologist who recently published Out of Darkness: Exploring Satanism & Ritual Abuse.

Little more than a year earlier, I had attended a similar workshop in Danvers, Massachusetts, sponsored by Community Program Innovations, a training agency for human-service workers. Although 127 people came to hear about ritual abuse, few seemed to have encountered it personally. "I feel like I should know more about it, because maybe I'm missing some things," said a therapist from Worcester. But in Connecticut the situation was dramatically different. Two Blue Cross case-management representatives told me they're seeing a growing number of catastrophic long-term cases involving ritual abuse. Ruth Schofield, a marriage and family therapist from Stamford, said three ritual-abuse cases have emerged among her clients; a clinical social worker from New Haven and a nurse from Hartford Hospital are finding them as well. Bruce Bellm, an abuse investigator for the state, had received allegations that a certain retarded person was being poisoned in preparation for a satanic sacrifice; he had to decide whether the state should intervene. A pastor from a small Baptist church in North Haven was seeing indications of ritual abuse among the incest survivors she counsels. Almost everyone seemed bemused and troubled.

"Nothing in my training prepared me for this," said Dr. Leslie Weiss, a New Haven clinical psychologist with four alleged ritual-abuse survivors among her clients. "One patient is a high-functioning mental-health professional who presented with depression and relational difficulties, and now we're uncovering this morass of stuff. These people are talking about a lot of physical and sexual abuse. I have one person who's recovered memories of participating in three murders and witnessing another. I don't go looking for this, but it's out there.

"One patient tells you about human sacrifices and these horrendous ceremonies and you think, This patient is psychotic. Then you get another. Then you get a third and a fourth..."

It's been coming in all along, but I didn't realize it. I've probably seen 15 or 20 of these patients over the last 19 years. Before, I missed the dissociation, the hidden allusions, the people who didn't respond to treatment. What I've learned to do is to notice it." Dr. Weiss scoffed at the idea that therapists obsessed with ritual abuse are somehow implanting false memories in their patients. "I don't make this stuff up," she said. "I'm not that kinky. Most of us are just amazed by what we're hearing."

Up at the podium, Dr. Sakheim was trying to bring some order to the chaos. Like many analysts, he divides most satanic activity into four categories. The "self-styled" Satanists are individuals £ or groups of loners who may be quite isolated, like Richard Ramirez, the California serial killer known as the "Night Stalker." The "dabblers" include teenagers and youth gangs experimenting with Satanism, often as a form of rebellion. The "traditional" Satanists include public practitioners like Anton LaVey and his Church of Satan or Michael Aquino and the Temple of Set, who worship Satan but may not break any laws. "No one really disagrees much about the first three groups," Sakheim said. The fourth category is the controversial one: intergenerational satanic cults, often involving other members of a given community that practice criminal abuse.

It is this type of cult that has generated the flood of reports from alleged survivors. "I've seen victims who claim they're the 12th generation," one therapist tells me. "They seem to be very proud of this genealogy." Many survivors think the cults they grew up in were composed mainly of local families, although they may have had loose ties to groups in other areas. The more extreme conspiracy theorists believe in the existence of an international network of highly structured, well-organized satanic cults that use sophisticated brainwashing techniques and monitor members wherever they go, activating decades-old programming whenever they try to break free.

Historians tend to take a measured view. "There are such vast numbers of reports from different civilizations of people practicing these rituals, of sacrificing animals, sacrificing children, having sexual orgies, and so on—so why shouldn't these things be happening now?" says Jeffrey Burton Russell, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "I believe these things occur, but on an isolated basis. How isolated, I just don't know. I know personally that terrible things have been perpetrated in the name of Satanism. A colleague of mine has a country place right down the road from a bunch of Satanists, and what they did to his cat is so horrible I don't even want to describe it to you."

'Manic-depressive, borderline personality, obsessive-compulsive, depressive—I got about five different diagnoses before I started to see Dr. Greaves," says Tiffany Spencer (pseudonym), a 36-year-old homemaker who lives in Augusta, Georgia. Dr. George Greaves, Tiffany's therapist, has put us in touch, at her request, because he believes that she is credible, despite the incredible nature of her memories and the fact that she formerly suffered from multiple-personality disorder.

