Part Four

Contagion

Wicked Game

Thursday, February 28, 1980

Ican feel the Devil right here in the media center,” said the woman, her eyes sweeping the library walls. “Some of these books have got to be suspect.”

Mike Tunnell opened his mouth, then hesitated. What could he say? The Devil? Really? Does he have late fees?

But Tunnell knew better than to joke. These people were out for blood, and all because of a game. Where was a Ring of Invisibility when you needed one?

Heber City was thirty minutes northwest of Pleasant Grove and resembled a dairy commercial: breathtaking mountains, sparkling water, endless fields of lush green alfalfa. In Heber, people farmed, went to sleep, farmed some more, and went to church. When they needed something that wasn’t sold on Main Street, they usually drove to Provo.

For kids who didn’t like farming (or religion, or sports), life in Heber City was something to endure. If you were lucky, you found a few friends, and everyone stuck together, making the best of it.

When Wasatch Middle School launched an after-school program, it drew those same kids—the ones seeking refuge. Two teachers, Mike Tunnell and Cecil Black, ran the program, and for a few hours every week, students could stay late and study computers, or a foreign language, or do hands-on science work.^*

The goals were education and communication, and the latter was often the bigger challenge. Then as now, bookworms could be shy and weird, afraid of a pantsing (or worse). Even if the beatdown never happened, it lurked around each corner, making it hard to relax. That’s what made Dungeons & Dragons so great: it got you talking. After a while, you weren’t nervous or second-guessing; you were just being yourself.

Tunnell and Black had discovered Dungeons & Dragons in a Provo hobby shop. They watched as players rolled dice, tallied points, and argued over strategy. There was competition, but only to a point. The game was inherently team-based; you had to work together, or everyone got killed.

As Tolkien fans, Tunnell and Black loved D&D’s epic vibe. As educators, they realized that the game could teach without teaching. Basic math, spatial relations, narrative structure, predictive reasoning, and above all, human interaction. Things, in other words, that football or baseball offered, but without the physical boundaries. At the gaming table, you could be blind and missing both legs, but still lead your comrades to glory.

After watching for a few minutes, Tunnell and Black had a shared thought. We should try this at Wasatch Middle.

Tunnell and Black weren’t fools. They printed up permission slips, and if a parent didn’t sign, the student couldn’t play. Two dozen slips came back, and in the first weeks of 1980, Dungeons & Dragons joined the after-school program.

For a while, everything was fine. Better than fine: kids who rarely spoke were engaged and social. There were arguments and occasional insults—these were middle school students, after all—but on the whole, it was going just as Tunnell and Black had hoped.

Then, something changed. A few miles away, in Pleasant Grove, people were talking about covens and underground chambers. About human sacrifice. All of it led by some teenager named “Jay.”

The talk grew louder and skipped all over town, mixing and merging and changing shape. By the time it reached adult ears, it was hard to know what was going on.

In late January 1980, a handful of parents went to Wasatch Middle’s principal, Bill Dudley, and complained about the after-school program. Spells? Demons? Talismans? What are you teaching these kids?

Dudley had no personal issue with Dungeons & Dragons, but if parents griped, you had to do something, if only to cover your own backside. Dudley asked the local parent-teacher association to review the game and report back. Was D&D suitable for teens? Pre-teens? Was it offensive or dangerous?

The PTA’s response was unanimous. It’s just a game. If kids have permission from home, let them play.

That chafed at Linda Burnes, who sat on the regional PTA board. Burnes wanted Dungeons & Dragons banned from school property, and made so much noise that the county board of education finally stepped in, creating a committee to decide the issue. Weeks later, by secret ballot, the committee voted 25–7 to keep D&D as an extracurricular activity.

Annoyed by this democratic setback, the censors got personal, targeting Tunnell and Black directly. Someone sent a letter to the school board president: Mike Tunnell is sleeping with your wife. The accuser was anonymous, and the claim unfounded, but that didn’t matter. Allegations were a weapon, and facts just got in the way.

Tunnell was shocked by the ugly tactics. “All these people in my own church were willing to believe the worst about me,” he later said, “based on threads of gossip.”

Burnes, meanwhile, went for the kill, delivering a bundle of D&D scare sheets to the office of Mormon Church President Spencer W. Kimball—akin to stopping by the Vatican unannounced. (She got as far as Kimball’s secretary, who agreed to pass the info along.)

That done, Burnes turned her attention to the school board. For the next several nights, she showed up at board members’ homes, knocking on their doors after dinner, when they’d have no excuse for cutting things short.

“This game is really evil,” Burnes would gush in a sugary voice. “How much evil do you want the kids to have?”

Not long after, a cluster of parents strode into Wasatch Middle, walked past the front desk, and entered Tunnell’s classroom, disrupting his English lesson. “We came,” said one of the parents, “to see what evil you’re teaching.” Then they stood there, watching, as he did his best to continue.

Tunnell stopped eating. He couldn’t sleep. His stomach ached from dry heaves. His phone rang constantly, people calling to threaten or scold him. He grew phobic—afraid to answer the phone, afraid to ignore it. At night, he would pace the house, chewing his nails and peering outside.

A few weeks into the controversy, the school board made an aesthetic change, telling Tunnell to cover the game manuals with plain black paper.^* If parents couldn’t see the game, thought administrators, that might be enough.

Thursday, March 27, 1980

At the next board meeting, the censors arrived with nearly three hundred supporters. They packed the room and spilled into the hall, where news anchors were doing live shots. It was a zoo. Then the speeches started. Dungeons & Dragons was antireligious. It led to possession. It was Satanic.

“The [Dungeons & Dragons] books are filled with witchcraft,” said one man. “They are filled with things that are not fantasy, but are actual in the real demon world, and can be very dangerous for anyone involved in the game because it leaves them open to Satanic spirits.”

Someone read a letter from Erma Christensen, who sat on Utah’s Board of Education.

“This kind of game,” wrote Christensen, “brings out murder, poisons, and assassinations. It is Satanic. You can take my word for it.”^†

Tunnell and Black should have known to stay quiet. You can’t reason with a herd. If you try, it only squeals louder. Still, Tunnell, who was a Latter-day Saint and social conservative, did his best, comparing Dungeons & Dragons to The Chronicles of Narnia.

The crowd responded with growls and hisses.

A board member jumped in, bringing some order and suggesting a compromise: the after-school program could continue, and Dungeons & Dragons could remain, but without the game manuals.

It wasn’t much of a compromise. The manuals were the game; without them, you couldn’t really play. And it didn’t matter anyway. Tunnell and Black knew what was coming. Weeks later, the parents were back with more demands, pushing for total victory. In April 1980, Superintendent of Schools Doug Merkley backed down, pulling the game entirely.

For Mike Tunnell and Cecil Black, the defeat wasn’t just upsetting—it was frightening, like something out of Salem. Beyond that, it was a slap at the very students that parents were bent on “protecting.” Even in rural Utah, kids faced a minefield, from simple isolation to major depression, and the combination could be lethal. But mental health was a vast, tangled area, and few had the patience for long-term adjustments. It was faster and easier to create your own answers, especially to difficult problems, and by 1980, one such problem had become a national crisis.

* The program’s full name was the “Gifted and Talented Program,” which, itself, probably angered some people.

* Probably the wrong color choice, all things considered.

† When not campaigning—as it were—against Dungeons & Dragons, the versatile Christensen fought to ban Planned Parenthood, defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, undo Title IX, and block a school breakfast program for poor children.

Suicide Solution

We would like to applaud Mayor Oren Probert for his decision not to allow our public facilities to be used by special interest groups for the purpose of promoting and teaching “role-playing games” such as Dungeons & Dragons.

We draw your attention to the book edited from a diary written by a Utah boy entitled Jay’s Journal by Beatrice Sparks (Dell Paperback 1979). Sparks indicates that the boy was extremely intelligent, became involved in various spiritualistic experiences and then ended his life by suicide.

—Connie King and Helga Cochrane, letter to the editor, Tooele Bulletin, April 6, 1982

The teen suicide rate had been climbing since 1970, and by 1980, it was up nearly 50 percent. That was strange enough, but the demographics were even stranger. Most of the victims were white teenage males, and not by a little: the skew was five to one.

It defied all the clichés. What did young white men have to be upset about?

That was part of the problem: no one really knew. Drug use? Maybe. Mental illness? Maybe. Sexual identity? Abuse? They were all possibilities, but that was a long way from knowing.

Even the safest guess—depression—was a blind alley. What did “depression” really mean, and where did it come from? Was Johnny depressed because he got high, or did Johnny get high to battle depression?

The dead boys weren’t around to explain things, and suicide notes were often withheld (or destroyed) by the family. Asking the parents was painful and frequently useless; most were at a loss, and those who knew about abuse usually stayed quiet.

So the deaths kept coming. At least once a day, someone found their teenage son hanging from the rafters, or idling a car in a sealed-up garage. Endless wondering was fruitless and corrosive, so parents groped for answers—anything to have an explanation.

For Art Linkletter, it was LSD. For Marcella Barrett, it was a breakup.

After Jay’s Journal, there was a new option.

Monday, August 11, 1980

In a tiny apartment in Dayton, Ohio, Kevin Bach jolted awake.

What the hell was that?

Kevin waited a moment, then slipped out of bed and crept down the hallway toward the living room. The air was thick and smelled like ammonia.

As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Kevin saw Dallas Egbert, seventeen, sprawled on the ratty couch, his head facing the other direction.

Something was wrong. Something about Dallas’s breathing.

Kevin stepped closer. The couch looked wet, especially—

On the floor lay a pistol.

“Dallas!”

At the sound of his name, Dallas lolled his head toward Kevin, and blood poured down his face.

Kevin ran for the telephone.

At two years old, James Dallas Egbert knew the alphabet. At three, he was reading. At fourteen, he finished high school. That fall, he enrolled at Michigan State University for the 1978–1979 year to study computer science.

Starting college at fifteen would have taxed anyone’s nerves, but Dallas (who always preferred his middle name) had some additional burdens. He was epileptic, and lived in fear of sudden, convulsive seizures. He was also gay, and male/male sex was a crime in twenty-five states. Even where it wasn’t illegal, being gay could get you beaten or killed. At minimum, you’d endure taunts and stares, and Dallas already felt like an outsider.

One upside to living on campus: there were lots of other nerds; men and women who cherished Tolkien, Lovecraft, Star Trek . . . and Dungeons & Dragons. Dallas loved playing D&D, but he often got completely blotto, which made everyone nervous. He was still underage, and the other players would catch hell if something happened, so they asked him to stay away.