"I was adopted when I was 5, and I was in and out of therapy since I was 12 years old," Tiffany explains. "I had no memories of my early childhood at all; after I was adopted I had a fairly stable life, and I developed one personality that stayed out all the time, until I was an adult. All the memories were kept from me; I was totally amnesiac to any of my 'alters,' " she adds, referring to the nine separate personalities that eventually emerged. When she first started to remember ritual abuse, she was terrified. ''I thought I was crazy," she admits. ''I thought I was totally losing my mind. I thought I had to be imagining all this. I had no idea what my memories meant. I had never heard of ritual abuse; I had never read anything about it, and I didn't even know it existed. I thought people were not capable of doing these things to anybody." But after years of living with those memories, she reacts fiercely to the idea that she might be mistaken about what happened to her. "I know what I went through," she says. ''I know what I saw. I know what I experienced."

Her body alone provides some form of corroboration; Tiffany has always had a baffling array of unexplained scars and other injuries. "I have scars on my ankles from being tied, and scars on my wrists," she says. "I have cigarette bums on my arms and stomach. My left thumb was cut through all the way down to the bone during one of the rituals; they were threatening to cut my finger off. I had surgery in the third grade to repair it. The first rape was when I was two; my father had molested me before that, but this was the first actual penetration, and he cut my vagina with a knife in order to achieve that. I have the scars. I was also branded on the inside of my right thigh. It's about the size of a nickel, about an inch from the pubic area. It's a circular brand with little dots in it; it was burned on. I remember a metal branding tool. The children in the cult were prostituted out at times, and the brand was probably to make sure that wherever I went it was known who I belonged to."

Tiffany's acute, chronic sinus problems recently led her to a surgeon, who said that severe injury was the only possible cause for what he described as a "boxer's nose." When he operated, he was so appalled by what he found that as soon as he came out of surgery he accosted Tiffany's husband. "Who the hell did this to her?" the doctor demanded angrily. Tiffany says she knows exactly who did it to her. That memory is the worst one of all.

"I had an identical twin sister who was sacrificed in a ritual on Halloween when we were four years old," she says, so softly I can scarcely hear her. "That was the one time I tried to fight against what was happening; my father punched me and broke my nose. They had put my sister on an altar in a bam; we lived in a small rural town, and the rituals took place in bams and basements. My father was the one who sacrificed my sister. He was wearing a red robe, and the others wore black robes and the children wore white. He took a knife and cut her chest and took her heart out, and that was when I started fighting. I refused to eat it, and I was punched in the nose. My sister and I were very close, and I had been isolated from her for two weeks before this; they put me alone in the basement, and I was given some bread and water. I think, in retrospect, my parents wanted me to be very weak at the time. After this happened, my sister was dismembered and put in a box, and my father took me to bury her in an unmarked grave out in the middle of nowhere. He told me if I ever told anyone I would join her in a box just like this one."

"This challenges the credibility of abuse victims. If the credibility of this is shown to be suspect, they all get tarred by the same brush."

During the ensuing years, Tiffany sometimes thought she remembered having had a twin sister, and when she was 17 she tracked down her birth mother. "It was really strange; I felt afraid of her," Tiffany says. "I had a real bad feeling, like it just wasn't safe." Still, she asked her mother whether she had ever had a twin sister. "She said, 'Yes, you did,' " Tiffany recalls. "At one point during that day she told me my sister had died of heart problems when she was four weeks old. Later the same day, she said she had died when she was four months old. But she said she didn't know anything about where my sister was buried or how it had been handled." Tiffany laughs bitterly. "At least she got the 'four' right."

But Tiffany has never confronted her birth mother about the cult. "It's really a scary thing to think about doing," she says hesitantly. "I'm just afraid my children might be harmed. ' ' She has reason to be afraid. Through all the years, through three marriages, three name changes, and five moves from one community to another, she says, "I have had phone calls checking up on me. On Halloween, the winter solstice, Easter—it's always on a Satanic holiday. No matl ter where I was, they'd \ find me. It's different I voices, but it's always 1 a male who calls and K says, 'I'm keeping up H with where you are. ■ I know what you're ^ doing. I know all about you.' "

Abuse survivors are not the only ones battling fear. One therapist came home to find his house locked, as usual, but with a curious tableau in the front hall. "Here's what was on the floor," he says. "A white dish from my cupboard, with an upside-down pentagram made with black Magic Marker, with an upside-down triangle that pointed at me as I entered the door. It was made of arrows, as in metal target arrows; they were arranged from feathers right to points left. In the middle of the dish was a green candle burned down to a nub. Since then I have been told that the upside-down pentagram and the upside-down triangle are signs of the occult; when the arrows are going to the left, things are closing down. I am also told that green is the candle of life, and that when the green candle bums down, your life is gone."

Dana Mitchell, a retired detective sergeant from Indiana, was working on a ritual-abuse case in which there were allegations of ongoing cult activity when he received a letter that said, "Back off or you won't be here anymore." On another occasion, a message on his answering machine specified a case in a different state and told him that if he didn't drop it "you'll find yourself waking up dead some morning."

Those who don't believe in ritual abuse maintain there must be other explanations for such threats. Some even suggest that "cult cops" and ritual-abuse therapists might fabricate threats in order to validate their point of view. Others acknowledge that such threats may have been made, but probably by disturbed patients; an individual with multiple-personality disorder can act in the guise of a hostile "alter" while other personalities remain unaware of what the alter has done.

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But in the absence of proof, paranoia flourishes, and it has inflicted serious damage on the credibility of some of the more extreme conspiracy theorists. The Los Angeles County Commission for Women started a task force on ritual abuse five years ago that quickly became known for its expertise. In recent months, however, members have claimed that dozens of ritual-abuse survivors and therapists were being deliberately poisoned with pesticide. Some of the alleged victims were diagnosed by a local acupuncturist but refused to see medical doctors, submit to laboratory tests, or report their suspicions to the police, according to Stephanie Sheppard, a task-force member who publicly criticized the group. "Anybody with any sense says, 'These people are a bunch of wackos,' " Sheppard concludes.

Others defend the claims of widespread poisoning by Satanists. "I used to tell people, 'They may make death threats, they may put a dead animal on your doorstep, but they're not going to hurt you,' " says Dr. Catherine Gould, a clinical psychologist on the task force. "But now I tell people, 'You should at least be aware of the symptoms of this kind of poisoning.' "

Three years ago, Robin Mewes was a college freshman whose mother described her as "a straight-A student and a model daughter." The Meweses lived in a small town near Terre Haute, Indiana; Mary Mewes worked as a cashier for a utility company, her husband, Bob, was farm manager at a local bank, and both were Methodist Sunday-school teachers and Bible leaders. The Meweses seemed the most conventional of families until Robin told them she had been having recurring nightmares. "She had come to the conclusion she had been sexually abused by her kindergarten principal," recalls Mary Mewes. "She also told us she had been bulimic and anorexic since junior high school."

The Meweses immediately arranged for Robin to go into therapy. Before long, horrifying allegations began to proliferate. "It was made known to us that Robin had been satanically abused," Mrs. Mewes says. "First it was the kindergarten principal, then it evolved into the minister, the baby-sitters, and good friends of ours. We couldn't believe it. The counselor said that only someone who had truly been satanically abused could come up with these things Robin was coming up with. As the therapy went on, her memories became more bizarre—the eating of flesh, the severing of body parts, the killing of babies, the eating of babies, throwing them in deep ravines, satanic masks, all kinds of things. ' '

"Some people don t know what they re accused of. They've gotten a phone call saying, 'You know what you did.' "

The Meweses say the therapist gave Robin a lot of assistance in "remembering." "She would say, 'Do you know what room that happened in?' and Robin would hesitate," Mrs. Mewes explains. "She would say, 'Could it have been the cafeteria?' and Robin would say, 'Yes, that's right.' " But the therapist soon convinced the Meweses they all might be in danger from Satanists. "She had Bob and I getting paranoid about everything—believing our telephones were tapped, being afraid that Robin would be kidnapped," Mrs. Mewes says. "Then she started putting us against one another in family sessions. She would say, 'Do you remember letting Robin be abused?' I would say, 'No,' and she would say, 'Give it time; it will come.' Robin started withdrawing from us. She would flinch when we touched her, and barricade her bedroom at night. One day we came home and found Robin beating her head against the wall. That was our indication that Robin was not getting better—Robin was getting worse."