Dallas’s drinking got worse, and his depression deepened. He added drugs to the mix, sometimes creating his own supply in MSU’s chemistry lab.

On August 15, 1979, Dallas Egbert, now sixteen, wrote a two-line note:

To whom it may concern:

Should my body be found, I wish it to be cremated.

Then he disappeared with a bottle of pills, intending to kill himself.

He woke up a day or so later, feeling like shit but very much alive. Hoping to stay off the radar, he crashed with some off-campus friends, then caught a bus heading south. He just wanted to vanish.

Dallas’s parents, meanwhile, were sick with worry and hired a private detective to find their missing son. The detective, in turn, dismissed Dallas’s suicide note as “a forgery” and fixated on the Dungeons & Dragons angle. Perhaps, mused the detective, Dallas had suffered a mental break, and D&D had consumed him. Maybe he was hiding on campus or wandering the streets of East Lansing, lost inside a medieval dreamworld.

The media loved this theory. Boy Genius Dons Wizard Hat, Seeks Grail at Local K-Mart—or whatever. Much more exciting than clinical depression.

Michigan police spent several days scouring the MSU campus, particularly the underground steam tunnels. Nothing turned up, but the D&D story lingered.

The following month, Dallas, who’d drifted south toward Texas, finally called home. When he learned his parents had emptied their savings to find him, the guilt and shame were crushing. He returned to Michigan, where depression and drugs continued their damage.

Eleven months later, on August 11, 1980, Dallas shot himself in the living room of the gloomy apartment he’d rented with Kevin Bach, a platonic acquaintance from the local gay scene. After a week of life support, doctors pulled the plug. Dallas Egbert was seventeen.

When Dallas initially vanished from MSU, Jay’s Journal was a pricey hardcover with limited reach. By the time he shot himself, Jay was in paperback, on its way to selling a quarter-million copies. More to the point, Jay had infected Heber City’s Dungeons & Dragons controversy, planting the notion of underage Satanists.

Dallas Egbert, Boy Genius, became Dallas Egbert, Boy Occultist, and when the facts didn’t support that claim, people invented new facts.

From the Calgary Herald:

Egbert was a Michigan State University Student who disappeared into a maze of heating tunnels under MSU’s campus in 1979. When he reappeared in August 1980, the boy wrote, “I’ll give Satan my mind and power.” He then shot himself to death.

From the Montreal Gazette:

Egbert, a 17-year-old computer whiz kid, was a member of the Tolkien Society at Michigan State University. “I’ll give Satan my mind and my power,” he wrote before killing himself.

The quote about Satan seemingly came from thin air, then replicated. Dallas Egbert’s Satanic suicide was soon accepted as fact, appearing in books and essays across the nation.

From the beginning, Alden Barrett and Dallas Egbert were similar. Uncommonly bright and deeply depressed, both sought relief in drugs, booze, and simulated combat (debate for Alden; D&D for Dallas). Both ran away from home, only to return soon after, chastened and embarrassed. Both had a taste for the mystical and a deep disdain for authority, and both were dead by seventeen, warm handguns near their bodies.

Now they shared another trait. Both were sucked into Jay’s horrific narrative, unwitting fuel for an ugly new fire; a blaze that absorbed whatever it touched, growing larger and meaner with each new addition.

May 1981

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON—Michael Dempsey, seventeen, commits suicide with his father’s handgun. Michael’s father, Patrick, a retired police officer, blames the occult, telling authorities that his son was invoking demons and that, prior to the suicide, the boy’s voice “changed, as if demonically possessed.” Newspapers (including the Chicago Tribune) repeat the “invoking demons” claim, which soon spreads.

June 1982

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA—Irving Pulling, sixteen, commits suicide with a gunshot to the chest. Irving, who belonged to his school’s “Talented and Gifted” program, had long felt like an outcast and struggled to make friends. Irving’s mother, Patricia, blames her son’s death on the occult and eventually writes a book on the subject, The Devil’s Web. Its description begins:

Pat Pulling lived every mother’s worst nightmare. In 1982, her unusually bright and gifted son died by his own hand after a brief and terrifying journey into the world of the occult.

“A white male who is intelligent, creative, and curious,” Pulling later writes, “is the most likely to be seduced by the occult.”

October 1982

DENVER, COLORADO—Stephen Loyacono, sixteen, commits suicide by running his parents’ car in the garage.

Recounting the incident in their book about the occult (Satanism: Is Your Family Safe?), authors Ted Schwarz and Duane Empey imitate Jay’s Journal, printing portions of Stephen’s private diary alongside their overcooked commentary:

He was fourteen when it started, a boy of brilliance, a faithful churchgoer, an honor student . . . in retrospect, his parents realized that they probably should have gotten more involved with their son, but . . . the only indication of his internal struggle came from his diary.

To some, he might seem to have been possessed, at least in retrospect.

In exchange for his pact with the Devil, say the authors, Stephen Loyacono sought powers of invisibility, the ability to shape shift, and the power to levitate objects.

In a happy coincidence for censors and zealots, the people most likely to kill themselves—young white males—were also the primary audience for Dungeons & Dragons, and the game was wedged into countless suicides as a proximate cause. For the next twenty years, adults in every corner of America would charge D&D (and its media cousins, heavy metal and horror) with destroying young lives. And nearly always the same kind of lives: white, mercurial males with high IQs and oddball intensity. They were skeptics and dreamers, gifted in science or language, with a taste for the otherworldly.

They were, in short, clones of Alden Barrett.

Prior to Jay’s Journal, “teen occult suicide” was all but unheard of. A decade later, it was everywhere—a ready blueprint for grieving parents, red-faced preachers, or anyone else who craved small, tidy answers. Never mind the drug use, or the sexual confusion, or the figurative hell of adolescence. (Never mind the ocean of guns, for that matter, or their availability to almost anyone.) No, it was demonic possession. Or a role-playing game. Or a witchy girlfriend. Anything but the ugly, messy truth.

Kid Fears

“The school used to be in Mapleton, Utah . . . but citizens grew tired of finding children who had escaped from the school with iron manacles around their ankles. The school was told to relocate and they did.”

—Testimony from Hearings on Abuse and Neglect of Children in Institutions, Day 2, before the Subcommittee on Child and Human Development, 96th Congress (1979)

Oak Hill School opened for business in March 1971, the month Alden Barrett died. Less than two years later, Mapleton (population two thousand) essentially kicked the school out of town. Horrible stories had started to spread.

In March 1973, the school—sporting a new name—resurfaced in Provo Canyon, a location that proved more fitting.

Provo Canyon School (or PCS) was for boys who “required placement outside their homes due to their lack of achievement and behavior in public schools,” and if that seemed a little . . . broad, it wasn’t by mistake.

PCS received a truckload of public money, but was privately owned and operated, and it cast a wide marketing net, receiving teens from all over the nation. Some were criminals. Some were addicts. Others had spotless records, but suffered from mental or emotional issues. Many had learning disorders or physical handicaps.

At Provo Canyon School, backgrounds didn’t matter. Everyone was equally brutalized.

Each new student, regardless of history or health, was ordered to stand, facing a wall, for up to fifteen hours a day. This, said school officials, was to promote “right thinking.” Students who stood incorrectly—or collapsed from fatigue—had to start over. Students who resisted were locked in small rooms for days on end, then given additional hours of standing. If a student was “belligerent,” the PCS employee manual had a suggestion: grab the student with one hand and yank on his hair with the other. Some teens lost whole chunks of hair this way, and occasionally gained a black eye or two.

Boys who complained spent weeks in locked isolation. To get out of confinement, they had to pass a polygraph test about their “attitude, truthfulness, and future conduct.” If the polygraph said they’d broken a rule, they were punished. If the polygraph said they’d thought about breaking a rule, they were punished.

If any of this made a boy seem “anxious,” staffers could “physically and chemically restrain” them (read: tie them down and inject them with Haldol or other powerful antipsychotics), all without direct medical supervision.

Every student at PCS endured this environment, including those with no criminal record, those with mental or emotional issues, and those sent there for special education.

From the beginning, students tried to get help, writing desperate, panicked letters to parents and friends. Outgoing mail was intercepted and opened, and students were forced to rewrite the letters, minus any “negative thoughts.”

Parents were discouraged from visiting. When visits were scheduled, boys were polygraphed before and after. If the test “proved” that a boy had complained about the school, or that he might complain about the school, calls and visits were suspended. (Access to legal help was restricted as “anti-therapeutic.”)

To leave the facility, even temporarily, a student had to sign a contract promising not to criticize the school or its methods. As soon as he signed, he was polygraphed. If the machine said the boy was lying, he was punished and his release was delayed or canceled.

Doyle and Marcella Barrett should have seen through the school’s puffy, tough-love marketing. As a medical doctor and mental-health advocate, Doyle in particular should have sensed that something was wrong. (PCS “counselors” were required to be at least six-foot-two and weigh two hundred pounds.)

Instead, the Barretts crossed their fingers and sent Scott inside.

Nearly eighteen months later, on a rare visit home, Scott gave his parents an ultimatum: If you send me back, you will never see me again. I’ll get out and vanish forever.

They relented, and Scott returned to Pleasant Grove High School.

“You can’t even imagine the psychological damage that place did,” Scott says of his time at PCS. “It turned me into a survivor, but I learned a lot of bad stuff, too.”

By 1980, conditions at Provo Canyon School were a matter of public record. A lawsuit by the ACLU had made local headlines and led to a federal ban on several practices, including over-drugging—a ban the school largely ignored.

Yet PCS stayed open for business and later went coed, promising to provide “healthy and positive life experiences,” enabling young men and women to “return home better-adjusted and confident.”

It would take another four decades for anything like a full reckoning. In the meantime, parents in Heber City lost their minds over Dungeons & Dragons, Orem city hall hosted a seminar claiming that magazine ads contained “hidden symbols of death and Satanic worship,” and up north in Layton, a Baptist congregation burned thousands of rock albums because “secret backward messages” held “invitations to worship the devil.”

Provo authorities, meanwhile, went for the gold, merging multiple strains of paranoia into unintentional slapstick.

From the Daily Herald, November 1, 1981:

Provo police have asked school officials to warn children not to accept candy or stamps from strangers. The stamps could contain glue laced with LSD.

“Timpanogos, Franklin and Grandview elementary schools have reported seeing a male dressed as a clown in the vicinity of the schools,” says Provo Police Chief Swen Nielsen. “At Timpanogos, children said a clown was giving away candy and stamps.”

Nielsen says in all instances, Provo police canvassed neighborhoods but could not find evidence that the clown was the same individual or if LSD-laced stamps were involved.