However, Robin's memories seemed to receive some corroboration after the therapist announced that her 15-yearold brother, Bill, needed counseling, too. She plied Robin with cult-related material such as Michelle Remembers, a popular autobiographical account, Rosemary's Baby, and a satanic bible, and eventually Bill also began to think he . might have been ' ritually abused. Still, the therapist's methods made him uncomfortable. "When Robin wasn't remembering up to what she wanted her to, I would throw out stuff, just trying to be helpful to my sister," Bill recalls. "You'd have what the therapist called a memory, but what I thought of as just making up stuff."

According to Bill, the therapist insisted that his mother had a split personality and a long history of abusing her children, but Bill was troubled by his own uncertainty as well as by the escalating allegations. The therapist also told them that if things got really bad at home she would arrange for them to be taken away and "hidden somehow," Bill reports.

He says that for him the breaking point came when the therapist announced he was being groomed as the Antichrist, a deduction she arrived at because of the numbers involved in his birth date.

But it was too late for Robin, who had long since dropped out of college. The Meweses grew so concerned they set up an appointment for her to be evaluated by another counselor. The next day she disappeared. Then friends reported they had seen Robin that very day at a Terre Haute fast-food restaurant—accompanied by the therapist. "But everything I asked her, she would say, 'I do not know.

I cannot say,' " Mrs. Mewes says.

The Meweses haven't seen their daughter since she vanished in September of 1990. Four months later, the therapist left her job at a local mental-health facility and dropped out of sight as well—but not before implicating the Meweses and other families. "She contacted the state police and said I was a Satanist and it was not safe to have me walking the streets," Mrs. Mewes says. "At the time, we were unaware that she was under investigation for filing so many reports of satanic abuse." Like all the other families reported by the-same therapist, the Meweses have since been cleared of any wrongdoing. They have hired nine different lawyers and two private investigators, but nobody has been able to find Robin; they took a second mortgage on their house to pay for their search, but every lead has turned into a dead end. Mr. Mewes has leukemia, and Mrs. Mewes says the family can't afford to do anything more. They blame the entire tragedy on their former therapist.

The Meweses have a lot of company these days, in both their grief and their conviction they were victimized by a crazy counselor, and they have found some solace in commiserating with other distraught families they met through the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. "About a third of the people we hear from don't even know what they've been accused of," reports Pamela Freyd. "They've been cut off in some way; they've gotten a phone call saying, 'You know what you did,' but they haven't a clue. We view these as memory issues, not abuse issues. There's no way we can tell the truth or falsity of any one story, but we can look at patterns. The techniques for recovering repressed memories bring forth all kinds of stories, and one has to be very cautious in rushing to judgment. You either have to buy into a conspiracy of such proportions that it's mind-boggling or you have to stop and say, 'Hey, what's going on?' and look for alternative explanations—and there are reasonable alternative explanations."

Dr. George Ganaway, a psychiatrist and director of the Ridgeview Center for Dissociative Disorders in Smyrna, Georgia, has written and lectured extensively on alternative hypotheses for ritualabuse claims. He points out that this patient population is a suggestible one that may be highly susceptible to influence from outside sources like books, articles, sermons and lectures, movies and television shows, as well as the personal testimony of other alleged cult survivors. "It is difficult for even the most socially isolated individual to avoid exposure to stimulating material that has the potential for contaminating the memories of the individual's personal life story," Dr. Ganaway told the American Psychological Association's annual convention in 1991. When patients protest that they had never read or heard about ritual abuse before they started retrieving their own memories, whether during or outside of therapy, Dr. Ganaway has a ready explanation: "source amnesia," in which "the person doesn't remember they've read a particular book, seen a particular movie or TV show, or heard a particular story from another patient," but has nonetheless "absorbed" the material from some outside source rather than experienced it directly.

Some skeptics even suggest that the entire ritual-abuse phenomenon might be traced back to Michelle Remembers, published in 1980; by the mid-80s it could theoretically have spawned the eruption of survivors' reports. But other observers say they were hearing about satanic activity in the 1970s. "By 1980 I had heard a couple dozen such accounts, maybe more," says Dr. Richard Kluft, director of the Dissociative Disorders Program at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital. "They came from all sorts of patients. Some seemed very credible, some seemed totally impossible to believe, and most were in between." Dr. Kluft, who is also a clinical professor of psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine, found it difficult to dismiss such reports entirely after he consulted on a multiple-personality case in the mid-1970s. The woman claimed that some of her "alters" were involved in a satanic cult, and one of her professors grew concerned enough to try to check out her story. "The professor said he had followed her one night and had come upon a bunch of people getting on robes around a campfire," Dr. Kluft says. "They had doused the fire and chased him away."

Consensus on ritual abuse seems remote despite reminders like Waco that the fabric of society is darker than we imagine.

Mental patients have always ranted about Satan, of course, but until recently the more lurid tales were simply ignored. "I've talked to staff at psychiatric hospitals who told me people have been saying this stuff for years, but in the past they would have assumed they were schizophrenic and put them on medication," Dr. Sakheim reports.

This scenario offers one possible clue to the seemingly unprecedented emergence of ritual-abuse reports in the mid1980s; maybe the evidence had been there all along, but no one noticed. Many abuse survivors do have long psychiatric histories, including repeated hospitalizations. Experts who don't believe in ritual abuse often use such histories to cast doubt on their testimony, while believers counter that the kind of traumatic abuse these women describe would be very likely to produce characteristic symptoms like multiple-personality disorder. Furthermore, not everyone fits the profile. Out in Illinois, two different therapists told Aubrey she couldn't possibly have suffered ritual abuse, because her life seemed so well put together. "I was atypical with my presenting symptoms," Aubrey says wryly. "I didn't drink, I didn't have a serious eating disorder, I wasn't in a sick relationship, I wasn't a multiple—my life was very functional, and I had a history of being functional."

However, she did suffer from chronic headaches, and when doctors were unable to find any physical cause Aubrey went into therapy. "Five days after I first remembered my grandfather molesting me, my headaches vanished," she says. The fact that women in large numbers have turned to therapy and self-help groups over the last 20 years may suggest another reason for the ritual-abuse phenomenon. "Because of the feminist movement, it became acceptable to talk about not only rape but incest," says Ruth Schofield. "I think ritual abuse became visible in the 1980s because permission to talk about it has been given."

But determining the reliability of anyone's memories is difficult, and the problem has been compounded by the increasing use of therapeutic hypnosis. Memories retrieved under hypnosis "are likely to contain a combination of both fact and fantasy," Dr. Ganaway warns, despite the fact that "hypnosis increases the subject's confidence in the veracity of both correct and incorrect recalled material." This argument carries little weight with survivors who have not undergone hypnosis. "Most of my memories have come when I was driving my car—or scaring myself half to death in the middle of the night," observes Aubrey. "I've remembered every way there is: nightmares, abreactions, body memories, flashbacks—I would be driving down the road in winter and I'd look over and it would be summer and I'd see the boy I was married to in the cult, mowing the grass."

Another explanation might be what therapists call "screen memories" that cover up "less tolerable memories," as Dr. Ganaway explains. Debunkers also talk about "urban legends" (like stories about alligators in the sewer system), suggesting that the entire ritualabuse phenomenon resembles a bizarre but unfounded rumor passed along by dissociative patients and their therapists. Dr. Sakheim offers additional possibilities: some ritual-abuse survivors may be malingering, and others could have Munchausen's syndrome, a rare disorder in which patients pretend they are suffering from all kinds of ailments.

Obviously, no single alternative hypothesis can explain every ritual-abuse case; collectively, however, they might. It's probably too soon to make a responsible judgment. But all arguments by disbelievers ultimately come down to the question of evidence, and the F.B.I.'s Kenneth Lanning is invariably cited. "I have consulted on hundreds and hundreds of these cases in the last 10 years," Lanning says. A decade of investigation has failed to turn up any physical evidence of the kinds of intergenerational cult activity alleged by survivors, leading Lanning to become the foremost proponent of the "Where are the bodies?" argument.