“We’ve gotten varying descriptions of the clown,” adds Nielsen. “There’s no doubt a clown has been in the area of elementary schools. But whether it is the same clown, or if he is doing anything illegal, is still a question.”

In all reported cases, the clown turned out to be “Cinderbritches,” the local fire department’s mascot, who—accompanied by a uniformed firefighter—visited schools to warn kids about the dangers of fires.

In churches, at town halls, and soon in therapists’ offices, eagle-eyed grown-ups were looking for monsters, but only where they didn’t exist.

Beatrice Sparks (who, as the Daily Herald put it, “dedicated herself to writing about those youth who are in such desperate need of help”) lived just four hundred yards from Provo Canyon School.

But she had other demons to fight.

Distant Early Warning

Monday, January 26, 1981

Sitting in her London hotel suite, Beatrice Sparks looked nervous and tired. It might have been jet lag, but speaking to journalist Shirley Davenport of the Doncaster Evening Post, Sparks had a different explanation. The stress and fatigue, she told Davenport, were from long investigations into black magic.

“The American kids are absolutely terrified to talk to me about it,” Sparks said, her hands knotting and unknotting as she talked. “It’s not like drugs, or any of those other things. With witchcraft, they are so frightened they won’t even open their mouths.”

Sparks was in London to promote the British release of Jay’s Journal. Ten years after Alden Barrett’s death, his corrupted diary had become a global product.

“Society,” warned Sparks, “should be asking itself why the suicide rate among teenagers was growing so alarmingly in recent years. How much of it is connected to witchcraft?”

As Davenport scribbled, Sparks painted a bloody, frightening picture. Youngsters, she said, were “getting hooked on witchcraft . . . rituals involving orgies, devil-worship, curses, animal mutilations and sacrifices,” and she had risked her own safety to prove it.

“One boy was afraid something would happen to me or my children if I knew too much,” she told Davenport. “He’d made some kind of covenant.”

What’s more, Sparks warned, the danger had spread far beyond the United States.

“I’m sure, from what I already know,” said Sparks, “that witchcraft is widespread in Europe and rife in London. I’ve heard indirectly that the use of Ouija boards and the soft approach to witchcraft is growing rapidly.”

It was grim and rattling stuff, and according to Sparks, it all came straight from the source.

“Jay’s diary,” Davenport wrote in the finished article, “was found concealed in a box in the loft of his home. After skimming through it, his mother sent it to Beatrice Sparks, suggesting that its publication may prevent other youngsters from getting hooked on witchcraft.”

For Sparks, the interview’s crowning moment might have been the photo shoot. Standing outside in the cool London air, she posed in a dazzling white fur coat, its upturned collar framing her delicate features.

As the photographer zoomed in, harrowing pressures were building.

Like a midocean earthquake, Jay’s initial force had been minor. The real damage was on the horizon, gaining speed and heading for land.

Sparks put one hand on a black iron railing, looked into the camera, and smiled.

Dirty Laundry

November 1982

At Brigham Young University’s bookstore, bundled newspapers arrived for display. On the front page, larger than everything else, was an illustration of a boy in a hooded black cloak gripping a giant (and phallic) ceremonial knife. Behind him, a Star of David hovered over a single large eye.

The headline said, “Beyond Jay’s Journal—Dispelling Occult Myths.”

Launched by two BYU grad students in 1981, the Seventh East Press was an indie counterbalance to the school’s official newspaper, and it carried a reputation for tough, even-handed reporting—which only made “Beyond Jay’s Journal” more egregious.

The idea had come a few weeks earlier, with five or six Press staffers tossing around story ideas. It was close to Halloween, and the brainstorming drifted in that direction.

Somebody mentioned Jay’s Journal, and the room lit up. “We’d all read it,” Press production manager Dean Huffaker said years later, “and we thought, ‘It’s gotta be bullshit—that would be fun to look into.’”

Camera in hand, Huffaker headed to Pleasant Grove to get the real story.

Reflecting on “Beyond Jay’s Journal” decades later, Dean Huffaker remembers a hard-hitting piece of journalism; the dispelling of hearsay and the finding of fact.

The actual article was somewhat different.

“High school groups like the one [Jay] was involved with still exist,” Huffaker concluded, “and appear to have grown in popularity.”

A bold assertion. How had Huffaker learned of these Satanic cliques?

Reliable Source Number One:

James Randolf (a pseudonym), a local counselor who has talked to numerous youths involved with such groups, estimates there are eleven to fifteen students in every high school—and six to ten students in every junior high school—involved with occult groups.

Reliable Source Number Two:

A high school student named Bryan (a pseudonym) who was formerly involved in occult activities commented, “I’ve heard of human sacrifice in other parts of the country, but I’m not aware of any occurring in this area. It has been an open discussion at times, though.”

Reliable Source Number Three:

Rich (a pseudonym), another student who is no longer involved with high school occult groups, explained that animal sacrifice is sometimes a part of necromantic rites (invoking spirits). “Most of the time it will be a hen or a billy goat. I’ve heard of cows being used, but I’ve never seen it done—they’re too big.”

Reliable Source Number Four:

A Utah Valley resident named Danny Simms (a pseudonym) was introduced to Satanism while serving a prison sentence. “About four of us got together and started our own Satanic cult, just for something to do with our time.”

What the hell kind of reporting was this? Did the story use any real names? Actually, yes:

In reality, “Jay” was a teenager named Alden Barrett who resided with his family in Pleasant Grove. In his diary he accounts how he and his two best friends, Mike Waid and John Lundgren, began experimenting with drugs and the Occult. Barrett later committed suicide on March 14, 1971.^*

Lest readers miss the point, the paper included a large photo of Alden Barrett’s tombstone.

The pseudonymous sources used awkward, ren-faire syntax (rituals involved “tying girls to trees and performing oddities with them”), and seemingly hinted at major crimes, including a recent murder.

And where was this horror taking place?

Pleasant Grove, of course. According to the Seventh East Press, Alden Barrett’s tiny hometown was a hellmouth of violence, and his diary was required reading for local warlocks.

“Members of the group are encouraged to read books about Satanism,” said pseudonymous Bryan, with pseudonymous Rich adding, “Everyone involved in local [occult] groups has read Jay’s Journal.”

This wasn’t a supermarket tabloid. The Seventh East Press was sold in BYU’s on-campus bookstore, and positioned itself as the voice of reason.

While researching the article, Dean Huffaker contacted Beatrice Sparks and asked how much of Jay’s Journal was true. Her two-sentence reply had a lawyer’s vague precision. “Entries in any diary,” Sparks told Huffaker, “are irregular and somewhat sketchy. It is often necessary to fill in the gaps to make it more readable and coherent.”

The Barretts, on the other hand, got shafted. Huffaker didn’t ask for their comments or even tell them the article was coming. Instead, they learned about it the same way they’d learned about Jay itself: after the fact and far too late.

* While relaying “Jay’s” real name, hometown, and friends, Huffaker got the death date wrong: Alden died on March 13.

A Fortune in Lies

In the wake of Jay’s Journal, a flood of demonic exposés emerged, each more lurid than the last. Devil Child, The Ultimate Evil, Say You Love Satan—thick, soft books with big, easy print, perfect for airports and study halls.

Even Canada joined in with Michelle Remembers, an overwrought doorstop disguised as a memoir.

Michelle’s narrative read like exorcist porn. In 1973, seeking help for depression, twenty-seven-year-old Michelle Proby sought treatment from Victoria, B.C. psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. Under hypnosis, Proby “recovered” a gruesome memory: when she was five, her mother had essentially given her to the Church of Satan for a year.

During that year, said Proby, the Satanists:

•buried her alive;

•made her eat part of a flambéed corpse;

•buried her alive again, this time with several cats;

•cut up multiple babies and shoved the pieces into her face, and

•killed one of her young friends, dismembered the body, and made Proby piece it back together again.

What’s more, said Proby, the Satanists cut holes in her scalp, attached horns to her skull, and grafted a tail to her spine. Then they locked her in a cage for three months, earning a visit from Satan himself.

Just when all seemed lost and hopeless, both Jesus and the Virgin Mary appeared in person, zapping the Satanists, rescuing Proby—and apparently erasing the horns/tail evidence.

As Michelle Proby uncovered these memories, Dr. Lawrence Pazder slowly moved closer. Then he started holding her hand. Sometimes he’d put an arm around her. Inevitably, Pazder joined Proby on the sofa, where she could lean her head on his shoulder. Finally, they moved to the floor, onto the thick rubber mat Pazder used for “body-release techniques.” Sometimes they stayed on the mat for five or six hours.

Both were married, but that didn’t last, and by mid-1980, Proby and Pazder (that is, patient and psychiatrist) were freshly divorced and able to marry each other, which they eventually did. They also landed a six-figure deal for Michelle Remembers: The True Story of a Year-Long Contest between Innocence and Evil.^*

On closer inspection—this should go without saying—Michelle Proby’s recovered memories turned into smoke. (Those months locked in a cage, wearing grafted-on horns? She was in school the whole time, a fact confirmed by photos and homework. Her life as an only child? Explain that to her sisters.)

In the meantime, Michelle Remembers made a big splash, selling tens of thousands of copies and getting a mountain of press. And why not? It was all entirely true; everyone said so. Even the New York Times weighed in, calling Michelle Remembers a “psychiatric case history,” which was like calling Atlantis the fifty-first state.

Maybe the Times just wanted to be consistent. Its publishing arm was still cashing checks from Jay’s Journal, so branding Michelle Remembers a fraud might have raised awkward questions.

Jay, meanwhile, continued to spread, cropping up in books about suicide, black magic, and adolescent mental health. In 1983’s A Cry for Help, child psychiatrist Mary Giffin quoted from Jay’s Journal, then slapped at Doyle and Marcella:

Anyone who reads Jay’s Journal could see that Jay’s girlfriend was the least of several pressing, serious problems. Jay’s parents probably could have saved their son if Jay had been talking to them instead of his journal. Remember: teens who need help don’t “grow out of it.” They become adults who need help—if they live that long.

Of course, the Barretts had known full well that Alden wouldn’t “grow out of it,” and they had tried every possible approach, including—yes—a psychiatrist, who had concluded that Alden “wasn’t truly depressed.” Giffin skipped that part, preferring to lump everything onto the family. Or Satan. Or whomever.

This flip dismissal was exactly what people craved. It was short, simple, and put the blame on somebody else. You could fit it on a matchbook.

Promoting A Cry for Help in 1983, Giffin, who ran a mental health clinic near Chicago, gave several interviews to local reporters, and the stories drifted like toxic fog. Eighteen miles west, adolescent psychiatrist John W. Tucker decided to investigate. He picked up a copy of Jay’s Journal and started reading.