"I am willing to admit that a few clever, cunning people might be getting away with this," he says, "but the problem when you're dealing with this from a national perspective is that we're not talking about a couple of people in rural Iowa. When you total them up, what you now have is thousands of people killing tens of thousands of people, and there is no evidence. If this was going on to the extent some people say it is, even if the police were doing nothing, somebody would have stumbled on it. You can't do what these people are alleging and get away with it. There either are alternative explanations or, if there aren't, we are dealing with the greatest crime conspiracy in the history of mankind, by a thousandfold."

I ask Lanning whether he thinks our society would be so quick to repudiate such accounts if thousands of men were offering them instead of women. Lanning insists it wouldn't make any difference. I then ask him whether he too has difficulty disbelieving all the women he has interviewed, since I, like so many therapists, remain deeply troubled by how credible some of them seem. To my surprise, he admits he has never talked to a ritual-abuse survivor. It turns out that, through all the years he has been investigating this phenomenon, his contact has been solely with other law-enforcement professionals and with therapists; he has never gone to the source of these reports, the women themselves. (Several weeks later Lanning revised his story to say that he had spoken with "several dozen" survivors on an unofficial basis.)

But the evidence question remains an undeniably thorny one. Ritual-abuse survivors consistently offer the same explanations for the seeming absence of bodies. Cults often include the town mortician, they say, and bodies are disposed of in crematories. Sometimes cult members sneak into a graveyard where a hole has already been dug in preparation for a funeral; the Satanists dig a deeper hole, dump the body, cover it up, and the next day a coffin is buried on top of it. No one ever knows the grave contains an extra body. When infants are sacrificed, particularly the fetuses harvested from "breeders," there isn't much left after cult members have drunk their blood and eaten some of their flesh. "A fouror five-month-old fetus isn't very big," one woman points out grimly. Many cult survivors seem to have grown up in rural areas where satanic activity was easy to hide; for example, Aubrey's family's farm is very isolated, and the only neighbors for miles around are relatives. In more populous places, sentries would allegedly be posted to make sure no one happened upon outdoor ceremonies.

Aubrey remains terrified of cult members. "After all, they do kill people," she says.

Some authorities scoff at such explanations, but others worry that the failure to find forensic evidence reflects on law enforcement as much as on ritual-abuse survivors. "We've got confessed killers on death row throughout the country who have said they killed because they worshiped Satan," says Larry Jones, a police lieutenant in Boise, Idaho. "We've got child molesters who have confessed that their satanic belief system places a positive value on torturing children. And people like Ken Lanning say there's no evidence. Any detective knows there are unsolved murders in every jurisdiction around the country. People disappear and never come home, or they disappear and 10 years later we find a decomposed body. Lanning says if satanic crime occurs, then it's the greatest criminal conspiracy in the history of the world. I think he hit it right on the head."

But official attitudes can play a significant role in the outcome of a given investigation. In Rupert, Idaho, the body ■ of an infant girl was discovr ered three and a half years ago in a remote rural area near a reservoir. She had been "dismembered, disemboweled, possibly skinned, and burned," [ according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. "Both hands were missing. So was the right arm, at the shoulder. The abdominal organs had been cut out, leaving only the lungs and a portion of the upper heart chamber. The body had been placed in a metal drum on its back, clothed, before being torched with gasoline."

The gruesome discovery prompted rumors of satanic activity that seemed to be borne out when a nine-year-old boy who had come to the attention of childprotection authorities described having seen a baby sacrificed and burned. "They put me on the table with a Bible," the boy said. "The devil is there. They pray to the devil. The devil makes these people hurt me. They hurt me so bad. They hurt me in the private parts.

. . . They sacrifice all animals. They even sacrifice babies. . . . The babies don't have any clothes on. They just put them on the table and pretty soon the devil makes a fire and they are on fire. It's a sacrifice."

Much controversy ensued, but the investigation was concluded when authorities decided the boy must have fabricated his stories based on tales he had been read from a Jehovah's Witness children's Bible. Despite the lack of evidence to support it, an elaborate scenario was also devised to explain the real-life infant whose body had been found. She was probably a baby "who died of pneumonia and then was discarded and set on fire by a scared family illegally in the country to work the Idaho crops," according to an investigator quoted in the Los Angeles Times. "Predatory animals could have mutilated the body."