Tucker was a PhD with degrees from BYU, Columbia, and Harvard. If that wasn’t enough, he’d done postdoctoral work at Oxford and was the former chancellor of Purdue Northwest.

Reading Jay’s Journal, Tucker grew worried. Was it possible that some of his teenage patients were actually witches?

Before long, Tucker was convinced, and it was even worse than he’d feared.

Writing on Purdue letterhead, Tucker shared his findings with Jay’s editor, Beatrice Sparks. Not only were the area kids into witchcraft, wrote Tucker, but a pack of spellcasting grown-ups was actually trying to recruit him.

Fortunately, John Tucker was a man of power. In addition to his private psychiatric practice, he sat on the American Board of Medical Psychotherapy.

Concluding his letter to Sparks, Tucker made it clear that he knew the stakes. This was about the children.

“These young people,” he wrote, “need help.”

* None of this troubled the Canadian Medical Association, which allowed Lawrence Pazder to practice psychiatry for another two decades.

Heroes Are Hard to Find

Spring 1983

Sixty feet under Quantico, Virginia, inside a converted bomb shelter, the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit worked in muffled isolation. The air was damp and soupy, like the inside of a submarine.

On each side of a narrow hallway, there were several offices, each with the same hazy, artificial glow. This far down, sunlight was only a rumor. A few of the desks held big beige computers with green-on-black monitors.

In Special Agent Kenneth Lanning’s office, the phone chirped to life, and Lanning (himself big and beige, with jowls and a retreating hairline) reached for the receiver.

Lanning had come up through the demolition squad, defusing and destroying explosives. Later, he added SWAT training, hostage negotiation, and endless classes on criminal psychology. When he made the jump to teaching, the FBI was just beginning its behavioral science program, later referred to as “profiling.” Lanning disliked that term, but it was easier than explaining the details, which made people’s eyes glaze over.

While Lanning’s peers across the hall focused on serial murder, he dealt with interpersonal violence—what used to be called “sex crimes.” He had taught the subject since 1973 and knew it could use an overhaul.

He zeroed in on the worst of the worst: crimes against children.

It might have seemed like the short straw, but Lanning knew it was vital. Crimes against children were incredibly complex, with endless overlapping concerns. Even tireless investigators could find themselves stymied. Looking for new perspectives, Lanning went at it full force, learning everything he could on the subject.

When he wasn’t buried in research or training new recruits, Lanning taught a ten-week course for regular cops. Officers came from all over the country, hoping to hone their thinking; later, if those same cops caught an unusual case, they could ring Lanning’s office and get his first thoughts, or maybe float a few theories.

Nobody phoned about a standard crime. When you called the FBI, it meant that you were deep in the weeds, and needed some fresh insight. So when Lanning answered the phone in early 1983, he was prepared to hear almost anything.

It was a police officer calling from New England. He’d just interviewed an adult woman who had a gruesome, detailed story. As a child, she’d been abused by a ring of Satanists, including her own parents. It wasn’t just sex, either. The woman described murder, mutilation, and all kinds of blood rites.

Lanning was shocked, but not by the crimes. He’d seen more hell than he cared to remember, and he knew what humans could do to each other. No, it was the overlap. Murder, ritual violence, child abuse, and cannibalism—all in one case? That was exceedingly rare. Throw in the group component, and it was almost unheard of.

“I was so concerned,” Lanning later said, “that I was determined to do everything I possibly could to help stop, catch, and convict the offenders.”

Lanning’s first advice was basic but crucial. Even after all these years, some evidence will still exist. Get as many details from the victim as possible and corroborate the facts.

Corroboration was key. If even a few facts could be proven, cops could scoop up the victim’s parents and pressure them to cooperate. Evidence made that far easier.

Hours after the call, Lanning was still rattled. If the woman’s claims were true, her case was one of the worst he had ever encountered, and that was saying something. If there was any good news, it was the outlier status. However long I’m in this job, thought Lanning, I’ll probably never hear another case like this one.

Several weeks later, a lawyer called Lanning for help. An adult woman had approached the attorney with a sickening story of childhood abuse. Blood drinking, ritual mutilation—the worst things you could possibly imagine. The perpetrators were some kind of above-the-law supercult, and the woman was conflicted about going to the police, so she wanted the lawyer’s opinion. The lawyer, in turn, wanted Lanning’s opinion.

As the lawyer spoke, Lanning rummaged for his notes from the previous cult-murder conversation. “I’m aware of this case,” Lanning said. “I’ve already talked to the investigating officer.”

The lawyer said that was impossible. Her client hadn’t told the cops.

Lanning asked more questions and realized they were two different cases, with different accusers and different families, in two different states. Only the allegations matched.

Soon, Lanning got a third call with the same basic story: cutting, killing, blood drinking. The location was a day care center.

By this point, Ken Lanning had ten years as a sex-crimes investigator. He knew that evil existed. He’d seen it up close, watched it lean across a prison interview table, manacles tightening, as it walked him through some long-ago bloodbath.

Still, this felt a little thin. How could these groups kill dozens of people every year without drawing attention? And why had they spared these three women?

Maybe they weren’t spared. Maybe they escaped.

But that was twenty years ago, when they were still children. If they had escaped, where had they gone after that? And wouldn’t a powerful group of murderers (actually three powerful groups of murderers) find and kill any stray witnesses?

It didn’t make sense. Then again, Manson. Jonestown. That guy in NorCal who’d raped fifty women and counting. The world had its share of monsters, and you prejudged at your own peril.

In the end, it was simple. If these groups existed, they needed to be crushed. Dragged out into the daylight and punished for all to see.

Lanning spent days, then weeks, speaking with social workers, psychologists, and other professionals. A staggering number had heard the same stories. Lanning took notes and asked questions, then he made follow-up calls.

The more he investigated, the more he found a troubling dual consensus.

Evidence? No, not really.

Are the allegations true? Of course they’re true.

“I’m not saying every one of them used these words,” Lanning later noted, “but the message was, ‘We must believe the children.’”

“Believing the children” really meant believing adults. For one thing, most of the initial stories came from grown men and women alleging events of thirty years prior.

Later, when actual children made statements, adults still ran things. They decided what was true and what was fantasy. They decided if a kid was traumatized—or just exhausted from all the freaky questions. Was a child truly remembering something or only saying what the shrink (or lawyer, or cop) obviously wanted to hear? Adults made the call.

Believing the children meant believing priests who saw the Devil under every mattress. It meant believing mail-order detectives, including the ones bent on book deals and courtroom fees. It meant believing parents with axes to grind or custody battles to win.

Believing the children meant believing Roland Summit, an influential California psychiatrist who said that kids were essentially incapable of lying about abuse.^*

For law enforcement, it was a no-win scenario. Every hour spent looking for blood cults was an hour not spent on burglaries, or embezzlement, or locking up wife beaters. But you couldn’t just ignore parents’ claims, even when those claims rang crazy. Parents had long memories, and they got snippy when people didn’t pay attention. Annoy them today, and they’d file a complaint tomorrow. And another next week. Eventually, you’d be working a tollbooth in Tupelo.

Utah County was no different, and when it came to occult-based crime, police walked a delicate line, neither confirming nor denying.

“When Jay’s Journal came out, a lot of people were concerned,” Pleasant Grove Police Chief Mike Ferre told the Seventh East Press in 1982, “and since then, we’ve been keeping an eye out for that kind of thing. I’m not aware of anything in particular, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

In Orem, a stamp-sized adjunct of Provo, police were more active, but only as a pretense. They met with school authorities and made a list of troublemakers. Satanism was a good excuse to rifle through lockers and expel teenage potheads.

For Latter-day Saints, the problem was definitional. What exactly was witchcraft? Joseph Smith, who’d founded the Church, had communed with spirits, told fortunes, and used magic rocks called “seer stones” to decipher mystical writing. Was that witchcraft? If not, why not?

What about Ouija boards? They were twelve bucks at Toys ‘R’ Us, and came from Parker Brothers, makers of Monopoly and Risk. Were toy companies agents of darkness? Who could say for sure?

In the end, there were no real measures or guidelines. Faith was fact, fact was subjective, and the standards of truth were eroding.

* The exceptions, it went without saying, were children who said they hadn’t been abused, even (or especially) when adults tried to wheedle allegations from them. Those kids were obviously lying, and if you disagreed, maybe you were an abuser.

Black Magic Woman

January 1985

Eighteen months after the initial report, Special Agent Kenneth Lanning was drowning in claims of Satanic crime. Calls were coming from everywhere, and more than three dozen police departments wanted help. Swamped and underfunded, Lanning sent word to cops, clinicians, therapists—anybody who might have some insight. Come to Quantico. Let’s share information and get a handle on this.

With everyone in the same room, Lanning hoped, it would be easier to sort things out. Nonsense would fall by the wayside, freeing up time and money to pursue the real cases. As a bonus, the attendees could return home with some calm, steady logic, and keep their communities from exploding.

That was the plan, anyway.

Monday, February 18, 1985

As the four-day seminar began, Lanning was optimistic. The attendees were standouts, and with their help, he hoped to separate fact from fiction and fiction from lunacy. Were Satanists killing or otherwise harming children? What was the proof? If it was real, how best to stop it?

Many of Lanning’s colleagues weren’t looking for proof; instead, they skipped right to belief. As reporter Richard Beck later wrote, “They were eager to hear just how big the ritual abuse problem really was.” Not to learn if it actually existed—they’d already decided it did—but to hear how far it had spread.

Some of this was expected. Humans tend to work backward from conclusions, keeping what fits and ignoring the rest. Everybody knew this, especially cops and psychologists. The point was to see past it; to guard against your own bias, and go where the evidence took you. Starting with a theory, then looking for things to support it? That was disaster on a plate.

And yet, that was what happened. During the Quantico seminar, people easily—almost happily—embraced the idea of a vast Satanic conspiracy.

One speaker stood out from the others.

Detective Sandra “Sandi” Gallant of the San Francisco Police Department had made her name in the early 1980s, poking around the Bay Area’s religious undergrowth. The massacre at Jonestown had scared the whole world, and since most Jonestown members had come from San Francisco, it made sense to look deeper, to see what else might be brewing.

Most of what Gallant found was either boring (Wicca) or campy (Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, which existed mainly to tweak straight society).^* But it was enough to raise Gallant’s profile within the SFPD.

Over the next four years, Gallant scoured San Francisco for anything vaguely demonic. She didn’t find much, but she wrote lots of memos, including “Ritual Crime Scene Clues,” “Satanic Cults/Sabbat Celebrations,” and “Colours Significant to Satanism/Witchcraft.”

By 1985, Gallant was famous in cop circles, and police from other departments frequently sought her advice. That put her on Kenneth Lanning’s radar, and when Lanning scheduled his conference on occult allegations, he asked Gallant to attend.

Now, as Sandi Gallant spoke, the Quantico audience leaned forward, rapt. She was engaging, with a deep command of her material, and made the supernatural seem commonplace.

This was something Kenneth Lanning hadn’t anticipated. Rather than deflating Satanic rumors, the FBI’s involvement was making them more plausible. Here, in the very heart of forensic analysis, grown men and women were nodding at phrases like, “Everything Satanists do . . . is done to defame the name of Christ,” and, “Christians look for faith, not the obtaining of power.”

The problem wasn’t Gallant’s Christianity (Lanning himself was a lifelong Catholic and former altar boy), but her conflation of religion with science. Faith and proof weren’t merely an awkward mix—they were opposites, and you had to pick one.

Gallant’s handout, the “Ritualistic Crime Profile and Questionnaire,” was a hash of factoids and candle-store blather, including a calendar of pagan holy days. There was also a checklist for sorting actual Satanic murders from apparent Satanic murders (“Were victims forced to devour mutilated parts? Check Yes/No”).

Then came a long list of “ritualistic indicators”—clues that someone was a Satanist. Here, the iffy (swastikas, cauldrons) sat side by side with the everyday (cameras, singing).^*

Lanning could have cut Gallant short, or confiscated the handouts, but that wasn’t his style. Lanning preferred carrots to sticks, and teamwork to turf wars. More to the point, Lanning believed in logic. Empirical fact would rise to the top, and fluff would disappear.

After four days, the conference concluded. The cops, teachers, and other attendees dispersed, taking home what they’d heard and seen. That included Gallant’s cult-crime handout, which wound up in the hands of civilians who took it at face value. It was, after all, seemingly vetted by the FBI.

Gallant left with something else: a halo of authority. Now she could casually drop phrases like, “As I said at FBI headquarters last month,” or, “When the FBI asked me to speak at Quantico . . .”

Three months later, Sandi Gallant was testifying as an “expert witness” in Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco.

According to prosecutors, a local mechanic had abused scores of children, including his own daughter, as part of an elaborate Satanic ritual. The daughter, nine years old, told the court about cannibalism and human sacrifice, and claimed that she herself had once “put a knife right through a baby.”

To buttress these claims, prosecutors called Gallant to the stand, and she didn’t disappoint.

“Eating and drinking of human waste, abuse of children, and human sacrifice,” Gallant testified, referencing her own questionnaire, were “characteristics of Satanic worship.”

Was there any evidence that these acts had happened? No, but the state was unmoved. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” said prosecutor Hal Jewett, “that the nine-year-old was a participant in Satanic worship.”

The jury split down the middle, and after a long deadlock, the judge declared a mistrial. Prosecutors wanted to refile and do the whole thing again, but the case had already cost too much money.

Speaking to the San Francisco Examiner in 1986, Sandi Gallant was defiant, unwilling to abandon her brand. “For some reason, in the 1980s,” she said, “children are being sexually abused, and possibly even murdered, during what appears to be Satanic-type rituals.”

Then she said something that should have alarmed everyone.

“The problem,” she told the paper, “is we are not finding any bodies. We are not finding any bodies, period.”

For most people, a lack of bodies—a lack of evidence in general—might have been reason enough to stop, or at least take a long reflective pause. But the growing army of cult cops didn’t need proof. They had faith.

* LaVey, who dubbed himself “the Black Pope” and looked like a bald Vincent Price, was a show tune–loving atheist who believed in neither gods nor devils. Church headquarters (a black-walled house on California Street) was essentially a gothic Playboy Mansion, with LaVey as its cloak-wearing Hefner. No one of importance—not the cops, not the feds, probably not the actual pope—considered LaVey or his church a serious threat.

* For more on the 1985 seminar, see Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015).

Unholy

Sunday, March 3, 1985

When I say the word ‘witch,’” Lynn Allen Bryson told a packed house at the Scera Theater, a seven-hundred-seat venue in Utah County, “people picture a little lady with a black pointed hat, and a hook nose, and a wart, and she’s hovering over a cauldron.”

Bryson, who was forty-six and looked like a rumpled weatherman, shook his head, cuing the audience for something else.

“If you want to see a witch, I mean a real one, here’s a picture of a witch.”

He showed a photo of a middle-aged Japanese woman.

“Yoko Ono, wife of John Lennon,” said Bryson. “And John Lennon is a sorcerer.”

Now he had their attention.

“Let me give you some names of other sorcerers,” Bryson continued, switching to a photo of a big-haired blonde. “Georgia Frontiere is a sorceress.” Then, in case anyone wondered: “She owns the Los Angeles Rams.”

By 1985, Lynn Bryson had spent three decades chasing fame. A string of radio jobs had come and gone, and his music career had fared no better. In the midsixties, he’d released a few singles that went nowhere (“Baby Move In,” “Big Mean Drag Machine”), and cowritten some flops for other artists (“Monster Shindig,” performed by future Three Dog Night vocalist Danny Hutton). To keep his hand in the game, Bryson had done flat-fee work on children’s records, scripting things like Wilma Flintstone Tells the Story of Bambi.

A glimpse of success had come in 1966 with a novelty song called “BYU Boy Missionary.” The song sold a few thousand copies in Utah, so Bryson left California for Provo, christened himself “the World’s Funniest Mormon,” and angled for new opportunities.

He managed a few local bands, did music for little-seen movies, and even recorded a concept album: a soft-rock opera about Church founder Joseph Smith. By 1979, Bryson’s record label had gone under, and the bank had taken his house.

Luckily for Bryson, a new market was booming, and it came with a captive audience.

“If you want to see a picture of a sorcerer,” Bryson told the teenaged crowd at the Scera Theater, “pick up the album by the Eagles called Hotel California. The real ‘Hotel California’ is headquarters for the first Satanic Church of America.”

Bryson glanced around the venue, making sure they all understood.

“This multimillion seller,” he said, paraphrasing the title track’s lyrics, “says, ‘It’s easy to get in, but once you’re in, you can never leave.’ That’s because that is where human sacrifices are held.”^*

Lynn Bryson’s “fireside” talk was called “Witchcraft and How It Enters Our Home,” and he performed it at Church venues in Utah, Idaho, California, Arizona, and anywhere else that would have him. Afterward, he sold books and cassettes in the lobby, and signed people up for his mailing list. He also peddled his self-published memoir, Winning the Testimony War, and his unabridged narration of the Book of Mormon.

But “Witchcraft and How It Enters Our Home” was Bryson’s most popular work—a freewheeling montage of dark suburban whispers:

The words “Stairway to Heaven,” when literally translated from witch language, mean “suicide.”

Queen has a lyric that says, “And another one bites the dust.” You play it backward, and it says, “Start to smoke marijuana.”

There is a devil, and you have got to stop inviting him into your house. There’s a game kids play—it’s called Dungeons & Dragons. That’s one way to invite Satan in.

Dubbed cassettes of “Witchcraft and How It Enters Our Home” passed from teen to teen, spreading through Mormon culture, and one segment in particular quickly grew notorious:

A young boy in Pleasant Grove, Utah, kept a journal of the events of his life from the time he was an active seminary student. When he left the Church, he just kept writing in the journal. He was visited by several spirits, including one called “Raul.” He didn’t know who Raul was, but “Raul” is just another name for Lucifer himself. Can you believe that Lucifer himself took the time to come to Pleasant Grove, Utah, to speak to one little kid . . . named Alden Barrett?

The journal he wrote? Well, after he committed suicide, it was made into a book which is published by Dell Books called Jay’s Journal. It is an account of what is happening thousands and thousands of times a day. If that were an isolated case, where it just happened once, maybe I wouldn’t even be giving this talk. But spirits are appearing regularly today, throughout the United States and the world.

* Like most occult “experts,” Bryson had a dramatic origin story. He claimed to have dated Sharon Tate in high school, and, after Tate’s murder, “learned through associates that Charles Manson was into witchcraft, and that he killed Sharon because he needed the blood of a pregnant woman for a ritual.” Bryson’s connection to Tate was tenuous at best: Tate moved frequently, and she attended Bryson’s former high school for only a single year—as a sophomore—by which time Bryson was twenty and living in a different city.

Unsubstantiated Rumors Are Good Enough for Me

Monday, July 29, 1985

The morning sun crested the mountains, flooding Utah County in gold. The air was thick and already warm, on its way to ninety degrees. To the west, vast beds of algae bloomed in Utah Lake, adding a heavy pasture stench.

As they headed for work, walked their dogs, or shooed the kids outside, thirty-five thousand Utahns—including Marcella Barrett—saw the morning paper.

DAILY HERALD

SATAN WORSHIP IN ZION

FIRST IN A SERIES^*

For most of the twentieth century, newspapers were the closest thing to the internet. TV was newer, radio more intimate, movies were bigger and bolder. Even magazines had better pictures (and color pictures, at that). But nothing mattered like newsprint.

Newspapers were portable. Newspapers were updated each morning, and some places had a separate evening edition. If a town could support two competing papers, that meant four news updates a day.

Newspapers were cheap, bordering on free—the advertising saw to that. Sometimes they were actually free, passed around the office or left on a bench. You could read them on your own time; no need to be home to catch the 6:00 PM news.

Newspapers even had a prehistoric Comments section: the Letters to the Editor page, where readers weighed in on whatever happened three days ago.

And, like the internet, newspapers had space to fill. Readers wouldn’t buy a paper that had nothing but advertising, and the more ads you ran, the more you needed other content: comic strips, chess columns, fashion guides, recipes, and whatever else was handy.

When it came to actual news, editors weren’t shy about recycling. Papers quoted other papers, or (for a fee) reprinted whole sections of the New York Times or Cleveland Plain Dealer. Companies like the Associated Press sold access to newswires: proto-fax machines that clacked day and night, ensuring that papers would always have something to print. In a pinch, reporters could rehash existing stories, swapping words around and adding their own bylines.

The constant need for material, coupled with a post-Watergate sense of mission, didn’t always encourage discretion. Who had time? There were scandals to break.

“Satan Worship in Zion” was a massive, five-day event, running more than fifteen thousand words. Interviewed in 2020, Daily Herald reporter Patrick Christian, who coauthored the series, downplayed his own involvement, and credited/blamed colleague Vicki Barker, who died in 2012.

“Vicki either got a tip from somebody,” said Christian, “or had some personal interest in [the story].”

Moments later, Christian expanded on the “tip,” adding, “There was an incident that happened in Pleasant Grove, and a book was written about it called Jay’s Journal. Vicki found out about it, and that launched the whole idea.”

Whatever its origin, “Satan Worship in Zion” was a reckless, destructive excuse for journalism, a weeklong exercise in blind quotes and gothic hackwork.

Behold one opening passage:

Sixteen-year-old Vinceniel,^* well on the way to even heavier involvement in Satan worship, finally reached a point of no return. He wanted out . . . The killing of bigger and bigger animals at rituals and the drinking of the animals’ blood was getting to [him].

The story, titled “Animal Killings Scared Teen,” read like Alden Barrett fanfiction—a mash of keywords and plastic thrills, all designed to rattle clueless parents.

Like Jay, “Vinceniel” was a bright Utah County teen; he even wrote poetry. Like Jay, Vinceniel had been lured into Satanism by an older (and possibly gay) male friend. Like Jay, Vinceniel escalated to hex casting, drug abuse, violent orgies, and cow-blood cocktails consumed at the source.

The breaking point, said the Herald, had come during “a Satanistic ritual,” when a red glow appeared in one corner of the room. Vinceniel, said the paper, “believes the red glow was Satan himself, or one of his representatives.”^†

Despite hinting at human sacrifice, the article lacked dates, real names, or even vague corroboration. Everything happened in “Utah County,” an area covering twenty-one hundred square miles. This, apparently, was how the Daily Herald “educated readers about the prevalence of Satanic worship,” and it was only Part One.

Over the next three days, the Herald jacked up the fear.

Tuesday, July 30, 1985

COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICERS REPORT SUSPECTED COVENS AT IRONTON HILL

By Vicki Barker

Herald Staff Writer

Utah County Sheriff’s Deputy Doug Witney said an old barn and an abandoned two-story house up the road are known sites of previous gatherings suspected to be covens of witches and Satanic priests . . .

OCCULT: LOCAL EXPERTS DISAGREE

By Patrick Christian

Herald Staff Writer

The director of a youth group-home in Utah County, who said he did not want to be identified, said, “I believe that 30 percent of those involved in the correctional system in Utah have been deeply involved in Satanism, while 60 percent have some involvement.”

Official action is being taken by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office to stop the spread of Satanism, according to [the] director of a new Intelligence Unit that is building a file on occult activities . . .

Wednesday, July 31, 1985

PROVOAN FINDS SATANISM ‘FANTASY,’ ‘THING OF ESCAPE’

By Vicki Barker

Herald Staff Writer

Judd (a pseudonym) is a developing devil worshipper . . . Born in Provo 22 years ago on the day before Halloween, Judd began his exploration of dark forces while in junior high school in Orem . . .

PRISON PSYCHOLOGIST SEES SATANISM AS CRIME TREND

By Patrick Christian

Herald Staff Writer

Prison psychologist Al Carlisle . . . believes Satanism is a crime trend of the future. “The occult is getting into our schools, and not just on a secretive, quiet basis,” he said.

Carlisle firmly believes the power Satan’s devotees claim to feel is from some real source and is not some self-generated delusion . . .

Thursday, August 1, 1985

ANTI-SATANISM LECTURER SAYS HE’S ANYTHING BUT ALARMIST

By Vicki Barker and Laura Jones

Herald Staff Writers

While nobody disputes the fact that Satanism is a rising influence . . . there is a big difference in the way individuals choose to deal with it.

[S]atanism is a devastatingly evil force that endangers not merely individuals, but society as well, believes Lynn Bryson, a top-selling Mormon author who has traveled to over 300 stakes delivering a powerful message against Satan worship. “The nature of witchcraft,” he says, “is that it grows. It’s like cancer . . .”

HOUSE FATHER EXPLAINS DANGER OF DARK WORSHIP

By Patrick Christian

Herald Staff Writer

Burt Headman (a pseudonym), the live-in house father of a home for troubled youth in Utah County . . . has counseled and talked at length with [teenagers] about their involvement in Satanism, rituals and meetings where animals were slaughtered and they witnessed supernatural powers such as levitation . . .

REPORT HINTS AT HUMAN SACRIFICES

By Vicki Barker

Herald Staff Writer

[A] common Satanic ritual is the lowering of people into a grave inside a coffin with a corpse . . . children, because of their innocence, are favored sacrificial subjects . . .

Orgies, homosexuality, lesbianism, pornography, and child-sex are avenues of expression meant to desecrate flesh, the idea of divine procreation, and faith in God.

Drinking blood and urine and eating flesh, feces, and hearts of humans is also a practice to desecrate God’s servants on earth . . .

These weren’t maverick stories that somehow escaped onto the front page. Every article went up the chain, from reporters Vicki Barker and Pat Christian to City Editor Dick Harmon, and finally to Managing Editor Robert McDougall, the self-described “czar of the newsroom” who had final say on everything. In each case, the stories passed muster and went out to a news-hungry public.

After four days of hair-raising prelude, the Herald unleashed its finale.

* “Zion” = a local nickname for Utah, particularly its heavily-Mormon regions.

* We will address this ridiculous pseudonym shortly.

† Yes, the article’s primary source used a pseudonym shouting out to Mötley Crüe vocalist Vince Neil. Also, the misspelling of “Vince Neil” as “Vinceniel” (with its reversed diphthong) is notable given that Alden Barrett’s middle name was Niel.

Hurt

Friday, August 2, 1985

SATAN WORSHIP IN ZION

YOUTH’S DEATH LEAVES QUESTIONS, WARNING

By Vicki Barker

Herald Staff Reporter

Fourteen years after his death, friends still speak in hushed and careful tones about the teenager’s suicide. Don’t ask questions, they advise. And stay away from the gravesite.

The tombstone in a Provo cemetery bears a hand-tinted color photograph of the boy, known in this and other stories by a pseudonym, “Jay.” The portrait mounted on white porcelain and trimmed in gold, the eyes piercing and unblinking . . .

In case the description of Alden Barrett’s tombstone (with its “unblinking” eyes) wasn’t enough, the article featured a photo of the granite-and-porcelain marker.

Vicki Barker resumed her scene setting:

Rumors persist among Utah Valley teens about “suicide clubs” comprised of devil worshippers, and of unsolved murders that are linked to the activities of Satanic cults . . .

Seldom is there reasonable proof that a death may be cult-related. But “Jay” left a diary.

Fourteen years later, people still remember what happened, and hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of others outside the valley remember too, because the diary was made into a book: Jay’s Journal.

Like the rest of “Satan Worship in Zion,” the final installment was filled with pseudonyms and unsourced quotes. These shadowy witnesses had the full scoop; they had seen Jay/Alden conjuring demons, had watched him offer his soul to Satan.^*

For the next two thousand words, the paper mixed truth and lies into a single, irresponsible sludge, without even the pretense of fact-checking. No one from the Herald contacted the Barretts for comment, or even told them the story was coming.

If this ambush sounds familiar, it should. It was what Beatrice Sparks had done to the Barretts. It was what the Seventh East Press had done to the Barretts. It was also a violation of journalistic ethics and a disregard for simple human fairness.

The article’s only trace of sympathy came from a local librarian, who hoped that Jay’s Journal would disappear. “I heard this poor, poor family just suffered because of it,” said the woman.

For Marcella Barrett, “Satan Worship in Zion” was another awful surprise. Alden’s suicide had fractured her marriage, and her decision to share the journal with Sparks had only made things worse. Then Jay’s Journal appeared, bringing Alden back in the worst way possible. If that weren’t enough, Doyle’s extramarital affair had eventually come to light, and in 1981, he and Marcella had divorced. Now, nearly fifteen years after Alden’s death, a local newspaper was kicking his corpse.

Not long afterward, Marcella stepped outside to get the morning mail. Reaching into the mailbox, she felt something soft, and pulled out a dead rat.

Enough is enough.

She talked to Doyle and Scott about the Herald series. Should they contact the paper and demand a retraction?

Before they could decide, another calamity flared.

Alden’s tombstone vanished.

* This slippery, uncheckable approach owed partially to Watergate, a scandal uncovered with help from nicknamed informants (“The Bookkeeper,” “Z,” the infamous “Deep Throat”). In the end, however, Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency was cut short by incriminating audiotapes, or what nattering purists call “evidence.”

Dead and Gone

Pleasant Grove City Cemetery sits in the middle of a quiet neighborhood, and has no gates or fences. It’s a big, open stretch of welcoming grass and lazy, low-slung trees, and looks like a small, well-tended park, until you see the headstones. Even then, the feeling is tranquil, especially at night, when the eastern mountain range—so close it looks like a rumpled brown wall—brings a spectral hush.

Houses flank the cemetery on three of four sides, and some are only three hundred feet away. From inside those homes, you can see across the grounds, clear to the other side. Alden Barrett’s grave, meanwhile, is just one hundred feet from the cemetery’s edge, and most of the surrounding plots have flat, horizontal markers. Anyone standing there is easily spotted.

But shortly after the Herald’s awful crescendo, someone (probably multiple someones) drove onto the cemetery grass, parked at Alden’s grave, loaded up the seven-hundred-pound granite slab, and drove away, leaving deep tire tracks, all without being seen or heard.

The neighbors were sick of Alden’s dark celebrity and the weirdos it brought to his gravesite. Now, someone had taken care of that, and nobody saw a thing.

The Barretts geared up to file a report, but didn’t get the chance. Just a day later, the headstone reappeared, only now it was facing the wrong direction. Once again, the activity went unnoticed.

Doyle and Marcella were beside themselves. The Daily Herald series was bad enough; now this. They scheduled a family meeting, and invited Scott and Elaine, plus a few other relatives.

Then they invited Beatrice Sparks.

In This House That I Call Home

Late August 1985

The sign out front still said “Barrett,” but it was really just Marcella. Doyle was remarried and living a few miles away. Elaine had a new life with her husband, Mike. Scott had married, divorced, and married again. But Marcella was still in the house on 550 South. It was full of ghosts, but at least they were family.

Doyle and Scott arrived early; there were things to decide before Sparks showed up.

First, Alden’s tombstone. Returned or not, someone had carted it off like a load of trash, and it could happen again. Forget the work Doyle had put into designing it. Forget the cost. It was just wrong. You didn’t steal someone’s headstone.

Maybe it was time to move Alden’s body; bury it somewhere else, without a marker. Find it now, you little bastards.

But exhumation was a major step, with lots of big, bad images. And it wouldn’t work anyway: someone would notice, and word would spread, and the vandalism would start again. The only way to keep it secret would be moving the body at night, and that was too morbid to contemplate.

They decided to split the difference. They’d leave Alden where he was, and put the headstone itself in storage. That would make the grave harder to find and keep the headstone from wandering off again, or being spray-painted or damaged. Maybe, someday, they could put it back out.

Next, the Daily Herald. Bad enough that Beatrice Sparks had depicted the Barretts as Mormon Munsters, but a professional newspaper? The Herald had spent five days on the Satan-worship series, and never even asked the Barretts to comment. There was nothing about Alden’s real-life struggles or about him as a person, just a lot of fear and gossip. And anyone who trusted the paper might believe it all.

They drafted a letter to the Daily Herald, demanding a full retraction and a public apology. They signed their names and addressed it for mailing.

A few minutes later, Beatrice Sparks arrived.

She looked done up, with lacquered nails and bouffant hair. Marcella did her best to be polite, and welcomed her inside.

Seven years had passed since Sparks unleashed Jay’s Journal, turning Alden into some kind of demon. Now, at last, the Barretts could ask her why. Why make a sad, short life even worse? And why hadn’t she warned them? Did she know what she’d done, what she’d caused? Did she even care?

No one quite knew where to start, so they asked her flat out. Where did all that occult stuff come from? Where did you get it?

Sparks had a ready answer: Jay’s Journal was actually a mix of three separate diaries from three separate people. One was Alden, and the other two were “close friends.”

If the Barretts had known more about Sparks’s past, they might have laughed. Once again, she couldn’t keep her own story straight. First, it was only Alden’s diary, and she’d merely “corrected the punctuation.” Now it was three different journals stitched together.

The Barretts pushed for specifics, but Sparks hijacked the conversation, pulling out a stack of papers and handing them around.

Book reviews. Sparks had brought reviews of Jay’s Journal into Marcella Barrett’s house, and passed them out like homework.

Before anyone could speak, Sparks handed out more papers. These were letters from readers, all of them gushing over Jay’s Journal. As an extra stab, some of the letters asked Sparks to “thank Jay’s mother” for them.

The moment was slipping away. Sparks was cool mercury, shifting and formless, impossible to grab.

Now Doyle was talking. He didn’t ask Sparks to pull Jay off the market, but to at least make it more accurate. Teen suicide was a massive problem, and maybe they could do something about it, if they were honest.

Sparks responded like stepping on an ant. Changing the book, she said, would make it dishonest. A fabrication.

Scott couldn’t take any more. “I want to write my own book,” he said.

That stopped things.

“I want to write a book about what really happened. About the real Alden.”

Everybody spoke at once, and things got heated. No one else thought it was a good idea. Even Marcella was opposed.

Marcella hated confrontation. It had taken her years to face Beatrice Sparks, and now that it was happening, she just wanted it to be over. She was drained—from the suicide, from the book, from the divorce, from everything. Sparks was a fighter, and seemed to thrive on conflict. Marcella was different, and her energy was gone.

“No,” said Marcella. “Just . . . leave it alone.”

Things deflated from there, and Sparks eventually left. Later, she said the Barretts were “in denial” about Alden.

Scott was through with his parents. He was through with their weakness and inaction, with their unbelievable passivity, and he was through with their Church. He walked out the door, and renounced them all.

His second marriage ended, and he felt the undertow. One night, he loaded up on beer and started driving.

Utah is creased by canyons and ravines, and the corkscrew roads are drop-offs; sheer walls down into nothing. As darkness fell, Scott wound his way upward, taking long, wide turns, finally stopping at a cliff edge.

He sat for two hours, revving up the engine, then killing it, then doing it all again.

Come on.

He started the car and put it in gear.

Now.

He pictured himself at age eleven, finding Alden’s body. Then he saw his own two sons and imagined their reactions.

He turned off the car and sobbed. Even suicide was off the table. There was no way out.

When he felt okay to drive again, he zagged back down the canyon road and went to a friend’s house. They stayed up all night, talking it through.

Decades earlier, after Beatrice Sparks’s father had walked out, her family had splintered, with everyone fleeing the tiny enclave of Logan, Utah. “We wanted to go,” as Sparks later put it, “where there wouldn’t be so much gossip about our family.”

Now the Barretts were doing the same, with Doyle over in American Fork, Elaine married and moving away, and Scott here and there, wherever the wind took him.

In time, Marcella gave in, leaving Pleasant Grove in a bid to escape the whispers. The Barretts had been the first residents of the house on 550 South, the first to live and grieve there. The first to do it all. Now the house was empty, a shell with no one to protect.

Kids still wandered by, stopping to stare from the sidewalk, but they saw only weeds and empty windows. Out front, the “Barrett” nameplate slowly vanished, hidden by ugly overgrowth.

Marcella found an apartment ten minutes away. Far enough to have new neighbors and a chance of blending in, but close enough to visit Alden’s grave. Even without the headstone, she knew where he was buried.

In God We Trust, Inc.

September 1988

Onstage, a sweating, dumpling-shaped man stood behind a wide, black altar. Spread out before him were knives, candles, and a human skull. The candles looked like bats; the knives were curved and stained.

As he spoke to the crowd—around seventy-five people—the man dropped his voice, letting the words ring with dark authority. “There is cannibalism,” he said, “and an underground market for human bones.”

The crowd shifted and gave a low rumble.

“And candles,” he added, “made from baby fat.”

The crowd inhaled, a great vacuum of revulsion.

A few years earlier, Tom Wedge had been a juvenile probation officer. That didn’t pay very well, and the kids were a hassle. If you were lucky, and stuck it out for thirty years, you’d get a small pension, then be forgotten.

Wedge’s new job was much better. He charged $350 a head, so this presentation would clear him $26,000, most of it from state and county budgets.

“What color candles do Satanists prefer?” Wedge asked the crowd.

“Black,” came several shouts.

People always said black; that’s why they needed Tom Wedge.

“Nope,” said Wedge. “It’s purple.”

Ah. The scratch of notes everywhere.

The audience was mostly cops and social workers, but there were usually a handful of civilians—people who had read about Wedge in the local paper. At the end of three days, everyone received a small diploma declaring them a fully qualified occult-crime investigator.

By the mid-1980s, consulting on Satanic crime was a lucrative business, and dozens of cult cops worked the circuit. Many had no real training, and more than a few had literal mail-order degrees.

In Ohio, nebbishy police officer Dale Griffis enrolled in a correspondence course, and soon acquired a PhD in “cult studies” from Columbia Pacific University, a sleazy diploma mill later shut down by the state of California. Most people only saw the letters “PhD,” and Griffis leveraged his faux degree into a whole new career as a trial consultant, expert witness, and all-around hero.

Griffis had the requisite spooky backstory: he frequently mentioned an (unnamed) teenage boy who’d committed suicide after falling into Devil worship. The boy’s death had transformed Griffis, who’d subsequently pledged his life to fighting Satanic crime.

“I like going to an area where I can do my thing and leave and ride out on a white horse and never be seen again,” Griffis told a reporter in 1985.

All over the country, police departments obliged, asking Griffis for advice. This sometimes backfired, as when Toledo cops spent three days excavating three different “grave sites” (read: vacant lots) in a search for human corpses. Griffis speculated that “as many as seventy-five people” had been sacrificed and buried at one or all of the sites.

Dozens of news stories later, police had found rocks, dirt, garbage, an old broken doll, and, trailing from a tree, a single piece of red string.

“Red string,” Griffis informed the Associated Press, was “used in Satanic rituals, and often marks the boundaries of graves or other ritual sites.”

Similar debacles happened in town after town. Nobody wanted to look like a chump, so when searches came up empty, the definitions expanded. Better to find something—anything—than admit you’d been swindled.

When teens were involved, things got even more vague. Depending on the source, signs that a teenager was involved in Devil worship included the following:

•listening to heavy metal

•playing fantasy and/or occult-themed games

•reading books by Stephen King

•skepticism toward organized religion

•skepticism toward patriotic ideals

•talking in rhyme

•owning bells or gongs

•black clothing

•silver jewelry

•heavy makeup

•a strong belief in individualism

•intense introspection

•clove cigarettes

The list was effectively endless, and sometimes doubled back on itself. A church in Wisconsin added “an unusual interest in the Bible,” “an obsession with Jesus Christ,” and “a preference for New Age ‘mood’ music.”

For a certain kind of teen, this was like finding a battle plan. Here was a list of ways to frighten and/or annoy adults—a list the adults themselves had compiled.

In the 1970s, British punks, Jewish and Gentile alike, had outraged straight society by sporting swastikas. Critics and codgers went berserk, which was (of course) the goal.

A decade later, heavy metal bands were the chain yankers par excellence, slapping Devil horns and “666” onto everything from bandanas to bracelets. The apotheosis arguably came with Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil, whose front cover was simply a giant black pentagram set against an even blacker background.

Teens paid their money; adults lost their minds. It was almost too easy.

But there was a catch. Screwing with grown-ups only worked if the grown-ups believed it. And the more they believed, the more they acted like crazy, destructive children.

The Mob Rules

September 1988

CALDWELL COUNTY, KENTUCKY—Rumors of planned attacks by Satanists sweep through several towns, including Princeton, where Devil worshippers will supposedly target “blonde, blue-eyed teenagers.”

By midday on September 16, more than twelve hundred Caldwell County students have either fled their schools or been kept home by parents, and by nightfall, local gun stores are sold out. The much-feared attack never happens.

Over the next six weeks, rumors that Satanists “will murder blonde, blue-eyed children” spread to Wisconsin, Kansas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Hoping to quell the growing hysteria, police in two dozen counties hold public meetings. The gatherings only accelerate the panic, and gun sales skyrocket as citizens form vigilante groups.

The Satanists never appear, but suspicion lingers. In northeast Indiana, several local businesses are accused of conducting “secret Satanic rituals in basements.”

February 1990

CAROLINE COUNTY, MARYLAND—After a spate of handgun suicides, rumors of adolescent Satanism spread through the community, replete with talk of moonlight rituals and animal sacrifice.

Christian Jensen, the State’s Attorney, downplays the occult angle. “It’s easy to say the Devil did it,” says Jensen, “rather than face up to the facts.” This infuriates many local parents, and hundreds crowd into town meetings, insisting that the teens’ deaths were influenced by “something far more sinister.”

“There’s a strong force that is causing [kids] to kill themselves,” says one woman. Other parents agree, and several mention “occult practices involving Ouija boards and heavy metal rock music.”

Three weeks later, another teenage boy kills himself with a handgun.

In the next budget rollback, the state cuts 25 percent from school programs intended to prevent child abuse, teen pregnancy, and teenage suicide.

August 1983–July 1990

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA—Following a single accusation by an alcoholic parent who suffers from psychosis, authorities investigate the staff of McMartin Preschool, and eventually conclude that 360 children were raped during sacrificial “Satanic rites.” After filing 321 charges against seven adults, prosecutors learn about the initial accuser’s mental illness, but withhold the information from defense lawyers.

As the case unfolds, therapists pressure children to “affirm and repeat” unprovable claims. (When one child won’t affirm suggestions of abuse, a therapist responds, “Well, what good are you? You must be dumb.”) Soon enough, the children describe flying witches, hot-air balloon rides, and toddlers being flushed down toilets into secret rooms.

Media coverage intensifies, and similar cases—with similar allegations—erupt in dozens of cities. “It can’t just be a coincidence that kids are telling these same stories across the country,” Detective Sandi Gallant tells the San Francisco Examiner. “The rituals are detailed and very consistent. A young child could not make them up.”^*

After seven years and fifteen million dollars, the state finally drops all charges. It is the longest, costliest trial in California history. Central defendants Ray and Peggy Buckey have lost their business, gone broke, and spent five years in jail—all without being convicted of anything.

Years later, the recantations begin, with multiple accusers (and even a prosecutor) admitting the sham.

September 1992

AUSTIN, TEXAS—Dan and Fran Keller, the owners of a small day care center in Austin’s Oak Hill suburb, are accused of Satanic ritual abuse. Among the allegations: forcing children to drink blood-laced Kool-Aid, cutting out the heart of a baby, throwing children into a shark-filled swimming pool, and “using Satan’s arm as a paintbrush.”

The initial accuser retracts her statement, as does the primary “eyewitness,” but it doesn’t matter. Jurors convict the Kellers, who spend twenty-two years in prison before an appeals court overturns their sentences, freeing the couple.

In 2017, district attorney Margaret Moore finally declares both Dan and Fran Keller “actually innocent.”

June 1993

WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS—A trio of young men (later known as the West Memphis Three) are charged with a savage triple murder. The prosecution paints the crime as Satanic and the defendants as Devil worshippers. Evidence for this claim includes a love of heavy metal, a mostly black wardrobe, and a fondness for Stephen King.

The prosecution’s “expert witness” is mail-order PhD Dale Griffis, who regales the court with exotic interpretations of teenage graffiti and notebook doodles.

There is no physical evidence against the defendants, and many clues point to a different suspect. Nonetheless, jurors convict all three men and sentence one of them, Damien Echols, to death. The trio spend nearly twenty years in prison before their convictions are de facto overturned.

April 1994–August 1995

WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON—In a town of just twenty-five thousand people, prosecutors charge forty-three adults (most of them poor and some actually illiterate) with 29,726 counts of ritual abuse.

More than two dozen people are convicted. Several have mental disabilities; some can scarcely comprehend the proceedings.

In 1996, the prosecution’s thirteen-year-old star witness admits to fabricating the accusations and publicly apologizes. She had concocted the claims to please her foster father, a policeman who was also the case’s lead investigator.

In 1998, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer prints a devastating five-part investigation, exposing rampant misconduct by Wenatchee police, prosecutors, and therapists. Among the revelations: “Some children were told they would be kept in a psychiatric hospital until they said they had been abused.”

It takes the state another three years to release the last of the defendants.

Journalists Shirley Downing and Tom Charlier, who cover the West Memphis Three case for the Tennessee Commercial Appeal, later estimate that between 1983 and 1987 alone, similar allegations plagued more than one hundred US communities.

Such cases were “not really about ritual child abuse at all,” write Downing and Charlier. “They [were] about the dangers of popular justice, the presumption of guilt, and a less-than-skeptical press.”

* The logical misfires deployed by cult cops could fill a separate book, but this particular trap (“all the allegations are similar, so they must be true”) is the sort of thing that even first-year psych students roll their eyes at. Quick: picture a standard-issue, probe-happy alien—the kind that snatches rednecks from back-country roads. Does your alien have a teardrop face, elongated frame, and large, dark eyes? It does? Apparently we’ve both been abducted.

All Together Now

Wednesday, February 17, 1988

Oprah Winfrey looked into the camera, her mint-green pantsuit offset by a gray turtleneck and strand of pearls.

“My next guest,” she said, “found herself part of a group of young women and children forced to surrender their bodies in some of the most evil rituals imaginable.”

“Her own child was used in a human sacrifice ritual,” Oprah continued. “It was only three years ago that Lauren Stratford—”

The shot switched to a midthirties woman with big plastic glasses, tight blond curls, and a tiny hyphen of a mouth.

“—gained the courage to talk about her horrifying experiences publicly.”

Even by daytime-talk standards, this introduction was amazing. Apart from “my next guest,” every single word was false. Not questionable or misleading, but provably wrong.

By the time she appeared on Oprah, Lauren Stratford had become a kind of horseshit savant, lying about everything you could imagine, and a few things you probably couldn’t.

At various points, Lauren Stratford (born Laurel Willson) had falsely accused her father, brother-in-law, and several teachers of rape. When none of that stuck, she accused her stepmother of selling her into prostitution. (Fact-check: Stratford didn’t have a stepmother.) Stratford told long, detailed yarns about razor attacks and forced enemas—tales she’d lifted from Sybil, a fraudulent bestseller about multiple-personality disorder. Later, she described being seduced by a group of lesbians at the Assembly of God church.

Best of all, Stratford once pretended to be blind, bumping around the house of an older couple who had let her move in for a while. When Stratford accidentally pointed out a local landmark, the couple asked her to leave.

Starting in 1984, Stratford spiced her stories with Satanism, leveraging each bit of attention into bigger and better exposure, finally landing a book deal for Satan’s Underground: The Extraordinary Story of One Woman’s Escape.

By 1988, Stratford was a popular speaker at Satanic Crime seminars and survivors’ conferences, and gave long interviews to journalists, spinning tales of underground mayhem.

Like Beatrice Sparks, Stratford couldn’t keep her facts together. She told Oprah that three of her children had been stolen by Satanists, but later told a different interviewer that it was only one child. At other times, Stratford claimed to be childless and sterile.

By 2003, Oprah Winfrey would be the first Black female billionaire, and powerful beyond calculation, but even in 1988, she was one of the nation’s most trusted faces. Oprah’s actions mattered. And on that February day, she tacitly endorsed Lauren Stratford’s bloody tale, sending it out to ten million viewers.^*

Talking with Stratford, Oprah’s voice went through all the stages of talk-show response: formal, incredulous, angry, somber. Then she plunged into the seedy, hidden world of “breeders”—captive women who pumped out babies for the sole purpose of Satanic sacrifice.

“Breeders” were a ham-fisted solution to Sandi Gallant’s “we’re not finding any bodies” problem. How do you kill fifty thousand people a year (the number alleged by many cult cops) without being noticed? Simple: grow your own victims.^†

It was all rubbish, of course. Lauren Stratford was mentally ill, and needed help—actual, real help. But no one dared say it, because (1) it might have seemed rude, and (2) her story made great television.

It was the same thing plaguing American teens, who were still killing themselves in record numbers. Adults, desperate for simple explanations (and/or a quick buck), had embraced the occult-suicide theory, pushing away real-life complexities.

Strung out? Bipolar? Confused about your identity? Sorry, we can’t help you—we’re busy chasing vampires and banning Dragonlance.

Several years later, Lauren Stratford resurfaced as “Laura Grabowski” and claimed to be an Auschwitz survivor. Instead of demonic snuff films, she described gruesome torture at the hands of Josef Mengele, and took thousands of dollars from Jewish charities, including a Holocaust survivors’ fund.

The internet was relatively new, and it would take a few years for Stratford’s myriad lies to surface. In the meantime, she had a pat reply for anyone who doubted: “I think only the individual can decide if he/she is a survivor.”

Even after her story unraveled, Stratford’s defenders were legion. One of the loudest was Gregory Reid, an author and youth pastor with memories of childhood abuse. According to Reid, these memories had been repressed until 1981, when a book brought them forth.

“Jay’s Journal,” wrote Reid in his memoir, Nobody’s Angel, “shook me to the core, because it could have been my story, and because it kindled a fire in me to get kids out of the occult. But the disturbing elements of Jay’s ritualistic involvement shook me even harder. I knew this stuff somehow.”

* Oprah’s interview with Lauren Stratford is sometimes dated to May 1989; the official transcript service gives the date as February 17, 1988.

† Like all conspiracy peddlers, cult cops didn’t have one explanation for things; they had a smorgasbord of “maybes.” Depending on whom you asked, Satanists also (a) ate the bodies, (b) burned the bodies in mobile crematoria, (c) turned the bodies into candles/ashtrays/decorative knickknacks, or (d) fed the bodies to pigs.

Doctored

December 1988

Beatrice Sparks was at home, viewing artwork for a new edition of Jay’s Journal: a paperback from Pocket Books.

The timing was ideal. Across America, teenage deviltry was filling headlines and frightening grown-ups. The latest issue of Woman’s Day featured “A Parent’s Primer on Satanism,” which warned that “bright, bored, underachieving, talented, and even gifted teens are susceptible to cults.”

Best of all, the Barretts were neutralized, and it had only cost her a visit. Not a retraction or even an apology. They’d worn themselves out, and then she’d left.

Good thing, too. She’d already sold the movie rights to Jay’s Journal.

Back in 1979, Casablanca FilmWorks (the company behind Midnight Express, an Oscar-nominated hit) had optioned Jay for a TV movie, but the deal fell through, so the rights went back to Sparks. Now she’d sold them again, this time to a Canadian screenwriter who paid her twenty grand. And if the movie didn’t happen within a few years, she could keep the money and sell the rights a third time.

The Barretts might complain, but probably not. They’d had their chance to stand up, and instead, they’d buckled.

As snow fell outside, Sparks surveyed Jay’s new cover art. It was a nod to Go Ask Alice, with dark hues and a half-shadowed face.

The real change was the credit.

Jay’s Journal

by Anonymous

Edited by Dr. Beatrice Sparks

She’d been saying it for years: “Dr. Beatrice Sparks.” No one had objected or even raised an eyebrow. Now, with the Barretts handled, why hold back?

She planned to get a real degree, someday. Brigham Young University was just three miles away. Maybe she’d actually enroll, do things the proper way, however long it took.

Of course, there were colleges that did it all by mail—even PhDs—and she had volunteered at the Provo hospital, which might count for something. True, that was decades ago, but so what? Learning was learning.

In the meantime, she’d push the limits and make people ask for proof. Nobody would, she was sure of that. Asking for proof was impolite.

And it wasn’t like Pocket Books would balk. If they had some hang-up about lying, they wouldn’t be publishing Jay to begin with. They were in it together.

She made a few notes, then approved the artwork.

Dr. Beatrice Sparks.

That was nice. Had a good ring to it.